A/N: So as my Stars would know, I'm fond of writing backstories of my characters that are canon but kind of like a 'break' to the main story line. These short stories mostly contain symbolism, motifs, dramatic themes or foils in relation to the characters in the universe to allow readers more depth in their reading of the characters and the story!
I've decided to do this for Vanilla too, but more as an added information to educate Beans on infant care (HUH???? CUPPIE, WHAT?? CHILDREN???) and the how the mind of geniuses can work, simply because Vanilla is quite a rare find from the usual... well... protagonists who are stereotypically not-as-clever as that all-knowing, glasses-wearing character that feeds them (and the audience) with information.
In the case of Vanilla, the reason why it's read so differently from the Baked series is precisely because I've decided for Vanilla to be like this and for him to be the main character; sort of similar to how Iolani Tori from FS is.
I understand that the language is much more refined, much more difficult to get through and that I may be alienating readers who do not have English as their first language and for that, I apologize. Maybe that's why BL was so well-received. It is simple; I must admit.
Allow me to challenge myself and the capacity of my mind for language. I hope you enjoy this one.
Stories beginning with See will be stories about Vanilla, and Saw will be about Leroy when he was younger.
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When Vanilla Julian White had his fifth infant check-up at a local family paediatrician, the clinic had directed him to a child intelligence specialist in a hospital an hour away in the city center.
The boy, at six-months old, had experienced the wonders of crawling for nearly a month and was in the midst of figuring out how the limbs attached to his hips worked by slapping and squeezing them every now and then. He also happened to be a very picky eater.
Alfred could barely remember when it all started—seeing his sister spoon those pre-packaged monsters in plastic re-sealable bags right into the boy's mouth only to have him leaving it open for the slimy, gooey banana-flavoured mush to drool onto his bib.
He was the kind of child who never seemed to cry and had, by some miracle, devised several ways to communicate his infant needs. While other babies and their mothers were busy attending trendy baby sign language classes featured in parenting magazines and swimming lessons for hand-eye coordination, all Vanilla's mother ever did was try to get him to eat.
And when her stringent brother had finally come round to suggesting they bring the boy for a thorough check of his wellbeing—euphemism for a visit to the child psychologist—to ensure that he was quite alright, the local doctor had referred them to a proper specialist after an hour of tests.
Being the man devoted to following instructions and a strict procedure of 'uncle-ing', Alfred did not hesitate to stick mother and son into a cab and together, made their way to the city center.
"So your paediatrician says here that your child shows signs of... word association," Dr. Marlee Windsor had been scanning a paged document through a pair of reading glasses before resting her gaze on the boy in his mother's lap. Beside, her brother appeared sceptical. "It means that he can not only read PCI level one words but also know what they actually mean."
Alfred had turned to his sister with a frown and he almost immediately, he could tell she was hiding a laugh. "Well, doctor... about that, could there be some sort of mistake? We're here on the grounds that Vanille has trouble getting food past his throat. It is very concerning to his mother and h-he can't possibly—"
"Yes, I have trouble believing it too," interrupted the psychologist with a quipped nod of her head. "We'll get started on the test and from there, the results will tell. The boy will be seated in his mother's lap while the procedure is carried out, so daddy will have to stay here."
"Oh I'm not the father," Alfred was quick to explain. "I'm his uncle, you see."
Dr. Windsor blinked, as though trying to see how this declaration could in any way change the outcome. "You still stay here. I can't have you in the test room as it might distract the child."
And so poor Uncle Alfred had to remain in his seat and resort to flipping through parenting texts and research books that were part of the room's entertainment. Apart from the children's corner that featured cotton cubes filled with fluff and baby books that squeaked when opened.
*
It wasn't long before mother and son emerged from the test room and returned to the doctor's office with a candied star reward that was failing in its appeal to little Vanilla, who refused to hold it in his hands and was exceptionally keen on tossing it at Dr. Windsor's face.
Sceptical Alfred, who had been waiting for nearly an hour and a half, had made the terrible mistake of overthinking, again, and had long fallen into the nightmare of there being something terribly wrong with his nephew's brain. This, he all hoped the documents and papers in Windsor's arms could somehow solve. On the other hand, his sister displayed no sign of concern and was her usual, carefree self—smiling and rocking her boy up and down whilst the latter attempted to slap the candied star out of her hands.
"Alright. Have a seat, Mrs White."
"I still don't understand what this has to do with him not swallowing his food," insisted Alfred at once in his usual state of mind, simply unable to take 'no reason' for an answer. "We were wondering if the poor boy's been suffering from some eating disorder and—"
"Your child, at six months old, may have an intelligence quotient that is higher than 99.453% of the entire human population." The child psychologist decided to open with, glancing down at the papers of results before resting her gaze on the boy's uncle. "I wouldn't be concerned about babies or infants refusing to swallow some mildly offensive store-bought food. It's actually quite a common problem. Have you tried making him some homemade pumpkin porridge, or, sweet potato puree? It always works."
The mother of the lovely boy wriggling his feet as though on the brink of getting them to work had turned to her brother with a blink, whispering. "Is that why he only swallows that quinoa ratatouille mom made a couple of weeks ago?"
Dr. Windsor gave them each a look, as though the question only served to prove her point.
"I suggest trying out different recipes and ingredients and staying away from the pre-packaged stuff. I understand you may have your difficulties as a single mother, but I can suggest some websites where they provide recipes and solutions for picky babies. That said... I've never heard of one who likes quinoa ratatouille."
Uncle Alfred seemed slightly relieved by all this, only to recall the very first declaration from the child psychologist, as though that had only been a secondary concern to him. First being, well, that the child was healthy and alive. Looking at his little Vanille tossing unhealthy snacks aside and playing with his feet, that was most definitely not going to be his prime concern.
"You were saying? Um, about the IQ."
Dr. Windsor rose from her seat to cross the room, stopping by the children's play corner to retrieve a pair of hula hoops before placing them in the middle of the room where there was a ton of empty space.
"He's been crawling?"
"Yeah! Nillie likes inspecting textured flooring," piped the boy's mother. "It's been a month and he's always fascinated when we pop by our mother's house for dinner."
The psychologist seemed to have found this fairly amusing, letting slip a humoured laugh as she beckoned to the mother and her child.
"Inspecting, you say? Well... it's not often that infants begin crawling at an average of seven to eight months old. And—do you read to him?"
"Baby books, sort of." Mommy White brought her boy over to the pair of hula hoops, placed a feet apart from each other and laid flat on the floor. "Alfred's been buying these sets of classics. Hans Christian Anderson, Oscar Wilde—the stories for children, I mean, not the plays—stuff like that. He reads them to Nillie but, I mean... those are actual stories, right? All I got him were the textured and audio word books that go 'moo' when you touch the furry white button with black patches on it." She'd laughed, cheery in disposition.
Dr. Windsor was quick to assure her that word books were perfectly normal for infants of six months old.
"Let's try something more telling. It's not written in code and numbers like the tests you've been doing but it might give us a better representation of your boy's... intelligence. Can you put him on the floor?"
The mother did as told, awaiting further instructions as she watched the psychologist pull out three word cards—no pictures—and placed them in front of little Vanilla.
DOG
CAT
BONE
"Tell him," she instructed next, "in IDS or motherese, we've talked about this earlier, to group the words however he likes. He has to put them in the circles, the hula hoops, to represent that they are in a group. Try not to read them aloud."
Alfred had given up the comfort of his chair to approach the three in the middle of the room for a better view. "Oh. Well, why can't you be the one doing that?"
"Infants always respond better to the IDS of a parent or at least someone who's been taking care of them for some time. This task is difficult, even for eleven- to fourteen-month-old babies. He's half their age, so we might need to give him a little more help."
Dr. Windsor turned to the child's mother, prompting her to follow the given instructions.
Lowering herself to the floor and already getting the attention of Vanilla by doing so, she took his hands and placed them on each of the word cards, talking in the spontaneous, exaggerated manner in which adults used to speak to babies.
"Look Nillie, it's words!" She began, tone pitched in a way that made her boy smile. "How many? Tha-ree, isn't that right? Let's look at them. Let's look at the words..."
To think an infant could be a step ahead of his parent, something like that would have sounded nearly bizarre and ludicrous but little Vanilla had picked up the cards—bent and curved in his miniature hands—and showed them to his mother in what seemed like a calm, collected manner.
"Good," the psychologist had this all taped and noted, prompting the child's mother with further instructions. "Tell him what he has to do, and make it look like you're just playing. Use the word 'home'."
She nodded. "Wow Nillie," tickling his chin, she made him squirm with babyish laughter. "Well! Done!" Little Vanilla proceeded to place them back on the floor, exactly where they had been and in the same order.
"But now, I need to find a home for these three little words! Oh noo, can you help me find a home for them? Maybe the circles can be their homes. Do you see the circles?"
In the midst of this happening, Alfred could not resist the urge to, once again, express his rampant doubts and confusion as to what the experiment was supposed to be doing. "I don't understand," he'd said in a lowered voice, "Vanille can't possibly group words like that. No baby can!"
"Well, both tests carried out by your local paediatrician and myself have demonstrated the boy's word association capabilities. I've had at least a hundred babies under my belt of experience and carrying this out has always proven machine calculations as accurate. Something I invented myself.
"Either they group the words by type—by that I mean animals and non-living things—or a higher-order understanding of complex relations, in which a dog always goes with a bone and dogs and cats are opposites so they belong in different circles. Even then, those are infants with parents who send them to special IQ development classes and read to them every day. Ordinary babies cannot word associate until they are fourteen to fifteen months old. Sometimes, it doesn't even develop till they are two."
By this point, the pair in conversation had witnessed little Vanilla throw 'cat' into the circle on his right and 'bone' into the one on his left before staring down 'dog' that remained ungrouped, seemingly unable to find a 'home' for the final word.
"Why don't you find a home for do—that word too, Nillie?" His mother prompted, all of a sudden concerned that her boy wasn't performing as well as the reports have projected. At the level he was, she'd assumed that he would miraculously be able to classify the words under animals and non-living things at the very least, albeit being a six-month-old infant.
Vanilla just sat there, in his diapers and cream-coloured, button-up body suit that had a tiny rainbow printed in the middle. 'Dog' did not seem to appeal to the current workings of his mind.
"I... don't think he actually knows what the words mean," said his mother after some time, looking up at the child psychologist, who appeared rather surprised. "But he definitely understands me. I mean, he kind of sorted them out. He knew he should be putting the words into the circles, at least."
Alfred was back at being a professional sceptic. It was his life-long career.
"So there! The readings aren't accurate. Vanille does not word associate, or whatever it is that you have been claiming, and he's just an ordinary boy who needs his basic necessities of love and care. We were being rightfully concerned of him not eating properly, which you have provided a solution to and we are very grateful for. But I think these tests only put further pressure on the poor boy and look how distraught he is! You can't possibly..."
The adults in conversation turned around at the ruckus that little Vanilla had somehow created, leaning over to grab the end of one hula hoop before pulling it towards him and smashing that on top of the other, so that the two circles overlapped.
And in the space that he'd created—between the two overlapping 'homes', the oval-shaped thing that contained neither 'cat' that was to the space on his right and 'bone', on his left, the six-month-old infant placed 'dog'.
He turned at once to his mother, looking up at her with those ocean blue eyes that twinkled like a pool on a summer afternoon. Eyes that did not look like they belonged to someone who, months out of a womb, had the ability to resolve the fact that dogs and cats were animals but that dogs also had a relation to bones.
It wasn't that he couldn't find the 'dog' a home with the 'cat' or the 'bone', or that he somehow needed a third circle for a whole new word—it was that he so needed it to be part of both. And his solution?
A Venn diagram.