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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.
"Yeah. A loitering bear would attract a lot of attention around the house. Maybe get him away from the house? It's trying to pass for Charlie; if we tell it we want to go kill a weekend in Olympic National Park it can't very well say boo. Take his phone - Andi, do you remember how to unload his gun? - siphon the gas out of the cruiser, bear."
"So Ethan needs a bear, maybe Robin should also have a bear for backup since you have to morph out every two hours to avoid lifetime bearhood and it might take longer to turn into a bear than it did for me to turn into the relatively more similar Andi - I think I'll try a bug, see how long that takes to get a range on the timing so we aren't surprised by a fifteen-minute morphing process later or something. Getting into the zoo to get a bear could be hard. I can catch a butterfly; I don't think any of us can catch a crow or pigeon or something similarly unobtrusive and aerial, and butterfly flight speed is nothing to write home about, morphing on-site carries exposure risk..."
pandion
"And the bear might be mad. But when you acquired me I was kind of - sedated? For a little while."
"Okay. I still don't want any of us filling up on morphs too greedily, and as long as we don't know the limit diversity could be important, but you're bear bait, you sedate the bear for Ethan, then you both get out of there. Me and Andi should probably also have combat-capable morphs in case things get hairy. I'd want us all to be the same bear if I knew we could be as many things as we wanted - the last thing we want is for the Yeerks to notice us and then be able to count us, way better if they never notice us and if they have to notice us they should at least think we're a small surgical strike force from some unknown large pool of morphers. Since we don't know that we can be an unlimited number of things and don't know the limit me and Andi should pick up something else. Elephants maybe, raw blunt force and some fine-manipulation capability. I think if the limit were very small - fifteen, twenty - he'd have thought to mention it - but he was kind of dying at the time. I wish I'd asked."
"Yes." Bella blinks, then writes something down. "Also, the cube has to be hidden someplace, and someplace is not this house, at least after tonight."
"You weren't there for this part, but Visser Three, who has an Andalite host - the only Andalite host, apparently - used its host's morph capability, turned into a giant monster, ate Elfangor, and then morphed back without being noticeably distended or anything. I am noting that when I have a chance I want to look into how morphing interacts with eating, generally speaking."
Bella makes a face, but doesn't comment. "Anyway. We should also have birds. Unobtrusive birds - maybe owls if we have room once we know more about what we're going to need, but unobtrusive daytime birds, raptors are tempting but people notice them. Pigeons can be fast, pigeon racing is a sport - I'll compare them to crows tomorrow but it might come down to which is easier to catch. That'll get us into the zoo at night."
"Renée might know someone who has volunteer slots at an animal rescue, or something, which is probably easier than trying to get hold of a wild pigeon. We can ask."
pandion
"Do you think people will notice if the critters go all floppy and sedated when we touch them?"
"Maybe. I don't think the Yeerks expect us to be able to morph, though. They didn't even check Elfangor's ship for the blue box before they vaporized it, so if it's standard cargo on Andalite fighters they don't know that. We should be able to fly under the radar long enough to get some utility morphs."
hold-infinity
"I'm interested in that pigeons versus crows thing now," says Robin. "I think I'll look them up, if you don't mind."
"Yeah, go for it. And anything else particularly neat we might be able to lay hands on that you want to look up."
hold-infinity
"Pigeons, crows, bears... I should have a list," says Robin. "Spare me a page? What else do we want?"
Bella writes in plaintext on a blank page. "Pigeons, crows, bears, elephants, I'm getting a butterfly to check morph speed - I'd get a fly or something similarly unobtrusive, but if Renée catches a butterfly in the house she won't kill it, I can't say the same for a housefly. You might want to look into other bugs though, for non-practice spy morphing - small things we can get that are hard to see or hard to kill or both." She tears off the page and hands it over.
