After a night spent trying to recover from the latest in a long line of near-death experiences, Tommy met up with the rest of the Animorphs, Tobias was the first to make contact with him, telling him that Jake wanted him to get to Cassie as quickly as he could. Jake was somewhere out ahead of him, having already gotten through the forest while Tommy was morphing and flying to meet with them.
Tobias told him what had been going on with Cassie while the pair of them flew, and Tommy found that he could understand why Cassie had felt that she had to save the remaining kits from the mother skunk she and her father had rescued a few nights ago. That feeling, of having to do something to make up for something else you'd failed to do, or something you shouldn't have done in the first place… Yeah, he knew the feeling.
Jake wasn't happy about her coming so close to their two-hour time limit, which Tommy could also understand, but since the pair of them seemed to have resolved that between themselves, he wasn't going to say anything about it.
"Well, this is more than slightly insane," Marco said, once all of them had gathered together a reasonable distance from the skunk den. "We're going to raise little, stinky skunk babies?"
"What's so insane about that?" Rachel asked, folding her arms and glaring over at Marco.
"They're skunks!" Marco said, looking like he'd just heard her say the weirdest thing possible.
"They're cute," Rachel said, folding her own arms and glaring right back at Marco.
"Ah, "cute", I see. That explains everything," Marco said, rolling his eyes.
"Cassie can't take them to the clinic, or they may get used to humans," Jake said, cutting into the argument before it could really begin. "So we're going to be taking care of these… These skunks, until their mother can come back from the hospital."
(Are skunks a sacred animal to humans?)
"Every animal is sacred to Cassie," Marco said, rolling his eyes in clear annoyance. "She's like Doctor Doolittle and that animal guy who comes on Letterman all rolled into one person."
"Calm down, Marco," he said, smiling as he made his way over to clap a hand on Marco's left shoulder. "I'm sure Cassie won't mind if you're not interested in helping."
"Given how many things you have going on in your life, Tommy, I wouldn't mind if you weren't interested," Cassie said.
"Thanks," he said, having already been wondering just how he'd be able to work helping raise baby skunks into his schedule.