the alien

[instar]

There are no more five-person meetings at the Swan household. They're a circle: Bella-Andi-Robin-Ethan-Trouble-Bella again. They meet in twos, threes, pass around information, get it all down in Bella's cipher in Bella's notebooks. They have a list of members of the Sharing, mostly procured by Ethan and to a lesser extent Trouble, but no safe way to learn if these people's behavior has changed; they have seen no more aliens, observed no more disintegrations, caught no one ducking into anything that is an alien hideout.

The twins try to behave normally with their father or his pod person, whichever the person who calls them is, for a value of "normally" that involves adamantly continuing to want nothing to do with the Sharing.

And sometimes crying and refusing to tell Renée what's wrong.

School proceeds. No one's grades see more than a minor downturn as a result of all the alien business.

Andi and Robin play music. Andi's getting pretty good on the drums, although her teacher moves away and she has to hunt up another one, who she sticks with for four lessons before deciding to go self-taught.

Bella tightens up her cipher. It began as a letter substitution and since then has evolved to include plenty of personal shorthand - she turns the ratio of shorthand to straightforward letters up as far as she can and still read the thing herself. She abbreviates, she leaves out spaces, she names things in roundabout ways, she refers to things many notebooks ago that she can find easily that anyone else could spend hours hunting for, if she has to record names she finds ways to describe the spelling without ever placing all of the characters in sequence. Maybe the aliens have super-cryptanalysis and super-OCR and can eat her notebooks in one bite and know everything they know; but maybe not, and maybe if she's careful enough she'll look like she's writing her paranoid diary and not like she's taking notes on the quiet invasion.

Trouble comes over a lot. He stays over a lot. Renée has a quiet conversation about him with Bella, in which Bella is vague, pretends ignorance, suggests that maybe he just likes it here, maybe his folks are allergic to gluten and won't eat his baked goods? Renée leaves it alone.

May begins.

Comments

[pythbox]

And then the Visser begins to morph.

His head grows larger. His legs slide toward each other along his body, meet, and merge into two thick trunks. His delicate arms sprout into vast curling tentacles. His mouthless face splits into a huge fanged grin. He grows taller and taller, twelve feet, then twenty.

He emits a roar that shakes the ground and rattles the skeletal buildings around them.

One of his long thick tentacles wraps around Elfangor's neck and hoists him casually out of the grip of the three Hork-Bajir.

[morphbox]

Elfangor cannot restrain a generally-broadcast cry of pain, or fear, or despair - but his tail never stills once it's freed; he slashes at the monster that Visser Three has turned into.

[pythbox]

It's about as effective as slashing at an unfriendly hippopotamus with a spring-loaded thumbtack. The morphed visser doesn't even react, just hauls Elfangor up over his head, opens his mouth, and lets go.

His massive jaws snap shut.

The Andalite prince goes crunch.

[pandion]

The twins flinch simultaneously.

[pythbox]

The original pair of Taxxons scuttle toward the visser, followed by a few more from the ship. The reason soon becomes clear: Visser Three is a messy eater. Stray pieces fall from his mouth, to be gobbled up by the ravenous worms with a whole new series of horrible sounds.

This goes on for a while. The Hork-Bajir make rhythmic huffing sounds that might be a form of applause; from the axe-blade ship there drifts a very human sound of laughter.

[pandion]

The twins are holding each other's hands so tightly their knuckles are white.

[pythbox]

<Ah,> sighs the visser, <nothing like a good Antarean Bogg morph for... taking a bite out of your enemies.>

He gives one last swallow. A ropy, glistening tongue dislodges a finger from between his teeth; a Taxxon lunges for it as it falls and gulps it out of midair. Then Visser Three demorphs. His stalk eyes sweep the area, still lit by one red spotlight, but he seems to detect nothing out of the ordinary.

<Back to the ship,> he orders. His subordinates follow him as he boards, Taxxons first, then Hork-Bajir. One Hork-Bajir lingers in the doorway; then it closes, and the ship lifts off and soars away, trailing its one remaining fighter.

All that remains are a few splatters of dark blood, its colour indeterminate in the dim light, and a small patch of gravel warped by the heat of the Andalite's ship disintegrating directly on top of it. Only the point where the front end contacted the ground is marred in this way.

[pandion]

"Let's get the hell out of here," whispers one of the Andis.

"Let's," agrees the other.

[aeskhyne]

A familiar figure emerges from cover at the other side of the flat empty area.

[pandion]

One Andi waves him over.

The other tucks the blue box into the same bag as her notebook, first.

[aeskhyne]

He crosses the open space, stopping next to the warped gravel to put his hand in a dark stain on the ground. Whatever he's doing there takes him a full few seconds, but then he gets up and continues toward the twins.

[pandion]

"Let's... let's go home," says the Andi without the bag.

"And write everything down," says the one who is probably Bella.

[aeskhyne]

"Shit, sounds good to me," says Trouble, wiping his hand on his pants.

[pandion]

"Is that blood?" says Andi.

Bella turns on the spot, slowly, checking for supervision, then -

[instar]

- turns back.

[aeskhyne]

"Yeah," says Trouble. "Turns out you can acquire from it. Anybody else feel like morphing that Visser guy?"

[instar]

"We don't know how many of these... morphs... we can get. Duplicate morphs could be handy for obscuring our numbers if it's animals, but I assume two people showing up as Visser Three's host at the same time makes it obvious what's going on. Of course if you're unavailable and we need to fake it... and the tails looked..." She considers, then goes to touch the blood, too.

[pandion]

"This is so weird," mutters Andi, "how do we even know this is Visser Three's host and not poor Elfangor?"

[aeskhyne]

"I've got 'em both, I can tell," says Trouble. "They feel different."

[pandion]

Andi chews her lip a bit, but bends to acquire Visser Three too. "Is this a boy Andalite? It's going to be weird if it's a boy Andalite. Being temporarily identical twins is not that weird by comparison."

[aeskhyne]

"I'm pretty sure it's a boy Andalite," says Trouble after a moment's consideration. "Insofar as Andalites have boys. It's not like I've ever seen a girl Andalite."

[pandion]

"Bleh." Andi finishes acquiring the Visser's host, finds a tissue in her purse, and wipes the blood off her hand. "Let's see if we can catch up with - okay, we can't catch up with Robin and Ethan unless Bella morphs into me again and they're being slow, but let's go - catch a bus."

[instar]

"Agreed."

To the bus stop.

[aeskhyne]

Trouble follows them.

[instar]

When they have stopped walking, Bella starts writing. She fills a couple of pages, then goes back and annotates.