The Angels moved quickly—once rushing a gang hideout to rescue fifteen mutants, another time killing an evil doctor who experimented on mutants.
The people they rescued were small-time, and the doctor they killed was no one important either.
Both sides were satisfied with this cooperative arrangement. Even with a bit of official scrutiny, the old professor could use his connections to quietly defuse things.
Charlie's Angels was just a side gig. Bella's main job was still being a student, and she devoted most of her energy to studying.
During summer vacation, though the Black president warmly invited them to visit the completely renovated White House, suggesting a private social gathering between their two families, after consideration, the Swan family declined.
Let's not go to Washington and make things complicated. Instead—let's just go back to Forks for summer vacation!
Strictly speaking, this wasn't a family trip. They lived in Charlie's old small house, spent time hunting in the forest, and the entire vacation passed ordinarily, without incident.
While hunting, Natasha quietly asked Bella: "Hey, Charlie and Samantha have been making such a big fuss—why is there still no news?"
Mentioning this, Bella was also puzzled. Charlie and Samantha had been trying for a baby for nearly a year now, yet still no reaction whatsoever. It was indeed strange.
She said irritably, "How would I know? This stuff depends on probability, right?"
Charlie and Samantha's situation could only be resolved through their own efforts. Bella had secretly used the Apple to check both their physical conditions. Both were healthy without any illness. Probably just bad luck.
If even the Apple couldn't find anything wrong, modern medicine stood no chance. Nothing to say—keep trying!
Regarding Charlie and Samantha's baby-making plan, the Bella sisters could only silently cheer them on. They gave them more alone time during the day—maybe someday it would happen?
By late September 2001, Bella's second year at Stanford was gradually shifting from theoretical study to practical application.
For a history major, language was paramount. But human energy was limited. With so many languages on Earth, knowing seven or eight foreign languages already made you a genius. No one had ever heard of someone knowing seventy or eighty languages—that would be too horrifying.
Chinese, English, French, Spanish, Latin, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese, and Swedish—Bella could fluently master these ten languages. She had others like Greek, or the Amharic she'd used when bluffing the Black president, but those weren't refined. She only knew some daily conversation, then couldn't learn more.
If she truly encountered a language she didn't recognize, she could rely on the Comprehend Languages spell to understand its meaning. The spell wasn't omnipotent—the meaning it parsed was very mechanical, like machine translation. It could only roughly understand the gist. If the speech was very cryptic, contained certain allusions, or hid certain information, the spell couldn't identify it.
"Huh? Bella, come here. Help me look at this letter." As Bella was about to return to Los Angeles for the weekend, her roommate Heather called her over and handed her a letter.
What's this about? She pulled out the letter and quickly read it once.
"Dallas Law Firm? ...Wow! This is so weird! Your grandmother left you a property and a farm?! You had a grandmother?"
Bella read the letter twice over. It was hard to imagine such a pie-from-the-sky situation happening around her. Her first reaction was scam—those "you've won a prize, quickly come to such-and-such place to claim it" type schemes.
America had plenty of scammers, and even more victims! Ever since her Da Vinci Code hit number one on the national bestseller list, she received similar scam calls daily.
Heather had sought her out because she worried about being scammed.
"Don't worry, let me check." Bella called Jeri Hogarth's New York law firm, using the firm's channels to verify the credentials of this Dallas-based law firm.
The name, phone number, and office address all matched up. This firm wasn't a scam.
She made two more calls, ultimately calling the law firm directly to repeatedly confirm that Heather had indeed inherited an estate.
The inheritance was truly left to Heather. No factories, stocks, or gold! The old lady's estate consisted only of a manor and a not-small-but-not-large farm, located deep in Texas.
"I never knew I had a grandmother? ...I was adopted!" Big Heather's husky-like eyes were full of unease. She really liked her current peaceful life, but this letter from distant Texas had still caused her tremendous impact.
Bella scratched her head. As an outsider, it wasn't her place to say much about this.
Heather took the letter home to ask her adoptive parents.
An hour and a half later, she returned to the dorm with red-rimmed eyes.
"I need to go to Texas to see. Can you come with me? Max and I aren't very good at handling these things..." Heather asked quietly.
Bella didn't really want to go. Her Hunger Games first book was nearly finished. Run all the way to Texas now?
But thinking of Max's unreliable nature, and worried the two might encounter danger in a place like Texas, if this goodbye became forever, she'd feel guilty too.
"Alright then, call Max. Let's go right now!"
They left immediately. Shaw had been hanging out with Root lately, the two going out to play all the time. Charlie had gone to school. Bella drove Bumblebee directly, picking up her employee Max and big Heather in San Francisco, then heading together to Texas.
Bumblebee's Volkswagen Beetle form had been exposed, so he'd switched to his Camaro look.
Max and Heather weren't surprised about Bella changing cars.
Designer clothes, cosmetics, various luxury goods, shoes, and bags—in their minds, Bella was rich. Changing cars wasn't worth making a fuss over.
"Don't expose yourself..." Bella quietly instructed Bumblebee before getting in.
Having gone on several missions with Charlie's Angels recently, Bumblebee was no longer as naive as initially. Happy about going to Texas to play, he hurriedly indicated through his car stereo that he'd absolutely follow orders and obey commands!
They went through Arizona, passed through New Mexico, and finally arrived in Texas.
First they went to Dallas, learning the lawyer handling the old grandmother's estate procedures had already gone ahead to a small town called Newt. After getting the address, they drove along the highway, passing through Austin and San Antonio, heading toward a small town near the U.S.-Mexico border.