It took Mark a moment to realize what he had just heard Theresa say. Then it took him yet another moment to understand the meaning of it, and then the implications. He opened his mouth to reply, closed it again, stared at her, looked at Mona (wearing one of her mischievous smiles again), then back at Theresa. He had no idea on how to react to that.
Eventually, he decided on just a "What?"
"I think the right thing to say would be 'Hello, Theresa'", Mona laughed, "wouldn't it?"
"Come on, it's a lot to process," Theresa defended Mark. "Give him a minute, mom."
That final little word was too much. "Wait, 'mom'?" he gasped. "Why are you calling Mona your mom?"
In the background, Stefanie chortled. "Because she is her mom, knucklehead," she said. "Theresa is the daughter you gave Mona."
"But how can- That's impossible!" Mark looked at both women before him again, one tall and willowy, one of average height and buxom. They had quite different facial features, and one wouldn't really have considered them related. Of course, what really made Stefanie's statement impossible was the fact that both of them seemed to be around the same age - if anything, Theresa looked a year or two older than Mona.
"It's still true," Mona replied, her voice suddenly much softer as she positioned herself at Theresa's side and put an arm around her daughter's waist. "This is our child, Mark. Yours and mine. And I'd say she came out beautifully, don't you think?"
Theresa huddled closer to her mother while still keeping her eyes fixed on Mark. "I think he's starting to get it," she said. "Give him another minute to realize how much I look like him."
Raising an eyebrow, Mark took a closer look at her. Could this woman really be his daughter? She did have pitch-black curly hair like he did, and her eyes shared the same medium-brown tone with his. And then there was the overall shape of her face too, and the delicate-looking cheekbones that showed in most of Mark's pictures from junior high. She was right, there was quite a bit of similarity, but still...
"Okay, explain it," Mark said, deciding that he was done with figuring things out when he could just be asking. "How is it possible that you're my daughter with Mona when we only just met a few weeks ago?"
"You already know that we're born only four weeks after we're conceived," Theresa answered. "We grow super-fast in our mothers' bellies. But we don't stop with that when we're born. We're able to fully mature within another four, sometimes eight weeks, and that only ends when we reach the physical age of nineteen."
Mark stared at her in disbelief. "So you're saying... you're pretty much just a few weeks old?"
Shaking her head, Theresa chuckled lightly. "No, you got that wrong. I'm nineteen years old. I just went through those nineteen years a whole lot faster than most people you know."
"I suppose you're now wondering how this is biologically possible," Naira joined the conversation. You're wondering where all that body mass comes from in just a few weeks, and how on earth she has learned to walk and talk and form coherent sentences in that short time. Am I interpreting that expression on your face correctly?"
"Pretty much," Mark said. "I see a woman here who definitely looks like she could be nineteen but who's telling me she was conceived just this summer. That's- Well, it's a lot to get my head around."
Naira nodded. "It's the most amazing part of our biology. Until maturity, our metabolisms are capable of working over two hundred times faster than those of 'normal' people." She drew quotation marks with her fingers upon the word 'normal'. "So we really go through those full nineteen years of physical development, only at a highly accelerated rate."
That still left more than a few questions open, Mark thought. "But how would a tiny baby even eat enough to grow so quickly?" he asked. "And how would changing diapers even work at that speed?"
"A valid question," Naira answered, giving scathing looks to the other women who were unanimously giggling among themselves now. "But the answer revolves less about the how and more about the what of eating. You see, the key to it all is in what we feed our baby girls. Now, in your experience, what do babies have for breakfast, lunch and dinner?"
"Well, milk," Mark said. "Mother's milk- Wait! So what you're saying is that the mother's milk you're producing-"
Naira nodded. "Bingo. That's what makes our baby girls grow so well. It contains a stupendous amount of energy, plus all nutrients, vitamins and other essentials one needs to become healthy and strong. Our bodies are able to convert almost all of it into mass - there's very little waste. And to answer your earlier question, until we're fully mature, we need to have our diapers changed - or go to the toilet - about sixty or eighty times altogether. In around four to eight weeks of real-time."
Things were slowly coming together in Mark's mind, though something seemed to be odd about the explanation he had just heard, and when it finally hit him, his eyes grew wide. "But for that all to work- Are you saying you're breastfeeding your daughters until they're nineteen?!"
"Yeah, that's pretty weird," Mona chimed in. "You're a teenager, you have all these interesting new things going on with your body, you'd really like to try it all out, and then it's dinnertime and it's off to mommy's breast." She looked over to Tanya. "No offense, mom."
"None taken," Tanya smiled, "and yeah, I can relate to that. I felt pretty much the same when I was still growing up. But that's the way it is."
Mark shook his head. "Breastfeeding teenagers," he mused. "I really have a hard time imagining that. I can't even picture you as teenagers-"
To his surprise, Mona giggled. "You never drew the connection, did you?" she asked.
"What connection?"
"You saw me once when I was fourteen or so," she said. "The first time you came to the safehouse. I was just outside stretching my legs, and you gave me the scare of a lifetime when you suddenly showed up there."
