BACK TO GRANDPA BELL

And that was how the human diplomat came to Moon Bell and turned out to be our precious daughter's soul mate. The End.

Hey! That was cutting it short! It reminded me of how Beta Lucas used to read me story books. He liked to sneakily skip pages to get the story to end quicker. It was very annoying, and from a very young age, I had to memorize my storybooks so that he wouldn't be able to get away with it.

"That was NOT how the story ended." Any pup would be able to tell that there was probably an entire chapter (or ten) missing here. I was not going to let Bell cheat me of a good story.

Bell caught my wrist, "Do not cast that again, baby. I'd like to get on with my life."

Grrr… But how else would I be able to hear how Dan Lion became Moon Bell's luna? I wasn't going to wait till I could ask Henri myself!

"But you can't leave me hanging like that!" I protested.

Bell ignored me and went on with his own life, which seemed to revolved around grandchildren. Our youngest grandpup was Dan and Henri's Art.

"They named their puppy Art?" For two sensible grown up wolves, that was weird, "Was Dan drunk when he named his puppy?"

No. After the first night, there was a rumor that the human Dan Lion was extremely dangerous when under the influence of alcohol, and none of our wolves would let him near any.

Art was short for a very proper and nice name, Arthur Alexander Lion.

Arthur was for a legendary human king. Alexander was for Wolfgang (so they would share the same middle name). Wolfgang  was Art's godfather. (Poor Art - there's no way he would be able to escape Teacher Hotstuff's nagging, I mean lessons.)

Art could possibly be the next Alpha of Moon Bell, but mostly because no one else wanted the position. JL4's pups were all in the Colored Mountains. Silas' pups were all over the place and no one knew what the hell they were up to. Even Stephan's grands turned out rather surprisingly free-spirited in their own way.

Stephan had 6 pups too - and all biologically his and his human soul mate's. Four alpha boys and two girls, who also had alpha pups of their own. Morning Light was no longer in shortage of an alpha either because Harvey's sister, Haylee mated a wolf with Alpha blood too. We were in no way short of potential alpha candidates who contrary to popular legends, were all uninterested in the Alpha position.

It turned out that traveling the world, looking for treasures, visiting relatives in the Colored Mountains, messing with vamps, picking fights with the fire wolves and snow wolves across the continent, teasing the last warlock, living the high life in Gate City, and pretty much anything else was far more fun than working hard in preparation of becoming the Alpha.

All of them were troublemakers. Bell couldn't figure out why (this was rich coming from a guy named Rebel).

You wouldn't see Henry's pups turning Gold City upside down... Unless they were running with our pups. In which case Henry would be the first to blame our pups for being a bad influence on his pups.

"This is the last time my pups will play with your pups!" He would yell… he still yelled this, even though all our pups had grown and had pups of their own.

In general though, it was widely undisputed that our pups had a certain influence on the world. I wouldn't call it a bad influence (even if Henry did), it was more of a disruptive influence. Never mind thinking out of the box, these troublemakers liked to do nothing more than shake up whole boxes and then pouring its contents out just to see what would happen.

I blame it on my Grandpa Alpha's catalyst bloodline.

In Moon Bell, our generation had an average of 4 pups. The population boom could be due to the fact that a large proportion of our new population came out from life threatening circumstances and found themselves in the "promised land". Nothing like surviving a war or escaping the fight cages to spur procreation.

Normally, that would ensure the survival of our lycan-kind, now it was just utter chaos. But Bell sounded too happy about it for me to believe it was a bad thing.

Bell was like one of those grumpy grandpas who made it like he was complaining about his grandpups when he was actually really proud of them. So proud that he couldn't stop showing off.

98X - We were still walking but my X's were down to 2 digits. When did that happen?

In Bell's opinion, JLV (where V was read as 5) was the most powerful wolf, but Ori was the strongest fighter one on one.

Who?

"Ori - Orion - Silas' boy." Bell said, "He was named for the stars he was born under."

I suppose if he was named after the constellation, Orion was a better name than Belt - just saying.

I must be the worst grandma in the world. I could barely follow Bell's narrative about our small multitude of pride and joy. It didn't help that I had never met any of our kids, much less our grandkids. It also didn't help that all the girls had tomboy nicknames.

Like George. Who turned out to be Georgette.  And Cole, who turned out to be Collette. Don't even get me started on Scar and Vio! (Scarlette and Violette)

The "ette" parts were a nod towards their Alpha Aunty, Henriette. I'm not sure if it were because her brothers were truly admiring their baby sister's strength and leadership or just paying tribute so they wouldn't feel so bad about saddling her with the pack work.

The boyish nicknames just caught on because the pups heard stories about Alpha Sam (that's me!) and thought having a boy's name could let them get away with more things. Ahem. Henri also signed off as Alpha Henri and had been mistaken for a male alpha wolf in the days before she started traveling out of the Packlands with Dan.

I was starting to understand Dan's gripe with our naming conventions.

And Dan seemed to have made an astute observation when he noticed how the cute nicknames often belonged to the scarier wolves. All our grand boys had really cute aliases. JLV ran by Alpha Five, and was called Hi-Five by his friends growing up. He was also the eldest, and already found his soul mate. The youngest boy wrote his name as "Art Lion". In between I think there was a Jules (whom I thought had to be short for Juliette, but turned out to be Julian.) Niki was Nicodemus. Lyn was... just Lyn.

We also had a Prince Charm. Short for Charmander, not Charming. This was much longer than his real name, which was Oz because he was born the year Fluffy's Yellow Brick Road Database Project was finally completed. 

And also because Felix (Fluffy's son) had named his first son Lyn (he liked how it had no vowels). He was determined to reduce the number of alphabets with every son. If he had a third son, he would only use one letter - X.

Thank goddess he stopped at two though. Lyn and Oz, aka Prince Lyn and Prince Charm, who were already too many Fluffies in one generation.

After all, one day in the future, it would be said, "Every generation would fight a war, and also contend with a Fluffy." Okay, no. I made that up. I did suggest it, but Grandpa Bell in all his future wisdom assured me that nobody would every say that.