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(no subject)

Who: Tobias and you!
What: Arrival tiiiime
When: 11/19 (During Alternately You event. Because the boy knows how to make an entrance, I guess.)
Where: Info Booth, around town.
Warnings: None yet, but given that Tobias is from the early 2000's so you can expect some, uh. Language that is no longer acceptable in polite conversation.

Arrival

Tobias was in a meadow, perched on a tree one minute, and the next he'd found himself outside an information booth. After a (very short) conversation, he'd tucked himself into some bushes and made the change from hawk to boy, accepting the information and money from Jerry. But once he'd been dismissed, he wasn't exactly sure what to do with himself.

He was alone. No animorphs. No Hork-Bajir. No obvious threat. No clear objectives. The alone part wasn't so bad, but the rest was just confusing. No one plucked him out of his world without a purpose. He looked over the pamphlet with a sigh, and turned towards the park exit. He looked more like he was leaving an exercise class than a fresh arrival, in tight shorts, shirt, and bare feet.

Around Town

Tobias is wandering around town in some new flip flops and a jacket, if only so he would have pockets to stick his money, pamphlets, and phone in. Under it, he was still wearing tight shorts and a shirt at least a size too small, but he didn't seem bothered by the fact that he was a fashion disaster, sticking out like a stone-faced sore thumb.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

There was no house here, nothing that even resembled a home, but Adam slowed anyway once they were close enough to the tree, eventually coming to a stop.

"Are you sure this is the right place?" he asked, turning off the engine. He was skeptical, but he remembered what Tobias had said about being a bird. If he'd actually been serious... Adam glanced at the tree again. "Let me see the map."

Tobias waited until the bike had stopped, pulling out his map before it was even asked for, to have a look for himself. "It seems right," he agreed, handing the map over as he slid off the bike and carefully removed the helmet.

He brushed a hand over his hair as he headed for the tree, looking up at it and the largest branch. It looked perfect. He was so distracted looking up that he didn't see the chest at the base of it until he tripped over it and tumbled into the grass with a yelp. "Ow! What the..." he sat up, staring at the trunk.

Adam studied the map for a moment, glancing around them then back at the paper. It seemed they were in the right place, which didn't make a lot of sense, unless--

He looked up, startled, when Tobias tripped, folding the map up and hurrying over with long strides. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," he replied without missing a beat. His shin was scraped, but it wasn't even bleeding. He'd been through much, much worse. "I guess this is for my stuff," he said as he pushed open the chest and looked inside. There wasn't much -- a couple of pictures, what looked like a pair of hockey pucks, an official-looking paper, and a drawing set.

It was almost nothing, but it had him going still as he reached in to pull the pictures out, looking at them for a long moment. "You wanna see an alien?"

Crouching down next to Tobias, Adam surveyed his scraped shin, shaking his head a little. He'd offer the kid a band-aid if he had one, even if the scrape wasn't bleeding.

The only thing that made him look up from politely ignoring everything in Tobias's box was the mention of aliens. He raised an eyebrow. "Okay?"

He put the photos back and picked up one of the hockey pucks, brushing his finger over part of it, and a hologram of an Andalite popped up. "This is my dad," he said quietly. "I only met him once." His face was still blank, but his voice was soft and warm. Like a smile you could hear.

Adam studied the hologram for a long minute without saying anything. He didn't know what he'd expected an alien to look like, but this wasn't it. There was no family resemblance, and that raised questions, but he didn't want to just verbally pelt the kid with things.

"So, you weren't kidding then? About being a bird?" If Tobias's dad was an alien, what was stopping him from being a bird? Or anything else the kid had told him?

Tobias shook his head. "Nope," he replied, forcing a small smile. "His name was Elfangor, and he saved the Human race." He sighed, looking at the hologram for a moment longer, before shutting it off and tucking it back into the chest. He pulled his jacket off, carefully wrapping the papers in the jacket, where they'd be safe from moisture. Then he stuck his sneakers and socks into the bag with the flip flops and tucked that in, too.

"I'm gonna turn back into a bird now," he warned. "You don't wanna see it or hear it, so stay here. I'll come back as soon as I'm done."

"He sounds like a hero," he said quietly. He couldn't imagine being the son of a hero. There'd been a time when he could barely believe he was the son of a dreamer.

He nodded, straightening up. He'd stay here, alright, and wait for Tobias to do whatever he was going to do. "I'll be here," he promised.

"He is," Tobias agreed, puffing up a little. "I didn't know until much later, that he was more than just a soldier, that he was my father. I almost died the day I found out," he chuckled, and headed into a bush.

It took three or four minutes, but eventually a red-tailed hawk hopped back out. <Hey,> he said, projecting the word directly into Adam's mind. <My feathers are da bomb, huh?> Even when the phrase was cool it had sounded lame in his voice.

Literally or figuratively, he wanted to ask, but that felt like prying, so he didn't.

Instead, he waited, occasionally checking his watch. He wasn't impatient, but the longer he waited the more he thought Tobias was maybe pranking him. Or had run away. But then he was back. Or Adam thought he was back.

It wasn't every day a boy went into a bush and a hawk came back out. Adam raised a hand to the side of his head, frowning. He didn't know how he'd expected Tobias to communicate as a bird, but it wasn't through telepathy. "How do you do that?" And then, a moment after that, completely deadpan, "They're totally rad."

<Honestly? No idea. It comes with the morphing,> and if there was any doubt about whether or not he was really the bird standing in front of Adam, the shrug of his wings should've dispelled it. <Andalites -- aliens like my dad -- don't have mouths that they can speak with. So this is how they always talk and I guess it got built into their tech somehow.>

"Huh." He wasn't sure that was how tech worked, but he was talking to an alien-bird-boy, so who was he to really argue about what was and wasn't possible? Especially when he was a dreamer. "It saves us a whole lot of trouble, either way."

Except he had one concern. Just one. "Can you read my thoughts or do you just project what you want to say?"

<Sure as hell does,> he agreed, waddling over to stand near Adam. <No, this is strictly one-way. Mind reading would be both great and terrible,> and he'd rather not, thanks.

That was a relief, to be perfectly honest--and Adam usually was. Crouching down, he reached out to gently smooth his fingers over the top of Tobias's head. He hoped Tobias didn't mind.

"Yeah," he agreed. "Personally, I don't want to see into anyone's head." Well, that wasn't strictly true, but generally speaking he didn't want to know what people were thinking.

<The ethics alone would give me a headache for years,> he agreed, holding still while Adam touched his head. <This is the body I'm usually in, but I've got all kinds of morphs. Human, alien, animals. Pretty much whatever I need.>

Right. The ethics. Of course, Adam had been thinking how easy it would be to blackmail people if you could read their minds, which wasn't exactly ethical to start with.

Pulling back, he rested his hands on his knees. "What other kinds of aliens are out there?"

It would've made the war much more difficult -- if it wouldn't have prevented it entirely. For a moment, Tobias was left to wonder what it would be like, if the Andalites had been able to read minds. Would Seerow's Kindness even be a thing?

The question had him shaking his head to dismiss the thoughts. <There'd the taxxons, they look like these great big, yellow worms. They're always hungry, to the point that they'll eat each other if someone gets injured. There's the Hork-Bajir, who look really scary, but they evolved to take care of trees. Most of them are pretty low-intelligence, but they're some of the nicest people I've ever met. There are the Kree, but I don't know if they really count. They're androids, total pacifists, and look kind of like humans with dog heads. Like, I'm pretty sure Anubis was a Kree.> He hesitates for a moment.

<Then there are the Yeerks. The aliens we fought off. They don't look like much, little gray slugs, but if they reach your brain, they can hijack all your motor functions. You're a prisoner in your own body. Wide awake, walking, talking. But completely unable to control anything.> It's pretty obvious why he might want to kill them all.

He listened quietly, making a face at the description of Taxxons. Hork-Bajir, on the other hand, sounded like someone he knew, and the corners of his mouth quirked upwards in a small smile. It was a shame there was no one around who would get the joke if he made it.

But then they got to Yeerks, and the smile faded from his face. "Yeerks and Taxxons sound pretty awful," he said quietly. "Do all Yeerks want world domination?"

<No,> he replied quietly. <But most of them do. They're not... they weren't trying to do it out of hate,> he's hesitant to defend them, but. <In their natural state, they can't perceive very much. There are a lot of them and on their home world, there weren't a lot of host bodies available, and those that were didn't have great vision or dexterity, either. Then Seerow, an Andalite, found them and gave them advanced technology.> A clear violation of the Prime Directive. <Once they got off-world, they started enslaving whole races. Earth was a perfect target. No similar species, less advanced technology, no contact with any alien races that they could tell,> he shrugged his wings. <We were a perfect target.>

He had the impression that giving them advanced technology had been the start of everything going wrong. While it was a shame they lived poor lives in their natural state, it didn't excuse enslaving other races.

"So, they wanted to better their own lives at the expense of others," he summed up. "That's still really shitty."

<Pretty much. That's why I don't have sympathy for any of the ones we killed.> He shrugged his wings again. <But it's also why I live alone in the mountains now. We did what we had to do, but we're not heroes. It was war.> It had been brutal.

"War is hell," he agreed quietly. "But you stopped a really massive threat. That makes you something." If not a hero, then something similar. "You saved countless lives, I'm sure." Even if a lot of lives were lost in the process.

<Yeah,> he replied softly. <It makes me alone.> It came out more bitter than he'd meant it to, but less bitter than he really felt, even though being alone had been his choice. It felt like the only time he'd had one.

"You don't have to be alone here, unless you want to be." Adam would be his friend. Adam would visit him and do things with him. But he also wouldn't force Tobias to do anything he didn't want to. Not unless it was good for him.