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~~((The National Jelly Bean Day Special -- page 4 of 10))~~
He'd been thinking about that little camping trip a lot, lately. The lessons learned during it hadn't been especially relevant so far in Vantalay, thanks to the many luxuries of Ridgemark, but this was still the first time that he and his brothers had gone anywhere for this long without constant supervision.

That, and he just missed Ismael and Ibai.

Ismael had been like a father to the entire House, in many ways. Despite House Blackburn's rather large head count, that man had always tried to make time for everyone--even to a fault, perhaps. Raul remembered trying to compete for his attention with children from the other branch families.

However, in an odd way, Raul also felt a little guilty about missing Ismael so much.

House Blackburn hadn't suffered nearly as many casualties during the Abolish attack on Dunehall as some of the other Rainlord families, but among those few had been the Triplets' own father, Lucio Blackburn.

The Triplets were something of a special case within the House. Their parents, Lucio and Aria, were non-servants. In terms of the overall family hierarchy, they were fairly low. "Uncle" Ismael hadn't actually been their uncle directly, but rather the uncle of most of House Blackburn.

Normally, that wasn't an issue. Those with higher "status" within the family like Melchor or Horatio never treated those with lower status differently, and in the everyday life, the disparity was all but nonexistent.

But when it came to choosing servants for reapers... well, that was another story.

With so many members of the family and so few loyal reapers to go around, Raul could appreciate that it would not be an easy decision to make, choosing which child among the many can become an immortal, superpowered warrior. Rather than trying to work out some vague, supposedly "meritocratic" system for deciding, it was simpler to just give that "privilege" to the branch families with higher status.