A\N: Trent is bipolar in this purely as a concept thing-I thought 'what if Trent's evil spell was the Gem triggering bipolar' and went from there. Conner did not, in fact, steal the monkey. Someone else did, and the monkey took offense. The monkey just likes Conner's mom's waffles.
Most days started off startlingly normally. Trent's theory was that being half-asleep for a few hours just dampened any potential emotion. Today was no exception; he woke up, took his meds, fell asleep for another few minutes, then got up, dressed, went downstairs, and prepared for a glorious day of doing ab-so-lutely nothing after the week of various types of weirdness that had happened. (He'd started categorizing weirdness. So far, he'd had Ranger, Corporate, and Why The Hell Is My Dad Dating My Principal Who Used To Be His Evil Minion. Plus Haley had to babysit a sick kid and he'd gone to help to avoid the third weirdness type. So it had been a long week.) He was kind of looking forward to a day of drawing and relaxing, to be honest. Maybe he'd go swim a bit later.
So naturally his brain decided today was a great day to go insane.
It was a slow feeling of motion that took over, like something in him was going twice as fast as it should be, followed by a feeling of giggling. Suddenly the thought occurred that he was just going to be insane today. Oooh, fun!
...Wait a minute...
Trent groaned and set aside his drawing pad. There went drawing today; the stuff he drew when he was having an episode was just weird. And he couldn't always finish it, either. The inspiration he drew from his less-than-sane moments was hard to replicate.
Well, there went his perfect day.
Trent mentally ran through his list of coping techniques. (Why hadn't anyone come up with a way to quick-stop bipolar episodes? Like Tylenol for bipolar? Seriously, why was this not a thing?) Chocolate only worked for depression; killing things really only worked for mixed states and wasn't even that helpful now that he was on meds anyway; coffee was...hmm. That might work, actually.
Trent grinned. Actually, taking into consideration his meds, coffee would probably be enough to knock his state out and bring him back to reality. Hey, after coffee and a swim, he might even be clearheaded enough to draw a bit! Sweet! He headed to the kitchen. He'd been disappointed to realize that his meds wouldn't ever truly get rid of his moods, but to be honest, on days like today the meds really were worth it. He still had some of the stuff he'd done while manic pre-medications, and wow, it was insane. Like looking at Picasso on crack, Conner had told him before suggesting they try to pawn it off on an unsuspecting collector as proof of Trent's artistic genius. Trent was still tempted to take Conner up on that.
Trent took a sip from the perfect cup of coffee he'd just gotten himself and nearly spat it out.
It. Tasted. Horrible. Like someone had taken a decent cup of coffee and done something wrong to it, something involving some kind of spices and a nasty bitter flavor. Trent almost gagged. What in the world was he drinking?
Trent glared suspiciously at the coffee maker, then opened the lid and sniffed the grounds. They smelled okay...Elsa only drank coffee during the school year, so that only left Anton and Trent who could have made this coffee. The two of them were coffee fanatics. It was a side effect of being, respectively, a scientist who thought sleep was for lesser mortals and a teenager.
So, that left the coffee maker itself.
Elsa came into the kitchen a few minutes later, stopped, and stared. "...Trent? What the hell are you doing?"
"The coffemaker tried to poison everyone." Trent explained, examining the disassembled parts on the kitchen table. "I'm fixing it."
Elsa just stared.
"I'm pretty sure it's just some kind of mold." Trent continued. "I mean, unless you or Dad installed an AI in this without telling me, but I don't think Dad does actual AI's, so." He frowned. "Does he? I mean, I could swear he's a geneticist but he put Zeltrax back together and then he made the Tyrannodrones and I guess they're kind of like AI's if you squint because they're all androidy except the flesh bit-"
"Trent?" Elsa interrupted. "Are you on drugs?"
Trent blinked. "...No?" Why was she asking? "Should I be?"
Elsa twitched. "Trent, if you ever for some ungodly reason lose your mind and decide to do drugs, for the love of all that is holy, do not do them around me." She turned back to the kitchen, muttering something under her breath about teenagers.
Trent shrugged and went back to inspecting the coffee maker.
He'd almost gotten to the point of deciding it was an AI gone wrong and starting to tear apart the individual pieces to find the hard drive when Anton wandered in, looking zombie-like. Anton headed for the coffee maker, got out a cup, blinked at the space where the coffee maker should be, then turned and blinked at Trent.
"Hi, Dad. Did you install an AI in the coffee maker?" Trent said. Yeah, yeah, technically it was cheating to ask instead of figuring it out, but whatever, he wanted coffee.
Anton blinked. "...Did my son just ask me if I installed..." He asked Elsa.
"Yes. If he's on drugs, I don't want to know." Elsa snarked, doing something involving what looked like sushi made with very scarily sharp knives.
Anton blinked a few more minutes. "...No. Why would I have installed an artificial intelligence in the coffee maker?" He finally said.
Damnit. "It tried to poison the coffee." Trent explained, making a face. "Damnit, I looked for mold but I can't find any..."
Anton took a minute to make sense of this, then went to the fridge, pulled out one of Trent's sodas, cracked it open, took a gulp, and made a face. "How, exactly, do you drink this?" Anton asked.
Trent gaped. "How'd you know those were there?" He demanded. "...Wait, more to the point, how long did you know those were there?"
Anton snorted. Oh, great. Trent's entire stash of 'hidden' food was probably completely not hidden. Trent almost had a mild panic attack over whether or not Mesegog had poisoned his food before realizing that, since he wasn't dead, probably not. "Son, explain to me why you think the coffee was poisoned again?" Anton asked.
"It tasted nasty." Trent explained, turning back to the coffee maker. "You know, Dad, there's some things I really don't need to know you knew." Seriously, he'd always had a sneaking suspicion that Anton had known more than he'd let on, but he did not need to know most of what it was.
"...Tasted nasty?" Anton asked suspiciously, his thought train suddenly switching from messing with his son to what, exactly, had happened to his coffee. "Was it already in the coffeepot?"
"Yeah, why?" Trent asked, examining a small piece of hardware while his brain screamed that it was time to go FLYING!
Anton tried not to break down laughing. "That was my new spiced roast, son."
Trent blinked. Then he stared. "You drank that." He demanded, stunned. "Like, willingly drank it."
Anton's lips twitched. "Actually, I rather liked it."
Trent just sort of goggled.
"I told you so." Elsa said, not entirely paying attention to the conversation. She suddenly registered the rest of what was being said and decided to join in the game of mildly torturing Trent. It was quickly turning into one of her favorite pastimes. "My favorite."
Anton grinned. "And now I remember why I love you."
"My amazing ability to detect good coffee?" Elsa bantered back.
Trent decided to get up, leave, go up to his room, and scream into his pillow. He was vaguely sure Elsa and Anton were laughing downstairs. He really didn't care.
His phone rang.
"Yep?"
"Hey, bro, Ethan and I are going to go to the zoo, want to come?" Conner asked.
"...Will there be coffee?" Trent asked hopefully.
"...Yeah, sure, we'll swing by Starbucks on the way." Conner agreed. Trent loved Conner. Sane, easy-going Conner who had access to normal coffee. "Be there in ten?"
"Sure thing." Trent hung up, grabbed a pair of socks, glanced over his clothes—no stains, yeah, they were fine—and headed downstairs. Anton and Elsa were making out in the kitchen. Lovely. "Hey, Dad, I'm going to the zoo with Conner and Ethan, bye!" Anton made waving gestures, completely distracted. Trent grinned and took off like a bat out of hell. Bat out of hell. Hehehehe.
Sitting on the front porch, he idly contemplated whether his father and...stepmother? Stepgirlfriend? Whatever? Had gone insane. Hmm. Puzzling. Well, he couldn't see Anton deliberately poisoning his own coffee—heeeey, hadn't Elsa said she'd recommended the coffee? That was it! She was getting revenge for what Mesegog had done to her! Okay, that was a long-term plan, too, it had been nearly a month. Trent had to totally congratulate her, once he'd let Dr. O know she was evil again and...um, actually, what the hell was he going to do? Arrest her? Whoo boy. "Uh, hey, Dad, your girlfriend wound up in jail for attempted poisoning and they're trying to suck the evil out of her but they could use your help. Oh, and have you seen the remote?"
Conner honked.
A monkey poked its head out of the back seat.
...This. Looked. Awesome.
Trent ran up and jumped into the car, unfortunately stuck next to the monkey. It didn't seem to have done anything disgusting on the seat, though. "Conner, who's the monkey?"
"Oh, yeah, uh, we might have to stop at Starbucks on the way back." Conner explained, heading off. "See, I woke up this morning and found-"
Ethan burst into a coughing fit.
"Found!" Conner repeated irritably, "A monkey outside my bedroom. So I brought him in and gave him breakfast and now we're taking him to the zoo, but we, uh, probably should hurry, because the radio's got this, like, amber alert for animals thing going, and apparently he was kidnapped, and we figure he's not too happy."
Normally, Trent would have asked if Conner was insane. However, this sounded like the world's best idea at the moment. "Sweet!"
Ethan raised an eyebrow. "...Are you manic?"
"Yeah, think so. S'why I wanted coffee." Trent explained.
Conner winced sympathetically. "Oooh. Damn. Okay, Starbucks first. Hey, Mr. Monkey, you like coffee?"
"You know, we're really pushing our luck not having him in a diaper, I don't think he needs coffee." Ethan pointed out.
Conner's eyes widened suddenly. "Dude. Dude. One word." He grinned. "Espresso."
Trent grinned.
"...You still haven't explained how this relates to what you originally said." Anton pointed out, trying very clearly not to laugh.
Trent tried not to facepalm, gesturing at the wreckage of the zoo. "See that? Halfway through all this, I calmed down." He tried not to shake his head in disgust. "So I tried to do the reasonable thing and sneak the monkey into the cage."
"Your definition of 'reasonable' needs quite a bit of work." Anton informed his son. "What went wrong?"
"It wasn't the monkey cage. It was the panda cage." Trent winced. "They...um, I think the zookeepers said they hated each other. Cordially."
Anton's lips twitched. "And then?"
"I had no idea what to do!" Trent explained dramatically, throwing his hands up. "I only come up with good stuff when I'm manic! Pumping crazy amounts of energy into the Triassic Shield? Manic! Taking on my clone? Manic! The double-cross-with-the-gems thing? Manic!" Trent paused. "...Goddamn, my life is weird."
"So you want to, ah, 'stay manic forever so zoos don't blow up'." Anton repeated, without actually air quoting. This was an achievement.
Trent threw his hands up again. "Finally! Somebody gets it!"
Elsa gave in and started laughing. Anton glanced over at her and Tommy, who had given up and surrendered to laughter a while ago. "Neither of you are any help at all." He informed them.
The adults kept laughing.
"Hey, Dr. O!" Conner shouted, holding up a sloth. "Can I keep him?"