Joel felt like a proud dad. Two weeks ago Aiden had brought home Charlie and Parker, who at the time, had kind of avoided each other in the cave, as Charlie had been concerningly eyeing Aiden and whispering to Parker "she said Aiden right?", and now they were fighting and training together as though they had been for years.

A few days into their stay Charlie had found a xylophone and had almost immediately started playing the gravity falls theme song, during which the sky got cloudy, nothing seemed off to the boys but to Joel it seemed promising. They soon learned that Charlie could manipulate weather with music, which Joel made sure he could weaponize asap. He also quickly learned that Parker could turn invisible, which made sense how he could steal so much yogurt undetected. And Joel had already been fine tuning Aidens power of fire manipulation, making the animals look more like bears and hawks and less like a blobfish, so he felt they were set.

But today was the test of a lifetime, their goal was to find and capture him in the woods today, which was Joel's absolute favorite test because he usually just farfed to aurora and chatted for an hour while his apprentices spent that time running around and getting lost, and then he'd rub it in their faces that they couldn't catch him at dinner, and they'd be so pissed that they wouldn't even realize he was gaslighting them, a skill he picked up from his years with Selby. He planned on doing the same thing today. All three boys lined up at the start of the cave, weapons ready and he started his speech on rules: 1) you can't leave the forest, 2) no murder, 3) work together, you are a team, 4) to "capture" him you needed to tag him, that's how they win, if he tagged all members of the team first, they lost, 5) he got a five minute head start into the woods. After sharing this he turned and ran into the woods, and once out of sight he farfed to Aurora ready to hear all the happenings she had to share.

***

If there was one thing Aiden was good at, it was catching on. He caught on to the fact that Charlie assumed he would die soon. He'd caught on to the fact that the fridge magically restocked on food, and almost exclusively orange juice for drinking. He'd caught on to the fact that the world was in danger, and that Joel was a god. And he'd caught on to the fact that Joel didn't actually follow rule #1. Another thing he was good at was waiting, he wold practice his archery and other combat weapons when Joel was away, to make him think that he was running around in the woods, so joel wouldn't catch on to the fact that Aiden had caught on, and he would wait for the perfect moment to pull back the curtain of his long forming plan.

When Joel ran off he stood at the edge of the cave for five minutes, to make sure he'd farfed away and then turned back into the cave and sat down at the table.

"What are you doing?" Parker asked, both him and Charlie looked confused as to why Aiden was just sitting there.

"He breaks rule #1 every time, there's no point in running around, I'm waiting till he gets back so I can ambush him when he's least expecting it," Aiden responded casually, "he's gone for an hour so get comfy, i'll call you when he's about to get back so we can get into position." he let that sink in and then asked, "have either of you seen that bluetooth speaker lying around?"

***

"Bye Joel," Aurora called out as he was about to leave.

"Bye!" he called waving and he farfed to aiden, expecting to see the woods and the three of them tired and sweaty from running around. Instead he was in an empty room in his cave with Charlie playing "You belong with me" by Taylor Swift on the xylophone and Aiden and Parker jumping at him and tagging him, winning his rigged game.

"I win," Aiden smirked. And in that moment Joel realized he had planned this whole thing out and had realized exactly what the point of the exercise was and had won. No one followed the rules in battle and his apprentices had all worked together to out con him and it had worked. He truly felt like a proud dad.