Part One: The Animal Ark

Mikey arrivesaround the same time as Em. He left the house quickly after her call to avoid any questions from his dad about her. As he climbs in through the window and finds her and Andy handling her backpack, he says: "Sorry about earlier again. My dad gets excited about the dumbest stuff sometimes." He pauses, blushes lightly and adds in an insecure tone: "And when I asked about hanging out, I didn't mean as a date." He glances at Andy and feels even more insecure. "I'd never ask you for a date, you know."
The words are already out of his mouth before he realizes how bad they actually sound. Cursing himself, he tries to change the topic by latching on to Andy's question he heard when he came in. "Yeah, Em, what you got in that backpack?"

Em can't help but grin a little at Andy when the boy comments on the weight and size of her backpack. "Just some stuff to keep up busy when there aren't crazy teachers torturing and killing innocent animals, and mag ships from the future aren't crashing into the lake over and over again." She's about to start unpacking when Mikey comes in, throwing conversational elbows without even knowing he's doing it.

"Stuff from the last couple of Christmases, stuff I don't really use at my aunt's house," the girl says, pulling out the first of many items: the board game Trouble. Kerplunk comes too, and Battleship. Those are accompanied by a Spirograph, some Playdoh(tm), Stretch Armstrong, an Etch-a-Sketch, a View-Master, He-Man and Battlecat, the weird Barbie styling head she just got, and no less than five other (normal-sized and very voluptuous) Barbie dolls the girl really wants nothing to do with. The boys don't know that conspicuously absent are her prized possessions -- Troll Dolls and Micronauts, and Morgan frowns at Rogan as she pulls a quartet of books from the now deflated pack: Champions, Rolemaster, Mekton, and the AD&D Player's Handbook. These are her brothers and she prizes them greatly, but reading them and playing in her head just isn't the same as possibly having a group of gaming nerds like Erik had.

Sitting back, Em, blows her bangs from her face and narrows her eyes at Mikey. "What do you mean you'd never ask me out? Why wouldn't you ask me out? Is there something wrong with me? What, am I weird or something?"

Turning to Andy, the girl pins him to the spot with a look as well. "What about you, Andy? Would you ever ask me out? What the heck, you guys!"

Georgie shows up in a bright yellow baseball style shirt with matching running shorts. Running being a very liberal descriptor of how they will be used.

As he sees someone enter the hideout, he looks around and then scales the tree. His wrist is a little better but still bruised awfully.

He climbs in and seeing Em and Andy and Mikey, gets really excited but tries to play it cool. "Happy Merry Christmas you guys, wow, I didn't expect to see anybody I mean I know I called you but it's Christmas I bet you got a load of nice things, right? I got an erector set and a cool book. I ate too much and my mom cried hard, is that a new shirt Andy? You got a new shirt and you're wearing it did they make you to leave the house? Haha that's funny!"

Andy turns bright red but has absolutely nowhere to hide so he rudely snatches the Kerplunk game and starts to shake it. Kerplunk! I used to love that game. We should play!

He totally ignores Em's question. He's smart enough to know that there is no good answer to that live fire. He starts fiddling with the box, sliding the game out.

Does it have all the marbles and the toothpicks? While he's gathering the pieces he remembers Georgie's question. Yeah I got a new shirt. New cleats too!

Morgan's frown deepens as she moves on her hands and knees towards Andy. "Hi Georgie, nice outfit," she says without looking at her friend, but then she's back to the topic at hand.

"Well?" she says to Andy, inches from his face, before turning to look back at Mikey. The look on his face just draws a sigh from the girl, and she plunks down on her butt, her skinny legs out in front of her. "Nevermind. I get it. Yeah. Kerplunk is fun."

"I'm just...", Mikey frowns. "I didn't mean it like that." He hates himself for always messing up around her when all he wants is to be her friend. "Look, as you said. I'm just 11. I don't have to ask anyone out, right?"
Then he tries to end that conversation by first turning to Georgie. "Hey Spud!", he says. Then he turns to all the stuff Em brought, picking everything up and inspecting it, the boardgames and the toys, including the barbies, making sure not to linger on any one thing longer than on everything else.
Finally, he turns to the books. "What's this, then?", he asks, rifling through them.

Andy froze when Em came within inches of his nose. Feeling like the proverbial deer in the headlights, it was the longest few seconds of his life.

His shoulders visibly dropped when she turned to look at Mikey. He realized then that he had been holding his breath and was glad that the focus of attention was no longer on him.

Jaden heard the fuss up in the hideout when he left his bike near the tree; he got a firm grip on his guitar's as he climbed steadily up to meet with the rest. He was hoping not to be the last to arrive, but he knew the chances of it were slim. "Much for a secret hideout. With all that fuss you're making, it's a matter of time for this place to get shut properly." he said as he came to the window. How's everyone doing?

Georgie suggests they go back to the junkyard to find a big magnet, then use that to disrupt the orb.

He hasn't been told about what happened at the junkyard, but only knows Jaden and Andy got out of there okay.

That's a terrible idea, Georgie, Andy says stifling a shudder. There is a vicious dog there for starters. And... We saw things. Chickens turned into mutants... We were lucky.

He shakes his head. No. Don't go there.

"Mutant chickens?", Mikey asks. He's sitting on a couch with one of those books Em brought in his lap. He's trying to read his way through it but it's pretty complicated stuff.
He closes the book, keeping track of the page with his finger, and thinks for a moment. "It's almost New Year's Eve. I got some money from my dad. We could buy firecrackers and try to blow up the orb. But if it doesn't work, that'd be a real waste of money."

"RPGeeeeeeees," Morgan says unhelpfully, stretching out the last syllable like it's on the rack. "Like Dungeon and Dragons? I mean this one here... it is Dungeons and Dragons. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. My brother would never let me play with he and his friends, so I've never tried any of them. They look really fun though. You fight monsters and get treasure, and there's magic!"

The girl says hello to the oldest boy when he arrives and finally relents with questioning Andy, but she looks alarmed when there's talk of going to the junkyard, and of blowing up the orb the boys said was there.

"Wait! I mean I wanna go to the junkyard and see this other silver spinny orb thingy... but we don't even know what the heck it does right? Are there just two? How do they interact?"

The floodgates open at this stage.

"And is Mr. Hernandez causing what's happening with that crashing ship? Or is he trying to prevent it? Is he even aware of it?" Drawing a breath even as she points to a particularly cool illustration in one of the books that Mikey is leafing through, she adds, "What if we keep Cuckoo away from the junkyard by letting the air out of his tires or putting sugar in his gas or something? That works, right? It does in books, and movies."

"That's not a bad idea!", Mikey says. "And who cares if Cuckoo knows about the ship? He's killing animals. That's what matters."

Em nods meaningfully, shivering a little at the thought of that freezer full of frozen animals... and now the thought of mutant chickens.

"Hernandez was nowhere near the orb when it went off when we were there. Whatever he's doing, I don't think he's causing the spaceship to appear."

He thinks about the scrambled animals. "Can the animals be about time travel? Pushing and pulling creatures through time but it isn't working right so they don't come back evenly? Maybe he wants to go somewhere, or sometime so he wants to make sure he will survive?"