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.

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

- turns back.

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

"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.

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

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

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."

"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."

"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."

Trouble follows them.

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

"Whatcha got?" says Trouble.

Bella looks around. There is no one else at the bus stop; the nearest pedestrian is a block away. She speaks softly anyway. "Descriptions of the ships, everything I can remember about what the aliens looked like and what Elfangor had to say about them - that'll be a reasonable benchmark for how good my memory is if we can turn into Andalites now - everything I can remember about what Elfangor said about morph limits and Yeerk numbers and how to starve them, what Visser Three said, how the - thought-speaking - seemed to work, my best guess about how long it took me to morph into Andi versus how long it took Visser Three to turn into the Antarean Bogg, the fact that we can acquire from blood. You hung back with Elfangor for a second; did he say anything else? I neglected to ask him how many morphs we can get - the limit probably isn't very low or he would've said, he seemed like he was definitely trying to be helpful..."

"He... asked me about my mom," says Trouble. "I told him she believed in aliens. Didn't seem like the time to get into the rest of it."

"...That's weird."

"Yep."

Bella writes it down anyway. "He was just like, 'Tell me something about your mother?' Why would he say that?"

"It was something like, 'Tell me about your mother, tell me about your family'. Maybe he was just going with the first thing he thought of in our five seconds of get-to-know-you-time? That's the only thing he asked, then he told me to scram and I asked if I could acquire him and he said sure if I was fast and I did it and ran."

"Weird. I wish..." She shakes her head. "Okay, so morphing works for healing, which is big, but takes enough energy that he couldn't do it, so it's not perfect elixir of life..." She chews her lip. "...And speaking of - Is there any point to talking to your mom, she who believes in aliens?"

"...Maybe," says Trouble. "I don't know. She hasn't said shit about them in years, and they weren't this kind of aliens to begin with, anyway."

"What kind were they?"