WHY DO I FEEL UNEASY?

9 MARCH, TUESDAY, MORNING

"What time are you leaving, Sam?" Dad looked up from his screen to ask me sometime at the end of breakfast.

I had been concentrating on my breakfast. While it was a wonderful thick slab of toasted sourdough with a generous helping of herb speckled creamed cheese and artistically arranged salmon slices that looked like a magazine photo on my plate, it was much harder to get it into my mouth. This was probably because I was trying to eat it like a burger - which made sense to me at the point of time. In hindsight, there was probably a reason why my place setting included a fork and a knife. But who used a fork and knife to eat breakfast?

I had to take pause, I guess if it were like a breakfast platter like sausages with eggs, but even then, I would just use a fork. Or if I had to spread something like peanut butter or jam, I would use a table knife - which was the standard utensil for all things cutting and spreading at every meal before Ki. After Ki, the utensils had a population boom and if butter was served, there was a "master butter knife" to serve the butter, and butter spreaders for such tasks.

Even our table knives had diversified to fish knives, steak knives, dessert knives… and we had two sizes of dinner knives, Lala knew the smaller one was technically a luncheon knife. Lala knew a lot of useless information like that.

I think the unnecessary array of tableware had to be a Lorent thing. Anyway, here I was trying to gulp down my breakfast like a penguin with a fish in its beak - sort of head-first longwise, so I had to stop mid-way to answer my Dad.

I looked out of the floor-to-ceiling glass sliding doors on the side of the dining room to note the warriors and vehicle convoy already parked out front and hazarded a guess, "Soon?"

It was at this point that both of us realized that Dad was asking the wrong person. We looked over to Ki who was pouring tea for mum.

"What time is Sam due at Night Forest, Ki?" Dad asked my beta because far be it for an alpha to know her own schedule like that.

Ki smiled like a flower to the sun, "The goddess is due at her leisure. The GAP Analysis Team will travel separately and are due to depart in fifteen minutes."

Basically, my poor betas, who ran like clockwork, had to be flexible about my travel itinerary today because Dad called an impromptu meeting last night when he said, "We will continue tomorrow morning…" So I had a meeting at the Alpha's office, one that was impossible for my highly efficient betas to estimate the length of.

On top of that, my future lovely luna, the Lorent Alpha James had declared he would come over AT HIS LEISURE to deal with my wolves and see what I needed him for. (BTW, Stephan had already reported to the FAO about half and hour ago and was waiting upon his alpha's leisure).

They didn't even know what time I would wake up (because Wolfgang disallowed anyone from disturbing the princess when she was in her room), or how long I would take to swallow my fancy breakfast… (I might want seconds.)

Basically, everyone was waiting on all the alphas' leisure, but if all went well, I would be expected at Night Forest in time for morning tea, or by lunch time. Any later and Uncle Louis would not be able to receive me personally until dinner, because at Night Forest, everything ran according to his leisure.

It was as if alphas did not own clocks, or knew how to consult one.

Or maybe alphas were above the mundane concepts of time. I looked out to check the sky, I had thought I was up early on a winter morning… but now I realized that it was Spring, not winter, and it wasn't that early, the sky was just overcast.

"It looks like rain today." Mum said, "And probably everyday this week."

Now Mum started to worry about the lunas shopping excursion to Gate City later this week, she sighed, "I hope the weather forecast is wrong."

Don't worry, Mum, it was usually wrong. I checked the time - yes, the actual one, by looking at my watch of many wishes - the one with lots of little diamonds lined up around its face that Luna Edith gifted me. It wasn't that early, but it wasn't too late. Breakfast never ran past 9 in my home, and the fact that Mum, Dad, and Sabre were still at the breakfast table proved that my watch had to be right. It was eight in the morning.

Savy was absent, but this was normal too. Today was a school holiday. Normal teenagers wouldn't be up at eight in the morning.

I think it was very lucky that I had automatically woken up at seven this morning. I also think it would be a good idea to set an alarm for myself from now onwards. Lady Amber's gentle chiding from Lala's memories played in the background of my mind, "Time a tide waits for no man, my dear child."

And then for some reason, because in THIS timeline, I knew Lady Olivia, I could hear her laughing, "Luckily, we're ladies, so we don't have to mind it."

They were sisters, Lady Olivia being the older sister but Lady Amber being the more sensible one. I had not known Lady Olivia in my past lives - now that I did, remembering that she had been shot in the Original Timeline was upsetting. She was alive and well in this timeline, which was different, but "as it should be"?

Why was I feeling so uneasy at the way things were going?

"Then we better get started." Dad had his thinking frown on.

"Is this about the High Council Meeting again?" Mum worried.

Dad quickly soothed her, "No, darling. We were just debriefing on previous events. Don't worry about it."

He must have meant, "Don't ever find out about it." Haha.

If Mum ever found out what Dad had been doing behind her back… Dad was going to be in SO MUCH TROUBLE. Luckily for Dad, I wasn't Ben. I didn't believe in blackmailing my parents.

Beta Lucas appeared at out door a few minutes after Dad decided "we better get started." He let himself in after the usual two raps on our glass sliding door, "Hoo boy, good morning Alpha, Luna, Sam. Looks like its going to rain all week."

I wondered if he had been waiting upon his Alpha's leisure too, or if it really was just about the time for him to accompany his alpha to work (because it was.)

Dad's routine had always been the most fixed one in our household. Savy and I would depend on things like whether it was a school day or not, Mum would depend on whether we had school, or if she had an appointment that day. But Dad was almost always wake up, eat breakfast, go to work, home for dinner, evening meeting or somewhere in the house, just wherever Mum was.

Whenever Dad was home, he would usually be wherever Mum was. Like even way back when I was a pup, if Mum was cleaning in the kitchen after dinner, Dad would be too. If Mum was folding laundry on the sofa with her TV drama on, Dad would be in his armchair working on his screen - but still able to respond to whatever Mum commented about her show.

"Oh, she shouldn't have agreed to that!" Mum would exclaim when the female lead made an obviously wrong move.

"What a silly thing to do." My dad would agree from behind his screen.

So I never knew if he were pretending to work or pretending to watch Mum's TV drama.

For all I knew, he might not even have been my REAL dad. Maybe he was a time-traveling dad just subbing for the evening. Gah! What's wrong with me? I was getting paranoid… I blamed it on the uneasy feeling that had been nagging at me all morning.

Maybe it was just the fish. Maybe I was the kind of delicate princess who couldn't stomach fish in the morning… HAHAHAHAHA… yeah, right.