Tobias fluttered down to land on the bank of the gully, while Slade landed just next to the miniature stream. As the three cockroaches scuttled out of his feathers, Slade had a brief urge to snap them up with his sharp beak. He shook it off, putting up a firm telepathic wall between his mind and the raven's.
The other Animorphs were already starting to demorph, and Slade figured that he'd better catch up. It took them about twenty minutes to fully demorph, Slade took a bit longer since he had to split his focus between maintaining the telepathic wall between his own mind and the raven's.
"Is everyone all right?" Cassie asked.
"We're all fine," Marco said, looking around at his fellow Animorphs. "I just wish I could see the look on that jerk Captain Torrelli's face when he realizes we've all suddenly disappeared." He laughed, and Slade, seeing the humor laughed with him.
Rachel shoved him, her anger at his earlier actions making itself known now that the Animorphs no longer needed to present a united front. "What was with you, asking all those stupid questions?!" she demanded. "He would probably have let us go if it hadn't been for you!"
Marco's demeanor lost all traces of his earlier humor. "No, he actually would not have let us go until he'd called all of our parents. This would not have been a good thing. So I deliberately provoked him, and now he'll just write us off as another bunch of deluded wackos. If we'd seemed perfectly sensible, then he'd really wonder what we were doing out there with no shoes."
Neither Cassie nor Rachel knew how to respond to that, so they didn't say anything. Slade's estimation of Marco went up several notches. So, he's the one in charge of security for this army. I'll keep that in mind, Slade thought. After all, one never knew when an issue of security might come up, and it was best to know who to discuss such things with.
"So now what?" Rachel asked. "It's starting to get late. We should all be getting home right about now. Those of us that can, anyway," she said, casting an apologetic glance at Slade.
Slade shrugged it off, turning to look at Cassie. Who, he was starting to piece together, was Jake's second-in-command. But it wasn't Cassie that spoke next, it was Tobias.
You guys should all start morphing as soon as you feel up to it. The air's starting to cool off by now. We won't have as many thermals to help us along.
As the four Animorphs started to climb out of the gully, wanting to be on level ground before they started morphing, Tobias suddenly piped up again.
