instar | the circle

Trouble and Charlie fly to Las Vegas to get their collections of drunks. Ax, newly empigeoned, and Ethan loosely follow Renée's car back to Phoenix, so that Ax will not be stranded in an unfamiliar city obliged to demorph into Andalite form with no garage to hide in.

Renée makes a very large grocery trip. Ax deems alfalfa hay intended for consumption by guinea pigs and rabbits to be the hoof-eating equivalent of palatable; it also turns out he can eat a few other things, like carrot tops and turnip greens. He still doesn't like living in the garage, even though it's a different one. Andi finds him a little planetarium gadget that throws star-patterns onto the ceiling.

Renée installs a cot in the basement for Charlie. (His generic human morph is a man about ten years younger than him, plausibly Latino but just as plausibly not, plain and unremarkable. He also picks up a Renée morph. He will be able to drive the girls places, publicly know their names. They can tell he appreciates the opportunity, however weird it is.) Trouble is allowed to sleep on the couch, when Renée learns that he would prefer not to share the basement with Charlie.

Bella sews weights onto all the curtain hems so they won't be easily nudged aside.

The twins also collect generic-human-morphs. Both of theirs are college-age women, samples collected from going on premature college tours and shaking a lot of hands - Bella's looks maybe half Asian when she's done tweaking it, Andi winds up with a complexion much like her usual one but a surprisingly Hawaiian set of features.

Renée never asks to be enabled to morph. Bella eventually offers, "for emergencies", and Renée aggregates a number of her co-workers into the most stereotypical teacher-lady it is possible to Frolis into without requiring vision correction.

Renée makes the arrangements well in advance to homeschool the twins.

Bella quizzes Ax about all sorts of things, for large parts of each day.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

aeskhyne

He coos again, pecks her shoe (which is also not made of bread, but you can't blame him for trying) and flutters off.

From:

megale

Rhea heads out of the park, skipping a little every few steps.

From:

aeskhyne

Her new pigeon friend follows. Unobtrusively.

She is just too cute. He wants to say hi. And if he's going to say hi, he should find out if she's a Controller first. Which means following her until he either sees her visit the Yeerk pool, or... doesn't.

From:

megale

Well, apparently she was telling the truth about the library. She goes into it and comes out of it with four books half an hour later.

From:

aeskhyne

That's a start. Trouble keeps watching.

From:

megale

Rhea walks back to the apartment complex, on the way attempting to open one of the books to read and dropping the other three. She collects them back up, smooths a blank page, and tries again with more success, and reads two chapters of The Scarlet Letter on her way back to her apartment.

From:

aeskhyne

This time, he does try to locate her window.

From:

megale

She doesn't have a very big window, but it's a window, on the third floor with a tree that offers a view in. She has a hammock in her room. She flops into it and reads, having obtained a banana on her way through the rest of the apartment.

From:

aeskhyne

Okay.

He takes the opportunity to demorph and remorph on the roof; might as well.

Sadly, pigeon eyes are not good enough to read over her shoulder. But he can be patient.

From:

megale

She gets bored of the book about halfway through. She turns on some music, which he can't really hear from the tree, and starts dancing.

From:

aeskhyne

How is she so great.

From:

megale

She pauses dancing to have a shouted conversation with, presumably, her mom, which is loud enough to be understood:

"Rhea, are you doing your reading?"

"I read like half a book!" Rhea yells back.

"Then you've only got half a book to go!"

"But Mom -"

"Rhea, I've gotta go to work, I don't want you only getting things done when I'm home to nag you, got to learn responsibility."

"I'll get it all done before school starts! That's in like a month!"

"Wouldn't you rather have it done in advance so you can have the rest of summer with no homework? Especially if you could read them all before Disneyland."

"Mo-o-om!"

"If you have your first book finished by the time my shift's over I won't say a word about it for a week, but you need to be on top of your school things," says Rhea's mom. "I'm going to work. See you tomorrow."

Rhea listens for sounds too faint for Trouble to hear. Then she flicks the music on and dances for a few more minutes before flumphing into her hammock again and picking up the book.

From:

aeskhyne

Awwww. Her small feathery observer continues to be entranced.

From:

megale

Book, book, book. She gets through another half an hour of reading before she locates a Gameboy (a generation out of date) and starts playing something on it. The screen's pretty tiny.

From:

aeskhyne

That's okay. He's not here to watch her play video games; he's here to make sure she isn't carrying any alien parasites.

From:

megale

Well, the video games occupy her and/or any alien parasites she may or may not be harboring for a couple of hours, and then she looks at the clock, swears loudly, and picks up her book again. This time she finishes it, although she's turning pages fast enough that it looks like she's skimming. Then she goes out of the room and comes back with a bowl of steaming soup. She eats a spoonful, burns her mouth, blows on each future spoonful before eating it, and leaves the bowl on her nightstand with two glasses and a plate that have also been abandoned there. Then she goes and comes back with a Fudgesicle and the comics section of the newspaper.

From:

aeskhyne

Yeah, Trouble definitely doesn't think she has a Yeerk. But he is going to make sure.

From:

megale

After she has finished her Fudgesicle, she leaves the room again and comes back with a phone handset. She talks with varying audibility to three different people in sequence until her dad comes home. He opens her door to ask her what she had for dinner, finds the answer satisfactory, asks how her summer reading is going, finds that answer satisfactory too, and says she can have another half an hour on the phone. She takes forty-five minutes and then protests when her father takes the phone handset away.

From:

aeskhyne

Trouble is getting pretty good at demorphing on the roof and coming back in the minimum possible amount of time.

From:

megale

She opens the window, paints her nails robin's-egg blue, attempts to play her video game with her foot while her nails dry, closes the window when she no longer needs the ventilation, and then changes for bed.

From:

aeskhyne

(Trouble declines to watch that last thing.)

From:

megale

If he comes back a couple minutes later, she will be in pink pajamas with a red swirl pattern, flopping into her hammock for the night. (There is also a bed in the room, but seeing as it's neatly made, it doesn't seem she uses it.)

From:

aeskhyne

(Of course she doesn't. She has a hammock!

He kind of loves her.)

From:

megale

Flop. Eyes closed. She gets up a minute later when her dad yells to ask if she brushed her teeth, and comes back, presumably with cleaner teeth, after that. This time she is not disturbed.