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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.
pandion
One Andi waves him over.
The other tucks the blue box into the same bag as her notebook, first.
The other tucks the blue box into the same bag as her notebook, first.
aeskhyne
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.
pandion
"Let's... let's go home," says the Andi without the bag.
"And write everything down," says the one who is probably Bella.
"And write everything down," says the one who is probably Bella.
pandion
"Is that blood?" says Andi.
Bella turns on the spot, slowly, checking for supervision, then -
Bella turns on the spot, slowly, checking for supervision, then -
aeskhyne
"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.
pandion
"This is so weird," mutters Andi, "how do we even know this is Visser Three's host and not poor Elfangor?"
pandion
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."
aeskhyne
"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."
pandion
"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."
When they have stopped walking, Bella starts writing. She fills a couple of pages, then goes back and annotates.
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..."
aeskhyne
"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."
Bella writes it down anyway. "He was just like, 'Tell me something about your mother?' Why would he say that?"
aeskhyne
"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?"