Chapter 90

Yor takes Bond out for his usual walk and Anya joins, angling for the park with the big obstacle course. Her fun is interrupted when two boys point at an old man on a bench and speculate that he is a spy. Anya scans his thoughts expecting a sinister plot and instead finds a confused man who only wants to get home. The boys chase him off with their accusations while she watches, speechless.

She crosses paths with him again on a log bridge, where he nearly slips before regaining his composure. Yor steps in to help, and the family learns he recently moved to the area and has lost his bearings. A note in his jacket suggests he went out to shop, so they try the market, where he mentions having taught at the nearby university and mutters about the damage the war did to it. Anya relays his half-heard thoughts to steer the search, but the group keeps landing in the wrong places: back at the park, a mafia branch office, a florist, even the top of a tower.

When the man despairs over the trouble he is causing, Anya insists the whole outing has been an adventure. Touched that she never mocked him, he buys her a waffle and says she reminds him of a granddaughter, which leads Yor to reflect that neither she nor Anya has ever known a grandparent. A raffle coupon falling from his pocket finally points to the candy shop Anya frequents, and Bond picks up a scent trail from there. The trail ends at the Forgers' own building, where Loid stands with an elderly woman he has been helping move in. The couple introduce themselves as Sigmund and Barbara Authen, the family's new neighbors, and Sigmund apologizes to his wife with flowers as the pair flirt in front of the amused Forgers.

Anya, Yor, and Bond spend an afternoon guiding a lost elderly man through Berlint in search of his home.

Sigmund and Barbara Authen debut and are revealed as the Forgers' new next-door neighbors.

Yor reflects on the fact that Anya has never had grandparents, since both her own and Loid's parents are gone.

An 18-page chapter of Volume 13 in the Term Finals Arc, released November 13, 2023, with Yor, Bond, and Anya on the cover.

The surname Authen plays on "authentic," a deliberate mirror of the name Forger, which denotes someone who fakes things; the contrast underlines the fake-family premise. The obstacle-course park is presumably the one seen in Short Mission 2.