A little while after breakfast, Robin pokes her head into the garage.

Ax is hanging out, one his hooves in a water dish, and apparently someone has procured him a book, although whether his translation module is good enough to actually read it or if he's just inspecting the alphabet is not immediately plain. His stalk eyes look at Robin. <Hello.>

"Hi," says Robin. "So - that thing you did, combining different members of a species to make a blended morph. How does it work? I mean, how'd you do it?"

<It requires more concentration, the first time a new combined morph is assumed. On multiple target patterns instead of one. The blending can be controlled, a little, although I do not have very much fine control.>

Ax watches her curiously to see if it works. He closes his book.

<You have certainly become very large, more than any of the specimens in the zoo,> agrees Ax. <It will be a good combat morph.>

Robin giggles. Not out loud. Her current vocal equipment is not really giggle-enabled.

Ax lifts his hoof out of the water dish, which is empty now. <Assuming that it has good endurance. Some predators do not, at least on my world.>

<It should. The Panthera cats aren't like cheetahs - those are fast, the fastest land animal on the planet, but they're sprinters. One good run and that's all you get out of them for the next hour. Lions and tigers and so forth are a little more balanced, I think.>

<So many animals,> marvels Ax.

<I didn't think the diversity of my homeworld, or any other world, was particularly limited until I learned about Earth. I cannot even remember the order of magnitude my teacher quoted for the number of distinct kinds of "beetles" you have.>

<About four hundred thousand species,> says Robin. <Which is about a third of all the species in the world. I looked it up once.>

<One third of the species on this ridiculously assorted biosphere are beetles?> asks Ax incredulously.

<Apparently so.>

<Where do you put them all?>

<I don't know, it's never seemed like a concern before.>

<There are forty-six species of the small exoskeletal crawling variety on my world and that has always seemed more than enough.>

She glances at him in startlement, flicking her tail again. <Only forty-six?>

<Yes. A much easier number to remember than the quantity of Earthly beetles. And far more than we have of birds.>

<I don't understand why Earth would be this different,> she says. <Are we the only ones with hundreds of thousands of species?>

Ax starts tapping his fingers together in what may be a thoughtful gesture. <As far as I know. I don't remember the total number from my home, and at any rate a new bacterium was discovered only fifteen years ago, so perhaps my knowledge is out of date, but Earth distinctly stands out in this respect.>

<Fifteen years? We get new species of microbes - much faster than that. Well, that makes sense. Actually, come to think of it, beetles might just be a third of all animals and not a third of all species generally.>

<That would make more sense, although still not very much sense.>

<Yeah. I have no explanation for beetles.>

Ax's main eyes squint in the suggestion of a smile.

<I am glad I was able to help you perform the maneuver.>

Well, there's Andi, taking kitchen inventory and making a grocery list.

"I figured out how to do combined morphs!" announces Robin. "I've got a lion-tiger-jaguar-leopard morph now. It's gorgeous."

"Ooooh! Are you gonna use it? Like if we have to actually fight aliens instead of being all ninja-y?"

"Probably," she says. "It's got a lot of advantages over any of the contributing species. Being fucking enormous, for one."

"How enormous is that?"

"Well, how wide is your garage? I was about that long. When I stood up my head almost bumped the ceiling. If I'd stood up straighter, it would have."

"Wow, big kitty."

"Yeah."

"I wonder if there's anything you could combine with an elephant?"

She shakes her head. "Probably not, except another elephant. The only animals I can think of that hybridize that well are horses and cats. Well, and dogs with wolves, I s'pose."

"Is there any good reason to want to be a wolfdog instead of just a wolf?"

"Hybrid vigor?" she suggests. "I'm not sure what specifically. I'll look it up."

"What's hybrid vigor?"

"The same reason my Panthera hybrid is bigger than any of the animals I acquired to get it. You get weird effects when you mix related species, and sometimes they're useful ones."

"Oh, huh. What else does that besides wolfdogs? Wolfdogs are real without anybody morphing them, right?"

"Yeah, they're all over the place. And, I don't know, mules?"

"Oh yeah, mules exist. I forgot them."

Robin giggles.

"Has anybody tried to make a four-panthera vigorous hybrid thing? Like, with real animals?"

"Don't think so. Most of them have been crossed with each other at least once, though."

"And then the baby ones don't get along when they grow up or they're like mules and it doesn't matter if they do or don't?"

"Or the zoo where they live doesn't have one of the other two species, or they just have a girl leopard and a girl liger, or they don't feel like trying it, or whatever. I don't know. Some of the hybrids are fertile, though, with the parent species."

"If I ran a zoo I'd mix 'em up all kinds of ways." Pause. "There is probably a reason I don't run a zoo."

...Robin laughs.

"Eventually I'd try to crossbreed a penguin with a puffin and it just wouldn't go well."

"Don't run a zoo," giggles Robin.

"But it'd be so convenient, I could borrow cool animals to acquire from other zoos and we wouldn't have to make long trips or sneak around at night."

"...All right, run a zoo, but don't breed anything."

"Not even little baby pandas?"

"How personally do you want to be involved in producing the little baby pandas?" she inquires.

"Whoa, that might've come out wrong?"

Robin cracks up.

"I would like to have a little baby panda. As a pet or to morph or both. I bet pandas are a happy morph."

"Right," says Robin, "that would be adorable - I'm not saying run your imaginary zoo with no baby pandas allowed, I'm just saying, the easiest way not to go overboard on something is to make it somebody else's job. No pestering the staff to send the snow leopard and the clouded leopard on a date."

"Ooh. And then I also don't have to do any work."

"That too!"

"Awesome, set me up with an imaginary zoo. I am delegating," says Andi, waving a hand in Robin's direction.

"Where am I gonna get an imaginary zoo?" she demands, giggling.

"That's your job! Delegatinnnng!"

She giggles some more.

"If I did it myself I'd go overboard, right. Marble columns around the petting zoo section and gold-plated manure shovels and stuff."

"What in bloody hell would you even want a gold-plated manure shovel for?"

"I dunno! It seems pretty stupid. So I better not procure my own imaginary zoo, huh?"

"I'll make Ethan do it," she decides.

"Ooh, I dunno, is there such a thing as too many layers of delegation?"

"Nah."

"Then awesome."

"Perfect."

"Do you suppose he's good at zoo-getting?"

"How should I know?"

"I dunno. Do you not stay up late into the night telling each other all your deepest secrets about your zoo related skills?"

"Not really," she snorts. "Well, not about our zoo-related skills, anyway."

"What instead of that? Why, I have no idea what I'd talk about if it weren't for those zoo-type topics."

Robin rolls her eyes.

Andi giggles a little.

Robin grins.

"Seriously though what do you even have conversations with him about? It's never all that obvious when you're around me how it's happening so it has to be while I'm not but you're so -" She twists her index and middle fingers together.

"I couldn't even begin to tell you," she admits. "I feel like I've known him forever. We just talk. About everything."

"You've known him like as long as you've known me. I mean, you've known Bella that long too, it's not like everybody clicks the same amount, but you're extra-double-chocolate clicky with Ethan."

"Yeah," says Robin. "I have no idea why, but it's true."

"Huh. I bet Mom would say you were sooooulmates."

"Maybe we are."

"Wouldn't that be weird if everybody actually had one of those? Oh my god what do you think Trouble's soulmate would be like?"

"And with a weird sense of humour. But the cuddly part's all I know for sure."

"And with, like, an infinite cake appetite."

"Infinite cake," she agrees, giggling.

"What about Bella, what do you think?"

"...I couldn't even imagine," she says.

"Yeah, I don't know either, and you'd think I would. Probably if she was presented with a soulmate right now she would be like 'how about you save the world and maybe then I will have time for you'."

"Well, 'how about we save the world', maybe?" says Robin. "I mean, expecting them to save it all by themselves would be a little harsh."

"Okay, yeah, probably. They would have to be very cooperative with her saving the world."

"Unless her soulmate just happened to come with an Andalite warship."

"Do you suppose somebody's soulmate could be an alien? Since there are aliens?"

"Why not?"

"It'd be weird. Hey, what about me, what would mine be like?"

"I dunno," says Robin. "You're not obsessed with saving the world and you don't generate infinite cake."

"I do not do either thing! Hmmmm."

"Yeah, I dunno. I mean, if you'd asked me to predict my soulmate before I met Ethan, I definitely wouldn't have told you he'd be vaguely criminal and kind of a jerk."

Andi snorts. "Well, I mean, the lockpicking turned out to be useful?"

"It did! Ethan's handy."

"Would you have guessed that your soulmate would be handy?"

"I dunno. Probably not."

"You thought you would have one who was barely even convenient or something?"

"I don't think I would've thought of how convenient they were going to be at all!"

"What would you have thought of then?"

"...I don't know. If Ethan is what soulmates are like, I don't think I could've imagined it at all."

"Huh. Maybe we'll all get surprised."

"Maybe," she agrees.

"Or maybe it's just you and Ethan and the rest of us will have to do without."

"Aww."

"I dunno, should I want my very own equivalent of Ethan?"

"...I'm really not sure," says Robin. "Hopefully yours would be nicer."

"Did I ever tell you - or I dunno, did anybody else tell you - that like months ago I had this itty bitty crush on him? It was the accent. I stopped, though."

"Sounds familiar. Yeah - I like my Ethan fine, but I wouldn't be keen to meet anyone else's."

"Well," says Andi thoughtfully, "I don't think I could be soulmates with anybody who couldn't get along nicely with Bella."

"There is that. I don't come with a twin."

"So my soulmate possibilities are conveniently, like - cinched up into a small space of agreeable soulmates."

Robin giggles. "Or at least more agreeable than Ethan. I don't know, he gets along with Trouble all right. But Trouble is pretty agreeable himself once he takes a liking to somebody,"

"Agreeable. Eenh... I dunno, the word fits basically, but I wouldn't have picked it out of the dictionary. He's friendly I think I'd say."

"Yeah, friendly's better."

"Trouble has too much going on to be agreeable," elaborates Andi, "agreeable people are nice but they aren't too complicated."

"Yeah. Trouble's plenty complicated," she agrees.

"I used to not be complicated. I might be getting more complicated. I mean, I can turn into animals, that's big right there."

Robin laughs. "Does that mean we're all complicated?"

"I guess? Aren't we?"

"I don't know. When the point of comparison is Trouble, no, I don't think so. When the point of comparison is some person who doesn't believe in aliens, then maybe."

"Yeah, one of those. Man, remember not believing in aliens?"

"Yeah," she sighs.

"It feels like it was longer ago than it was."

"I know what you mean."

"Oh well."

Bella is upstairs. Charlie's in the room too, but they don't appear to be interacting.

"Hi!" says Robin. "I figured out how to make a lion/tiger/jaguar/leopard hybrid morph!"

"How'd it turn out? Is it hard to combine the acquisitions?"

"Not very! I got the hang of it all right, and it was only my first try. I think Trouble's experimenting as we speak," she adds.

"What's he mixing up? More cats?"

"Yeah. Snow leopards are fluffy," she explains. "Dunno what he's trying to combine one with."

"What's the procedure?"

"...Hard to explain," she says, "although Ax told it to me just fine, so maybe it's just easier done than said. You have to sort of - when you morph just one thing, you know how you think about it first? Think about all the morphs you want to combine. And just... push them together in your head. You're supposed to be able to control the result, but I didn't do a great job of that."

"But you like your result anyway?"

"Yeah. My result is awesome."

"Excellent. We should all collect a bunch of random humans and fix ourselves up with generic morphs, then, although only three of us can afford to be seen by humans in Forks."

"And some of us can't afford to be seen by humans at all. Although I guess Ax already has a generic human morph," she muses.

"Ax is all set, Charlie and Trouble can probably risk it if they fly someplace no one would expect them to turn up - not here for Charlie, not in Phoenix for Trouble, ideally someplace completely elsewise for both of them - and aren't conspicuous finding people to sit next to briefly at the bus stop or whatever."

"Right," she says, "yeah."

"And then maybe Charlie - I mean, Dad, sorry - pretends to be an illegal immigrant or that he lost all his ID in a house fire and his parents believed that Social Security numbers were the mark of the beast, and washes dishes or something and rents an apartment. Not really seeing you settling comfortably into the pigeon lifestyle, Dad."

"I know you call me Charlie when you're not paying attention. Think you have plenty else to pay attention to, now." He sighs. "I'll see what I can get, I s'pose."

"Yeah," says Robin, contemplating this plan.

"Hmm?"

"Nothing, just - I'm worried something's going to go wrong with that. There's too many things that could."

"I've been trying to think of a way to safely get at blood samples," shrugs Bella. "Or corpses, for that matter, but I'm not coming up with anything. Ideas?"

"...It shouldn't be that difficult to get at a corpse," Robin says thoughtfully. "Especially if it doesn't have to be a whole corpse..."

"Do you have whole or partial corpses lying around somewhere unguarded where it won't be obvious someone has been digging them up? Charlie says the local morgue would be too easy for him to get caught in - if someone legally alive and officially present were found in there it'd be fairly easy to paper over, but the place does have cops around."

"Well - I hadn't got as far as details, I just sort of put 'morph powers', 'nighttime' and 'digging' together in my head and gave them a shake," she says. "I mean, no one accuses earthworms of grave robbing, do they? But I don't actually know what kind of creatures would be good for the job - we might even need several. And it'd be nasty work, and we don't actually know how big a piece we'd need to acquire from, or how fresh it'd have to be..."

"The casket seems like it'd get in the way of a mole or whatever, and I don't want to disturb enough earth to make it clear that someone has, in fact, been digging up dead people. I'd rather figure out how raccoons or something could go about robbing a blood bank, if we decide it's too risky to send Charlie and Trouble flying to Las Vegas to acquire drunks."

"I was imagining something smaller than a mole," says Robin. "Acquiring drunks in Las Vegas would definitely be less disgusting, though."

"By a long shot. And if they're drunk, being observed by them is not nearly as big a problem."

"Yeah. Hmm, blood... can mosquitoes throw up, I wonder?"

"I think only the females drink blood, which suggests they're doing something with it other than lunching, so maybe. But I do not think any of us should be a mosquito. Mosquitoes are fragile, hated, slow, and not terribly difficult to detect."

"Mm," says Robin. "That just means we should be careful mosquitoes, if we need to be."

"If Trouble or Charlie screw up in Las Vegas or wherever, then there will be an unsubstantiable report of someone who's supposed to be dead - and screwing up that badly is very unlikely; do you read obituaries from out of state and memorize the associated photographs and bother to tell anyone if you spot them, in the dark, while buzzed? If we screw up as mosquitoes we're dead - or, potentially even worse, maybe half-swatted and trying to demorph in front of somebody who we really should not be demorphing in front of."

Robin shrugs. "I don't necessarily mean we should use mosquitoes for this. But who says this is going to be the only time we'll want to acquire somebody we might not be able to just walk up to? Or something. Maybe someday we'll want to acquire an animal from a zoo we can't break into, or something wild we couldn't get close to easily. I think it's worth finding out if we could use mosquitoes in those kinds of situations, and maybe even figuring out how to do it. And if not mosquitoes, I want to know if there's something else that's small and drinks blood that would work better."

"It's worth at least looking up blood-drinking bugs," allows Bella. "Fleas are harder to swat. Find out if fleas can vomit."

"Fleas might not have the carrying capacity," she points out. "And they're probably even less mobile. I'll make a chart."

"Excellent. A chart."

Robin grins. "I'm proud of my charts!"

"You're adorable," giggles Robin, crouching down to pet him.

"You look like one of those ridiculously expensive - what are they called - Savannah cats," says Bella. "What'd you mix in?"

<Serval and snow leopard. I'm a fluffy little killing machine,> he says proudly, and leans into Robin with an ecstatic purr.

"Aww."

Purrrrrrr.

"And so soft," says Robin, plopping down on the floor and scooping him into her lap. "I could just pet you forever."

"Well, two hours, at any rate."

<Two hours is a lot of tummy rubs,> says Trouble, stretching out in Robin's lap.

Robin takes the hint. "Oooh, fluffy."

Bella laughs softly.

"So how long did it take Ethan to ask if he could skin you and wear you as a coat?"

Bella appears to find this inordinately hilarious.

<I said not until he learns how to actually make a fur coat,> he adds, <which shut him up about it. Mostly.>

"Yeah, there's probably some difficult curing process involved," snorts Bella.

<And I bet sewing fur gets complicated.>

"Probably."

<Wanna pet me?>

"Sure why not."

Trouble rolls out of Robin's lap and hops up into Bella's.

Pet pet.

<I'm soft and fluffy,> he says smugly, purring up a storm. <And cute as hell.>

"You are," she agrees. "So before you came in, we were talking about how to get you and Charlie generic human morphs while you're supposed to be dead, and the going plan - given that there are many unknowns and severe risks associated with graverobbing and mosquito vomit - is that you fly to Las Vegas and acquire unsupervised drunk people."

<Sounds good to me,> he says contentedly.

Pet, pet, pet.

Purrrrrsnugglesnugglepurrrrrrrrr.

"You would make an excellent coat."

<I totally would,> he agrees. <Wanna skin me?>

"And get blood on your pretty fur? I don't know how to make coats either."

Purr-giggle.

Pet, pet. Sigh of indeterminate emotional content.

Snuggle snuggle purr. Trouble's emotional content is easy to determine: he's a cat, and he's getting petted. Happily.

Yep. He's pretty readable that way. The purring is helpful.

Andi and Ax are in the garage, and she is explaining the cultural context of the Beatles.

<I'm a kitty! Who wants to pet me?>

"Ooh, me!"

Kitty Trouble rubs his face against her leg and purrs encouragingly.

Andi scoops him up and pets him. "Sofffft," she coos.

<Yep,> he says, purring louder. <Soft and fluffy and cute. That's me.>

"Uh-huh! What are you exactly?"

<Part serval, part snow leopard. It took a while, but it's not like I had anything better to do. And now I look like a housecat but I'm way better at killing things! And so pettable.>

Pet pet. "Well, you're an adorable little killing machine, that's what you are."

<Just how many animals of the 'cat' type are there?>

<Hell if I know. Lots. Mostly you just hear about the domesticated kind, though; if somebody says 'cat', that's usually what they mean. People keep 'em as pets. They hunt little squeaky things where little squeaky things are a problem, and otherwise they're just cute.>

<...What kind of problem do little squeaky things present?>

<Eating things they shouldn't, I think.>

<Ah,> says Ax, though he continues to seem puzzled.

"Little squeaky things like mice, Ax," clarifies Andi.

<Do humans not approve of the mouse named Mickey?>

"Turns out," says Andi, aiming her remark at Trouble, "it is kind of hard to do just an overview of human culture for an alien."

"Yeah, but would it have occurred to you to say so when you were explaining what Disney is?" Andi asks, burying her hands in his fur.

<Disney makes fictional movies out of drawings displayed at high framerate,> says Ax helpfully.

<I dunno, I just did. It was harder than I thought.>

<Image thoughtspeak is more difficult to master, yes. Andalites vary in how good we are at it; I don't know about humans.>

<Seems like it could come in really handy, though.>

<It can, yes.>

Ax hesitates, but when Andi lifts up kitty-Trouble in his direction, a many-fingered hand tentatively joins hers.

Trouble is very soft, very fluffy, and very purring.

<Why are you vibrating?>

<A peculiar adaptation,> remarks Ax.

"An adorable adaptation."

<Yep,> says Trouble, purring some more.