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.

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aeskhyne

Trouble shrugs. "Yeah. And, you know, whatever these people are doing, they're not blowing anything up or conquering anybody. At least not so's you notice. Maybe they don't have that many resources, either. Maybe pod people and zappers are their only tricks."

instar

"Pod people, zappers, however they're hiding when they're monster-shaped, and, if they are aliens after all, however they got here," clarifies Bella. "That's the realistic minimum - they could theoretically be here by accident and not have that mechanism under control, crash landing or surprise portal or something - and the hiding could be by relatively mundane mechanisms, but still."

"What I wanna know," muses Trouble, "is how our razor-studded friend got into the closed bookstore around midnight before he chased that other dude out."

"Pod people can turn into monsters and that one so chose for some reason even though he wound up using a ranged weapon, there's a secret passage or compartment or something to a monster hideout, they can teleport but under relatively limited circumstances, it sprouted there overnight - hideout requires the fewest extra assumptions, but it could be any of those."

"Next question's why either of them was there," says Trouble. "I'd almost say it has to be hideout. Otherwise you have to explain what else they were doing there and how it went so badly south that Mister Pointy ran out on the street to zap the guy. And he went back in afterward, too, didn't he? To do what? Crawl back into his hole, I bet. Or I guess he could've been going to get chewed out by his boss first - but then why was the boss in there?"

"Hideout seems like the best explanation. This is a long, long chain of inferences, though, and any link in it could be broken - not enough data."

"Right," says Trouble. "And I'd poke my head in and look for secret tunnels if all I had to worry about was getting vaporized by trigger-happy demons, but then there's the part where they maybe have mind control."