"This society is way too celebrity-obsessed," she said. "It's so superficial."

"Yeah," Cassie said, giving her a mocking look. "I hate that."

"We were lucky," Jake said seriously, drawing the attention of pretty much everyone at the table, with the obvious exception of Ax. "No one happened to snap any pictures of a flock of raptors carrying that guy to the water; no one happened to wonder what a dolphin was doing so far upstream from the ocean." Jake leaned in close, his eyes intense and serious in a way that Rachel hadn't usually seen them outside of missions. "And no one, that I've heard of, has so much as mentioned the fact that we had a Teknoman flying up and out of the river."

"That man was lucky, too," Cassie pointed out.

"No way," Marco said dismissively, shaking his head. "Lucky would have been getting mouth-to-mouth from Naomi Campbell."

"Where are the cinnamon buns?" Ax asked, looking all around the table and incidentally distracting Rachel from her search for the perfect, crushing retort to Marco. "Tobias said that he would get some. Cinnamon buns. Bun-zuh."

Neither Slade nor Shara were sitting with them at the table, of course: their groups had never been friends at school, and the Carter family was still listed as missing in any of the papers that bothered to mention them at all. The general consensus from the media was that the group, family and friends, had simply vanished. There were some speculations, mostly in tabloids where people wouldn't believe them, about what had actually happened to them all.

Rachel had saved one of the more interesting clippings, one suggesting that the Carters and their fellow campers had been abducted by a flying saucer under the command of Elvis Presley's half-alien clone. The headline was funny for two reasons; the first because it was just so completely absurd, and the second because it was the closest that anyone had gotten to the truth.

The Radam might not travel around in flying saucers, but they were definitely aliens.

"I wonder what happens to George Edelman now?" Cassie wondered aloud, bringing Rachel's attention back to the conversation at hand.

"Who?" she asked?

"The guy," Cassie said, rolling her eyes in mild exasperation. "The man in the papers. That man that you and Shara both helped to save, Rachel."

"Oh," Rachel said, blinking. "That was his name?"

"Yes," Cassie said, sounding a bit more annoyed. "It's been mentioned in all of the newspaper articles."

"Okay," Rachel said, shrugging. "Okay, so his name is George Edelman. Big deal."

"Rachel," Cassie said, leaning across the table so she could look her oldest and best friend more completely in the eyes. "You helped save this man's life; you and Shara. Without you two, the rest of us might not have seen him in time. If you hadn't decided to act, he'd probably have been splattered all over the concrete. A human life was saved yesterday. He might go on to cure cancer or something later. And you're telling me that you don't even remember his name?"

"Hey, wait a minute," Rachel said, after a momentary flash of guilt for not having done so. "This guy isn't anything to me; I don't even know him. It's not like I'm responsible for him or anything."

Not knowing quite how Shara felt about the whole "unplanned rescue" thing, Rachel wasn't about to speak for her, but she figured that the other girl would feel pretty much the same; it wasn't like either of them could have just let the man die once they knew he was in danger.

"I don't know," Marco said, tilting his right hand back and forth as if he was weighing something in a scale. "Isn't it the Chinese who say that, if you save someone's life, they become your responsibility? Or maybe that was the Japanese. Or the Greeks? Well, it was someone. I saw it in a movie."

Rachel shrugged, beginning to feel slightly uncomfortable; she made a mental note to talk to Shara about what they'd both had a hand in yesterday. "It was mostly just a goof, you know? For me, at least. I just wanted to see if I could do it. It was," Rachel paused for a moment, searching for the right word. "It was a challenge; that's it. A personal challenge."

Tobias returned to their table before anyone else could say something in response. He was carrying the very Cinnabon that Ax had been so excited about. It was a particularly large one, one of the largest they sold, and dripping with frosting and cinnamon.

A great deal of frosting and cinnamon.

Ax's eyes went wide at the sight of it, his mouth hanging open slightly in a mixture of anticipation and delight. It was kind of an odd experience for Rachel, and she wondered for a moment if any of the others felt the same way. Ax's human morph had, after all, been created from bits and pieces of four of them.

It was just weird, sometimes, seeing someone who looked so much like you doing something you'd never do.

Setting the plate and its arguably precious cargo down on the table, Tobias retook his seat and settled into it. "I figured that we could all have one bite each and then leave the rest for-"

Tobias trailed off, an expression of stunned amusement on his face. Rachel didn't blame him: Ax had just snatched up the entirety of what Tobias had just dropped off; the Cinnabon, plate, and plastic fork all in one go, and was even then in the process of stuffing them into his mouth. The bun itself, as well as the plate, and even the plastic fork were all in the process of being consumed by the overenthusiastic Andalite in his composite human-morph.

Pulling the fork out of his mouth so that he wouldn't end up choking on it, Rachel watched the spectacle along with five of her fellow Animorphs. It was definitely something to see; like watching a python trying to swallow a small pig. Only Ax didn't have the luxury of unhinging his jaw in this particular morph, though Rachel at least could tell that he would have probably liked to.

Once Ax had finished almost-literally stuffing his face, Rachel was the first to speak in the ensuing, stunned silence.

"George Edelman, huh?"

"Yeah," Jake confirmed. "But, I want everyone who can to keep an eye on TV and the newspapers for awhile, okay? If someone did notice our... intervention... we want to know about it as quickly as we can. Mostly, we're going to have to hope George Edelman keeps his mouth shut."

"People will just figure he's nuts if he talks," Marco pointed out with his habitual bluntness. "No one's going to listen to a guy who tried to kill himself."

Rachel nodded; blunt as he could be, Marco was probably right in this case. No one was really inclined to take what someone said seriously after they had tried to kill themselves; especially something as utterly crazy-sounding as being rescued by a flock of birds. Birds that wouldn't have normally flocked together in the first place, at that.