Eeeeee smiley face.

He writes:

I'm looking forward to it. :)

and sends it to Karen before he loses his nerve.

Well, at least the earth is like one percent less doomed than it was previously.

She does her unfinished homework in English class, as is her custom, and looks around for alien-fighting team members when it's lunchtime.

Lev is bouncing on his heels a little bit when he sees her. 

"Hi!"

Asher is following him, doing a moderately physically improbable ballet jump. "Hi, Karen!"

Oh god, everyone else on this team is at least 50% focused on how to impress this one girl. The earth is completely doomed.

"Hey."

She is.... moderately concerned about this level of enthusiasm about her presence, but probably they're all just excited to discuss aliens and it has nothing to do with her and she should ignore it because aliens are legitimately pretty exciting.

"Hey! Any idea what we should get started with?"

"We should probably figure out our powers first. And, uh, try to learn anything about how Yeerks work."

"Yeah. I was thinking, like, there are probably animal forms that we can use to spy on people without being noticed? Except that we don't actually have any leads on where to find out about the - things." She looks around. "I dunno how much we should be using - certain words we shouldn't really know, in public spaces, in case someone overhears?"

"That's a good idea, we shouldn't. --We could acquire flies, probably? I don't know how morphing interacts with mass, I hope we wouldn't wind up as enormous flies like in a bad horror movie."

"You go down to the size of the animal you morphed. At least if the animal is cat-sized. I morphed a cat last night. It was - weird."

"What was it like?"

"Well, uh, I was me? Like, I had all of my memories and stuff? But I was also a cat. Especially at first, like - there was this rush of, like, I really cared about movements, and I was kind of concerned about the other cat even though I knew it was literally just my pet cat, and I kinda wanted to go find some mice to chase? But after a few minutes it wasn't so bad."

Lev wants to turn into EVERY animal and write down what they think like.

"If we find a Yeerk, it sounds like," Asher says, "we can acquire it and learn more about how Yeerks work."

"Not using words we shouldn't know in the high school cafeteria, again. We'd have to find one outside of a human somehow. But it seems like a good idea if we can pull it off."

"We should come up with a name for them that isn't words we shouldn't know." He pauses. "Varelse?"

At least the cool guy also has bad taste in science fiction.

"That's making some assumptions, isn't it?"

"I feel like if you're capable of lecturing someone about your evil plans, your problem isn't so much being varelse."

"I can't believe every single one of you is a hopeless nerd."

"You recognized it too! --Fine. What about Trill?"

"Fine, Trill. Where are we gonna find a Trill."

"Stupid idea: turn into a bug or something and buzz around the mayor or someone else you might take over if you're trying to take over the city."

"It's not a terrible first pass. I'm - concerned that bugs might not have enough brain to do anything, and I don't know if they can hear stuff, and I don't know how long we'd have to follow the mayor around to find anything out, even if he is... part of this."

Asher attempts to swat a fly and instead kills it. 

"I think this might take a while. Keep talking."

"If I were a mind control parasite trying to take over the world, what would I do? --I think it depends on whether there are a lot of parasites or a few. If there are a lot what you need is hosts, you'd want something that could get people alone so you could slug them-- a doctor's office, maybe, or a religious group. If there's only a few you'd want to target powerful people. Political leaders, generals, media people..."