The Vesta House Squad

1) Setup, Part 1

"That's not good," Arthur muttered to himself as he stared at his phone.

His older sister Frankie peered over his shoulder to see what he was looking at. Behind her, everyone was getting ready to leave. "I don't see anything?"

That was the problem: the screen was blank. His phone should have charged overnight but seemed to have run out of battery instead. 

"Have you tried pressing the power button?" his older brother Dallas offered helpfully.

"Yeah it was the first thing I tried," Arthur replied sincerely, his brother's sarcasm going over his head. Actually, he was thinking that he already knew the problem was with his charger. He had told his parents, Will and Eliza, about this yesterday. However between their work (Will was a veterinarian; Eliza was an aerospace engineer) and the fact that they had six children to look after, he knew that they were busy and that it would be some time before he would actually get a new one.

Maybe cleaning out the charging port would help, he thought. He looked around for a paperclip, found one, untwisted it, inserted the tip into the charging port, and tried to clean it out.

There was a sharp tingling sensation at his fingertips. Thinking he had been electrocuted, Arthur instinctively dropped the phone and the unbent paperclip. But nothing happened, other than that he now looked like an idiot in front of the whole family.

"Jeez Arthur, just let me do it," said his other older brother Cillian as he reached down and picked up the phone. He pushed the power button; the phone turned on.

Arthur was baffled. "Wait-"

"It's like Dallas said, you just have to press the power button. C'mon Arth you're thirteen, you should know these things by now," Cillian said with a wink as he handed Arthur back his phone.

"But..." Arthur trailed off as he picked up his phone. The battery was completely charged. But he was sure he had tried turning it on earlier?

Well there was no time to think about it now, he had to get ready for school. Now that Frankie was back from college for the summer, their mom had asked her, as the oldest sibling, to pick up and drop off Arthur and his youngest sister Bryony at junior high for her while their dad dropped the boys off at high school. Just for their last week of school, she had said. And although she wasn't a bad sister, Frankie tended to get impatient.

Arthur grabbed his backpack and ran outside, passing Cillian and Dallas as they fought for the passenger seat to their dad's car, and hopped into the back, next to Bryony. After Dallas forced Cillian into the back, the five of them took off.

As Frankie pulled into the school driveway, Arthur couldn't help but feel a bit self conscious about how they looked. Between his dark hair and pale skin, Bryony's blonde hair, and Dallas' dark skin, they didn't look like they belonged in the same family. 

The reason for this was that they had all been adopted, their biological parents victims of a terrible pandemic that had swept the world. Arthur was only a newborn baby at the time so he didn't remember any of it, but he had been told that there had been a worldwide quarantine for over two years, during which everyone who went outside had to wear masks. When he mentioned his background, people typically responded with pity over the fact that he never got to know his real parents, which Arthur found strange. To him, Will and Eliza were his real parents and he liked being a part of this big family where everyone looked different from one another. Sometimes though, he did wonder what his biological parents had been like.

Arthur made his way through a sea of students towards his locker. Along the way, he noticed that he was attracting weird looks. That was unusual; Arthur was one of those kids that tended to go unnoticed. He wasn't one of the popular kids in some clique, nor was he one of the unpopular kids who was shunned and bullied. He even looked boring: appearing completely average except that maybe he was a bit on the skinny side.