pandion | eek, monsters

Time goes by. Trouble keeps right on bringing desserts (and once a quiche and once a loaf of bread with nuts in it). The Swans are uncomplaining. On Christmas Eve he brings two kinds of cookies and an astonishingly edible fruitcake and stays overnight on the couch. (Andi, self-servingly, got him a little box of assorted Genuine Maple Products. Bella got him an inexpensive yet adorable miniature sewing machine.) Robin comes over too, Christmas day (Andi gives her a packet of guitar strings and sheet music for assorted Green Day songs. Bella gets her a tiny tape recorder.)

School is back in session in January, after New Year's. (The twins set off small fireworks in the driveway - well, Andi does. Robin is invited to this event; Trouble is not, it somehow does not seem wise.)

Now it is the first weekend after the resumption of school.

Robin's supposed to be over any minute for practice for Nameless Band Which Kind Of Needs A Third Person But Bella Doesn't Want To. Andi taps out beats on her drums. Taptaptap. Taptaptap-kish. Taptaptap. Taptaptapkish.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

palmofyourhand

"Any luck?"

From:

instar

"Not really."

From:

palmofyourhand

"Didn't think so."

From:

instar

"Yeah, I haven't had to figure out anything like this before."

From:

palmofyourhand

"I bloody hope not," he says dryly.

From:

instar

"No kidding. But - Robin, did this thing look to you like a species? Well-adapted for something, good at moving around, not - sick, asymmetrical?"

From:

hold_infinity

"It - no, yeah," she says, making a gesture that combines a nod and a shake of the head into an ambiguous wobble. "Whatever it was, it was definitely one of it. It worked."

From:

instar

"If it is, so to speak, one of it," says Bella, "then there are certainly more of it - even if they're dead, far away, or - hiding."

From:

hold_infinity

...Robin contemplates this idea.

From:

palmofyourhand

Ethan hugs her.

From:

instar

"This one was careless enough to let Robin see it, but it and however many conspecifics it has have been discreet," says Bella, tapping her pen on her notebook. "On at least one occasion at least one - demon? we can call them that till further notice - has interacted with at least one human; it was not friendly. We can't be sure if the one demon or the one human or the one interaction is typical, especially since if it were very common more people would be going missing - although I'd want to look at statistics to be more sure that they aren't - and more doors would be broken and someone less circumspect about adults than Robin would have spotted one. Although I wonder if there's a way to cruise through a psych ward to be more sure they haven't. Robin, can you draw - or direct Andi to draw - the demon?"

From:

hold_infinity

"I'm not much of an artist," she says. "But I'll describe it again if you want." She smiles wryly. "Like a police sketch."

From:

pandion

"I'll see what I can do, lemme go get some paper," says Andi. She fetches a clipboard and a sheet of paper and a pencil and does her best to render the demon according to Robin's description.

From:

instar

"Draw some random other monsters, keep the drawings together in a stack," says Bella, "I'm probably being paranoid, but these things didn't exactly land on the White House lawn to announce they came in peace."

From:

hold_infinity

Robin describes it as exactingly as she can. Long neck, long bladed tail, horns, claws, beak, plenty of miscellaneous sharp parts.

From:

instar

Bella peers at the drawing, writes a few notes about it in her own notebook.

From:

pandion

Andi finishes touching up the demon, then gets more paper and draws fanciful other creatures to keep with it for camouflage. Spherical fluffy bird with eight legs, low-slung turtle-sloth hybrid with long droopy whiskers, six-headed dragon, scary unicorn with fangs and bat wings, butterfly-winged fairy with enormous compound eyes and four arms and fluffy antennae.

From:

hold_infinity

"That one's cute," says Robin, of the flufferfly.

From:

pandion

"Thanks."

From:

instar

"If you had to bet," says Bella to Robin, "would you put your money on science fiction, or fantasy, here?"

From:

hold_infinity

Robin chews her lip meditatively.

"...Science fiction," she says at last. "That thing it fired off was not a magic wand."

From:

instar

"That was my bet too from the way it sounded," nods Bella, "but you're the one who saw it. And if there are lots of it, if it's one of it, this isn't a mutant or an isolated science experiment - they could still be designed, but it'd be a big project, hard to hide, time-consuming, and it would mean getting a lot of groundwork science done under the radar, I'm assigning that low probability -" She scratches symbols in her notebook. "Which leaves some class of thing that sci fi has not adequately prepared us for, or aliens."

From:

hold_infinity

"Alien demon," she says, and sighs, and rubs her forehead, and cuddles into Ethan.

From:

instar

"Aliens could have all kinds of interesting tech - and that's another kind of designed they could be, easy to hide your science fair project if you do it in space, that guy is spiky enough I wouldn't be at all surprised if it were ordered up for custom ambulatory Cuisinart needs - but if this one crashed through a door, I'm betting they don't have personal teleportation. They could still have extremely fancy ways of crossing interstellar distances, or this one could be stupid or forgetful or its tech could be broken, but probably they cannot teleport. They probably also don't have personal invisibility cloaks - that doesn't rule out invisible ships, and there's still the stupid/forgetful/broken possibility, but that's two things that it would be bad for hostile aliens to have that they probably do not have."