Chapter 899: There Is

After lunch, Mary Tarith came in person to collect the guests of honor and lead them to the prepared location for the family-exclusive birthday event.

She had put it in one of the upstairs suites, so it felt more like home, with the large living room and kitchen, while only Dave, Molly, Max's siblings, and a small assortment of the closest of the Tarith Reavers were in attendance.

Nico's father came in only a few seconds after Mary led them into the room, and the Matriarch of the Tarith Clan called the guests to attention.

"Welcome everyone, and Happy Birthday to our not-quite twin Commanders." She joked.

"They might come from very different families, but the two of them have been tied together from the very start. They first saw each other on the way home from the hospital the day that they were born, and they have been together since the Academy assigned them as roommates on the very first day."

With that said, Mary brought out a montage of childhood training videos, taken from the Academy on Kepler Terminus.

That footage should have been very highly privileged and classified, but Mary treated it as a childhood photo album for both Max and Nico, with the time references removed so that it looked like she had watched them grow up together over the course of a number of years.

Dave knew better, as did Mary, but the rest of the room was mostly unaware of the accelerated timeline or of the true youth of the two Commanders.

"Thank you, Mother Mary. You've outdone yourself this year with the birthday celebrations. A whole world ship worth of party is quite the event." Max joked as Mary paused to take a breath.

"You're welcome, Darling. But that's not going to stop me from replaying my montage of childhood photos." Mary laughed and then changed the feed to show more scenes from their first field trip, then their first deployment aboard Abraham Kepler, which Max recognized as having been taken from General Tennant's point of view.

The old General could very well have sent her the footage in advance instead of making her search for it, but Max knew that she had simply hacked the Kepler military mission logs when things got chaotic on Kepler Terminus and saved everything that might be worth taking, with the expectation that the Rebels would start to destroy what that they could as soon as they realized that they were going to lose.

"Look at them, receiving their first Crusader Class Mecha." Mary reminisced, while the others began to laugh.

They were both still very babyfaced, as they had received Stalwart and Tarith's Rage at not even thirteen years old, but with the accelerated growth of the System, they looked more like young adults than young teens.

There were a few scenes of them around the ship, celebrating their new acquisitions, but there were a lot of missing moments along the way when there wasn't anything recorded for her to display.

That was a problem that Max could fix though. Nico had it all recorded herself, and there was a lot in the ship's computers that they had downloaded from their Mecha while they were servicing them.

Max collected a montage of those, and sent them directly to Mary's wrist device, making sure to only cast himself and Nico in the best of light.

Mary smiled and added the extra footage to her files, while the staff of the hotel came around and dropped off drinks and some of the hotel's specialty pastries for the group to snack on. They all knew that Mary wasn't going to be done reminiscing too quickly and then there would be some time and socialization before they moved onto the actual cake.

Nico wasn't the only one in the Tarith Family who was obsessed with trying to get the recipe, she was just the one who had the most luck getting parts of it from her mother.

After Mary finished talking, Dave was up next and gave a nostalgic smile at Max before he began.

"You know, this boy was barely three years old when we first met. He was outside my room with one of his parent's tablets, because the data network in his parent's house had been cut off and he wanted to hack my wifi. Even at such a young age, his System Talent had made him more mature than any other child I've ever met, but what really made us solid friends was when he came over to warn me in advance the day that the police came to raid our building.

That's a level of loyalty that it's hard to say no to, so I took him in and let him stay all he wanted at my apartment. We learned the basics of Mecha together, I taught him his first lessons of Command, and then I sent him off to the Academy where they could do their best to undo my teachings."

The Reavers laughed and cheered, while Max resisted the urge to remind Dave that the reason that he had been so eager to help was partially because it was his job to keep an eye on Max and make sure that Max's worthless parents hadn't done anything that would damage the government's Alpha Grade asset.

One after another the people in the room stood up to give a recounting of various incidents where they had encountered the two, or a reminiscence of the time that they had spent at the Tarith household.

Getting to tease Nico about her baby years was their favorite pastime, but Dave had a surprise up his sleeves. He too had a montage, of footage from the building's security cameras that he had saved of a young Max at play.

"There isn't nearly as much here, since we had to destroy most of it for security reasons, but I do have a bit of footage of young Max." He laughed and then played the two of them hacking on his outdated computers, or out for walks to let Max gather intelligence as they passed the police station on the way to the convenience store to get more beer and snacks.

The speeches finished and Mary gave the room a huge smile.

"Now the reason that we're all really here. It's time for the CAKE." Mary informed the room.