Author's notes: This started out as part of the "Your Song" series which I haven't updated in seventy billion years, and evolved into this on it's own. I felt kind of weird making up my own characters, but they're not Mary Sues (Marty Stus?) or anything like that, just necessary evils. Title is loosely derived from Ender's Game, because that's what inspired me.

Italics denote the alliance guys talking.

'...' denotes thought, which is only necessary for our psychics.

Feed me! kaylee@kikiroxxorz.com

Pairings are: (Simon/Kaylee, Mal/Inara, Jayne/OC and River/OC) but they're not truly important to the plot.

~*~

“They’re intelligent.”

“The children?”

“Yes. There has been no formal examination, due to their…unfortunate location, but from what we can observe, they are remarkably intelligent—possibly more so than their aunt.”

“What about their abilities?”

“The girl appears to have a natural affinity for medicine and the boy--”

“You know that isn’t what I meant.”

“From what we can observe, they show psychic activity. They can communicate without speaking--”

“Is that not normal twin behaviour?”

“I wasn’t finished. They can communicate without speaking; answer their parents’ questions before they ask. Tease people about their thoughts. Juvenile things like that.”

“Excellent. How soon can we get through to them?”

“That’s the difficult part.”

“We know where they are?”

“We know where they are. Finding them is not the difficult part. Convincing them to come with us is. We’ve already used the school premise on one of their family members. I’m sure they’ve heard all about the Academy, and they’re intelligent enough not to trust anyone from the Academy. We need another plan.”

“Can we not just use brute force, sir?”

“It’s not ideal, but if worst comes to worst, I suppose that’s what will have to happen.”

~*~

“Grr! Arrrrrghhhhh! I am a fearsome, dangerous Raptor! Grrr! I will eat you! Haha. Hahaha!!”

“But you…you’re so dashingly handsome! Oh, Raptor! I love you!”

“What’s this? Ah! T