[video]
@jollysunflora : The second half of my complete list of modern AU Animorphs headcanons, approximately one per book.
28. “Ax,” Marco says, “How come you can roll out ‘venti dulce de leche dark-chocolate frappuchino extra whip’ without batting an eye, but you giggle every time you have to say the word ‘soy’?”
- “It has so many vowel—owl?—sounds, in so little space,” Ax says. “That long sssssssssss, so pleasant on the tongue, but then that odd oooyyy ooy-yah? All in the back of the mouth. Very strange. Sssoooy. Ssususs-oooyaaa.”
- “Also, he’s moved on from the frappuchinos,” Tobias adds. “Now he keeps spending all our hard-stolen bitcoins on espresso mack… mach…”
- “Espresso macchiato con panna,” Ax explains. “Doppio.”
29. Cassie feels herself sweating as she props the laptop across the room from her, tools laid out and Ax unconscious on the table. She never expected to find a YouTube video on how to perform brain surgery—and to be honest, it’s actually about “how neurosurgeons perform an orbitozygomatic craniotomy,” not intended to be a how-to manual—but it’s the best she can do under the circumstances, and so she’ll follow along for now.
MM3. “That’s the kind of strong leadership we need.” Jake gestures to the full-color television (this year’s latest model) where a program of their current leader plays on a loop. “Keeping the wrong kind of people out of this country, saving America for the right kind of Americans.”
- “Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Rachel says. She and Tobias and Jake are the only three Animorphs, except when Melissa joins them sometimes, and listening to their “Supreme Leader” blather on gets old sometimes. “All I want to know is whether it’s true that within a few years people will really have phones that plug into their cars. That’d be cool.”
- Tobias rubs his eyes against the silk of his wing feathers. They itch constantly, since he doesn’t have a gas mask to wear every time he goes out into the pollution-opaque air outside the way that his human friends do. Jake and Rachel take bets sometimes, idly, brutally, about whether he’s the last raptor left on the face of the planet.
- “Magnificent!” Drode appears in their midst, and both the Berensons immediately point guns at his head.
30. Marco is lying on his bed the day after watching Eva fall, staring at a patch of wall above his dresser, when he registers that his phone has been buzzing for a while now. It goes off so many times he assumes he has to be getting a call, but when he checks his notifications he just discovers he’s gotten seventeen text messages in the last hour.
- The first is from “Smurfette,” and says “Did you know that there is a type of food that involves baking a cinnamon bun inside of a donut? We must secure as many of these as it is possible for a human to consume, as soon as possible!”
- The next one, from “Hawkgirl,” reads: “found out recently that apparently ax still thinks you invented flea powder. i told him that if youd invented flea powder wed all be a lot richer right now.”
- “Team Dad” (not to be confused with “Real Dad,” which is how Marco lists Peter) sent along several invitations to team missions on League of Legends this afternoon, along with a threat to have Cassie play Marco’s avatar if Marco doesn’t join in. “we both know that by the time you get back you’ll have only healing attacks and she’ll have trained it to apologize automatically for stabbing people,” Jake adds.
- One of the many texts from “Julia Butterfly Hill” suggests that Jake has underestimated Cassie’s diabolical streak, because it’s a screenshot of a clone of his account which has had its name changed to HarambeWasFramed.
- The real surprise, however, is the single text from “Xena: Warrior Princess.” It’s a link to an article about a disaster in the local national park and the efforts to clean up the wreckage of an as-yet-unidentified craft which went down in the canyon. Marco has to read it a few times to understand the point she’s making, because it’s all about what’s not there: the article makes no mention of any human bodies being found among the wreckage.
- Marco gets halfway through typing a reply to them all which informs them in no uncertain terms that he sees through their transparent attempts to cheer him up and doesn’t appreciate it, but he deletes without sending. He can practically hear his mom’s voice saying it: he can focus on the fact that he’s still surrounded by people who love him, or he can focus on the negative side of everything. And being constantly negative is no way to live.
31. “Sharing this again, because its been 3 months,” Jake’s cousin Brooke posts on Facebook. “Anyone who has any news at all about Saddler, no matter what it is, PLEASE contact my family. Big brother, I dont know if youre still out there, but I miss you. I miss you like crazy.”
- Jake turns up his Spotify’s Offspring channel a little louder to drown out the sounds of Tom and his dad shouting at each other downstairs. His eyes flinch past Brooke’s post, but they can’t move fast enough to prevent the thought that flashes across the surface of his mind: Is this going to be me a year from now?
32. Tobias texts Rachel and Jake an article from Audubon.Org, where several birdwatchers are going into ecstasies of scientific fascination at the bald eagle and peregrine falcon seen flying in close formation in a cell-phone video taken near a highway overpass downtown. His only comment is, “Told you so.”
33. In the aftermath, Rachel does a Google search: “PTSD treatment symptoms outcomes.” She reads through the WebMD site, the NIMH page, the Wikipedia link to a DSM-5 entry. She thinks of Tobias’s withdrawn silences, his antipathy toward so much they used to enjoy, but she thinks of other things as well. How exhausted Jake seems any time they’re not on-mission. How badly Cassie flinches when the school bell rings and doors slam. How Ax seems to be gradually losing interest in the things—cooking shows, new condiments, human history trivia, These Messages—that once drew his fascination. How last week Marco flicked an ant off the back of his hand and then went white like he’d just kicked a puppy. How good it had felt when she’d hurt David, spreading the pain around, giving it back.
- She catches an Uber to the clinic downtown, filling out forms in the waiting room based on the checklist written on her phone for “how to get tobias an ssri”: Yes, she often feels tense and worried. Yes, her heart often races for no reason. No, she hasn’t thought of ending her life. No, she doesn’t feel out of control when she eats.
- She gets as far as developing a cover story—it’s about how she’s never felt the same since her parents’ divorce—but in the hallway to the office she panics and calls Cassie. “Am I doing the right thing?” she asks, after she’s explained.
- Cassie is silent for a long time, never a good sign. “I’m not sure an SSRI would work on a bird,” she says at last, “and that’s even if we could figure out a dose that would work without killing him. I know you want to help, and I think you should, but…”
- Rachel hears what she’s not saying: but what if her mom asks too many questions? But is this risk really worth it? But what if the psychiatrist (the receptionist, the pharmacist) is a controller? But isn’t it them, and only them, against the world, and isn’t that just how it has to be?
- “The war won’t last forever,” Cassie says weakly, and Rachel hates her a little for it. “When it’s over, when we get to tell everyone what’s happening…”
- Rachel hangs up. She goes home, morphs, and flies out to the woods.
- «You know I love you, right?» she asks Tobias later that evening.
- «Of course I do.» He sounds exhausted. She’s never felt more helpless in her life.
34. The Yeerk Peace Movement, as it comes out, has a Twitter feed. It is rather painfully obvious that it has been set up and run entirely by aliens who are doing their very best to communicate with humans, and not quite succeeding. Most of the posts are couplets, for some reason that none of the Animorphs can fathom.
- “Want to be On Fleek? When you see someone’s rights threatened, speak!”
- “Don’t be a Belieber anymore - end slavery and even the score.”
- “#tbt: Remember when we were symbiotes? Give taxxon freedom your sympathy votes!”
- “Nickelback is super lame, and keeping involuntary hosts is just the same.”
- “Respect your host’s rights today, and make your human into your bae!”
35. It’s Marco who comes up with the idea for how to take down William Roger Tennant. This is a guy, after all, whose cockatiels have their own Instagram account: he runs his fame on the internet.
- “It’s simple,” Marco explains. “We start a hashtag—#notsonicetennant—and we make it go viral. All we have to do is film this guy everywhere he goes, and eventually the yeerk will slip up.”
- It proves not to be simple after all. Their gif of Tennant twitching madly mid-EPA speech gets overshadowed by the news story about One Direction nearly getting poisoned with spiders at the same banquet. Ax does not understand the concept of hashtag, and keeps adding #notsonicetennant to his retweets of what Marco calls “food porn.” They train one of Tobias’s repurposed GoPros to follow poodle-Marco, but that becomes a meme mocking the world’s most obnoxious stray dog rather than Tennant himself.
- The plan finally, finally comes off when they pull out all the stops and just confront him in morph. The smartphones that Rachel rigged up in the surrounding buildings don’t pick up the thought speak, but the audio of Tennant screaming at the aliens to leave him alone comes through just fine.
- When the scandal breaks, the internet (in truly predictable fashion) drops #notsonicetennant and starts using #tennantgate instead.
- Ax reposts an old photo of Tennant eating a quinoa salad—zoomed in on the salad—and tags it #tennantgate. All of his teammates assure him they appreciate the attempt.
36. “All right, that’s just weird,” Marco says, looking at the final entry in the underwater creepshow they’ve been walking through for the past hour. “All the other ships have been getting more modern as we’ve gone, but this one? Looks like it was made in the sixties, at the latest.”
- «The world’s creepiest museum curators are getting sloppy with the placement of bodies as well,» Tobias points out. «There’s no way that many people could fit on a boat that small. They’re practically falling over the sides.»
- Jake and Cassie look at each other, seeing the same realization reflected in each other’s eyes. Neither one of them wants to say it out loud.
- Jake becomes the one to bite the bullet. “Don’t you get it?” He points to the ragged clothes, the emaciated bodies, the modern smartphone tucked in among the antiquated radio equipment. “They were refugees.”
37. Rachel shuts the window on the library computer as soon as she hears someone walk into the room, but she can tell she was too late by the look on Jake’s face when she turns around.
- “Roy Ludvig, huh?” Jake says. “Heck of a name.”
- “He was at the T.V. studio when we attacked.” Rachel looks down, picking at her nail polish. “No civilians were supposed to be in danger.”
- Jake’s expression softens, as much as it ever does. “And now you’re scrolling through his Facebook, looking for something that’ll let you sleep at night.”
- “He’s got a grandson,” Rachel blurts. “Jordan’s age. He…” She shrugs. He’s dead, and it’s more or less her fault.
- “Shouldn’t be looking on Facebook.” Jake sets his phone on the library table next to her, taps the screen to bring up an official-looking report. “You should be, say, borrowing my dad’s computer. Sending an email from his account to ask for the guy’s medical records. If you had, you’d know that Mr. Roy Ludvig had a heart condition. That he had maybe a year to live, at most, and doctors said he might die at any old time.”
- Rachel looks down at the report for a long time, and eventually looks up at Jake. “Doesn’t make it okay, what I did,” she says. “He’s still dead.”
- Jake shrugs. “You don’t have to forget it ever happened, but you do have to live with it. Live, and fight another day.”
38. In the aftermath of Estrid’s visit, Tobias is flying over the boardwalk when he sees a henna artist who clearly smokes way too much pot to be a Yeerk. He gets Ax, they morph human, and both get henna tattoos of Elfangor’s name. (Ax had previously expressed an admiration for the human tradition of commemorating a lost loved one by making markings on one’s body.) They know the tats will disappear when they demorph, but they’re both glad they did it. The artist asks how long they’ve been together, and Tobias says in a scandalized voice, “he’s my UNCLE!” Thus, Tobias succeeds in both of his goals: making Ax laugh, and reminding him he has family here on Earth. Honestly, the reminder doesn’t hurt Tobias either.
39. “You know, not all squirrels are like that,” Marco is fond of saying after a morph goes wrong. “Not all termites are horrifying worker drones.” Sometimes it’s, “You know, some of my best friends are fleas.”
- It’s Cassie, however, who gets the last laugh out of that one. «You know, Marco,» she says as they swim away from the wreckage of the helicopter, «Not all ants are like that, right? I shouldn’t say that all ants are killers, right?»
- Marco stares at her in silence while the others snicker, watching him war between the two impulses: to keep the joke going forever, and to express his honest hatred of ants.
- «Come on.» And now Rachel has joined in on the teasing. «You’re just going to let that kind of besmirching of the ant community stand?»
- «Okay, okay!» Marco gives in. «Ants suck. Yes, all ants!»
40. “Our experts have examined the video extensively, and near as we can conclude, this footage is genuine and unedited,” the newscaster says. “Given how viral this video has proven to be, with over two million views since it was posted to YouTube on Wednesday, everyone wants to know: is this footage proof that aliens exist? Is this a publicity stunt for the upcoming Fantastic Beasts sequel? Or, as one YouTube commenter asks, did a Smurf just have sex with a centaur?”
- «Potential new ally?» Tobias suggests. He’s already tapping out a search for the original video in his modified tablet.
- Ax laughs. «Of course not. He’s crippled. A vecol. Useless. We must respect the privacy of his isolation.»
- “You know what? Fuck that,” Marco snaps. He shoves to his feet, posture tight with anger. “Just… Fuck that,” he tells Ax. “I have ADHD. Attention Deficit whateverthefuck. I take a pill every morning to help me function because my brain isn’t good enough to filter stimuli all by itself. I got a fucking 135 on the world’s most boring IQ test and I’m still failing half my classes. I’m a vecol. You think I’m useless, huh? You gonna start refusing to talk to me because of some bullshit about ‘respecting’ my ‘privacy’? Huh?”
- «That’s different,» Ax says. «You’re not…» He doesn’t seem to know how to finish that sentence.
- «If he’s an exception, I hope I am too,» Tobias says more gently. «I got screened for anxiety disorders as a kid, and I guess we’ll never know if I qualify or not, ‘cause my aunt decided that doctors cost money and if the test said I needed one then she didn’t want to know about it.»
- Ax doesn’t answer for a long time. He doesn’t seem to know where to look.
- «Let’s go tell the others what we found.» Tobias taps a button to send the video to himself. «We can talk more about this later.»
MM4. Tobias flinches when his phone makes the small ping sound that means he has an alert. The new kid is the easy target in every school on the planet. He wonders what it’ll be this time: another Facebook post where the semi-anonymous account Toby IsALoser tags him in another meme about how he has to pay people for sex because the sight of his body would make any normal girl run away screaming, another unnamed Instagram ping telling him he should kill himself so that no one has to look at his stupid fat face anymore, another Snapchat image of a puddle of vomit with the caption “me when I think of you,” an email with the most disgusting gif anyone could find after a quick search…
- It’s not, though. It’s an invite to join a private Facebook group, called The Sharing, with several hundred local members. Most of the names Tobias recognizes are cool older kids from the high school. Intrigued, willing to trust for the moment that this isn’t some ridiculously elaborate prank, Tobias clicks “join.”
41. Jake looks around at the enormous open field, concrete pitted with openings and low hovels of corrugated steel and rebar. He can see for nearly half a mile in every direction before the smog makes it impossible, and the tallest things around are the hunched hork-bajir. “Where are we?” he asks.
- Cassie frowns. “This? Jake, this is downtown Manhattan.”
- He gapes at her. “What happened to it?”
- “Tall buildings are targets for drone strikes,” she says casually, turning away. “The only way to be safe was to go underground.”
42. Marco doesn’t bother going to the house of the guy who photographed them, nor does he try to catch the kid before he uploads the video anywhere. Instead he waits for the image to appear on YouTube, then becomes the first commenter. “Sweet manip!” he says. “Is that Photoshop, or can you do that in free programs like Gimp?”
43. “EarthIsOurs-dot-tumblr-dot-com?” Marco says incredulously. “What does Taylor do there, post pictures of her pet taxxon? Reblog plans for planetary domination?”
- «Judging from her archive history, she’s had this blog for many years,» Ax says. «She recently changed the domain name, but some of the content on here is from as early as 2008.»
- Jake and Marco get caught up in debating with Cassie about what exactly to send to her, but Tobias just scrolls quietly through Taylor’s old posts. She didn’t lie about being beautiful, he realizes, or about being popular. There’s a long blank period in her tumblr account in mid-2014. And then she posted one selfie—just one—after the fire.
- He can’t bring himself to read the names that the trolls call her, or the discussions about how much money they’d have to be paid to have sex with her. But there’s no overlooking the suggestions that she kill herself. The posts are too numerous, too vitriolic.
- “Every chick ever to wander onto the internet has gotten that crap,” Rachel says; clearly she’s been reading over his shoulder. “She should’ve developed thick skin, not joined the Sharing.”
- Tobias thinks of the Facebook page made at his old school just to discuss the fact that he’s a chubby zit-face, of the posts which eventually overwhelmed his Instagram with death threats. «Yeah, I guess,» he says.
44. It takes a long time for Cassie to get home from Australia, but at least they’re not too worried for most of that time; she texts them her location and a brief description of the insanity that landed her in the Outback as soon as she gets in contact with Yami’s family.
45. “None of this makes any sense,” Peter says. “I’m hallucinating, or you’re delusional, or else—”
- Marco sets his phone in Peter’s lap. “Check the timestamp, Dad. I took that six months ago.”
- Peter stares at the phone for a long minute, and then slowly looks up at Marco. At a clear loss for words, he tilts his head back toward the screen.
- “I know.” Marco laughs, the sound wet with tears. “That blond wig looks terrible on her. But it’s really her, Dad. I swear.”
46. “So they’re going to get the U.S. embroiled in another war,” Marco says. “And this one with a country that can actually fight back.”
- «Seems like,» Tobias says. «Only why bother with all the secrecy and political wrangling? Why not just send a couple mean tweets to Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un? That’d probably do the job just as well.»
- “No, it wouldn’t.” Jake runs a hand through his hair, looking around at them all. “The yeerks need a total war. Everything the U.S. and its allies can pull out, against everything China and its allies can muster. Our military has gotten too used to sending drones to fight its wars, to ‘tactical strikes’ against insurgents. If the yeerks want half the species annihilated, they have to do a lot more than poke a couple of egos.”
47. “News flash,” Marco says. “Your average suburbanite ain’t gonna accept a seven-foot-tall alien for a neighbor. You know the number of times my mom’s been asked for proof of citizenship before she was allowed to vote or cash a paycheck or buy a car? How many times she’s been pulled over by cops while driving the speed limit with her seatbelt on? And she’s a regular old human being. Toby’s right—the hork-bajir have a whole other fight coming if we ever win the war.”
48. Rachel feels the blood drain from her face when she opens the Facebook message and sees the name attached. David’s Facebook account has been defunct for almost two years now; there’s no one left who would want or even be able to access it from the outside. Should be no one.
- Miss me? the message from David’s account says.
- Who are you? she types with shaking fingers. What do you want?
- I know what you did. I’m coming for you. I’ve got friends all over the place and they’ll find you. They’ll kill you. Amazing the allies you can get, when you know where the bodies are kept. On the internet, no one knows you’re a—
- Rachel hits “block.” She tells herself that the screaming nightmares she has all that night and into the next are the product of having a stressful life, she’s an Animorph for pete’s sake.
- She doesn’t stop shuddering every time she gets a message for the next two weeks, but she never hears from whoever (It wasn’t David. It couldn’t have been.) it was ever again.
49. They stagger away from yet another hopeless fight, all of them injured, half of them missing limbs or bleeding to death. Dragging their damaged bodies behind the first dumpster they find, they demorph, remorph, and force their minds to focus long enough for the long flight home. It’s only when Rachel is in owl morph, staring around the dimly lit alleyway, that she sees the security camera pointed directly at their location.
- «They must not check it that often,» Marco says without much hope. «Or else they’d be out here already to come looking for us.»
- «Doesn’t matter,» Tobias says harshly. «It had a perfectly clear view of all your human faces. And that building is owned by the yeerks.»
- They all stare at each other in dull shock as the realization sinks in. They always knew this moment was coming—they could only be so careful for so long—and yet, on some level each of them hoped it never would.
- «Take one more night to be with your families,» Jake says at last. «We evacuate everyone in the morning.»
- Jake loses his phone, again, somewhere amidst all the chaos. This time around he doesn’t bother to replace it. It’s not like his mom is going to be wondering where he is, not anymore.
50. “So,” Jake says, “this is going to sound crazy, but—”
- “Aliens are invading the planet, and you’re the only kid terrorist who can stop them?” James suggests. “We do have wifi up here, you know. You’re Jake Berenson, right? You’re all over the conspiracy theorists’ forums right now.”
- “Um.” Jake runs a hand through his hair, starts again. “Yeah, pretty much.”
- James nods. “In that case, you’ve got thirty seconds to convince me your story’s not a load of crap before I call security.”
51. Ax secures their wifi in something a billion times better-hidden than Tor. With that reassurance, they all end up starting blogs.
- Marco’s is a rambling string of wry comments about everything from the invasion to his parents’ science projects. Sample post: “Insider source (aka my mom): Visser Three has morphed human and eaten AN ENTIRE BAG OF MARSHMALLOWS in one sitting, ON MORE THAN ONE OCCASION. Pass it on!”
- Jake’s is the place that people go to find out how they can help, and to get his reassurance that the help means something. Sample post: “As Barack Obama says, ‘We the people recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom without a commitment to others is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.’ This fight will never be over just as long as we keep supporting each other. I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you all for the KickStarter donations.”
- Rachel’s has beauty tips for the American girl on the run, light and self-deprecating enough that you often don’t notice the undercurrent of desperation. Sample post: “If you want to be able to look at yourself in the mirror, try fixing your hair using reflective surfaces such as pots, ponds, or pieces of Bug fighter wreckage. Alternately, just say ‘fuck it’ and never look at yourself again.”
- Cassie’s tells people how to stay safe, and how to keep their environments safe as well. Sample post: “Everyone please remember, it’s important to stock enough food and water for family pets as well as humans when retreating to an apocalypse bunker!”
- Tobias’s has a lot of good-natured grumbling about everyday life in the valley. Sample post: “In other news, my girlfriend’s mom is currently arguing with the smartest being on the face of the planet about where to put the new latrine facilities. Sorry Naomi, but my money’s on Toby.”
- Ax’s has a lot of food reviews, of course, but again there’s that undercurrent of desperation, almost like he’s trying to convince someone else (or maybe even himself) that humans are worth saving. Sample post: “Marco assures me that there are no less than 23 distinct flavors contained within every sip of Dr. Pepper. Just think of the years of experimentation and innovation it must have required to produce a drink which can inspire 23 different reactions from human taste buds, all at the same time. Truly inspired genius.”
52. They run drills upon drills for what to do in case of a drone strike. Using any morphs they have that can dig or build—mole, taxxon, elephant, beaver—the Animorphs create an extensive network of tunnels and shelters, posting guards at all times to keep their eyes on the sky. The hork-bajir valley doesn’t show up on satellite imagery, which they only know thanks to Peter’s definitely-illegal fact-gathering missions on the darkweb, but they don’t know for sure whether an overhead camera would be subject to the same strange perceptual distortions they all experience when flying there as birds. They nearly lose their precious secrecy when Naomi sends several emails from her work account, claiming she’s being held hostage and asking anyone who will listen to come rescue her. Eva generates a hasty follow-up from the same account asking people to ignore “the prank that I now realize was in poor taste,” but none of them are sure it worked for the next several days.
53. Rachel makes one last post on her nearly-extinct Instagram account. This time the scrap of paper she uses appears to be torn from the back of a food label, but the penciled script is as intricate as ever. It reads “Who wants to live forever? —Freddie Mercury, 1986”
54. After it’s all over, Tobias retreats, he hides, but he keeps a thread of communication open. Cassie shoots him an email with the subject line “Hawk patient with intermittent aggression and lethargy—any idea what could be causing it?” Marco sends him idiotic memes that now feature the Animorphs’ names and faces. Ax asks for constant updates on the new wing of Taco Bell being built downtown, and repays the favor by leaking confidential information about the search for the Blade ship.
- And then he gets one of the stranger emails he’s ever received. It’s an offer of a full legacy scholarship to Harvard University (which has just found the means to explain some inconsistencies in the records of one “Alan Fangor,” who graduated in the ‘80s) in exchange for Tobias teaching one class per semester on any subject of his choice. He agrees, with the stipulation that all his classes be online.
- The resultant course (Ornithology 442: An Insider’s Perspective) is like nothing the students who participate have ever seen before. Tobias will write out rambling treatises on Why Blue Jays Suck or All the Ways Hawks Are Superior to Eagles with a thought-speak-to-text recorder. He’ll deliver online lectures from a shaky webcam pointed into a nonspecific tree, occasionally wandering off for hours at a time to go hunting. Students who ask him personal questions about Rachel get regurgitated mouse skeletons Fed-Exed to their campus mailboxes. Essays that don’t demonstrate much effort get feedback such as “even I can tell this sucks and I have a seventh-grade education” or “my grandmother could make better sentences than this AND SHE’S AN ANDALITE WHO DOESN’T SPEAK ENGLISH.” Assignments include “find one bird fact in a textbook and explain why it’s a load of crap” or “go film a Boston pigeon until it does something interesting, I dare you.”
- Nevertheless, enrollment is so popular that Harvard has a three-year waiting list and charges students an extra $500 just to sign up. When Tobias finds out about the extra fee, he promptly video-calls the Intrepid, gives Ax remote access to his computer, and explains why he needs Ax to convert the course illegally to a MOOC. Harvard University fires him for breach of contract; Yale hires him on that very same afternoon.
Anonymous asked: UM HI. So I'm the one that sent the ask about the magical gf things and I have a confession. I already knew it was from your magical book and was kinda subtly hoping you would talk about it?!?!?! I"M SO SORRY but like I said I'm so invested in this crap and would read the entire frikin thing. ALSO I LOVED THE EXCERPT. And now I'm leaving before I disgrace myself any further.
WAIT NO DON’T LEAVE
SO HERE’S IRONY FOR YOU: you came in and didn’t want to bug me so you asked in like a sideways way, BUT I DIDN’T WANT TO BUG YOU, so I didn’t talk about it. (I’m a mess, I’m sorry, y’all gotta be explicit about this stuff because I have no self-confidence.)
BUT ON THAT NOTE let’s talk about perceptions of sex and romance in Alleirat? Like? I’m into it?
Earth is where the trouble comes from
So you know the code of chivalric love, where like the fair and pure maiden is adored from afar by the knight and on the one hand it’s kind of cool but on the other hand it’s predicated on the fair and pure maiden who can’t reciprocate or even really acknowledge what’s going on? I like that first half but the second half bothers me like FUCK so I made a better version.
In Alleirat, sex and romance are considered linked, but not intrinsically so–having casual sexual partners is fine as long as your partner is aware and good with it, and sexual experimentation is considered normal (even expected) between the ages of like 16 and like mid-to-late twenties. (People who are like ‘I am gay/straight and I am EXCLUSIVELY gay/straight and I have never experimented with another gender’ are considered weird and kind of to have missed out? Like, they’re thought of as…having skipped an important life stage? Societies Are Problematic, is my point here.) Monogamy is common, but not mandatory, and conditional monogamy (which I’m about to get into) is pretty normal.
So, the courtly love arrangement, which is called amuniasa. Like, say that you are a woman and you work closely with another woman, and you fall in love with her. And you’re very much in love with her (commitment is Serious Business in Alleirat and cheating is considered an actual crime) and you tell her as much. Now she has two options. Either she can take you up on it and you can attempt a relationship, or she can acknowledge the honor you’re doing her with your feelings and declare herself amiasa, or ‘the beloved.’ Then you have the choice to remain committed to her as amdri (the lover). Some basic rules of amuniasa include:
ANYWAY THIS HAS BEEN A PRIMER ON LOVE AND ROMANCE IN ALLEIRAT, PLEASE FEEL FREE TO ASK OTHER QUESTIONS.
if you think you’re “enlightened” or “modern” for mocking religious people for believing in god/gods, the afterlife, reincarnation, prayer, etc., then i hate to break it to you but you’re actually just an asshole
(via littlestartopaz)
really feeling this tweet (x)
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what are your ocs sexualities?
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Anonymous asked: How would the series have played out if David hadn't betrayed the group?
- For a long minute, Jake and David stare each other down in the middle of the hotel room, the breeze from the broken window making the only movement as it rustles their hair. “Fine,” Jake says at last. “Spend the night. But we’re going to talk about this in the morning, and this is not happening again.”
- “Yes, sir.” David smiles mockingly.
- When he rejoins Tobias and Ax outside, he can feel the questions in their stares.
- «I’m not going to push this one,» he says grudgingly. «He just lost his family, his home, everything he knew…»
- «Poor poopsie,» Tobias snaps.
- Jake stops talking. He’s addressing a kid who constantly survives being trapped in a whole other body and one who lost most of his family the day he crash-landed on this foreign planet. Tobias is right: if they could both adjust, then David should be able to as well.
- Sometimes he hates being in charge. «Look,» he says, «I don’t love this either, but he’s one of us now and we’re going to have to learn to work with him. We wouldn’t have gotten this far if you and Marco hadn’t learned to get along. We never would have gotten anywhere if Rachel and I still got in fistfights every time we disagreed the way we did in elementary school. I’m sure we’ll figure out a way to get along with David, okay?»
- «One of you is the human child named David—»
- Tobias cuts Visser Three off mid-sentence. «Don’t be ridiculous. We would never resort to using a human child to do our dirty work. Who do you take us for?»
- Undeterred, Visser Three tries again. «Then you should tell David that I have his parents, that—»
- This time, he’s cut off when David sinks four-inch fangs into his back leg and starts chewing. He morphs, they fight, they escape—barely—before the human authorities get there.
- David gloats the whole way home, until Marco says «Don’t get cocky, kid,» in a voice that’s not quite gentle but not quite harsh either. It seems to do the trick, because David shuts up for the time being.
- David moves in with Erek’s family. It’s not a perfect solution, definitely not a long-term one, but it’s what they can manage for the moment. It ensures that at the very least David can sleep in a bed and get three meals a day, that (although Jake would never admit to this motivation) he has someone to keep an eye on him any time he’s not with the main group.
- Marco conveniently forgets to mention, as he’s moving David in, that the nearly-omnipotent androids can’t actually defend themselves or even harm anyone at all. David will no doubt figure it out sooner rather than later, but in the meantime having Erek casually demonstrate his ability to lift an entire refrigerator one-handed during David’s first hour at the Kings’ doesn’t hurt anything.
- After that, they get into the habit of meeting less often, or in smaller groups. Rachel or Marco will often go out into the woods to meet Ax and Tobias there, or Jake will stop by Cassie’s or Marco’s place on his own. They don’t admit to themselves that they’re avoiding whole-group meetings because there’s no way to meet like that without inviting David along… But nevertheless, that’s what’s happening.
- “So then he’s like, ‘Marco hits on you all the time, and you never get all PMS on him.’” Rachel paces up and down, gesticulating wildly, while Jake watches from his seat on the bottommost bleacher of the school gym as if this is a one-woman sporting event. “Which, no kidding, because let’s start with the fact that Marco doesn’t use terms like ‘all PMS’ when I tell him to take a hike. And don’t get me started on the way that little twerp looks at me. It’s—”
- “Yeah,” Jake says very quietly. “I’ve seen.”
- Rachel growls, throwing her hands up. She pivots on the far end of her cycle, hair flying around her, face red. “He’s such a perverted, disgusting, small-brained cromagnon bastard. And hellooooo, I have a boyfriend already, which even if I didn’t, still wouldn’t be grounds for comments like…” She drops her voice, jutting out her jaw in an exaggerated parody. “‘Do you always have that leotard under your clothes, Rachel? Do you even wear underwear at all?’”
- Jake flinches. “Jesus, he said that?”
- Rachel crosses her arms. “No, I just made that up because I love talking about my fucking underwear with my fucking cousin.”
- Jake holds up both hands defensively. “I didn’t mean to question you. I just…” He props his hands on his knees, burying his face in his hands. “I’ll talk to him,” he mumbles into his fingers. “Again.”
- “You’ve tried talking.” Rachel sounds less angry now. She knows he’s just a lost kid like her, that he doesn’t have a magical solution. “We both have. We’ve talked to him, like, a dozen times now. It doesn’t stick.”
- Jake rubs at his forehead with enough force it’s as if he’s trying to press his brains into a new shape with his fingertips. “What should we do, then?”
- They stare at each other in silence for a long time. They’ve both had the talks, of course they have; they know why it’s important to tell an adult if anyone says something to make either of them uncomfortable. And that’s the crux of it: they want to tell an adult. They both want to give this one to a grown-up to handle, because it’s too grown-up for them to know what to do.
- “I’ll talk to him again,” Jake says at last.
- Rachel sighs. “I’ll do my best to ignore it.”
- It’s not a solution, not remotely. It’s also all they have.
- They start going on missions as two semi-separate smaller units. Jake gets very good at the strange algebra of what their team dynamic has become. He will usually pair himself and Cassie—sometimes Ax as well—with David. He’ll send Rachel, Marco, and Tobias out as their own unit. Sometimes he takes a break from David’s constant cycle of complaining, taunting, and gloating, and will guiltily give himself a mission with Rachel’s team instead. More often he’ll let Cassie or Ax, or even both, join the other team while he takes point on handling David. Tobias and David can work together, if the mission absolutely requires it. Marco and David cannot, no matter how dire the situation is. Rachel and David are out of the question.
- One consequence of this strange arrangement is that they all regularly take breaks from the missions at times. They get out of the habit of being a team, a family; instead, they are a ragged collection of whichever three or four or five people can be spared to attack tonight’s Kandrona shipment or next week’s Sharing recruitment event.
- It’s not a solution. It’s also the best thing Jake’s got.
- Jake is halfway to his room when his mom calls out. “Honey? Your friend stopped by.”
- He freezes, turns, and finds David sitting in his living room. David is talking in a low voice to Tom, whose yeerk is feigning interest only half-heartedly. Jake charges through the door so quickly that both of them look at him in surprise, drawing him up short halfway across the room.
- “You’ve got a great family, you know that?” David puts a little too much emphasis on each word. “You’re really lucky. You know that, right?”
- Jake shepherds them both upstairs as quickly as he can. “What are you doing here?” he demands, once they’re alone.
- David’s eyes immediately fill with crocodile tears. He spins the lie that Jake was expecting, even if he didn’t know to expect it from this direction: he misses having a family, he just wanted a normal evening, he doesn’t have the chance to eat a home-cooked meal every night the way Jake does, is it so wrong…
- Jake watches him talk, nodding as if he believes this. Jake knows by now that this is just how David is: he’s the kind of kid who loves nothing better than to pour a puddle of gasoline on the floor and then inch matches ever closer to its edge, for no other reason than to watch other people’s anger and fear.
- David could ensure that Jake, too, ends up living at the mercy of the hork-bajir or chee as his entire family are enslaved, if he even survived that long. All it would take are three words whispered in Tom’s ear. David’s proving to Jake, and to himself as well, that he has that power, and he’s willing to use it.
- “Stay for dinner,” Jake says at last. “But if you ever show up at my house again, don’t expect my parents to let you in. I’m having a conversation with them both after you leave.”
- “I’m sorry,” David says for the fortieth or fiftieth time as they trudge away from their very next mission. “I really am. Okay? It was an accident. You know that, right? It was an accident. I’m sorry.”
- “We know you didn’t mean it.” Cassie’s tone of voice is kind on the surface, but its undercurrent suggests that she’s just as tired of listening to his whining as everyone else.
- They had been cornered back there, outnumbered and outfought by a dozen hork-bajir. If all seven of them had been present, they might have had a chance. As it was, they were all seconds away from dying even before, somewhere in the heat of battle, David’s slashing claws had opened Jake’s left flank to the bone. Jake had collapsed on the floor, bleeding to death from severed arteries. David had suddenly snapped into hero-mode and fought off the three hork-bajir that menaced them before dragging Jake to safety. The fact that Cassie had walked around the corner at that exact second was probably a coincidence. Probably.
- “Jake hates me, doesn’t he?” David whines. “It was an accident. Anyway, he’s fine now, and I said I was sorry. It was just an acc—”
- «Yes,» Ax snaps suddenly. «It was an accident. A very foolish, sloppy accident. Warriors who cannot tell friend from foe in the heat of battle are more dangerous to their own allies than to their enemies. Any aristh who is so careless with his tail blade so as to injure his own prince does not deserve to have a tail anymore.»
- “Ax…” Jake takes a deep breath, trying to massage the headache out of his temples without much luck. “He knows he screwed up, okay? It’s not going to happen again.”
- The algebra changes again, after that incident. Ax is so disgusted with David’s very existence he can barely stand the sight of him, and doesn’t exactly keep this a secret. Jake starts taking Tobias with him and Cassie as backup on David-wrangling duty. It’s not fair to Tobias, not remotely—David bullies him worse than anyone but Rachel. But Tobias has an utterly horrifying amount of experience in grinning and bearing it, and so he does.
- Jake isn’t sure how long it’ll be before it’s just him and Cassie and David. Or just him and David. He apologizes before each mission and after each nasty comment to Tobias and Cassie, even though they know perfectly well it’s not his fault.
- While all Jake’s energy is taken up elsewhere, Rachel leads a raid on a television studio that gets a random bystander killed. She and Marco fight about it afterward; their shouting match seems mild by comparison to some of the rows David has started, since no blood gets drawn.
- Jake dreams every night, and it’s always the same dream. He slinks through the forest on cat feet, ethereal as fog, following a distant flash of yellow fur. When he catches his prey he digs teeth and claws into all the soft places that mane cannot protect, until there is nothing but meat on the ground. He sits looking over the shattered corpse on silent haunches, and then moves on.
- He feels guilty every time it happens, but not that guilty. They’re the only good dreams he has left.
- They’re all there, when it happens. The basement garage has flooded with dozens of controllers from four or five different species, and the seven of them are not enough. They’ve given up on trying to get to the computer files they came for; now they’re just battling with everything they’ve got to get to the exit.
- Rachel is a monster of unstoppable rage, slashing blindly at everything that comes within range of her claws. When she goes down, Marco rushes to help even as Jake and Ax make a hole in the surrounding troops with desperate brutality. When David goes down across the room, Tobias tries to help. Really, he does.
- Jake gets the industrial garage door open long enough that first Cassie and Ax, then himself and Tobias, can race through. It’s Marco who makes the call, shouting for Jake to shut the door before any hork-bajir can get through and leave the others to fend for themselves.
- Cassie and Tobias are both shouting at Jake to go back for Rachel and Marco. Somewhere inside, David is screaming for help even as Rachel continues raging at the controllers. But he knows Marco made the right call, and he reverses the course of the door.
- It slams shut. Jake watches it, and he doesn’t let Cassie past him to reopen their teammates’ only exit. Inside, some of the screams are audible not just to their ears, but inside of their minds.
- Five minutes pass, as they wait outside, still able to hear the animal and alien screams inside. Hours pass, in the span of those five minutes.
- Later, Jake won’t ask Rachel or Marco what happened during those five minutes. No one will.
- When the door starts to slide up once more, they all tense—until the enormous black-furred hand catches the underside and swings it upward. Marco is half-dragging Rachel, who has even more blood around her claws and mouth than before but is also oddly subdued.
- «David?» Tobias asks.
- «Dead.» Marco doesn’t sugar-coat it.
- Jake drags them all away from the scene of the battle, because no one else has the presence of mind to do anything but stand there and shiver in shock. Cassie nearly gets run over when she stops in the middle of the street to puke her guts out on the asphalt. Rachel’s face is so pale in the streetlights she looks faintly green. Silent tears streak Marco’s face, and he makes no effort to wipe them away. It’s a warm California night, but they are all, to a one, very cold.
- Funny, how quickly they fall back into their old constellation of all working together to hold each other upright. Jake can’t form sentences; it’s Ax who morphs him and fakes a call to his parents with some excuse to spend the night at Marco’s. Cassie pulls herself together enough to call Rachel’s mom and explain the sleepover they are going to have tonight as if she’s an adult talking to a child and not the other way around. Tobias disappears over the rooftops; Ax morphs at top speed and follows.
- That evening, Cassie will smother Rachel in every blanket she owns and give her hot chocolate besides. Ax will coax Tobias into morphing andalite once again, and together they will perform the ritual of death. Marco will shepherd Jake home and make bright excuses to Peter, never showing the slightest sign of concern even when Jake doesn’t say a single word all evening long.
- That night, Jake’s dream is like nothing he’s ever experienced before. He’s not a tiger, or even a kid; he’s a grown man living in yeerk-owned New York City. After he makes a choice, he asks the presence which has sent him the dream: Why?
- BECAUSE, the power answers. YOU JUST MADE THE CHOICE WHICH WILL SAVE THE WORLD.
Anonymous asked: What if Tobias hadn't gotten stuck as a bird in the first book? Alternatively, what if one of the others had gotten stuck in morph?
- Their first mission. The Yeerk Pool. Tobias is crouched in a hidden alcove above the hork-bajir cages, shaking from head to talons, longing for this nightmare to end. Every molecule of color in the battle, every whisper of sound in between the screams, assails his enhanced senses with so much force that he thinks he’s going mad. There’s no way out. There’s nothing he can do. He doesn’t know if any of the others are even still alive out there.
- And then a clawed hand touches his talon. Tobias nearly startles into taking off, but stops himself when he realizes that one of the fierce-looking hork-bajir has reached up through the slats in the ceiling of the cage to get his attention.
- “Hruthin,” the hork-bajir says. “You go. We make yeerk look.” He’s male, enormously strong, and his sire and dam called him Jara Hamee. His bloodline is one which produces more seers than any other. Tobias doesn’t know any of this. All he knows is that he has gone from having no hope to having a tiny thread.
- Tobias takes off, beating the air as hard as he can with wings made strong by terror. The yeerks would spot him, but from behind him there is an enormous CRASH. Half a dozen hork-bajir have thrown themselves against the front of a cage all at once, tipping it clear over to smash on the ground. All the controllers are running in that direction.
- Tobias never finds out what happened to them. Later, even after they free several hork-bajir, he’ll never see Jara Hamee again.
- Afterward, he can’t stand the thought of going back to his uncle’s place, not when he doesn’t even know if the others are okay. He walks for a long time, the streets silent and so very flat. Eventually he finds himself outside Jake’s neighborhood. He morphs again, flies up to tap at Jake’s window. When Jake sits up, Tobias pretends not to see the tear tracks’ dried salt residue on his skin. They talk for a long time, sitting side-by-side on the end of Jake’s bed, and then Tobias leaves.
- He goes back to wandering until the library opens at 7:00 the following morning. The librarians are used to seeing him there for several hours a day; they don’t mind when he slumps on one of the reading room couches for a nap. Afterward, he checks out a battered copy of The Witches for the fourth or fifth time and takes it to school with him, just to see whether it’s still scary after everything that’s happened.
- Rachel becomes the one to ask Tobias out, as they’re coming out of Algebra together one afternoon. She’s normally so confident that it takes him a while to figure out that she’s just as nervous as he is. They go out to a movie, get dinner afterwards, kiss twice on the long walk home. When Tobias shyly asks her why she asked, she laughs. “Because,” she says, “we could die at any moment.”
- When Tobias starts having strange dreams, he takes forever to mention it to Jake, but when he does Jake admits that Cassie has been having the same dreams. They all morph dolphins together and go to find Ax.
- Inside the Dome ship, Tobias becomes the first one to greet the strange new andalite. He follows Ax around for over three hours, pestering him with questions about everything from how andalites eat to what that configuration of the pond and the tree is called. Ax is cagey about the details of most of the technology, but far more willing to let Tobias poke at the strange plants and to translate the writing which covers the hatches and floor.
- Later, Ax takes DNA from all five of them. His resultant morph is a little taller, a little rounder-faced, a little more floppy-haired. It’s still beautiful enough to turn heads everywhere he goes.
- Tobias and Rachel kiss before every battle, and they kiss after each time they demorph after having survived another fight. Marco usually makes loud gagging noises while Jake and Cassie blush and avoid each other’s eyes.
- For three days, while Jake’s tied up out in the woods starving out a yeerk, Tobias has a mom and a dad and a brother and a dog. For three days, he learns what it’s like to have someone lean over and kiss him on the forehead before he goes to sleep. For three days, he walks through the halls of his school without fear, and half the people in his grade wave or shout hello as he passes. He eats three home-cooked dinners during which someone asks about his day and actually listens when he answers. He wakes up on three different mornings to the scent of toasting bread and the soft sounds of Jake’s parents singing along to the radio in the kitchen.
- There are reminders, of course, that it’s all a lie. Tom looks sharply at Tobias when Tobias gets up to duck into the bathroom to demorph for the third time in one afternoon, and Tobias feels the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. Mr. Feyroyan stops talking in surprise when Tobias casually comes out with an answer to an Algebra problem that (he realizes too late) Jake probably wouldn’t have known. Once Tobias gets caught out between classes an hour and fifty-seven minutes into his morph and no bathroom stalls free, and barely makes it in time.
- The reminders aren’t enough to stop Tobias from wondering, just sometimes, what would happen if he left the morph just a little too long.
- The first time Rachel takes Tobias home to meet her mom and sisters, it doesn’t exactly go according to plan. Naomi’s eyebrows raise when Tobias mentions the name of the street he lives on, and they draw together into a frown when he admits that he doesn’t so much have a curfew as he has a tendency to check in on his uncle every few days to make sure the old fart hasn’t yet drowned in his own vomit.
- Jordan, who is old enough to discern her mother’s barely-concealed snobbery but young enough to lack all tact, bluntly asks whether Tobias is from “the wrong side of the tracks,” because “Rachel’s not allowed to date guys from there.”
- The quality of the conversation doesn’t exactly improve from there on out, especially not after Rachel throws a blob of rice at Jordan and starts shouting at her mother.
- It’s an ordinary Tuesday when Tobias snaps. For everyone else it is, anyway; for the Animorphs it’s the morning after a nasty, exhausting battle where they were an inch from dying eight times over while struggling to destroy the Anti-Morphing Ray. Andy Valentino shoves Tobias up against the wall of lockers full-force on his way down the hall—and Tobias shoves back.
- Tobias isn’t sure how it descends so fast from there, just that he is sick to death of being shoved around and picked upon by everyone from cosmic powers to twerps like this, just that it feels so good to cut loose, to take a hit and then hit back. Andy’s got friends on the lacrosse team, though, and before Tobias knows it the fight has become three against one… And then Rachel flings herself on Tap-Tap from behind, and now it’s two against three.
- Half the school is watching them, or that’s what it feels like; they’re back-to-back, flinging wild punches at anything that gets too close, and there’s an entire circle of chanting losers surrounding them.
- Their teammates are drawn by the noise, because of course. Jake sends Cassie to find a teacher and Marco to make sure that Principal Greene beats Chapman to the scene. He’s planning on staying put and trying to disperse the crowd himself—but then Evan Murphy gets both hands around Rachel’s throat and before Jake knows it he’s already waded in to fling him off.
- The three of them are fighting half the lacrosse team by now, and they’re just about holding their own. They fight like wild things, like savage creatures, unafraid to dig teeth or nails into tender places, unafraid to fight dirty. They have no technique, no training, but that doesn’t matter, because they don’t go down. These kids can fight through severed limbs and bullet holes and punctured arteries. Compared to what they’re used to, a few cracked ribs or concussions are nothing at all.
- John Spencer lands a punch that sends Tobias slamming back into the nearest locker so hard that he bounces off, ears ringing. He spits two of his own teeth at John in a spray of blood and flings himself forward again, feeling all the while like he’s watching the battle from an enormous distance. Andy throws himself onto Jake’s back and Jake rolls forward to fling him off with catlike grace; Andy hits the ground with breath-stealing force and doesn’t get up. Rachel roars like an animal, paste-on nails snapping like claws as she jabs them into the soft meat of the lacrosse captain’s chin and stomach.
- Mr. Tidwell isn’t the first teacher on the scene, but he—or maybe Illim—is the first one brave enough to wade in and drag Jake away from Sean Richardsen. After that Ms. Paloma gets between Rachel and Evan, and Tobias has the good sense to back off before Chapman has to force the issue. They all get dragged to the office—or the ones who aren’t due for a trip to the nurse’s or E.R. do—and interrogated for the next two hours. The Animorphs don’t talk; the lacrosse team does. Rachel and Jake each get a month’s suspension, whereas Tobias (who everyone knows doesn’t have irate parents who will come to his defense) gets ten weeks.
- Jake’s mom shouts, literally, until she loses her voice. He listens, he nods, and he agrees with every word she says without irony or guile. He knows how irresponsible it was to get involved.
- Rachel’s mom cries when she gets the call, which in its own way is even worse. She asks Rachel if this is because of the divorce, voice so tired that Rachel falls over herself to come out with denials.
- “Ten weeks, huh?” Tobias’s uncle says. “They better not expect me to feed you during ten weeks’ worth of no free lunches.”
- Tobias lies to his uncle about it being in-school suspension, and spends most of the next two and a half months hanging out in Ax’s scoop during the day. The other four come by as often as they can, bringing Pop-Tarts and class notes and homework and Lunchables and news. Ax, who Tobias barely knows, takes Tobias flying more than once to try and map yeerk pool entrances.
- Marco handles the situation with his usual style: he makes jokes about it being a crime to keep nerd-boy from throwing off the grading curve for so many days on end. His class notes tend to be filled with rambling asides (his summary of the themes and motifs in Great Expectations contains four pages’ worth of marginal notes on how Dickens is a bombastic moron who was clearly hoping no one would notice all those impossible coincidences) but at least he takes notes which are more-or-less coherent.
- Jake, on the other hand, has an approach to most classes which consists of zoning out for up to 20 minutes at a stretch before jerking back to reality long enough to scribble down a few key phrases that sound like they might be on the test later. (His summary of the themes in Great Expectations is just “death, talking gravestone, class struggle… prison ship = class… card names = class… word choice = class… Which class?… wittles = ??? [probably class].)
- Tobias winces every time he sees Jake during that first week, because whereas Rachel can just tape her no-longer-broken fingers and redraw her bruises every morning with eyeshadow, Jake definitely can’t get away with making his broken nose or spectacular pair of shiners disappear without his dad especially asking too many questions. Tobias himself stopped and fixed his concussion and broken teeth on the way home from school; he has no one in his life who will ask awkward questions.
- After that, they all fall into a pattern of doing each other’s homework to save time for missions.
- Jake completes everyone’s take-home U.S. history quizzes, Cassie writes up several different versions of the same Biology experiment, and Rachel regularly performs a small miracle by writing five different essays that actually argue five different positions on whatever novel their English class has to read that month.
- Marco might grumble about filling out page after page of Algebra problems, but not only does he have a knack for math but he also has the easiest job, since he can find each answer once and then simply copy it four times.
- Ax’s primary contribution to the group effort consists of writing gushing reviews of the bad cooking projects Cassie and Tobias churn out for Home Ec.
- Tobias bats cleanup for the rest of the team, finishing Rachel’s and Cassie’s French assignments in between Jake’s Econ homework and Marco’s Art History projects. If Marco is doing the least work (even when he occasionally fills in for Jake or Tobias on their Spanish work), then Tobias is doing by far the most. He insists he doesn’t mind, and he really doesn’t; of all of them, he’s the only one still making an effort to learn things despite the war.
- Tobias coasts into his own neighborhood one afternoon with a whopping 90 seconds left before he’s trapped in morph. He’s tested that boundary before, teased his finger close to the edge of that particular candle flame, but he’s not planning on going over today. That’s why he lands behind the sparse cover of an empty dumpster and demorphs in the alley between houses—and the woman walking her dog catches him there.
- Tobias straightens up, fully human, heart pounding, wondering how on earth he’s going to talk his way out of this one. The dog is whimpering in fear—or maybe in eagerness to eat the strange bird-human creature—and the woman says softly, “You all right there?”
- Tobias is about to stammer out some kind of excuse when he registers, with a guilty rush of relief, that the woman’s not actually looking at him as much as she’s tilting her head in his general direction. That her dog is wearing a service vest. That the handbag over her shoulder has a collapsible white cane sticking out of its pocket. That she hasn’t taken off her sunglasses, even though they’re standing in a dark alleyway in late evening.
- “I’m okay,” he says, stepping toward her. In the glow of the streetlight he’s suddenly assailed with several other details: the round curve of her cheeks, the slope of her shoulders, the blond hair still thick between the scars. The long nose he’s seen in the worn photograph next to his bed at home. The pointed chin he sees in the mirror every morning.
- He opens his mouth to ask if her name is Loren. What comes out instead is “Mom?”
@words-writ-in-starlightreblog this post with a picture of the weirdest dog
(Source: birdfacts)
