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The pigeons scatter in every direction.

One of them scatters a little too slowly.
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She scoops him up, and laughs, and pets him. "Gotcha," she giggles. "Oooh, you are soft. I probably shouldn't hold onto you too long, you'll poop on me."

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Trouble coos when petted, and investigates her fingers with his beak, in case they are made of bread. They are not! But you never know.

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"Aww, you're not even scared of me. Unless you're trying to pull my fingers off, but you are really bad at it if you are. You will probably poop on me anyway, though." She pets him again and sets him down.

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He coos again, pecks her shoe (which is also not made of bread, but you can't blame him for trying) and flutters off.

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Rhea heads out of the park, skipping a little every few steps.

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Her new pigeon friend follows. Unobtrusively.

She is just too cute. He wants to say hi. And if he's going to say hi, he should find out if she's a Controller first. Which means following her until he either sees her visit the Yeerk pool, or... doesn't.
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Well, apparently she was telling the truth about the library. She goes into it and comes out of it with four books half an hour later.

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That's a start. Trouble keeps watching.

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Rhea walks back to the apartment complex, on the way attempting to open one of the books to read and dropping the other three. She collects them back up, smooths a blank page, and tries again with more success, and reads two chapters of The Scarlet Letter on her way back to her apartment.

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This time, he does try to locate her window.

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She doesn't have a very big window, but it's a window, on the third floor with a tree that offers a view in. She has a hammock in her room. She flops into it and reads, having obtained a banana on her way through the rest of the apartment.

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Okay.

He takes the opportunity to demorph and remorph on the roof; might as well.

Sadly, pigeon eyes are not good enough to read over her shoulder. But he can be patient.
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She gets bored of the book about halfway through. She turns on some music, which he can't really hear from the tree, and starts dancing.

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How is she so great.

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She pauses dancing to have a shouted conversation with, presumably, her mom, which is loud enough to be understood:

"Rhea, are you doing your reading?"

"I read like half a book!" Rhea yells back.

"Then you've only got half a book to go!"

"But Mom -"

"Rhea, I've gotta go to work, I don't want you only getting things done when I'm home to nag you, got to learn responsibility."

"I'll get it all done before school starts! That's in like a month!"

"Wouldn't you rather have it done in advance so you can have the rest of summer with no homework? Especially if you could read them all before Disneyland."

"Mo-o-om!"

"If you have your first book finished by the time my shift's over I won't say a word about it for a week, but you need to be on top of your school things," says Rhea's mom. "I'm going to work. See you tomorrow."

Rhea listens for sounds too faint for Trouble to hear. Then she flicks the music on and dances for a few more minutes before flumphing into her hammock again and picking up the book.
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Awwww. Her small feathery observer continues to be entranced.

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Book, book, book. She gets through another half an hour of reading before she locates a Gameboy (a generation out of date) and starts playing something on it. The screen's pretty tiny.

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That's okay. He's not here to watch her play video games; he's here to make sure she isn't carrying any alien parasites.

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Well, the video games occupy her and/or any alien parasites she may or may not be harboring for a couple of hours, and then she looks at the clock, swears loudly, and picks up her book again. This time she finishes it, although she's turning pages fast enough that it looks like she's skimming. Then she goes out of the room and comes back with a bowl of steaming soup. She eats a spoonful, burns her mouth, blows on each future spoonful before eating it, and leaves the bowl on her nightstand with two glasses and a plate that have also been abandoned there. Then she goes and comes back with a Fudgesicle and the comics section of the newspaper.

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Yeah, Trouble definitely doesn't think she has a Yeerk. But he is going to make sure.

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After she has finished her Fudgesicle, she leaves the room again and comes back with a phone handset. She talks with varying audibility to three different people in sequence until her dad comes home. He opens her door to ask her what she had for dinner, finds the answer satisfactory, asks how her summer reading is going, finds that answer satisfactory too, and says she can have another half an hour on the phone. She takes forty-five minutes and then protests when her father takes the phone handset away.

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Trouble is getting pretty good at demorphing on the roof and coming back in the minimum possible amount of time.

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She opens the window, paints her nails robin's-egg blue, attempts to play her video game with her foot while her nails dry, closes the window when she no longer needs the ventilation, and then changes for bed.

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(Trouble declines to watch that last thing.)

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