No Pulvinicide, Just Exe-Cushion

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I was coming up with new uses for my swarm sense all the time; for example, hiding a few bugs on the underside of the dinner plates made it a lot easier to balance a bunch of them in my hands and on my arms, as I carried the sizeable load of food into my room. Could I patent an insect-based gyroscope? A dragonfly-roscope, maybe? Who needs a flywheel, when you can just use flies?

"Hope you guys like BLTs," I called out to my new room mates. Putting down a plate next to the bed, I glanced at Lisa. "You've mostly gotten the B, since that's probably best for your digestion." A second plate was placed in the large cardboard box that now took up a considerable amount of space on my desk. "And here's plenty of LT, and a bit of B, for you."

Murmurs of appreciation filled the room, as I settled down on my bed, resting a plate with a regular BLT sandwich in my lap. For a few minutes, the room was mostly quiet again, apart from the sounds of three mouths working their way through a plain yet tasty lunch. It was different from the kind of quiet this room had been filled with for many, many months; not much louder, but far warmer, far more companionable. Ever since Emma- ...Well.

I was about to take a big bite of my sandwich, trying to distract myself from the gloomy turn my thoughts had taken, when a small nose darted in front of my face. Staring in mute disbelief, my jaw still hanging open from the aborted bite I'd been about to take, I watched in horror as a set of pearly white teeth snagged a strip of bacon. One swift tug later, the crispy goodness had vanished from the insides of my sandwich, and was headed for the insides of the freeloader sitting next to me on the bed.

"Hey!" I cried out in mock anger. Actually, my disgruntlement wasn't all that hard to fake; this was some pretty good bacon she'd just stolen! "You've got your own plate – and you haven't even finished that, yet!"

"Sorry," Lisa chuckled after swallowing the last morsel of illicit pork. "But ill-gotten gains always taste better." She licked her lips, throwing a sly glance at the sad remains of my partially de-baconed sandwich. "Besides, I'm on a diet. Low carb, high theft, y'know?"

Despite my attempts at keeping up an offended expressions, I couldn't help but chuckle a bit at her terrible jokes. "Sure, you're a regular pickpocket, you are." Turning in my seat, I held my sandwich away from her, shielding it with my body. "Or should I say: Pig-pocket?"

"Aww, don't get mad," Lisa cajoled. "Get even!" She hooked one leg around her own half-eaten plate of bacon, and pushed it towards me. "Go on, steal one. I'll even look away while you're busy thieving, to make it easier for you." She started studying my floor intently, making little 'ooh'-ing and 'ah'-ing noises whenever she found a particularly fascinating smudge, or a rare endangered dust bunny.

Shaking my head, I pushed her plate back towards her. "Nah, I'm good. Besides, you're the one who's been living on the streets for weeks, and trying to avoid getting captured by that guy, Coil."

Lisa sighed. "I suppose you're right," she moaned, snatching another bit of bacon with her teeth and gobbling it down. "I do need plenty of fuel, to keep this amazing brain ticking over. Besides, I'd be a fool to turn down dietary advice from a mighty hero like Chompy!"

"Dammit, Lisa," I groaned. "I told you not to call me that!"

She just laughed. "Sorry, but that story about how you got your cape name is never going to stop being funny."

"Is that so?" I mused, watching her devour the rest of the bacon in short order. "I should probably get you some healthier food options... If you eat too much grease and fat, you'll just end up going from Thinker to Thicker."

Lisa's head bolted upright, her ears jittery with emotion. "Did you just call me fat?" One moment, she was lying on the bed beside me; the next, she'd leapt into mid-air and pounced on me. "You totally did! I shall never forgive this slight against my good name and character."

As she batted at my face and boop'ed me on the nose with wild abandon, I laughed out loud. "Oh, no! C-can I bribe you with more snacks, to make you forget about, uh, my insult?"

Her savage attack abated instantly. "Insult?" She chirped. "What insult? I don't remember anything about anything like that." She yawned, and curled up on top of my head, letting her tail dangle down the back of my neck. "Must be all that bacon you're going to feed me", she muttered. "It's already giving me ham-nesia."

I smiled. "Y'know, you'd make a really amazing Davy Crockett hat."

One of her eyes cracked open. "I know, right? I'm like a raccoon, only redder and better." She perked up again, before clambering downwards, draping herself across my shoulders. "Or I could be the world's greatest fur collar, whispering secrets in your ear." She leaned around to peer at me. "Hey, if I help you arrest a villain, could you tell the PRT that you got assistance in making the collar, from your collar? I wanna see the look on Armsmaster's face when he tries to parse that statement."

I didn't like ending a fun game, before it even really got started, but... "We should probably hold off on doing that sort of thing outside the house, until after Coil's been dealt with." Picking her up with both hands, I carefully put her down on my bed again.

"Yeah, you're right," she traipsed across the bed covers, tail held high, and took a seat on my pillow. "Still, if you ever need somebody to guard your backpack, just say the word. I'm small enough to fit inside it; anybody tries to steal your stuff, they'll need to get Panacea to give them the finger," she clacked her jaws. "On account of me having bitten their old finger off."

I started playing with Lisa's tail, until I realized how that sounded in my head. It was just so soft, it was hard to resist when- ...Okay, stopping that line of thought, right there. Fluffy. That was a good word to describe Lisa's... furry bits.

"So," I frowned, hoping that Lisa's power hadn't picked up on my little moment of inappropriateness. Judging by her smirk, my hopes were probably in vain. At least she was polite enough to refrain from commenting on it. "Until your morpho-whatsit field settles down, you're stuck as a fox?" It had sounded like weird Tinker pseudo-science when she'd first explained it, and our later conversations on the topic hadn't made it sound any less odd.

"Morphogenic," she corrected me. "And yeah, pretty much. I mean, I'm pretty sure there are things I could do to speed up the process, but none of the options are pleasant, as far as I can tell." She did a little twirl, showing off her sleek red-furred body. "Besides, I like being a fox. It feels very... Me."

I smiled, and nodded, and tried to think of something to say; since my high school existence had been basically one long bullying campaign, with a solid side order of public ostracism, my social skills had gotten rusty enough to require a tetanus shot.

"What do you think?" Lisa broke my maudlin reverie and struck a silly pose, resting her head on one paw. "Red is just totally my colour, right?"

I chuckled. "Sure, my fashion sense is definitely tingling."

"Awesome-sauce," the fox did a little twirl. "And my smile? How would you describe it?" Her muzzle split into a toothy grin.

"Hmm..." I rubbed my chin with one hand. "It looks very... Vorpal," I concluded with a emphatic snap of my fingers. "Like you're about to make a keyboard go clickety-clack, and then someone loses their head."

"Really?" Lisa giggled. "That's great! I've got to remember that one." Her grin faded into a frown. "...Although, I was actually aiming for vulpine." She planted both paws on her face, smooshing it into odd expressions. "You'd think that'd be easy with a face like this."

I reached over and ruffled the fur on top of her head. "Aww, but you have such a kind and gentle expression," I cooed. "Like you really give a fox!"

Lisa held her paws up to her nose, spreading her nostrils wide with two claws, and blew a raspberry at me. I wished I had a camera, but settled for sticking my tongue out, too.

"Are you two finished making silly faces at each other?" The grumpy voice coming from the cardboard box on my desk made me realize that the background chewing noises had stopped completely. A tiny bald head rose over the edge of the box, like a particularly cranky sunrise. Two clawed feet grabbed hold of the box's rim, steadying the turtle as it glared at us. It was a good glare. It was intimidating. It commanded respect. It did, in fact, put the 'rep' in reptile.

"You promised to help find my loyal servants, to repay your debt," the turtle grumbled. "But so far, all I've seen from you lot is a measly few vegetables, and plenty of cheap theatrics! This is no way to behave in the divine presence of Om!"

"Now, now," Lisa grinned. "You've got to finish your supper, before you can have any supplicants. Otherwise, you'll ruin your appetite."

"Blasphemy!" Om cried.

Lisa waved a paw in a dismissive gesture. "Sure, we'll find some blass for you, while we're at it. Any other requests?"

The turtle was glaring at Lisa, or possibly trying to smite her with a bolt of lightning from his supposedly godly eyes. "A little less sacrilege would be a start," he snarled, turning his glare on me. "And don't think you're much better! I mean, look at this tawdry box!" He gave the side of the container a dismissive tap. "Cardboard? Is this supposed to be a sacred shrine to the mighty Om?" He waved a leftover scrap of lettuce he'd impaled on a front claw. "And in case you're wondering, 'sacred' isn't spelled S-A-L-A-D."

"Jeez", I muttered. "Ungrateful, much?"

"Fret not, your holiness," Lisa rolled her eyes. "I'll rustle you up some worshippers soon, so they can get down on their knees again."

"You said that yesterday, and the day before that, as well," the turtle grumbled, pacing back and forth with angry steps. "And yet, here I am, bereft of any and all circles of angels, I have no-"

"Actually," I mused. "That box has four corners, and they're all right angles. So, according to basic trigonometry, you've got four times ninety degrees, which is three-hundred-and-sixty... Or, in other words, what amounts to a full circle's worth of angles."

Lisa cackled. "Nice sophistry, there! We'll make a theologian of you, yet."

"Oh, yes," the turtle hissed. "Let's all have a jolly good laugh at Om! You should just count yourselves blessed – literally! – that I've deigned to be squatting in this hovel, like some two-bit demi-god!"

"Well, you got a sandwich in your box," Lisa snickered. "Which would at least make you a deli-god."

"Barbarians! Savages! Pun-believers!" He glared at us over the shoulder of his shell. "I mean, would a hymnal be too much to ask for?"

Lisa and I looked at each other for a moment. Then, Lisa started singing: "Sacred godlike preacher turtle," and once I recognized the tune, I joined in. We managed to get through a couple more repetitions of the impromptu hymn, in something close to harmony, before our improvised lyrics diverged.

"Holy in the half-shell," I warbled.

Lisa's sang with much greater confidence: "Halo on a half-shell!"

I smiled at her. "I think I like your version better."

Om stared at us in silence. "Delightful," he eventually groused. "I can just feel the adulation. At least the tune was halfway acceptable, even though neither of you are exactly holy choir material. I mean, you're supposed to carry a tune, not just hurl it across the room."

Lisa just smirked again, and started chanting: "T-U-R-T-L-E prayer," over and over.

I leaned down, whispering in one of Lisa's pointed ears, before she could get started on making her own rap lyrics. "Are you sure he's really a god, and not just some sort of crazy Case 53?"

"What, do you have some kind of prejudice against talking animals?" Her grin took any sting out of her words. "But yeah, I'm pretty sure he's a genuine Dewey 299."

I hugged myself, rubbing my arms. "I'm not sure how I feel about that. Aren't deities supposed to look more... deific? Deified?" I watched the turtle cram the last bit of lettuce into his mouth. He chewed noisily, swallowed, and made an impressively loud burp for such a small turtle. "Heck, I'd settle for 'dignified'."

"That's all her fault!" Om waved an accusatory claw at Lisa. "If she hadn't barrelled into my divine manifestation upon this mortal plane, and stolen some of my holy power, I wouldn't have ended up in this crude form!"

"I would apologize, and claim that it was all an accident," Lisa grinned, buffing her claws on her fur. "But since I've already bragged about how my power let me know what the weird distortions in the air meant, when I spotted them in that alley where you popped into existence, you probably wouldn't buy it."

I collected Lisa's empty plate, and stacked it on top of my own. Frowning, I turned to ask the fox a question that had been nagging me. "It still seems incredibly lucky that there was some sort of power effect, right when you needed it..."

Lisa pressed her paws together, a mock pious look on her face. "Maybe my prayers were heard? It did give me a chance to escape Coil's merry band of kidnappers." She shuddered. "I almost didn't manage to jump into the burst of thaumic energy in time... My Thinker power really went into overdrive, trying to interpret it all. Mind you, I couldn't actually see any of the light show, but my power insists that there was a huge flash of greenish-purple light. Well, assuming that light outside the visible spectrum can have a colour... Null-traviolet, maybe?"

The more she told me about that incident, the more it sounded like the work of some crazy Tinker; still, I wasn't going to mention that where Om might hear it.

Lisa leapt up into my lap. "You're looking a little pensive there," she said, poking me in the stomach. "Ooh, I know what you need!" Her tail started wagging. "Some good old TPL&C!"

I snorted. "Most people would suggest TLC, y'know? That thing that starts with tender, and ends with loving care?" I tried to sound flippant, but Lisa still butted her head up under my chin, wrapping her limbs around me in a fox's approximation of a hug.

"I'm not much good at tender," she mumbled against my chest. "But Trolling PHO Losers and Cackling always cheers me up. I'm know you'll grow to like it, if you give it a chance. Although, don't give the PHO losers a chance. Just do what I do, and mow them down like wheat, with the sharp edge of scathing arguments."

"Shouldn't it be TPHOL&C, then?" I asked. "Oh, wait... Macronyms are different, right?"

Lisa grinned. "I knew you were a smart one!" She leapt down from my lap and scurried under the bed, wriggling back out again after a few seconds of rummaging through her small, hidden stash of personal belongings. Hopping back up onto the mattress, she opened her jaws and deposited a smartphone next to my hand.

I offered her a smirk of my own. "I know they're called 'consumer electronics', but I still don't think you're supposed to put it in your mouth."

Lisa stuck her tongue out at me. "Yeah, well, I'm currently kinda short on opposable thumbs." Her expression turned hopeful, with her tail wagging in excitement. "Speaking of which, any chance I could persuade you to do a bit of typing for me?"

I shrugged and picked up the scuffed and scratched smartphone. Grimacing, I belatedly wiped fox saliva off the screen with my sleeve. "Okay, I guess. Do you want to enter the codes and passwords on your own?"

She waved a magnanimous paw. "Nah, it's fine. Go ahead."

We sat in awkward silence for a little while. Eventually, I raised the phone and waggled its lock screen at her.

"Oh! Didn't I tell you that, already? Right, sorry," said Lisa. "Just type, uh..." She sat for a moment, staring intently at the glowing screen. "Nine double-oh nine!"

I frowned, as those numbers triggered a vague memory. "...You unlock your phone with the word 'boob', upside down?"

The fox watched me, sitting still as a statue. "Uh... Yeah?"

Another thought entered my head and started jumping around for attention. "Lisa... Did you use your Thinker power to unlock your phone, just now?" I squinted at it more closely. "This is your phone, right?"

Lisa dazzled me with her most innocent smile.* "Well, it sure is, now!" She tilted her head, and folded her paws. "Besides, can anyone truly own a thing? Did you know that possession is nine-tenths of the law? Or, aha, should I say: Vulp-'ine-tenths of the-"

"Lisa! What if-"

She shook her head. "Nah, the previous owner was a rich a-hole, or at least an affluent d-hole. That douche canoe can afford to buy new one, it's no great loss for him, and frankly he deserves to-"

"But what if-"

"Nope, no risk of that whatsoever," she chirped and tapped the phone screen with the tip of her nose a few times. "Nobody's gonna trace it, I've disabled all the-"

"I can't-"

She grinned. "Afford the fees? Of course we can, I've-"

"Okay, stop." I raised my hands in front of me, waiting for her to click her jaws shut again. Taking a deep breath, I pinched the bridge of my nose. "I'm willing to pretend that there's not actually any crime taking place here, if you stop answering my questions before I've even had a chance to ask them. Do you have any idea how annoying that is?"

Lisa just barked a laugh. "I know! It's great, right?" Her face quickly turned sombre when she noticed my glare. "I mean, yes, sorry, I accept your terms."

I sighed. "Whatever. Let's just... T the PLs and C."

Lisa started bouncing up and down on the bed. "Yay!"

"Do you at least have your own PHO account? Or do you just hack into other people's, when you feel like it?"

Her eyes widened. "Oh, there's an idea..." I had an awful sinking feeling for a moment, thinking I was about to become complicit in even more illegalities.

Then, she laughed again. "Relax! I have multiple accounts, to minimise the hassle when the moderators ban one of them," Lisa explained. "I use AllSeeingEye for semi-official cape stuff, but now that I'm temporarily foxified," she waved her tail for emphasis. "I've also got an account called WhyEyeDoubleEff."

Pausing in my examination of the phone, I glanced at her. "Seriously?"

She grimaced, rubbing her chin with a paw. "Mostly, I picked it for the irony, what with my Thinker power providing me with infinite TMI, and all that." She flopped down on the bed, giving a languid sigh. "I'm sure all the furries out there would be terribly disappointed; the world's only talking fox, and I have zero interest in yiffing."

We eventually managed to get the constantly derailing conversation back on track. After logging in with Lisa's 'fox-traneous account', as she called it, we browsed the site for a while. She provided a running commentary on the various topics and users, peppered with plenty of snide jokes and the cackling she'd promised.

Even so, she didn't explain every little detail of her online discussions and general trollishness, and some of the minutiae went over my head. That wasn't surprising, really; I tried to get online whenever I had the chance, but that was mostly limited to the few classes I had with Mrs Knott at school, and my occasional foray to the local library. There was no doubt plenty of recent memes that had passed me by, considering how fast things sometimes evolved on the 'net, and how busy I'd been with my new cape lifestyle, lately. I had total control over buzzing insects within my range, but that mastery didn't extend to buzzwords. Did that make me a buzz kill, or just an undercover buzz?

Eventually, my curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to bite the proverbial bullet. "Um... Lisa?"

She hummed in a distracted tone, deeply engrossed in the heated debate happening in cyberspace. "Mmmyeah? Wassup?"

I pointed at a specific word on the screen. "Why do people keep mentioning someone called Lenny, every time they've written a really long block of text?"

Lisa turned a confused look on me, before her foxy face lit up in sudden understanding. "Oh! That's not Lenny, that's LE;NL," she said. "It stands for 'longum est, non legi'. People write that when they've made a long post, and they're worried people won't bother reading it."

I squinted at the screen; she was right, of course. "Some people need to learn to write acronyms with upper-case letters," I groused.

After a moment, I realized that Lisa hadn't returned to staring at the screen; instead, she was staring at me. "What? Is there something on my face?"

She shook her head, tail waving with the motion. "Nah, I'm just wondering when you're gonna ask me about the CaTS."

I shrugged. "I figured you just mention cats in all your posts as a non-obvious way of bragging about your new foxy body, without the risk of letting Coil discover what you look like, these days," I said. "I mean, cats and foxes are vaguely similar, and people on the internet are crazy about lol-cats, and stuff."

Lisa giggled. "Not a bad guess, but it's actually C-a-T-S," she wrote the letters in the air with the tip of her tail. "Y'know? Cachinnans tabulatum supervolutans? You write it to signify that you're laughing so hard, you're rolling on the floor." She tumbled onto her back, and started demonstrating the proper rolling motion on top of my bed covers. "Of course, people sometimes abbreviate it 'CaTSup', but only when they're commenting on pictures of really amusing food items, like... Sausages suggestively shaped like wieners, or something."

I stared at her. "Cachinnans?"

"Yeah, it basically means 'laughing loudly'," she foxplained. "That's why you often see people write CAC, when they think something's funny."

"CAC?" I frowned. "I thought it was 'kek'?"

Lisa shook her head. "Nope, the only people who spell it like that are kooks, who deserve a kick in their co-"

"Right, I get it." I rolled my eyes at her. "Seriously, what's with all the Latin? Is that a new internet fad, or something?"

"Well," Lisa drawled. "A lot of kids use their phones to go online, these days, so... They're probably worried about Roman fees."

The phone tumbled onto the bedsheets as I groaned, slapping both hands against my face in despair. Lisa's half-yipping, half-cackling fox-laughter filled the room.

Om stared at us. Turtle faces are excellent at doing flat, disapproving glares. "I have no idea what you two are babbling about."

Lisa twisted around to grin at him. "Y'see, there's this thing called 'roaming fees', which-"

"I said that your gibberish talk is gibberish, not that I care about it," the turtle dead-panned. "That toy seems pretty useless to me, if you can't even use it to find some worshippers of Om."

Lisa and I looked at each other, then shrugged in unison.

The turtle started shuffling back and forth in his box, trying to draw our attention. "Say, do any of those inter-netters mention how much they love Om?" He tapped a clawed foot against the saucer of water I'd made sure to provide him. "Maybe there's some of them that use words like 'devout' really often, or list 'prayer to Om' as their favourite hobby?"

"Uh... Well..." I flicked down through the thread that Lisa currently had me browsing. "There's someone with the username OMWWC-fan, maybe that's like... 'What would Om do', only misspelled?" I winced. "Really, really badly misspelled?"

Lisa leaned closer, her whiskers tickling in my ear as she whispered. I jolted back and spun around, staring at the fox with a mixture of shock and disgust. "Ew! Seriously?! That's just gross!"

"What?" Om scrambled upwards, leaning with his forelegs on the edge of his cardboard box as he tried to get a better view of the phone. "What did she say? Do any of the Ws stand for 'Worship'?"

I whimpered.

Lisa glanced at me, then smirked. "Sorry to disappoint you, oh almighty Om," she chortled. "But it actually stands for Old Men With Wrinkly-"

"...Crosswords!" I blurted, clamping a hand over the fox's muzzle. When I noticed the odd looks that the two animals were giving me, I stuttered out an explanation. "Like, uh, t-they crumple up the newspaper when they get upset over difficult words?"

For a long few seconds, Lisa stared at me with a carefully blank face. Then, the fox perked up in another vorpal smile, and turned to address the turtle. "That's exactly right," she chirped. "That is precisely what people on the internet spend their time on."

Om scrutinized her with a grumpy turtle expression. This wasn't as noteworthy as he might have hoped, since all his expressions seemed grumpy. With a harrumph, he slouched back into his box. "Sounds like a bunch of heathens and pagan unbelievers," he grumbled. "They need a jolly good smiting, the lot of them."

Lisa laughed. "Oh, the ones with a pagan fetish often enjoy a bit of smiting," she cackled. "Even if they need to use special equipment to actually, uh, pag someone."

"Lisa..." I groaned as I face-palmed.

The fox bounded around on the bed, her tail flailing as she engaged in some rather graphic and explicit miming. "And once they've strapped it on, they-"

I lunged forward, grabbing her quickly and wrapping a hand around her muzzle before she could say anything else. TMI powers, indeed. Lisa retaliated by tickling my nose with her tail, so I promptly wedged her under one arm, and tickled her with my free hand. Distantly, I heard Om sigh, as he trundled back into a far corner of his box, while Lisa and I did battle.

Turns out that sentient foxes can easily beat humans in a tickle fight; even when the human in question is a Master with control over fluttering, squirming, wriggling bugs, this is still true, at least if the fox has a Thinker power.

Time, it seemed, for me to escalate.

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Danny Hebert unlocked the front door, and clomped into his home with a weary sigh.

"Taylor?" he called out. "It's me, I'm home early." He waited a beat. No reply, but he could hear noises coming from upstairs. Did Taylor invite a friend over to visit? Come to think of it, she hadn't had visitors in ages. When was the last time Emma dropped by? He snorted; people always said that your memory was the first thing to go.

Climbing the stairs and walking towards his daughter's bedroom, the voices grew clearer, along with the other noises. One of the people was definitely Taylor, but the second voice was unfamiliar to him; it certainly wasn't the red-headed Barnes girl, although he heard Taylor make some sort of remark that the other girl's "red fur's gonna look great with some tar and feathers". Were they fighting, in there? No, surely not. It was probably something innocent, like giving each other a manicure. Heck, 'tarred and feathered' might be teen slang for nail polish and eye-liner, for all he knew. Did 'tar' mean the nail polish was black? What would they call ordinary red nail polish, then? 'Borscht case scenario'?

He paused in front of the door to his daughter's room, and knocked twice. "Taylor?" The sounds of creaking furniture and muffled yelling continued unabated. They were probably just playing around, but... Danny felt a sharp pang in his gut, as he thought of the locker, and the bullying at Taylor's school that his little girl refused to talk about, and which just grew worse in his imagination.

Turning the handle and shoving the door open in a swift motion, Danny was prepared to yell, or punch a bully in the face, or... Something. His half-formed battle cry died in his throat, as he took in the sight before him.

Taylor was sprawled on the bed, with a small animal perched on her chest. Was that a fox? Didn't some foxes have rabies?! What was a wild animal doing in his daughter's bedroom? He was aware that teenage daughters usually acquired boyfriends or girlfriends, sooner or later, and some amount of petting was to be expected; while he didn't feel quite ready to deal with that, he was even less prepared for his daughter to start a petting zoo.

Both of them were wielding deflated-looking pillows, Taylor's clenched in a fist, the fox holding it clamped between its teeth. Several more tattered cushions were strewn around the room, sagging as their filling spilled from burst edges and corners. The air was thick with feathers, drifting like snowflakes. There also seemed to be a large number of insects flying around. If all those had come from Taylor's pillows, too, they wouldn't need to worry about bed bugs biting - they'd be trampled in their sleep by the stampede, long before they felt the bites.

Danny tried to think of something to say. Maybe he could point at the feathers, and ask Taylor if she was having a pillow fight with that hopefully-not-rabid fox, or just playing chicken? Teenagers loved dad jokes, right? Or at least, they enjoyed rolling their eyes at dad jokes.

Instead, the most eloquent sentence he managed to utter was: "Um..."

His train of thought was promptly derailed by a loud, triumphant shout. Danny whirled around to stare at Taylor's desk, where he noticed a large cardboard box had now taken pride of place. A turtle, of all things, had climbed up from inside the box to perch with its head and front legs over the edge. The reptile seemed to be beaming with happiness, as it looked Danny up and down.

Turning to Taylor and the fox, the turtle waved a claw at Danny. "Finally! You found me a worshipper of Om!"

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*Considering Lisa's current shape and the personality that shone through from within, her smile had far more nosiness than innocence. If a team of PRT power rating assessors had been present, they would've immediately nominated her for Stranger 1 status; they would have attributed her new rating to the surprising absence of empty hen houses or ransacked chicken coops behind her, when her smile clearly indicated that there should be at least three.