" - I mean don't know if there'll be colleges if everyone gets enslaved by aliens?"

"But like. Until then? I need to make my parents happy?"

Even as he says it he realizes this is a stupid argument.

"That's incredibly dumb. We're going to fight the aliens. Where's Dennis?"

"I think he ran over to the convenience store?"

Dennis is still in the convenience store. He's staring at the refrigerators full of milk. He's maybe been staring at the milk for a long time.

"Welcome to the alien fighting team," Asher says.

"I'm not going to fight the aliens."

"What all happened?"

"We should probably go somewhere else to talk about - everything."

"Good idea."

Karen, he has decided, is clearly going to be one of the MVPs of his alien-fighting shapeshifter team.

Oh man is she gonna have to keep making decisions.

"We could... head over to the football field, I guess, it should be deserted and not be the site of any very recent murders?"

"Sounds like a plan. On the way there we should catch Dennis up and then talk about what skills we have so we know what resources we have for alien fighting."

"Not going to fight any aliens," Lev protests.

She leads them out of the convenience store.

"We don't actually have a chance of straightforwardly fighting any of those people anyway. They had, like, phasers, or whatever, the four of us are not going to be able to defeat them by turning into... whatever we can even turn into. We need more information."

"I'm not getting involved in this at all."

"First, we should explain what happened to Dennis so that we're all on the same page."

He does.

"So you realize this is all, like, crazy."

"Uh, yeah, but I also saw a blue centaur alien, so."

"It's crazy that you wanna fight them ourselves."

"Do you see anyone else gearing up to fight aliens?"

"I don't think that automatically makes us capable of it?"

Karen sits on the bleachers and pulls a notebook out of her backpack.

"All right." Sigh. "What do we know."

"Anybody could be Yeerked. We can turn into animals and into other humans. --We should experiment with our powers."

She writes these things down. "They've already enslaved at least two other alien races. They definitely have - phaser things. The Andalite thought they didn't have morphing. Visser Three is not very nice."

"The Andalite probably isn't telling the whole truth."

Gosh. An opinion.