the animorphs

[instar]

Renée is gone in the morning, a pot of maple oatmeal for the girls and Trouble cooling on the stove and a note on the fridge, she's going to be gone all day on a day trip to Tucson with her friends.

Andi wakes up first. Bella's not far behind.

Comments

[pandion]

"Excellent, don't have to sling any projectiles."

[instar]

"Seriously, beautiful notes. Ethan thinks you might not like my next proposed research project, though."

[hold_infinity]

She grimaces in advance.

[instar]

"Should I trust his assessment and just do the research myself?"

[hold_infinity]

"He said I wouldn't like it; did he say I wouldn't do it?"

[palmofyourhand]

"No."

[instar]

"I don't want to use up your goodwill on day one when I could do it myself, though."

[hold_infinity]

"Why don't you tell me what it is first," Robin suggests.

[instar]

"When we find Yeerk pools, I want to know what's obtainable, relatively compact, and likely to disagree with the inhabitants. I don't know if the right answer looks more like 'elemental sodium' or more like 'bleach' or what."

[hold_infinity]

"You're right," she says after a pause, "I don't like it. But if I don't help you're just going to do it anyway, aren't you?"

[instar]

Bella shrugs. "They might turn out to be too heavily protected. For all I know there are force fields around the damn things. But from the sound of it there's two ways to find Yeerks. Lots of them, vulnerably swimming around in pools. Or one at a time. Hiding behind their hosts."

[hold_infinity]

"I don't like that any better," sighs Robin. "I don't like any of this."

[instar]

"It's lousy," Bella agrees.

[hold_infinity]

"Lousy isn't the half of it."

She sighs and leans her head on Ethan's knee.

[palmofyourhand]

He pets her hair.

[instar]

"If I ever think of something better to do with Yeerks than kill them, I will be all over it," Bella promises.

[hold_infinity]

Robin sighs again. "Great. ...No, I mean that, that is good, it's just..." She shrugs helplessly.

[instar]

Bella spreads her hands. "I don't have a way to put them on a comfy space prison colony. If I were handed a lot of Yeerks in slug form who wanted to be Yeerk Switzerland and sit out the conflict, I could sit them on the blue box and then give them all pigeons and supervise them for two hours to make sure they could wreak only limited havoc if they changed their minds, but I have no way to be sure we can trust any given Yeerk with even the powers of flight and thoughtspeech, given what they as a group or a political unit or whatever are doing with the powers they currently have. I don't have a way to render them magically incapable of infesting people. I might be able to kill them, and as long as that's all I have, this planet needs to be as uninhabitable-to-Yeerks as I can make it until the Andalites come along to save the day, if ever they do."

[hold_infinity]

"And where are the rest of us, in all this?"

[instar]

"That's up to you. I could really use help. I'll do without it, if I have to."

[hold_infinity]

She glances up at Ethan.

"Look," she says, turning back to Bella, "I don't want to think of this as your project that I'm just helping out on. We were all there too. If there's responsibility to go around, I have as much of it as you do. Even if I didn't stay for the show."

[instar]

"Sorry."

[hold_infinity]

"I mean, I sort of get it. If I didn't think I could get any help, I'd be thinking like that too. But we are all in this together, all right? Even Ethan, God help us." She pats him fondly on the knee.

[pandion]

"Bella's all introverted and doesn't understand how group projects work," Andi says, "also generally despairs of other people being useful at important things."

[instar]

"That's an exaggeration."