Salem, Oregon, 201-, two months later.

Fish Out of Water

Seven-year-old Ruby Sargent sat disconsolate in the principal's office.

She had disgraced her clan.

Worse, she had humiliated her mother.

She'd felt so proud carrying her first big girl spear into the elementary school building past the tall ooman who wore a uniform like her mother's.

He had smiled at Ruby, waving her in after he'd stopped the cars in the street, so she could walk across without a confrontation.

Feeling like she was representing her clan in style, Ruby had swaggered into the building, Dora the Explorer lunch box in one hand, spear in the other, only… she somehow got turned around and didn't know where to go.

Worse, she was the only Yautja in sight, though she saw some ooman girls, ones with dark skin, with hair like hers, all done up in big girl dreads like her mother's.

Only they had pretty beads in theirs, beads shaped like little animals, beads shaped like hearts. Round beads arranged like rainbows.

Ruby. Didn't.

Her mother had put bone beads in hers.

Plain, icky white ones that she'd been proud of until she saw the ooman girl's beads, all bright colors.

And some of the ooman girls who wore beads and dreads had their dreads arranged in cool tassels on either side of their heads, with some of it in loose puffs like the plants called dan'd'lions.

Others wore their dreads braided in stars, stripes, squares, and hearts.

More astonishing, the lighter skinned ooman girls wore their hair like waterfalls and it came in all sorts of colors.

Hers didn't.

The light skinned girls and some of the dark-skinned girls had hair that went in all directions, it was what her father called "curly".

Her's. Wasn't.

They didn't wear breathing masks like she had to.

Worse, when she took hers off to say "Hi." like her father told her to for politeness, the ooman children pulled away and didn't want to Hunt with her on the playground.

It seems mandibles weren't as cool as she thought they were. (Even if you'd buffed and buffed and buffed in front of the mirror and then oiled them for extra pretty shine after breakfast.)

That was when Ruby had the uncomfortable realization that she was the only one wearing body armor.

Feeling thoroughly out of place and ugly, the usually self-possessed Ruby who happily told her older brothers every morning what to do since she was old enough to talk, had a meltdown in the middle of the hallway because:

She didn't know where she was supposed to go,

Somebody had swiped her lunch box, and

For the first time in her life Ruby felt ugly.

So, Ruby had sat down, spear at her side, on the cold, hard tiles of the hallway of Salem Elementary and bawled her eyes out.

Only because Yautja don't have tear ducts, Ruby had to make do with throwing her head back, extending her mandibles as far as they would stretch, and howl.

The sound of breaking glass had been gratifying.

Finally, the ooman who wore a uniform like her mother's picked Ruby up and carried her at arm's length to that most dreaded of shame holes, the "Principal's Office" until the Principal could figure out what to do with her.

The bench shifted as a ooman child in a grubby dress and mismatched sandals sat down beside Ruby and began swinging her feet.

Her blunt claws were painted all different colors, something else Ruby didn't have and suddenly found herself wanting very badly.

She too, had been crying. Her gooey eyes were red and she sniffled from the funny knob in the middle of her face.

Speaking of eyes, she had four, like Ruby's father.

Interesting.

"I'm Marlys. What'cha do to get sent to the principal's office?" Four eyes said in between sniffles. "I got sent to the office because Bobby Fuller said I was fat and smelled like an ash tray. So, I blew my nose on his new Ninja Turtles t-shirt while he was wearing it – what's your name?"

"Ruby." Ruby chirped.

"Cool!" Four Eyes, no MARLYS, shook her head, which had two red tufts poking out of the top. "Watch this!" she said and then buried her face deep in a tissue before making a wet blowing sound.

Awestruck by this hitherto unheard of super power, Ruby rattled her mandibles – the closest thing to a giggle a Yautja pup could produce. This was so far the best thing that had happened to her today, maybe in her entire life!

Marlys pulled the tissue away from her face and smugly offered it to Ruby, "Allergies are awesome. You should get some!"

Enthralled, Ruby studied Marlys's rubbery, sticky green masterpiece as rain began to spatter the sidewalk outside.

Boogers were… wonderful.

Rainy Day Blues

Puck still wasn't sure what to think about last summer as she walked through the cafeteria, wearing her backpack like a total geek when everybody else left theirs hanging on one of the hooks by the double doors that led into the reeking room.

She would have done it too, only she needed the battery built into the bottom of the blue nylon bag– it was either that or eventually run down and fall flat on her face. Then everybody would know she wasn't, well, human.

Rads and normies aside, I'd just as soon keep the world guessing because it's none of their damned business what I am!

She paused near the table of popular girls just long enough to catch Maggie, her twin's eye.

Maggie wore makeup and new clothes: a mini dress and platforms and sat next to Draculaura who was wearing an identical outfit, pointedly looked the other way.

The two sisters had had a fight in their shared room in the guest house behind the Stein's big art deco house before Uncle Mike had dropped them off at school on his way to his new job.

Well, Puck, anyway. Cleo deNile's dad had given her a new convertible, Nile blue, last week as a reward for getting her driver's license. All the other girls from the neighborhood piled in, including Maggie, who'd changed a lot since they'd washed up in Salem.

But not Puck.

Cleo then disdainfully made one of those apologies that everybody including Puck really knew wasn't.

Then the little Porsche zipped off, leaving Puck in a cloud of exhaust facing the choice of walking the mile to school or ride the school bus, which was mostly elementary and junior high kids and smelled like armmpits.

Gross.

Maybe it was time to get a job and get one of those little scooters that you didn't need a license to drive.

Better yet, a motorcycle like Uncle Mike's.

Or maybe like Aunt Raina's.

As for the fight, it started the second Puck's twin asked Puck why she had to be so damned embarrassing all the time?

Without waiting for Puck to answer, Maggie loudly started listing what she hated about Puck: her bad fashion sense, her bad temper, her bad hair, her not choosing to let the Stein's fix her like they'd done Uncle Mike, Aunt Raina, and herself – why did Puck have to be so klunky in her old body and baggy, concealing clothes when she could be pretty like Maggie?

Puck returned fire by reminding Maggie that Maggie had stood by while Springtrap murdered her and laughed about it the whole time with her scuzzy boyfriend, Vinnie before those two had run off to do God knows what.

Maggie, who lately didn't like to be reminded about their shared past, had hurled a sunlamp at her.

By the time Uncle Mike intervened, dragging the grappling girls out into the driveway between the Stein's house and their borrowed one, Puck had yanked Maggie's hair out of its careful style and Maggie had left fang marks on Puck's still metal arms – and their shared room had been trashed.

Uncle Mike, barefoot and half in his new uniform and half out with shaving cream still on his face angrily tossed them one after the other into the Stein's new koi pond, or he would have, except that Puck, not wanting to deal with shorting out and killing the koi because the koi were cool, (plus she had a brand new copy of Lord of the Flies in her backpack that she didn't want ruined) had scrambled up his arm and crouched hissing at her now bawling waterlogged sister.

Yelling at all three of them while Jeremy bounced around them barking hysterically, Aunt Raina pulled Puck off of Uncle Mike, while Uncle Mike pulled the weeping Maggie out of the pond.

Aunt Raina getting involved had been the neon pink icing on the (very dropped) singing cupcake with eyes.

Aunt Raina getting involved meant they all had to stay away from each other until it was time to go to school or work while Aunt Raina stood in the hallway directing bad-tempered traffic.

Aunt Raina getting involved meant that when Cleo and her bitch pack pulled up to the curb in front of the house, Puck had an audience when Maggie, now dry and dressed as if it had never happened, looked her in the eye from the back of Cleo's Porsche and said, "You know what Puck? I used to be able to stand being around you for more than fifteen minutes."

Then Cleo gunned it, and the Porsche crammed full of giggling girls except for Puck, shot down the street, leaving Puck and her new blue backpack with its battery plugged into her lower back standing in a cloud of exhaust.

But at least Lord of the Flies hadn't dissed her. So far.

Aunt Raina intercepted Puck's angrily extended middle digit, laughed, and mimed swatting her with the newspaper, before turning back towards the guest house in time to give Uncle Mike the onceover as he climbed aboard his Goldwing motorcycle: picking invisible lint off of his black police uniform while handing him the big metal lunchbox that contained a spare battery pack before the two of them (OMG, could this day get any WORSE?) KISSED!

Thoroughly squicked out by the sight of public old person smoochies, Puck reluctantly climbed onto the back of the motorcycle only to regret her existence further when her uncle dropped her off early at the new High School where people could see them before driving around to the back to park in the Resource Officer's slot.

Oh God, not that, too.

Yes, Puck's uncle had not only taken a job with the local police department, but for some reason the Universe which clearly HATED her, had seen fit to humiliate her further by getting him assigned to Merston High School as the official SRO.

Why not a direct lightning strike? It would be a lot less painful for starters.

There was a rumble of thunder and a few drops of rain landed on the sidewalk, so a thoroughly miserable Puck pulled her old bomber jacket up over her head, wanting to pull her arms in its voluminous sleeves, followed by her legs so that she'd just be a nameless, faceless worn brown leather lump on the ground that somebody would want to spray paint their initials on.

Or words with four letters.

Like "Fuck".

Avoiding the further humiliation of a public shorting out, Puck walked past the smelly guy with the dead eyes peeking out at her from under his grubby white hoodie and braved the first day of High School without her sister, who once again, was breaking yet another promise.

Jeff is Jeff is Jeff

Jeff knew he didn't belong at Merston.

How or why he knew this, Jeff didn't know.

Or care.

Still the bell, the voices, the smells, pulled him closer so that he stood watching the lit windows, drenched by the first of the big Autumn rains, lank hair limp, and water sloshing around his worn sneakers.

Unblinking, Jeff turned around, and began the long trudge back to sanctuary in the downpour, smiling a Glasgow smile.

Meter Maid

Sargent casually lifted the ooman vehicle with one hand, slapped a boot on the left front tire, and dropped it so that the illegally parked car bounced. Adjusting the police cap that she'd carefully velcroed to her broad, high forehead earlier in the morning, she folded her eight-foot frame back into the truck assigned to her as an official vehicle, the golf cart most parking enforcement officers used was too small for her.

She'd been on traffic detail for over a year. It was time for a promotion.

After all, she had mouths to feed – even if Patador was now delivering mail on one of the worst mail routs in town (Which he liked. It was exciting, you never knew what might happen!).

Fredator and Tedator ate everything in sight while wandering around her bower in their underpants stinking up everything they came in contact with – and it wasn't cheap.

And Ruby, the youngest didn't know any other place.

Her oldest, three rattles and a click (Ba'Doom'Tiss!, for short…) worked as a game warden on an estate five miles away and could fend for herself, but now she wanted to go to University and that cost money.

Money Sargent didn't have.

Still, she didn't regret bringing her family all the way up from a place that the oomans called "Columbia" – working for a living was easier than trying to keep track of her unruly descendants and their skeezy sire in the jungles of Colombia, watch the skies for rescue, AND hunt.

Truthfully, Sargent really didn't want to go back to the clan that she'd been separated from.

Not with a mate like Pat, who was short, bowlegged, and had terrible eyesight. He'd been her spear carrier on a solo hunt and scheduled for castration because of his obvious inferiority once they returned to the main armada.

Only something had gone horribly, horribly wrong.

After ten solar cycles, the stranded Sargent, wanting pups, had given in to his increasingly frantic courtship – by Yautja standards, his unabashedly clever traps for prey were… cute.

Cuteness aside, Sargent was afraid for her children.

Their sire was inferior, even if he had good ideas and could talk his way out of nearly anything, something you needed around oomans if you were going to live among them.

Ba'Doom'Tiss!, was short, too short, for a girl – who would want her?

Fredator had a terrible speech impediment that would get him castrated.

Tedator would survive, easily, but there wasn't as much opportunity to move up among the Yautja as there was among oomans. He could still be castrated because his father was inferior.

Ruby, Sargent's pride and joy, would be taken away from her and raised by another clan.

As for Pat, ugly and near-sighted as he was, she held affection for the homely little squirt.

Somewhat.

Thunder rumbled.

Sargent stopped the truck, and got out, looked up at the turbulent sky, and then spread her mandibles wide so that some of the sudden downpour was funneled into her mouth.

Delicious.

Maybe a letter, a letter that Ruby or Fred wouldn't have to read to her out loud because she'd been attending ABLE classes religiously all summer, would be waiting in the mailbox tonight after she got home from work.

A letter informing her she'd finally been promoted to a full member of the Salem Police Department and not just an underpaid drone in a silly hat handing out tickets in all weather.

Lunch Table Blues

Great, thanks to Maggie being such a stuck-up bitch with her new cool friends, Puck had to sit by herself in the lunchroom watching everyone else eat – at least she had Lord of the Flies to keep her company.

She walked past the vegan table.

Nope.

She walked past the gluten free table.

Nope.

Followed by the fish, peanut, and dairy-free tables.

Nope x3!

The jock table.

As if!

The mean girl table.

You have got to be joking.

The band geek table.

Meh.

The orchestra dork table.

Feh.

The artsy table. The theatre creep table.

Eh.

The gamer table.

No. Thanks.

The nerd table.

You what?

Finally, the SJW table.

No. Just, NO.

All options exhausted, Puck found herself and The Lord standing at the back of the cafeteria staring out the back door at the patio with its steel tables and overhanging sheltering metal roof, studying the clearly labeled "alternative diet" table with a sinking heart and rising alarm that rivaled her feelings when she learned two days ago that Uncle Mike was going to be the SRO at Merston this year.

Seated by herself was one of the most bizarre kids Puck'd ever seen in her existence, dead, alive, or somewhere in-between – which that was saying something, considering that she was the ghost of a murdered girl deliberately anchored in the shell of an anthropomorphic Siamese cat that could do acrobatics and had been for nearly thirty years.

She, (or was it "he"?) smiled up at Puck, eyeless head topped by a huge frill that may or may not have been a hat or part of her long head. (You never knew in this freak show.)

"Hi!" giggled the unexpected inner mouth that shot out of her jaws, "I'm Tina, Tina Morph. What's your name?"

Gainful Employment

Mike had spent the last two months preparing for today and still felt like none of this was real.

The body, the situation, the job, none of it.

He'd worked hard to break old habits – of compensating for hips and knees that were metal grinding on metal and a body with a low center of gravity.

Of hands that were more like paws.

Of reaching for things that he couldn't pick up with those paws.

Of having no sense of smell when suddenly the world assailed him nose first.

Of no sense of touch when now the slightest current of air felt like a slap.

Of vision that no longer came in through a twin set of miniature cameras and was now color,

Of hearing that didn't fade in and out with static. (If Mike didn't consider himself already 7/8ths crazy, this alone would have been enough to push him over the remaining 1/8th.)

Had he let it.

This time he'd been lucky, starting when he looked in the mirror that Mrs. Stein held in front of his detached head and was startled to see the man he vaguely remembered being almost thirty years before and not some pizza grease smeared plastic toy.

He had responsibilities: Raina, the girls, and Jeremy, who preferred to sleep on the back porch of the guest house in the sun when he wasn't chasing squirrels.

And oh God, what did all of this cost? His rebuild. Raina and Maggie's slow piece by piece rebuild even as Puck refused anything beyond basic maintenance. As for Jeremy, all Mike got for an answer was a bark - still, they couldn't live in the Stein's guest house forever!

So when Viktor, in the middle of tuning Mike's new central nervous system casually mentioned that there was a job opening at the police department, and that if Mike wanted it, he knew someone who could put in a good word for him.

So Mike said "yes". before going outside to mow the Stein's lawn.

Though still learning how to walk and talk again while picking things up without breaking them, Mike managed to bull his way through the interview even as ne nervously wondered why they didn't ask for a resume and who was that short, dark guy with the widow's peak who sat off to the side saying nothing, dark, hooded eyes glittering.

He got a call a day later while he was trimming the hedges that lined the front of the Stein's house –The City was willing to pay him every month in cash if he accepted their offer.

It was a cop's salary, barely more than what he'd made as a Marine Lieutentant back in the 90s, but unless you counted a monthly electric bill of terrifying proportions, they didn't eat, and if they kept expenses down, he could figure out their next move even as he paid the Steins back while accumulating enough money to buy Raina, the girls, and Jeremy from Fazcorp so they'd be safe if he wasn't so lucky the next time.

So, Mike accepted, taking midnight runs when he wasn't doing nonstop pushups with one and then both girls and then the girls and Raina on his back so he could survive the required refresher course – as far as Salem was concerned, on paper, he was a recently retired ex-Marine with three dependents and a background in law enforcement.

Which was what the little guy, Vlad-something-something Tepes, had told him that afternoon when he accepted the job.

Tepes had played close to his brocade vest behind his huge ebony desk in his downtown office.

Mike had no idea what the guy was, but he suspected Tepes was some sort of Rad, a Rad who preferred to work in the shadows.

Tepes clearly wasn't happy about the Rads being outed, but there was no nailing the coffin shut now that the corpse had escaped and was running around in exposing itself to anybody who would look; they'd all have to live with it. The little man with the penetrating, unblinking stare needed someone inside the school who could pass as a Normie to keep an eye on things.

Mike was the best candidate he'd seen so far.

If Mike did his job, there would be… compensation.

Such as a new identity.

Likewise, his two nieces.

And his wife.

It would be legal.

All Mike had to do was follow orders.

Tepes would take care of the rest.

Soaked where his black issue raincoat left off at the knees, Mike finished directing traffic in the rain in front of Merston High school and still dripping, squelched into his little office to one side of the big administrative one to change shoes. Lunch hour was over; it was time for him to inspect the fire alarms because it was Wednesday.

Why do fools fall in love?

Fredator, or "Fred" to the Wolf brothers, and now anybody who noticed him, looked back at the lunchroom over his shoulder, cooler under one massive arm.

The Sargent brothers had initially sat with the jocks until they'd opened the lunches their mother had carefully packed for them and dug in, only to realize that everyone was staring at them as delicious blood and other bovine body fluids dripped down their chins.

Talons bloody, Fred then noticed that the other bros, including two of the younger hairy Wolf brothers, were eating off trays while using forks.

Worse, the food on those trays had been burned beyond recognition.

That was when the school's diversity counselor nervously scurried up to them and urged them to their feet and away from the table, leading them outside through a pair of double doors to a different table.

Suspicious that they'd somehow been exiled from the Hunt their mother assured them they belonged to on the first day without even trying, Fred lumbered after the diversity counselor, a tiny ooman named Ms. Goode with a squishy middle and long graying brown hair who fussed and fussed and fussed, Ted right behind him as rain hammered on the metal roof overhead.

Only to stop and gape.

Sitting at the new table was the most amazing creature he'd ever seen in his short life – talking to an ooman GIRL with animal ears and a glum expression.

She (PLEASE let it be a SHE!) was a glistening black, had no visible eyes, two sets of arms and not one but TWO mouths. Still more fetching, she had decorated her big head frill with fluttering ribbons in the school colors!

Blushing, a now sweating Fred dropped his lunch on the tabletop across from this fantastic discovery with a thump. Fred, who until now had been planning to translate Shakespeare back into the original Yautja so the full impact of the powerful prose could be experienced by future audiences, landed hard on the groaning steel bench, removed his breathing mask, shook out his dreads, opened his lunch, and dug in, Shakespeare forgotten. What kind of trophy would impress this stunning, obviously high in demand GIRL, and where could he hunt it?

As for Ted, a simple soul with a burning crush on the head lunch lady, a large ooman with a mole on her chin that deserved its own ZIP code, he sat across from Fred noisily slurping down an entire raw cow's liver while wondering what would earn him the lunch lady's heart the fastest: a bull moose for two or a freshly killed football?

On the other mandible, obviously the tall flat-chested and unbelievably HOT ooman GIRL with animal ears sitting across from the great big GIRL with no eyes and two mouths would LOVE a freshly killed football!

Under My Skin

Mike and the girls finally out of her hair, Raina scooped the last of the displaced pebbles from the Stein's koi pond as the big, slow brightly colored fish brushed her hands like so many friendly scaled cats and leaned forward beside the water into Child's Pose after untying the strings of her bikini top, enjoying the sun on her recently tattooed back and upper arms as it fed her. Like Mike, she declined to go Stein "green".

They weren't Steins, and, no offense, never would be, so why look like one?

Behind closed doors in the guest house, Mike agreed, "If things go belly up, we need to be able to blend in, to disappear if we can't get back into the Maze right away.

The Maze.

Mike controlled it, whatever it was, but since they'd all been reactivated two years before, the Maze acted funny.

Sometimes it let them in, sometimes it didn't, though Puck seemed to have better luck with it lately, but maybe this was because Mike and the girls turned out to be blood relatives – something all four of them were still attempting to wrap their head around.

Ummmm…. right… anyway, back to the Maze and it's unaccountable behavior.

Blood relative aside, when the Maze did let them in, it wasn't the familiar, friendly place that wrapped itself around them, creating playgrounds and puzzles when it didn't shape itself into wonders or releasing interesting people like her babcias, her long dead grandmothers, or others when they needed them the most.

If Raina didn't know better, she would have sworn the Maze was… sulking.

She looked down at her arms where swirls of red, green, aqua, brown, purple, and turquoise floral and water patterns wrapped around them, crossedher shoulders and down to the small of her back where a patch of intense green easily hidden by her clothes if necessary, pooled before swirling down her legs and the tops of her feet.

Not ink, Raina corrected herself, algae.

Algae which had been injected into her new synthetic skin like ink.

Raina didn't understand how it worked, but if she couldn't get to a battery or a wall socket, she could always "feed" by exposing herself to sunlight or a UV lamp because intricate tattoos even on women were all the rage these days. Who would think that her "optional" extras were what kept her, and Mike moving and thinking?

Mike's "tattoos" were more masculine: flames, barbed wire, rattlesnakes, bears, and grinning skulls, that flared up his arms, across his upper chest and shoulders and up his neck before it wrapped around his torso and ended in a patch of intense green like Raina's only to trail down his legs to his ankles and feet.

She had blue-green wings tattooed down the synthetic skin on either side of her new titanium spinal column above the main feeder patch – Vivica had hemmed and hawed over Raina's request until she found a design online and translated it into code so that Raina spent three days on her new belly on the marble slab while computerized needles injected the design into her flesh and Mike helped distract her from the pain..

Mike's nieces didn't have theirs yet, but the Steins insisted that as they were younger, they should be allowed to actually "grow" before something as drastic as a full body design should even be considered.

Maggie was all for it, but Puck sullenly refused, only allowing the Steins to engineer portable batteries for her disguised as a backpack for school while Maggie spent ages agonizing over designs, letting them tinker here and there, eagerly anticipating what she'd look like when she was full "grown" while temporarily making do with the green patch recently installed on her lower back.

Meanwhile Puck slouched in the background, scowling at Mike, Raina, and Maggie as they basked together like lizards on a blanket on the guest house roof the way the Steins had taught them with Jeremy down below still the dog he had become after he'd tried to shed his collar.

The sun dimmed; Raina looked up, there was a storm coming in out of the west. She rose to her feet, watching the lightning on the horizon walk towards her, skin automatically pulling energy out of the approaching bad weather.

As much as Raina would like to stand out in the rain and eat, it was time to go back inside the house, close all the windows, and start reading the local want ads under a sunlamp.

Everybody but Raina had a place to go.

A job, any job, would help pass the time.

Anyway, Mike shouldn't have to pay for all this good fortune on his own.