2/2

She needed to either sit down and try to dredge up everything she knew of this world from some stupid comic book in her last life or sit down with Lisa and grill that woman for answers she might be able to use.

Rachel's life might not actually be much help, other than a very general guideline of what not to involve herself in a couple decades down the line, because Sonya didn't recall a whole lot from that. It had been nearly a decade since she had last thought of it, the details were damn blurry now.

It wasn't like she had known it was going to become so majorly important, and keeping notes of the future in a massive multilingual and privacy deficit neighborhood like hers...

Before this life, it hadn't been anything more than a pleasant diversion when she read the story and watched the anime. What her new life was apparently based from was just a fraction of what it had covered, and it hadn't been the only anime Rachel had been enamored with.

Hell, Sonya recalled more of Naruto's plotline and Inuyasha's cast than she recalled what her own life's apparent 'storyline' held in store for her.

Alas, the lack of silver-haired hotties in her life.

It made her wonder what story her last life had been a fraction of, and if she could find out here.

Either way, this life would probably hold the answers she couldn't recall anymore. All she had to remember was the 'Strongest Seven of the Era' would end up cursed babies until the Tenth Vongola candidate did something to fix the damn issue and avoid pissing off anyone along those lines. Which she might just end up part of, given she had apparently no intention to abandon Cherep to his future misery alone.

Wasn't there a time-travel war thing going on sometime between all of that?

Well… she'd figure it out eventually…

"Right… we're screwed, but at least we're going down together." Forcibly redirecting her thoughts, mostly because there was little more she could do about them for the moment, she refocused back on the other kid. "You ever think of trying to go home, Cherep? Your parents should still be alive, right?"

Looking a little blindsided from the change of topic, the boy shrugged at her in response without much care. "I've never really thought of it. They were… terrified of me by the end, Sonya. I think the whole fact I was kidnapped might actually have been a bit of a blessing to them."

"They might have been terrified for you, you know."

"I'm pretty sure it wasn't that way around, actually." Cherep looked damn depressed in his sopping wet kitten way by that too, which made her not want to try asking him to check just in case.

Well, he wouldn't be the first kid to run away from home… no matter what kind of help he had gotten getting away. Although she was sure there was more to that story than just 'I managed to get away a few days later'.

She was content to leave the options he had available up to him though, as she wasn't exactly the poster girl for family ties either. The very least she intended to do was wrestle his old address out of him and go double check, he might like getting his birth records to help him out and his birthday was coming up.

"Whatever. Go home, Cherep. I'll drag you back to Aleksandr's tomorrow, sometime after noon."

Her dork of a friend picked himself up off the ground with a small frown. "You're sticking around, then?"

He was also very carefully not looking at her again.

She beat back her desire to wing a rock at his messy purple hair for such a stupid question.

Cherep was annoyingly abuse-able, no wonder Reborn and that blond sniper dude did it regularly… and why did that make her want to hate the two of them?

She wasn't exactly better in that she did it too…

"Yes. You're stuck with me. Suffer my random visits gracefully, it won't end even on your deathbed… since apparently that'll never happen."

"And you're fussing over me from a distance? Cause I saw all the money you stuck on me, Sonya." The idiot beamed at her, squawking and running for it when she rose up to her own feet and reached for a nearby fallen branch.

XVI (Friday the 1st of April, 1960. Arseniy & Lisa's home, Moscow, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.)

"Mafia Land?" Lisa echoed, a faint thread of surprise in her tone as she served up dinner to the empty place for the vor of the house before herself. "It's not really all it's cracked up to be, Sonya."

Well, if she ever really needed solid confirmation after talking to her purple haired friend… that was it.

"I've been there once, myself." Continued the older woman absently, either not noticing the face the youngest was pulling or not caring. "It's… not exactly much different than any other vacation destination, just less vagueness is needed to avoid getting arrested. It's perfectly acceptable to wander around with a fully loaded assault rifle, just so long as no one loosely classified as 'visitor' and 'innocent' dies from it."

Tatiana had been blindsided by this topic of conversation, but perfectly willing to continue it. "Really?"

Their foster mother shrugged, waving around the fork she was eating with as she chewed. "It's basically an amusement park for mafia members, what do you expect?"

"Less stupidity?" Sonya tried, still wondering how such a thing had come to be… and how it hadn't been shut down yet.

Privately owned land maybe?

Who owned it, then?

"It's a good place to network a little, too." Lisa informed them both with a sly smirk. "There's Guild Halls for a whole lot of branches of underworld dealings, and countless other Mafia Families and Syndicates tend to scope out new blood there. We might actually go for a visit once Tatiana starts working."

The young blonde wanted to smash her head into their dining room table, in contrast the redhead looked excited. "Really?"

"You both should probably scope out the Thieves' Hall a little. I don't think you'd want to try that out, Tatiana, but Sonya might find it more to her liking."

Confused, she looked up at that news.

The brunette gave her a small smile from across their kitchen table. "Taking contracts to steal things for others will either convince you to go back to soloing what you want to do or find yourself a niche you like. You might even like bounty hunting or taking up hitman contracts, just promise me you'll try it out at the very least."

"Can we do that?" Tatiana butted in before the other girl could process that, looking and sounding bewildered.

"So long as you pay your dues to the Zolotov Clan? Of course." The very bitter note in her voice had both young girls staring at her in surprise. Lisa's smile had turned a touch brittle suddenly. "We're female, we'll never attain the vor status unlike the men. As far as most Mafyia syndicates on this end of the world care, we're support at most and arm candy at worse."

Apparently, women's suffrage hadn't quite reached the underworld just yet… or at least hadn't reached them out in the USSR's criminal underbelly. Sonya supposed that was why the older woman didn't have the status Arseniy did, even if they were about the same general age.

Well, their world was rather male dominated.

Tatiana was more surprised than her at the news, and probably more disgruntled. The physically younger of the two of them had put together the fact that all the vor they knew were male and every female was either married or merely making income for their clan and come to that realization. It hadn't bothered her much, seeing at this life wasn't really her original goal in the first place and she was perfectly fine with just 'thief' and not a 'thief-in-law'.

Her eleven-soon-to-be-twelve-year-old preteen 'elder sister' was probably realizing that only the boys she worked with in her little ring of thieves would get that label. Likely galling in a way when the group was mostly her own work in pulling little Mafiya brats together for large stakes heists later in their lives.

Before their discussion could continue the only male member of the household finally returned from wherever he had been, giving his partner a look that only Sonya's extra life experience allowed her to interpret. Arseniy was giving Lisa a 'why do you do that to yourself' look, edged in some downright rare exasperation.

She figured that a possible hang-up of gender in the Mafiya was an old topic for the two of them, and it was equally possible they knew each other from very early in their lives. It was even possible they knew each other since the same period in Sonya's and Tatiana's lives, and that was why a vor like Arseniy was teaching a pack of idiotic brats how to be Mafiya as Lisa taught them other equally important skills.

She found that kind of history together rather awesome and wondered if she, Tatiana, and Dmitriy would have something similar in a decade's worth of time.

The man thumped a thin book down next to her plate, a leather-bound affair with no obvious title, and wandered into the kitchen for a drink to go with his own food.

Despite the rule about reading at the dinner table, Sonya cracked it open to see what it was about. Cramp handwriting sprawled out in a neat hand mark every page she got a good look at.

"Sonya." Called the older woman with a frown, giving the volume in her hand a once over of her own. "You know better."

XVII (Monday the 4th of April, 1960. Arseniy & Lisa's home, Moscow, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.)

Tatiana didn't start out a petty thief like Sonya had, the orphan had been earmarked to become a con-artist by her Zolotov recruiter. She could have gotten one of the card suit tattoos, but… kitty.

She had been the best of the crop in her recruited group, gone after because she had no parents to raise her but had a remarkable charisma that let her talk her way out of a lot of things in and around her orphanage, before a tiny blonde girl got tossed into the mix suddenly.

Sonya had not been expected at all, by anyone.

The man who had brought her in all those years ago had looked to be a relative of hers, and while giving up an unwanted or at-risk child to the Mafiya for their protection wasn't unheard of... Tatiana hadn't expected to see it happen in front of her.

That had been why the redhead took the initiative to approach the little girl, who she expected to be upset or scared by what she got shoved into with probably little to no warning.

She found out fast that Sonya had been neither frightened nor upset at all. The tiny midget, shortest girl there by virtue of her shockingly young age, had looked bored.

It wasn't by any means the first sign that whatever the blonde had escaped had aged her past her scant few years, the younger girl was like a morbid old woman in a child's body. The redhead had floundered trying to connect with her little foster sister, because she was both too old and too young at the same time as well as hard to talk to.

Sonya didn't play dress-up or play games at all, the closest the girl had to a leisure pursuit was reading novels and wandering around the city. She also usually had all the emotional range of a block of ice unless something interested her, or the situation was somewhat serious.

She also fucked off for long stretches of time, either not wanting to be in a house for a few hours or just to wander about. It made it hard to have a casual conversation with her, or even see her for more than just the mandatory stuff.

Tatiana gave up trying to get to know her after getting fostered together for a full year. Sonya seemed to do well as a socially retarded little prodigy, or if not well seemed content with what she had by then. Somehow one of her old friends from the orphanage managed to get the girl to talk to him for more than just the minimum, and that donkey's butt Dmitriy refused to explain how he managed that minor miracle, so she had decided to respect the younger girl's choices and move on.

No matter how mature or understanding she liked to think of herself, it did hurt to be sometimes effortlessly outdone in certain subjects they were taught. Sonya always had little problems learning new lessons, barring history which she tended to screw up frequently, and with her natural quietness she had been stealthy long before they were fostered.

The thief skills were the only time the blonde lagged slightly behind her, while the younger girl was a better pickpocket and lockpick than her it was the redhead who was better at cracking safes and forging documents. She was better at the more 'hard-core' skills than 'petty', which their talents seemed to differ.

However, the little thief was also successfully stealing at a very early age. Nimble fingers coupled with her young face meant she could wander around at will and pull a decent amount of money in, to start paying back vor Arseniy for allowing the girls to live with him for what was left of their childhood.

Her first wake up call, that hinted maybe her icy little foster sister wasn't as content as she appeared to be, was when she finally made her own friend outside of their collective group.

Cherep was practically the opposite of Sonya in almost every way, slightly clumsy and brightly cheerful instead of contained and reserved. Jarringly, the boy made the girl smirk and on one occasion actually crack a smile... and was the topic of the first non-awkward conversation between the two foster sisters in nearly two years' worth of time.

Tatiana had the thought maybe she had approached the other girl wrong. Instead of trying to bond over things she liked, maybe she should try finding something the little thief liked that she could get into.

Which didn't work out too well, because the girl was still a damn block of ice in terms of personality unless a purple colored kid was somewhere nearby. Sonya was also surprisingly protective of Cherep and his civilian lifestyle, which made it hard to see if she could befriend the boy too.

The slightly older redhead had to remind herself her little foster sister was socially inept in a lot of ways, and it was possible the younger girl just didn't know how to connect to another girl. Therefore, she refused to give up as easily as she had before because if Sonya had to start stalking her best friend in order to get him to accept her as one it was totally possible that it required something drastic to show the girl Tatiana wanted to be her friend and sister too.

She didn't think it was working until the other girl came back from her first successful heist, which was galling in its own way because the blonde was two years younger than her.

The charm bracelet had been one of the many little trinkets the younger thief had brought back with her. Getting presented with it was the first sign that Sonya thought something of Tatiana and her opinion, and the semi-hopeful but wary look she wore when she presented the present to her made the redhead think she was possibly getting somewhere.

She probably wasn't the greatest foster sister in existence, because she had pretty much abandoned her little sister to her own devices for years before realizing that probably hadn't been what the other girl wanted. However, she was still trying and the five years they had lived together allowed the redhead to read some of the tics the blonde had.

When Sonya came home one night, looking as if someone had shoved one of her practice staffs down her spine, Tatiana at least knew something was wrong. She spent a whole moment trying to recall what the younger girl had claimed she was going to do that day, then figured there was something wrong with her friend Cherep.

Since the two of them still couldn't communicate at all well without very awkward pauses or floundering for more topics, she took that conclusion to Lisa instead of asking her foster sister. Their foster mother agreed to ask about it and did so a day later, but she was a little surprised that whatever it had been had them both going to Arseniy with it.

That discussion took less than an hour, and she was still wondering why Cherep was suddenly living with them.

XVIII (Tuesday the 5th of April, 1960. Arseniy & Lisa's home, Moscow, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.)

"He's a little scary." Cherep informed her inanely, still clutching what little belongings he had to his name to his chest instead of putting it away in the drawers being made available to him.

Sonya was still a little confused herself, so she figured his own hesitance over the whole situation was allowable. "Arseniy is only scary when he's angry, and that only happens if you actually try to piss him off or do something stupid. He's just usually surly seeming by nature, you'll get used to it."

The thief was not sure why the Mafiya vor had ordered her to relocate her friend to their house, but she did appreciate it anyways. The man hadn't twitched at learning her reasoning for not helping the purple boy out of his slum hole of an apartment, but his expression had gotten rather ticked off when she got into why she was sure he'd probably not be able to get out of it without help she was only then planning on giving him.

Some of what he told her in confidence had to be relayed to the vor, but she was hoping he'd forgive her that. She had stuck to the kidnapping, and the possible experimentation, rather than admitting to the still gut-twisting 'undeath' thing.

The kid kind of needed his paperwork, his birth certificate and traveling papers to explain where he came from and why he was in the USSR and not his native country of Czechoslovakia.

Sonya had planned on doing a heist in his hometown to get those, then asking either Lisa or Tatiana to mock up what else he would need to legitimize himself… but apparently Arseniy decided to take care of that all himself.

She might need to go out of the country to lift Cherep's paperwork from wherever it had gotten to, but she would only have to if her foster father struck out on his end now.

Speaking of certain redheads, Tatiana appeared from the staircase and flounced over to the guest room… which she now supposed was the boy's bedroom.

The older girl cheerfully ignored the purple haired kid's wary look and her semi-suspicious stare boring a hole into the side of her head at her arrival, flashing them both a small grin. "Isn't this great? Now we have a foster brother!"

"Eh?"

Sonya ignored Cherep's less than articulate response and shrugged. "At least Arseniy's no longer the only male in the house and Lisa might actually stop suggesting on a girls' day out for us all."

"Aw… that would be fun." She pouted at the younger thief, and after a beat turned back to the bewildered boy still standing in the middle of his new room. "So, hi! I'm Tatiana, Sonya's older foster sister. You're Cherep, right? Least, that's what she claimed your name was."

"It is." He confirmed slowly, still looking at the older girl like she was some new type of bug that had suddenly popped up out of the woodwork. "I didn't know Sonya had a sister… or that she was fostered."

"Yeah well, Sonya's social skills are a little… bad. You'll have to forgive her that."

What?

"I've noticed." Cherep reassured her dryly, a small smirk pulling up one side of his mouth.

Sonya blankly blinked at them both, still confused from before and now a little lost.

There was nothing wrong with her social skills.

"Do you think you can translate for me? Cause I've known her a few years now and I still have trouble holding a conversation with her."

"I've found that you can't wait for her to respond, because she won't usually. Just keep talking, Sonya will listen for as long as you do."

Tatiana had a look of dawning realization on her face as she spun to her with a very wide grin. "You're shy!"

"…what?"

"I didn't realize… you're always so self-contained and confident. Sonya, you don't have to be shy around me." Getting grabbed and smashed into the preteen's non-existent chest was a new if uncomfortable experience for her, the older girl also didn't seem too interested in letting the physically younger thief go. "That would explain why you're so quiet, didn't you have friends before we got taken in? I bet you didn't."

Well… no she didn't, but that was more because of the twenty years of another life getting dumped on her head during that time. She might have got out a lot, but there wasn't a whole lot of socializing going on at the same time.

Tatiana pushed her away, only far as her arm's reach unfortunately. "That explains so much. I can't believe you're shy."

"I'm not." She protested slowly, frowning up at her. "I just don't talk much."

Cherep made a noise, which sounded like a cross between a snort and a laugh. The blonde hoped he hurt himself, because although she didn't understand how the older girl came up with her theory she knew the kid hadn't helped at all.

XIX (Friday the 8th of April, 1960. Aleksandr's basement, Moscow, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.)

"You didn't tell him all of it?"

"Did you want me to?"

Cherep blinked his wide purple eyes at her blankly, jaw slightly unhinged. "But…"

"I could fix that, if you want." Sonya informed him easily, still a little sour over the misunderstanding he had perpetuated with her foster sister. She tapped the butt of her makeshift staff against the ground to be sure of its purchase against the hard concreate ground, stretching out her aching legs.

She was still trying to figure out the Flame stuff by using her own minor experience with the incident in Aleksandr's basement training hall. If a few very odd facts hadn't been confirmed independently, she might have been able to brush off the one possible use of her own.

Something as bewildering as the existence of Mafia Land was a very pointed suggestion that certain things she had been slightly afraid of were true.

He might just need that information sometime in the future, so she was going to suck it up and figure the damn thing out without him having to die again to learn something.

There was also that book Arseniy gave her… she should probably investigate that thing too instead of skeptically skirt around it suspiciously.

"Why?"

She gave a sideways look, then sighed through her nose. "Because."

Cherep still looked like he didn't understand, which made her feel slightly insulted.

The brat had told her about his undeath in confidence, out of worry for her and what she might be getting into. Why the hell did he expect her to turn around and tell everyone?

He had been kidnapped for that, keeping the information to only those that needed to know was just common sense.

She pushed herself up stiffly, using her staff as a cane out of respect for her still tender calf muscles. Before he could do more than squawk at the sudden moment the old vor who ran the training hall summoned him back over for his own lessons, effectively ending their conversation about what she had and had not told others about him.

A bit too irritated to appreciate the thought of the bruises the poor purple haired kid would walk away from the hall with, Aleksandr wasn't a gentle teacher and the man had taken it upon himself to teach Cherep how to defend himself, she went back to what she had been doing.

While her mind set wasn't conducive to experimentation, the stress relief in using her borrowed staff against the practice dummies was greatly appreciated. Sonya pretty much failed to think of anything but their little mini-argument and in the process of working out her irritation with the boy she might have hit the straw filled burlap sack a bit too hard.

Which naturally meant she broke the shaft of wood she had been using clean in half and the dummy somehow made a small crater in Aleksandr's training hall floor.

Somehow.

Like she had somehow kicked a man into cracking a brick wall one dark night.

She heaved a tired sigh, using the broken off end of her staff to poke the mess of straw out of the way to see what damage she had caused. It was one thing to suspect, another to learn it was possible, and an entirely different thing to see it happen again.

Aleksandr's voice coming from right behind her nearly made the young thief jump out of her skin. "I think a break might be in order, Sonya."

"Arseniy gave me a book, I think I'll read that before trying this again." At least she now knew she was either on the right track or close enough.

The old vor gave a completely noncommittal hum, eyeing the damage in his floor over her head.

XX (Saturday the 9th of April, 1960. Arseniy & Lisa's home, Moscow, Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.)

The book Arseniy gave her was a handwritten diary of a Dying Will Flame user, a Rain from about three hundred years ago.

Sonya despaired over her future for a full hour before getting past the first page.

While it was fascinating from a purely historical standpoint to read about a guardsman named Milos, one of the Regent Sofia Alexeevna's personal guard and his daily exploits serving as a wall-fixture in her court, there was little in the way of actual information she could use to figure out what she had done and what Flame she had.

Although the journal was something she could blindly stare at while she dredged her own memories from her time as Rachel for any hints of what to do, the tiny details that filled the accountings of one man's day filled in a couple holes for her.

From what little she could recall from her other life, it was called Dying Will because the ability was unlocked by using willpower that typically was mustered either at the edge of death or in defiance of it. Like she possibly defied the idea of Cherep's death before she learned he'd never have that issue.

That wasn't really something Sonya excelled in… given her lack of motivation all around. Dying and remembering it had dampened a lot of her previous personality into a laid back, quiet, loner type who didn't tend to make connections well. Tatiana and Dmitriy were exceptions merely because they both approached her and made the initial effort to get to know her.

Cherep was merely the exception to just about everything, freaky coloring and abilities included.

She figured it was either karma or irony that she would just suck at having willpower, and of course her only specifically chosen friend would come with a bucketful of difficulties.

As both Rachel and Sonya, she had pretty much gone with the flow of life. She had never bucked the system laid out for her until this one, and only because her eye caught on her brand-new foster brother's odd coloring and she got curious.

She supposed she could try defying her assigned role as a thief of the Mafyia, but that just sounded suicidal rather than anything else.

It was entirely possible for her to get out of her current lifestyle, just not realistic. A whole whopping nine years of age did not an adult make, and the Zolotov clan ran their little 'youth outreach' program with the aim of collecting new blood and skills from the lower-class and slum children who just needed a little something better to flourish from. Either a new home when they had none or a broken one, or a bit of guidance from someone actually taking the time to listen and teach them.

Her own situation was… possibly not what she had assumed it to be but given the conversation she overheard the night before her father took her to a warehouse-turned-tattoo-parlor there had been very little else she could make any assumptions from. The fact it was now five years into her new life and no one had yet to say anything about her mother's plan to sell her off to satisfy a debt just made Sonya a little wary of what had happened and what it might really mean.

That would probably not end well when it raised its ugly head, but there was little she could do if her initial assumption was wrong but wait and find out.

Other than finding her biological father and asking, but Sonya wasn't sure if she wanted to know and the man had told her not to go back to Saratov. Which she already flouted once, getting her tattoos touched up and added to in her hometown.

As it was, she had a measure of protection in the Mafiya rather than outside of it. That same protection had been extended to Cherep, who was pretty much allowed to come and go as he wanted and would probably only be known to have Zolotov sympathies in the fullness of time.

Unless he really wanted to get into anything himself, but Sonya was pretty sure that wouldn't happen unless something drastic happened to him.

"Sonya?" Lisa interrupted the young thief's train of thought when she poked her head into the girl's room. "Aren't you usually out and about by now?"

"Usually," Agreed the still youngest foster child wryly, wondering what panic attack her foster brother/best friend would have next since he was kicked out for combat training without her, "but this is… confusing."

"How so?"

Grabbing hold of the opportunity to ask questions with both hands, because one did not question the head of a Mafiya household lightly, she sat upright on her bed and turned to her elder. "Why was I given a book? Doesn't anyone know how to use this… stuff?"

"There used to be, but for some reason Dying Will Flame users have been light on the ground for the last century or so." The older brunette informed her easily enough, rubbing the back of her neck as she took the steps needed to enter the room fully. "The lack of any real users stymied a whole lot of things that used to rely on them, until the rare few that could use that stuff were guarded jealously by the ones who claimed them. Within our own group there aren't any others available to teach you anything. We'd have to ask another syndicate if you want actual instruction, and that carries with it a whole lot of risks."

Sonya had figured some of that out herself, given that Cherep had gotten kidnapped for his own talents.

The news of a decline was new to her, but that made a small amount of sense coupled with a two-hundred-year gap between the sets of cursed rainbow babies. Which had its own mention in her journal, as apparently an oddly short Frenchman by the name of Pierre-Antoine Carpentier had once been 'the Storm Arcobaleno' and a friend of Regent Alexeevna.

That had prompted her to vow to take a very long look at a world history book or two, because there might be another reason why Lisa thought she was bad at history other than simply because her memories of Rachel's schooling was going and she had once learned America's version of it.

"Sonya?"

The young thief rubbed her face with her hands. "I'll figure something out, Lisa."

"Ask if you need to, sweetie. We might be able to get a few questions answered if we're careful."

Sonya heaved a sigh as the older woman left her bedroom.

She needed more willpower. Neither Sonya nor Rachel were willful in personality, right now it was likely she had next to none.

How did one build up willpower?

From what she recalled from her past life's leisure activities, either by near-death experiences or over the top training… and that was only if she was willing to take a cartoon as the ultimate authority in her second attempt at life. Which she wasn't intending to do, because of that all so wonderful term 'artistic license' that might have twisted a few things from the reality she was now living in.

Sonya would take what little of the storyline she recalled and the names of the major characters and plan around that, but the story's less than clear occurrences might be enough to trip her up if she relied too heavily on that.

If she was going to take her current experiences as truth, then on both occasions when she had done something outside the realm of physical possibility she had been either scared or irritated to the point of distraction. Which was a very strong hint, but both emotions involved a kind of tunnel vision that would probably end up being lethal for her.

Which would also probably scar Cherep for life, and not something she wanted to do.

Flipping a couple pages of her book absently while still mentally assembling what she knew was possible against what she knew was truth, the tiny thief wondered what to do now.

Arcobalenos, Dying Will Flames, Mafia Land, an undead Skull verses a highly developed and organized Mafia underground that spread out over all corners of the world, possibly undead Mafia Enforcers, her own possible use of Flames, and thirty to forty years before Vongola's Decimo begins to move around and shakes up a few things.

Her friend probably had a little more or less than a decade before the Strongest Seven were assembled, whatever amount of time they would spend together, then the rest of that time he and several others would be cursed to baby form. Which meant she had just as little time to think up some way for the brat to support himself like that… and the only place that wouldn't blink twice at pint-sized adults in a baby's body would probably only be the Mafia.

Probably all thanks to Reborn's efforts and reputation as the World's Greatest Hitman.

…Sonya was pretty sure that would not start well at all. Cherep wasn't Mafia, or even Mafiya like her, and she still couldn't think of him that way no matter how hard she tried. He was just too nice and honest for that to work well for him.

Then again… with his initial circumstances, he might not have had any real options. A Czech boy in Moscow wouldn't have known how to navigate around and find a Mafiya group that would take him in and not expect him to join up as soon as he was old enough.

Arseniy had taken the undead boy in and between the Mafiya members in the house they would probably set him up so he'd have options before sounding him out for the Zolotovs. He was probably a year or so older than Sonya who was already working as a source of income for her clan, but probably not much younger than Tatiana who was almost ready to start working with the rest of her ragtag gang of thieves.

…so, what was going to happen now?

AN#2 : Again, translations

Vory v Zakone (Singular vor, Plural vory) – Thieves-in-Law, title awarded by one's peers (like a peerage title rather than a military rank)

Militsiya – A kind of paramilitary law enforcement, less military and more police in nature.

Malchik – Little Boy

Tupitsa – Means dullard, bonehead, dunce, numskull. The general meaning is stupid and dumb.