"You okay?" she murmurs.

"Yeah," he says, "I just - sometimes I miss being human most of the time." He drops his hands and adds softly, "Can I have a hug before I remorph?"

Bella hugs him.

"I'm glad."

Bella scrunches her eyes shut partway through.

Robin puts on her very best innocent face.

"Pff."

She cracks up.

Andi follows suit.

<What's so funny?>

And now Trouble is mentally snickering.

"If it's what I think it is that was very dangerous," says Bella under her breath.

"I don't think it was exactly what you think it was," Robin murmurs back.

Bella sighs and looks away. "Whatever it was took long enough that a line could've accumulated."

"So I took a while in the loo. Sue me."

Bella shakes her head and falls silent.

Robin shrugs.

So does Robin!

Trouble demorphs and remorphs as quickly and quietly as possible; you never know when someone's going to come in.

Ethan does likewise.

She shakes his hand. "How'd you guess?"

"Process of elimination. What's your bag look like?"

"Little and black with pink and red swirls painted on; you can't miss it."

"All right then." And the baggage carousel is observed intently in case it displays such a thing, or either twin's bag.

Eventually all of the bags are retrieved, and the girls follow Charlie - for lack of a better word - to his police cruiser.

So are the twins.

"You have fun, Dad," says Bella softly.

"I know you've made yourselves clear you don't think much of it, but just to be sure..."

"We'll just unpack," says Andi, shaking her head.

"Yeah," says Robin.

"I would never, ever guess," says Andi, shuddering, "if I didn't know."

Bella unpockets Trouble. "We know when it eats, or at least have a very good guess, now. We can schedule our we-want-to-go-hiking trip accordingly."

"Olympic National Park. Probably most convenient if you're the one who really wants to go hiking. It knows us as well as Charlie does."

"Sure," she says. "Tell me all about Olympic National Park so I can get properly excited."

Bella relates what she knows about the park and its hiking-related virtues.

Robin constructs an appropriate enthusiasm.

"So let's talk about the part where I get eaten by a bear," says Trouble.

"That's cover-up, not part of the rescue itself. We set up the hike, cut as close as we can to when the Yeerk is going to need to nip out for some Kandrona. Before we leave Andi unloads Charlie's gun in case he brings it. While we are out in the woods, we encounter some bears. You guys can rotate out, but don't let him get to the car or otherwise away. Tree him if you can, avoid hurting him if possible - Trouble, the Yeerk will come out when it's hungry enough pool or no pool, right?"

"Yeah. When they starve, they kind of - shrivel up and ooze out."

"Good. When that happens and it's good and dead, we can explain everything to Charlie, and unless he has a better way for him to plausibly meet his end - or, conceivably, can think of a way around needing to - you turn into him and Ethan mauls you and we generally stage the scene like a bear killed and dragged off our father, we go look for park rangers - whichever of you is not being a bear at any given time would be helpful if they were being pigeons and checking for park rangers who might get near Charlie. We tell the park rangers a bear killed and dragged off our father. Meanwhile Charlie gets morph-capable and turns into - something, it'll depend on what's available, probably some kind of bug."

"Sounds good to me," says Trouble.

"I'm not sure pigeons are really optimal for that kind of work, but I guess they're the best we've got."

"If you get a chance to grab a bird of prey between now and then, do, I just don't see a great way to manage it and still want to conserve morphs as much as we can." She pulls out her notebook, starts scrutinizing ciphers. "If it's got any plans to take us by force in the next couple days, we can morph our way out. Andi sleeps light enough that it can't even open our door at night without waking her and it knows that. We do the cooking when we're here so it's not like it can drug us. Am I missing anything?"

"How do we keep in touch with Ethan and Trouble?"

"Good question. I'm assuming we won't be staying in your pockets indefinitely; we do need to sleep."

"I was imagining you'd hang out in the woods, sleep in shifts, wake each other up if anybody wandered by. Feeding you will be a little complicated, but for just a couple days you can eat in morph, I'll get you some bread." She starts rummaging for bread.

"We're right up next to the woods. You could stay just within thoughtspeak range, and me and Bella will usually be able to find a moment by ourselves to morph each other."

Ethan shrugs. "Sounds all right to me, then."

"Okay. Unpacking time, fun fun fun. And - looks like Dad or whoever already put stuff on the couch to make it up for Robin."

"...Okay, that's actually a problem, um."

"Arcane Teenage Girl Giggling is so useful."

Ethan laughs.

"And then Andi's light-sleeper-hood will cover all three of us." Bella hands off the mattress to be hauled upstairs by less clumsy hands.

Andi totes it, and comes down for the sheets and pillow and so on too.

Which Trouble helpfully extracts from the couch.

"Thanks." Tote tote.

Trouble hugs Robin.

Robin hugs back.

"I don't want to rush you guys but I'd rather not frantically try to toss you out a back window if he's back earlier than we expect. I recommend doing a flyover of the general woods area before settling in so you don't get lost."

"Yeah, sounds good," says Trouble. He starts morphing to pigeon.

Ethan follows suit, including the part about hugging Robin first.

Bella opens the back door for them and hands each one a slice of bread to carry away.

Off they flap.

"And now we unpack, I guess," says Robin. She hauls her suitcase up the stairs.

Unpacking ensues.

Charlie and his occupant are back not long after. He orders a pizza rather than have the girls cook their first night there. "What do you get on pizza, Robin?"

"Oh, whatever's going," she says amiably. "As long as there's no anchovies."

Two large with pepperoni, one with onions, it is then.

Over pizza, Bella says, "So Dad, we accidentally got Robin all enthusiastic about the national park and she wants to go. I have a nasty bruise on my ankle and want to walk even less than usually but I think it'll be all cleared up by like Tuesday, can you take off Tuesday do you think?"

"Sure," says Charlie, glancing at Robin. "Long as it's only for the morning. Got some things to do in the early afternoon."

"We can pack lunches and have a picnic in the woods and then go home," suggests Andi.

"I am all in favour of picnics," says Robin.

"Sure," shrugs Charlie. "Picnic in the woods. You need a ride to the grocery store for," he waves a hand and says vaguely, "picnic things, between now and then?"

"That'd be great, yeah."

"Picnic things," giggles Robin.

"Sure, sandwiches and little tubs of cut-up melon and stuff," shrugs Bella.

"And those sugar cookies they have at the store here, I always miss those when we go back to Arizona."

"No problem. Tomorrow evening groceries."

"Ooh, tell me more about sugar cookies," says Robin to Andi.

"They're soooooo soft," says Andi, "and they have sprinkles in them, and I don't know what they even do to them because there's nothing special in the ingredient list but they're better here than anyplace else."

"I'll have to try some," says Robin.

"We'll get a bunch."

"Good plan."

Dinner concludes, Andi freezes the extra pizza in plastic bags, explains that Robin's going to crash in the twins' room "like it's a sleepover", and then starts channel-flipping to kill the evening.

Bella goes upstairs. There's probably going to be writing.

Robin reluctantly refrains from eating all of the cookies. (It's a good thing they got lots.)

Bella writes a lot. She passes the boys bread and whatever more substantial food she thinks she can sneak. And she informs them when they're going to leave for the park. They should go ahead of the Swans - traveling as flies in the car leaves too much risk of travel delay, but they'll be able to catch the family where they park. (Maps are deployed.)

The boys are very grateful for the snuck food, and they successfully follow the group to the park parking.

It is a delicious picnic. Robin scarfs quite a lot of cookies.

Andi is pleased to have converted someone else to the following of delicious sugar cookies.

They are just so delicious.

"What if I fall," asks Bella, sounding wobbly as she can.

The bear keeps coming.

Robin freezes - knowing in advance is all very well, but that's still a bloody grizzly bear - and then joins the others in following Charlie's sensible advice.

("Away", of course, is deeper into the woods.)

Backing away... niiice and slow... Charlie is nowhere near the food anymore.

The bear snuffles around the remains of the picnic and eats the last of the cookies.

This bear takes a more direct interest in Charlie. Steps right up to him, in fact, while the other one is still raiding the picnic.

Backing away, backing away, gun still up but he's increasingly sure it's not going to do anything.

It definitely doesn't seem to worry the bear.

And of course, if he keeps backing up like that, he's going to run straight into the other one.

He backs away more... sideways.

The bear with a sugary nose now seems interested in finding out if Charlie has any more cookies hidden in his pockets.

He does not. No cookies here. He holds very still when investigated.

Maybe they will just sit right here and stare at him until he produces some.

The sugarless bear headbutts him gently in the chest.

Indeed it does not!

Sugar Bear shuffles closer.

"What do you want?" he asks, holstering the gun. "Why don't you just kill me? Concern for the host? That's not going to get you far."

No response.

Headbutted again.

The bears chase him. And they can easily keep up.

"What do you want?" he demands again.

(Off in the woods, twins morph pigeons.)

(And Robin morphs a bear.)

Charlie's new friends decline to say anything.

Pigeons supervise unobtrusively from the trees.

Charlie continues evaluating bears, periodically asking what they want, and trying to get away.

When the third bear shows up, the second one wanders off.

Sugar Bear sticks with him, then walks away when the second one - or is that a fourth? - comes back.

"What do you want from me?" demands - well, the Yeerk.

The bears are silent.

So are the pigeons, yet unnoticed.

Charlie is starting to look... uncomfortable.

Good for Charlie.

The bears are patient.

"Hi, Dad."

Trouble-the-bear snickers over thought-speak.

"No, really - girls - what? Bella, you're sitting on an Andalite bear, you were a pigeon, what's going on."

"We're not any of us Andalites," says Andi. "We're Animorphs. Are you okay, Daddy?"

"I'm - fine, for now anyway - what's an Animorph?"

"We were thinking we'd fake your death, unless you have a better idea," Bella says. "An Andalite gave us morph tech, but then he died."

"A few weeks ago," elaborates Andi. "And then we found out what the Sharing is and knew you had to have one of those things so we saved you."

"Do we need to fake your death or do you or your ex-Yeerk have some kind of extremely convenient circumstance?"

"How were you planning to fake my death?"

Bella pats the bear she is sitting on. "This one morphs you. That one," she points at Ethan, "assuming I haven't mixed them up, mauls him and drags him off to the nearest water source, then this one demorphs, all better, he doesn't mind getting mauled. We find park rangers and tell them a bear attacked you and we barely got away. The tracks are right, the blood is right, etcetera. Meanwhile, we make you morphable, you turn into some kind of bug or something else we can catch here, we take you someplace you can hide out - probably back to Phoenix, ultimately."

"Trouble's been being a pigeon a lot," adds Andi. "You can... be pigeons... together?"

Bella checks her watch. "Bears may as well demorph now," she remarks, "even Ethan, low on morph time - who wants to check again for park rangers?" She slides awkwardly down Trouble's side.

Trouble rubs the side of his big furry head against her shoulder in a gentle friendly sort of way and then starts to demorph.

Ethan demorphs too.

<I'll take a look,> says Pigeon Robin.

"Thanks," says Bella to Robin. "Okay. Dad, do you have a better idea than ours?"

He shakes his head slowly. "I didn't - think I was ever going to get rid of him, I don't have a plan. And we should hurry in case anyone at the Seattle pool notices I'm not showing up."

"Okay. Back to the picnic stuff for the box, then you let Trouble acquire you, they try for their Oscars, we leave some of your stuff around - Andi has your bullets, you can reload the gun, maybe fire at a tree to make it plausible that you tried to hit the bear and missed, leave it on the ground. Then you turn into whatever's handy and little and me and Andi go act hysterical."

Trouble leads the way toward the picnic stuff.

Bella takes the box out of its layers of obfuscation and takes Charlie's hand and puts it on a side.

He twitches a little when it zaps him. "That's it? That's the big Andalite morphing tech?"

"Yeah. User-friendly, huh?" She wraps it up again. "Shake hands with Trouble, you'll go kind of sedated - and then you're going to have to give him most of your clothes. If you were wondering why me and Andi are dressing like shrinkwrap is the new fashion it's because it's easier to incorporate snug outfits into a morph."

Charlie shakes his head, but extends his hand in Trouble's direction.

Trouble takes his hand and concentrates.

Charlie's eyelids droop and his posture slumps when he's acquired, and then he comes around. He sighs and starts handing over clothes. "You go behind a tree or something when you morph," he tells Trouble, "all right? And - I did that 'cause Bella has a plan, not necessarily okay with being turned into for... plan-unrelated things."

"Bug-hunting time," Bella announces, and she starts looking for bugs.

So does Andi.

Trouble snorts. "I'll be just as happy to never turn into you again," he says, accepting the clothes.

Eventually Charlie is standing in his underwear, looking for bugs with his daughters, muttering under his breath. "What's the plan for dealing with Esclan?" he asks.

"Is that your Yeerk? We can bury it. You might want to acquire it first - the rest of us have a different one, we don't know when it'll come in handy but it's the sort of thing with better odds of doing so than, like, earthworms."

Trouble goes behind a tree to put Charlie's clothes on and then morph him.

Charlie hikes back to where his Yeerk slipped out, manages to acquire it, and then gets a stick and digs a hole to dump it in and cover with leaves. Then it's back to bug-hunting.

Andi finds a tiny, unremarkable black beetle, which she presents to Charlie.

He acquires that too. "How many of these can I do?" he asks as he loads his gun up again.

"At least eight, apparently. Trouble has the most and this is his eighth. We don't know, Elfangor didn't say - which suggests it's not a tiny limit, but we're trying to be conservative."

Trouble wanders out from behind his tree and makes a face. "Being you is weird," he says to Charlie. And to Bella, "Can Ethan maul me already?"

"Yeah. Have fun. Dad, don't shoot a tree until we're ready for rangers to come running."

He provides realistic fleeing and struggling, but declines to scream.

Bella supervises.

Andi definitely does not.

And neither does Charlie.

Ethan makes sure that there will be plenty of gnawed-on Charlie parts for the park rangers to recover and identify.

And then Trouble demorphs and remorphs to pigeon, leaving behind as much of Charlie's clothing as he still had on him.

"Okay," says Bella. "Time to go crashing heedlessly through the woods like we just saw our dad die."

"I found you a park ranger," says Robin. "This way."

Andi settles for gripping her sister's hand tightly.

Robin does an excellent impression of Completely Horrified.

Robin drinks the apple juice and doesn't say much.

Andi goes to the bathroom to let Charlie demorph and remorph after it's been a while. She passes the toothbrush cap to Bella when the receptionist isn't looking so she doesn't wind up looking like she's been drinking gallons of coffee if they wind up staying here for a while.

Robin pushes for more detail once or twice, but then looks at the girls and goes quiet again.

The park ranger awkwardly pats Bella on the shoulder, but doesn't try it on the other girls when she shrugs him off and scrunches in towards herself.

A couple of pigeons are waiting for them at home.

After Bella has checked all the curtains and given him the all-clear, Charlie demorphs. He doesn't really have any tight-fitting clothes, but he goes and gets a bathrobe.

Trouble demorphs too. He does not have a bathrobe, but his morphing outfit - a tight T-shirt and bike shorts - is intact.

Likewise Ethan.

"So - thanks," says Charlie awkwardly. "Suppose nobody knows how much food there is in the house and won't miss a few slices of leftover pizza."

"I'll go warm some up."

Ethan sits on the couch and hugs Robin.

Robin thinks this is an excellent plan!

"...Wait, you hear something? I kind of - I thought it was my imagination."

"I don't hear anything - what is it?"

"Thought-speak," says Trouble. "Really faint. Incredibly faint. I can barely even hear it. If there are words, I'm sure not getting them. Just - feelings, kind of? Like 'help me, help me'. And something else I can't figure out."

"...The ocean?" says Andi vaguely.

"Yeah. I think so, yeah. Like, the bottom of the ocean. All that water." He shivers. "I don't think he likes it down there."

"Yeah, it's not... a happy voice."

"...Dad, is this ringing any bells?"

"Esclan wasn't important enough to know anything about that kind of thing," says Charlie, shaking his head, "his job was to have a respectable authority figure participating in the Sharing chapter and let Controllers off with warnings if they had to commit crimes going about their business."

"So... mysterious SOS from somewhere under the ocean," says Trouble, "in thought-speak. Who else thinks that Andalite ship might not have been as burnt up as it sounded?"

"Do you think you can find the place?"

"Sure, if I could get there," says Trouble. "Morph a whale or something. Dolphin? Do dolphins dive? I don't even know how far down we'd have to go."

"Anybody have a way to get ahold of a marine mammal that doesn't involve flying to Seattle? Can fly to Seattle if we have to, it's just a long way. We have a few days before Renée gets up here to console us, we're just lucky she's on the road trip and not answering the home phone."

"Not that I can think of," says Robin. "Are we rescuing the underwater Andalite, then?"

"It seems worth doing if we can do it. Any objections?"

"Not from me."

"I'd love to know what we plan on doing with this underwater Andalite once we rescue them."

"Find out what morphs they already have, work out a plan from there to get them a pigeon or crow or something, hide them roughly the way we're already hiding Trouble and Charlie, and pump them for information," Bella says. "We may need some kind of permanent hiding setup. I guess once Charlie is legally dead me and Andi inherit all his stuff - Dad, you cool with donating to the general cause of ridding the Earth of Yeerks?"

"Yep," says Charlie shortly.

"I'm not surprised," says Ethan.

"I'd be talking about telling the authorities or something to take the pressure off you kids but I've seen enough to know that's suicide - if they don't have the authorities they have their spouses or their kids or their assistants."

"I had worried about you taking that position," says Bella. "I'm glad I was mistaken."

"No kidding," says Trouble. "Okay, so back to the rescue job. What's your plan for getting the morphs, Bella?"

"Seattle has an aquarium. It has orcas. You get to play killer whale bait."

He beams.

"Do I want to know?"

"You have less than zero desire to know, Dad."

Trouble giggles.

"Right. I don't have a pigeon morph."

"You can sit on somebody's foot in the beetle form. I hope, anyway - if you don't think you can stick on there might have to glue you, have somebody else carrying a little tube of glue, you'll come apart on demorphing."

"...Are you sure about the coming apart?" wonders Trouble. "I mean, probably, yeah, but we might want to check first."

"Oh, wow, you do not know Bella that well, she combined morphing and every household product that exists the first week we had it," groans Andi, "yes, he'll come off when he demorphs."

"He will probably come off when he demorphs," says Bella, "and the worst case scenario isn't irrecoverable if it's just a little dab of glue - Andi, you kind of confound all the results because you're so fast and controlled and you're the one I was trying stuff with."

"Do you think," says Ethan, "that it might be a good idea to let the rest of us know your results when you do these little experiments?"

"I'll go over everything I found when we're back in Phoenix if you like - I don't have the relevant notebook with me so I'd be working from memory and nothing springs to mind as usefully as the glue thing."

"Most of it was boring. She made me pierce her ear to see what would happen when she morphed after," recalls Andi. "The earring she borrowed from Mom came out when she morphed me and the hole was gone when she morphed back."

"I'm sure it was very boring," says Ethan. "Which is why I want to know all about it, so I'll never have to do any of it myself."

"We also found out that when I turn into her I still don't like almonds but do start liking cilantro? Usually it tastes like soap."

"We can go over all of this when I have the right notebook in front of me. In any event, gluing Charlie to someone's foot is probably safe."

"All right. So when do we head out?"

"Dad, are your co-workers liable to swing by?"

"Couple of them might," he acknowledges. "Once the rangers are sure I'm dead and not clinging to life in a cave or something."

"So we need to be home the rest of today, but Dad's friends - unless they're suspicious Controllers? - aren't going to go prowling upstairs uninvited if we're short with them at the door. Me and Andi and Robin are all officially here and can take turns being downstairs and awake to answer the door while everybody else naps so they can stay up late. After ten p.m. nobody is going to go bother some teenage girls whose father just died, so we can go then, pigeons aren't great for at night but we'll have city lights to go by and should be able to manage. Orcas will be in a tank open to the air, with any luck we can find one by itself so Trouble can calm down one hundred percent of the whales in the tank for us."

"Nobody who'd be likely to come by is a Controller. I can write you a list of local ones, if you need it."

"Bad list to have written down in the clear. You can dictate it when we have downtime and I'll put it in cipher."

Charlie snorts. "It's good you have that. Esclan wouldn't've respected your privacy."

"I like this plan," says Trouble, finally sitting down next to Robin and snuggling up.

"Okay. I'm kind of wired, I'll stay up to receive well-meaning guests first. Everybody else, have some pizza, go upstairs, catch some sleep."

Andi pokes the warming pizza in the oven, then takes it out. It's sizzling.

Pizza!

Pizza.