Fandom Idiot Teens With a Death Wish

[Noam]

The first thing Ezra did when he got home was ask his cousin about encrypted texting apps.

Maggie looked up from her laptop and raised one bright purple eyebrow at him. “You realize that’s, like, a really suspicious question coming from a teenaged boy.”

“You caught me,” Ezra said, as sarcastically as he could manage. His pulse was still hammering in his throat, and he had to shove his hands in his pockets to stop them from shaking. He was pretty sure that he’d lost the Hork-Bajir, or whatever they were called, about a mile ago, and they weren’t about to come barging in through the living room windows. Pretty sure. “I’m spying for the Russians.”

“Funny boy.” She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “The best one is probably UnderGround. Their whole thing is that you can’t buy it or even find it randomly; you gotta be in the know to get it. Fortunately, you are in the know. Or at least, you are now.” She held out her hand, and he gave her his phone. She plugged it into her computer, typed for a few minutes, then said, “There,” and handed it back to him. “Your secrets are safe.”

The icon for UnderGround looked like a calendar. “Thanks,” Ezra said, and fled to his room before she could start asking him any weird questions.

He had Ben and Rebecca’s phone numbers, just to set up their ASL study group, and Georgia’s phone number because that was what happened when you grew up on the same street. He opened the app, picked a username, and sent them all a message.

--

Georgia had told her parents she was too sick to eat dinner. She’d vaguely implied that it was period cramps, which got them to leave her alone. She was huddled under her covers halfway to a panic attack when her phone chimed in her hand.

EZ wants to talk to you on UnderGround, said the alert. She frowned, but opened it.

So that wasn’t my hallucination, said the text that appeared on her screen. It wasn’t a regular text, it was in some kind of app with a black background. We did just meet an actual alien who gave us superpowers.

Ezra wtf, she typed back frantically. The app prompted her for a name, and she typed in Georgia, then thought better of it and typed in Curly. E-Boy had to be a reference to his name sign—the letter Z drawn with an E hand—and hers looked like the word for curly. Don’t text about this, the government could be tapping our phones.

 

[PPluma]

"Ben, are you really sure you are okay?", Rebecca asked with a suspiciously raised eyebrow.
Her older brother just nodded, a smile on his face that she hadn't seen for years. Ever since their parents had died, to be exact.
Something was definitely off with him.
Well, apart from the obvious stuff like having seen an alien that probably had granted them some weird kind of superpower...

They had just been waking home from school together, mainly discussing about the ASL study group they were setting up, when suddenly that... Thing, had appeared high up in the sky and crashed down in the ground, luckily in an abandoned area.

This blue centaur-like alien with a tail like a scorpion had come out, horribly wounded, and told them secrets... So many secrets.
It had all gone so fast; they had been granted the power to morph, how the alien had called it. Turn into whatever living being they wanted, as long as they had copied it's DNA once, for two hours max.

And then this other spaceship had landed and more aliens had attacked the blue horse-guy and lastly noticed the four of them.
It felt like a miracle that they had been able to get away unharmed, even though Tobias had disappeared for a brief ten minutes.
She had already been close to losing her mind in fear for her older brother, when he had suddenly showed up beside her again, claiming that he had just gone lost while running.

Ever since, the usually so grumpy and unhappy boy had made a 180 turn. He seemed like a completely different person, but it definitely was him.
Not that she wasn't happy about his sudden change to the better.
She was just really suspicious about it.
And how would the others react if they would find Benjamin behaving that differently?

"Bec, did you get a message from Ezra too?", her brother interrupted her thoughts. "Looks like some kind of encryption program or so... Smart move."
"Hmh, yeah", Rebecca mumbled, already typing to reply.
we should find a safe place to try if it really works, she wrote, picking the username 'Queen B'.

Meanwhile, Benjamin was typing as well, and soon a message from 'Amalesh' popped up in the chat. If they just knew...
what about the abandoned factory hall? No one ever comes there, and a forest is nearby so we can pick up DNA to try it. In 15 minutes?

 

[Noam]

The abandoned factory Benjamin had been talking about was a lot more than fifteen minutes from Georgia's new house. She begged the car from her dad, claiming to have forgotten something from the library, and drove halfway across the city to the neighborhood that Ezra and the twins lived in. She'd grown up there, too, so it was kind of her neighborhood, but--well, she'd moved away, and it was weird to go back and see how junky everything looked. There were a couple empty houses in her new neighborhood, but they had realtor's signs on the lawns instead of plywood over the windows. There wasn't trash on the streets. The corner stores were all brand names instead of being called Manny's or Rita's, and they didn't have bars over the windows.

She'd lived there for fifteen years, and now she felt weird going back.

She still remembered where the hole in the fence around the burnt-out furniture factory was, though. She crawled through and found the others standing in a weedy patch next to an anemic bunch of trees that barely counted as a forest. It was almost too dark to see their hands. So? she signed impatiently. Have any of you tried to turn into animals?

"Yeah, it turns out wild animals are a lot harder to catch than we thought," Ezra admitted. "I guess we could try to buy some food and lure in a stray cat?"

 

[PPluma]

Rebecca was watching the surroundings suspiciously, looking out for her brother.
As soon as they had agreed on meeting here, Tobias had disappeared with the words 'gotta go and pick some stuff up, meet you there'.
And off he was.
Since when did he ever do something that didn't have to do with retreating into his games?
Sure, it was a good thing, of course, but she just was weary about it. Benjamin was instable and even though he didn't actively show it, she knew he was close to the breaking point for months already.

He still cringed when he heard sirens, and he had never entered a car again.
And now he suddenly had taken a taxi to God knows where.

When suddenly a pair of arms wrapped around her shoulders from behind, she span around instantly, smashing her elbow right into-
... Benjamin's face.

"Ouch!", He winced, pushing his hand against his hurting nose while he glared at his little sister for a moment.
It however didn't take long until the excited grin was back on his face, and he took four small envelopes out of the pockets of his jeans.
"So I made a little detour into dad's old office at the laboratory and-"
"Wait wait wait-", Rebecca interrupted him. "You never even mentioned dad. And now you suddenly break into his old office?!"
Ben just shrugged. "As the samples I could get my hands on aren't attached to living animals anymore, it will probably only work once to copy the DNA, so we will have to agree on who will get what", he explained.
"I got samples of a greater sooty owl, bald eagle, timber wolf and red fox. Now, anyone got any preferences?"

 

[Noam]

"What exactly is your dad's job again?" Ezra asked.

What are they saying? Georgia signed, stepping closer to the group and squinting at Ben's face.

Apparently, B-E-N and R-E-B-E-C-C-A's dad has a bunch of animal DNA in his office?

What the fuck?

Dude, I don't know. Ezra shrugged, and kept signing as he talked. "When you say DNA samples, is that, like--what's in those envelopes? And how did you get it?"