Author’s Note: This is the start of my story for the ficathon. My challenge was as follows:

Genre: Romance, Horror/Suspense, maybe Fantasy/Supernatural elements
Rating: T-M
Likes: Some insanity, quirky teenagers (preferable a hot biscuit), and sarcasm.
Dislikes: Too much angst, perfect characters, and predicable plot twists/endings.
Words/phrases to use: "Your love for me makes the ducks want to cry." "Darling, stop teasing the masks." "Keep lying like that and you'll have my mom snogging your ass/butt/."

Please review!

Septima

I’m probably the first person ever in history to say this, but it’s true. I, Septima Orpheus Grace, desperately wish that my life were less like a fairytale.

I mean, I live in the modern day, you know? I reside in the age of TV and mp3s and trans-fats and music piracy. I don’t need a bunch of fairy tale magic crap messing with my life. But it’s there, and I have to deal with it. Even if I got the short end of the stick.

I guess I can start with the fact that I am one of nine children. Yup, you heard me. Nine kids.

My parents have been busy. Man, I don’t even want to know.

Not just nine kids, mind you, but it’s like, some weird sort of rule that they all have to be twins. So we’ve got four sets of twins. Blonde, bitchy twins. You’d think that, after pushing out one set, my mom wouldn’t want to have to go through all that again, and she’d probably castrate my dad. But no. They just kept at it with the twins. And me, of course.

There’s a good reason for it, though. You see, my mom’s bloodline goes all the way back to the middle ages and beyond…and it’s got some weird quirks.

And by ‘weird quirks’, I mean magic. And by 'magic', I mean the ability to completely and totally kick ass. She was placed into an arranged marriage with my dad because, apparently, he’s got amplifier genes that have the lovely effect of kicking the magic quotient of his offspring off the freaking scale.

So now I have six older sisters and two younger sisters with the magical ability to beat me seven ways to Sunday.

And what of me? You ask.

I got nothing.

Well, that’s a lie. I got the angsty back-story.

It seems that I was destined for mediocrity from the moment of my birth. You see, the minute that I popped out and I wasn’t followed by a twin, my parents knew something was wrong. I always thought that it was some fluke, and I always assumed that my dad was so perpetually disappointed at my existence because I wasn’t a boy. I was kind of bitter about that for awhile, you know? It’s like ‘gee, dad, sorry I missed out on that y-chromosome and got stuck with a vagina, but it’s your fault anyway, you jerk! Everyone knows that the sperm determines the sex of the baby!'

It wasn’t until I was six and my mother had died that he sat me down and we had a Talk. With a capital ‘T’. Yes, he was disappointed that I wasn’t a boy, because the ratio of estrogen to testosterone in our household was absolutely staggering, and he could have used the moral support in a family filled with hormonal girls, but he was more disappointed because I wasn’t his child at all.

It turns out that my real father was some delivery guy that happened to be in the right place at the right time.

So that explained why I wasn’t blonde. My hair was a more light-brown with a few highlights, in the summer, and was wavy and thick and unruly instead of sleek and straight like my siblings’. Their eyes were a much lighter blue than mine, and they were built slimmer and more slender.

But anyway, my dad…or not my dad…explained that since I was a bastard child, born without the amplifying gene or whatever, not only had I missed out on the magic, but my extended family on both sides, though they thought that I was a freak of nature, agreed not to disown me, but instead would limit my education to the plain, simple, mortal purgatory known as the public school system.

Great.

Now, before you start screaming ‘Cinderella! Cinderella!’ like you know anything, I can tell you now that it ain’t gonna happen. Cinderella was the youngest. And, while I am on the younger half of the scale, I’m not the youngest. Not to mention, though my father...er, the man who raised me, loves me, there’s no stepmother to hate my guts. So, no fairy godmother and freaky pumpkin-coaches for me.

And my family is far from abusive. I mean, we’re dysfunctional, but my dad and I were at peace after that, and he actually seems to love me best now, even though we aren’t related. Probably because I’m the only one in the family who is also without magic…that and I seemed to have missed out on the hormonal, drama-queen stage that all my sisters lavished in for as long as they could. We were each other’s moral support in the face of eight magic-using women of various ages and mental stabilities.

My eldest sister, Prima, is twenty six now. She’s tall and gorgeous and talented; she’s an actress making foreign, art-house crap and is currently shacked up in Greece with some Italian guy named Dante who poses for romance novel covers. She spends her time tanning on the beach and being rich and pretending that she’s not related to us. We barely see her anymore. Sometimes she sends us a Christmas card. Sometimes. She was born with the power to manipulate earth, but she never uses it. I can remember during some of our more…exiting family reunions, the ground started to shake whenever she was particularly pissed off.

Segunda, Prima’s twin and younger sister by two minutes, is some jetsetting, corporate ball-busting journalist who works for a major newspaper in New York. I mean, the woman’s only twenty-six, and she’s got a corner office and everything. She’s currently single. It would take a special sort of man to get to Segunda…she prides herself on making them cry. She manipulates metal, too. Though she’s another one who rarely uses it.

Tria, twenty-four, has just graduated from one of the most prestigious women’s colleges in New England and has come home to live with us while she works on crapping out her first book deal. She’s always wanted to be a poet, and she’s dressed the part since middle school. I’ve never seen her in anything without flowing ruffles or natural fibers or lace. Her elemental power is over wood, which makes sense. Her room has always been more tropical broadleaf forest than room. It’s a biome unto itself.

Quarta, younger than Tria by three minutes and twenty seconds, would have had the dubious honor of familial Black Sheep had I not been born. She is a raging lesbian who wears her hair boy-short and cyan green, and is a radical animal rights activist, currently unemployed and on the run from the law. She’s wanted for arson and criminal vandalism in five states, and probably in at least three countries. She was home for a bit about a week ago; she showed up at about one thirty in the morning, crawling through the bushes in the backyard garden, and I let her in the back door so she could shower and eat. Whatever deity happens to control humanity really messed up with her. I mean, the girl is an explosive personality, and she got the power of fire. How could you even call that intelligent design?

Quinta is my asexual, nineteen-year-old Beatnik sister who shares an apartment with Segunda in New York and makes her money in small clubs being emo and wearing black and berets and sunglasses and spouting weird poetry over bongos and coffee. She smokes like a chimney and dyes her hair black. Her power is over air. More often, over smoke.

Sexta, Quinta’s younger twin, has always been beautiful beyond comprehension but always got picked on in middle school for her unfortunate name. She lived up to said name in high school, winning the unofficial title of being the trampiest slutty ho-bag anyone’s ever heard of. But now she’s a model, so she had the last laugh. She was also considering going into XXX movie production last time I saw her, but she made me swear not to tell dad. She’s got control over water, but she only uses it when it benefits her to have a wet, nearly transparent shirt.

All six of them have left home now and all, except for Tria, are more-or-less self sufficient and living on their own. But there’s one more set of twins, younger than me: the adorable little Octavia and Nona.

Oh, please. Don’t get me started.

The two little brats are both twelve and obnoxious and self-centered as all get-out. They also happen to hate each other. Octavia, who controls electricity, is going through a punk streak; she won’t wear anything that’s not black or red, or at least has some rips or zippers or chains or weird band logos. She puts so much eyeliner on every morning I’m amazed that she can open her eyes, and she’ll bitch at anyone who will listen. She also has a boyfriend who’s sixteen and still a freshman in high school, but she says that if I tell anyone, he’ll track me down with his switchblade and kill me. He probably would, too.

Nona’s our resident little plastic Barbie-soulless-monster in training. She won’t wear anything that costs less than forty dollars or doesn’t have a brand name label clearly visible, she straightens her hair every morning, and her entire room is pink and fuzzy with a sign on the door that says ‘princess’. Yeah, she’s a bitch. She also controls sound, which our family is reminded of on a weekly basis; whenever Octavia feels the need to pump up the static in Nona’s hair, Nona’s screams always come suspiciously close to breaking the sound barrier.

And then there’s me. Neither blonde, nor a twin. Since I don’t have anything particularly interesting or powerful about me, my family has decided that the best thing for me is to be quietly married off as soon as possible to Mr. Joe-Schmoe nine-to-five with whom I can have two-point-five kids and live a stunningly average life as far away from my gifted and talented sisters as possible.

Damnit, if only Jane Austen had written my life, and not the Brothers-freaking-Grimm. Then, though I wouldn’t end up with an awesome Mr. Darcy or a Colonel Brandon, at least I’d get an Edward.

I could live with an Edward.

Whatever, man. I just want to survive high school.