I wasn’t wrong about Qwerty really wanting to meet Lucent. As soon as we got out to the van, the little guy leapt through the open passenger-side window. “Hi, hi, hi!” Those three (or one) words came before he’d even landed on the asphalt. And he didn’t so much land as bounce. Rebounding off the parking lot, he hit the side of the van he had just jumped out of, rebounded off that to jump onto the side mirror, then jumped off that to land on top of the van roof. Each time his feet touched down, he said another word. “My--name’s--Qwerty!” From the roof, he leapt out, spreading his wings to glide over all of our heads (Lucent was on my shoulder), then tucked the wings in, did a somersault in the air, and came down for a landing on the hood of another car. Once there, he spun back to face us, standing up on his hindlegs to wave frantically with his front paws. “Nice to meet you!”
Pushing off my shoulder, Lucent flew down to land on the car next to Qwerty. “Ahem, tis a pleasure to make your acquaintance as well, my boy. You are…” He paced in a circle around the parrot-squirrel, clearly marveling a bit. “You are a Wonder.”
“Yeah, he is pretty wonderful,” I agreed reflexively.
Lucent, however, shook his head. “No--well yes, of course. But I was referring to his combination of animal traits. A TONI who is two or more animals combined into a single being of a single mind is known as a Wonder. They are… not common.”
Qwerty, for his part, beamed proudly and puffed his colorful chest up. “You hear that, everybody? I’m rare!”
“We could’ve told you that,” Paige pointed out while emerging from the van with a quick glance around that told me she wasn’t all that comfortable even standing here in the parking lot. “You’re one-of-a-kind, Qwer.” Addressing Lucent while clearly trying not to look anywhere else in this place, she added, “But he needs like… a license or a badge or something, right?”
“Why bother?” That was Murphy, also coming out of the van. “Seems like it’d be better to operate under the radar, you know? What’s the government gonna do if they find out about him besides try to control him, tax him, and blame him for shit he didn’t do?” Her eyes flicked toward Lucent before she added an unconvincing, “No offense, dude.”
“I shall take the remark in the spirit with which it was intended,” Lucent assured her. “The desire to protect a friend from those who may mean him harm. But yes, there are very good reasons for a TONI to be registered. It ensures we are given all the rights of a citizen of this country, the precise power of which may waver now and then, but there is a vast gulf of difference between the rights of a sapient citizen and those of a wild animal. The latter, for instance, cannot generally own property. Among other benefits. Wild TONIs do exist, of course. But I am afraid their lives, particularly within a city, are not to be envied. There are those who intentionally seek out unregistered TONIs for the thrill of hunting human-intelligent creatures.”
“Wha--that’s still a crime though, isn’t it?” I snapped reflexively as Qwerty made a noise of distress at the very idea. “I mean, registered or not, it’d still be murder.”
“It would, yes,” Lucent confirmed. “But if one is unregistered, it is much harder to both identify that such a crime has occurred, and to prove it in court. TONIs who insist on not coming forward, who carry on their existences secretly in order to avoid any attention, are difficult for law enforcement and court officers to prove sapient after the fact. The best way to do so is to show the lives they lived and introduce witnesses who knew them. But if they were remaining under the radar… those may be difficult to produce. Particularly reliable ones. And yet, despite being difficult to legally prove sapient, those who hunt them lack such requirements. They are very good at identifying animals that show just a little too much intelligence, who live just a little too much like humans. Those wild TONIs tend to become little more than a statistic.”
“I don’t wanna be a statistic!” Qwerty blurted quickly. “I wanna be Wonderful!”
“Yeah, we have to make sure everyone knows how wonderful you are,” I agreed with a small smile despite myself. I knew what Lucent was doing. It wasn’t about scaring Qwerty with horror stories or anything. It was about making sure we all understood how dangerous life could be out there for all TONIs, let alone one as small and vulnerable as a parrot-squirrel. He was telling us, without just outright saying it, that we needed to look out for the little guy. Not that we wouldn’t have done that anyway, but still. I understood why Lucent would want to reinforce the idea.
“That’s why I wanted him to talk to you,” I added after we’d all had a chance to absorb that. “We just met him recently and um, he needs to do all that legal stuff. We were hoping you could help with that. Or maybe just point us in the right direction? I mean, I know you’ve got a lot going on, especially right now. It’s just not fair to make him wait, so if you could just tell us where to go to get started with that?”
“I shall do far more than that,” Lucent insisted. “‘Twould be quite the moral and personal failing to stand aside and leave you unaided in this task, no matter what other distractions may exist. And, as it happens, I keep the paperwork for such filings in my office here at the compound, just in case. Unless you have anything else requiring your immediate attention?”
“No,” I replied quickly as Qwerty and the others looked to me. “We’re ready to do whatever it takes to make him a legal person.” Besides, maybe this would distract me a bit from worrying about how Amber was doing, and the fact that I wouldn’t be allowed to see Izzy for awhile.
Paige, on the other hand, didn’t want to stick around that place any more. So, after getting several more assurances from me that I was fine now, she headed out along with Murphy, Roald, Rubi, and Sierra. Meanwhile, I wasn’t sure how poor Qwerty would react if he got too bored with the whole filling out paperwork thing, so Wren, Peyton, and I accompanied him into the building with Lucent. I was going to send Wren with the others, but she insisted on coming along to help. And considering how much the poor kid got left out of other things by being stuck in the workshop, who was I to deny her? If she got bored, we’d find something else for her to do.
Except, as it turned out, she didn’t get bored with paperwork at all. In fact, she was the only one of us who didn't. Seriously, there was so much to write on all these forms. The stack of them had to be over two inches thick, and most of them had a bunch of small print. They wanted to know just about everything possible about a new TONI, from the species (and there were about three more pages for the whole being a combination of multiple animals thing), to when they touched, any human who might try to claim ownership of them (they couldn't legally, but there was still a whole process for dealing with that), to a physical description, chosen name, estimated level of implanted education, and more. It just went on and on. Even Qwerty got bored with answering the questions and started playing with the tape measure and scale we used to record his size. Which was eight inches long from his nose to the start of his tail, plus seven inches of tail. From the tip of one wing to the tip of the other was just over twelve inches, and he weighed about six ounces. All of which we had to record about twenty-five or so different times on various sections of these forms. Among many, many other questions. Qwerty enjoyed answering them at first, including giving some details we had made up ahead of time to ensure that people would think he had Touched here rather than in Utah. Which--I did feel bad about lying to Lucent on that point, but I didn’t want to put him in the position of having to lie to his superiors. Even if we could convince him, and that would’ve required telling him a lot more than… yeah. But maybe we should have told him. Maybe we should’ve told him everything. It was a thought that occurred to me more than once through that whole long and excruciatingly boring time. Giving myself carpal tunnel by writing the same answers over and over again would be a really terrible way to get a permanent injury, wouldn’t it?
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And yet, through it all, Wren didn't seem bothered. If anything, she was enjoying herself, very neatly filling in the answers with the best handwriting I'd seen from anyone who wasn't a grown adult. And, honestly, better than most of those as well. The kid seemed to genuinely enjoy filling out endless paperwork, even when she had to write in the same answers over and over again. There were forms for over a dozen different organizations, all of which had their own systems. And they couldn’t just communicate with one another of course. Because that would be too easy. They all needed separate files, each of which had questions that were phrased very slightly differently so if you weren't paying attention from one to the next you might misread it and write in the wrong thing. Which, of course, would fuck up the whole process. It was mind numbing in a way that almost made me want to get into another fight just so I could punch something.
Peyton tapped out first, falling on the floor with a groan. We were in Lucent’s office, which looked like any other office aside from the fact that the desk was clearly set up for a bird, from the wooden perch where a chair would normally be, to the large keyboard with each row of letters spaced far enough apart for him to stand and walk between them so he could peck at the keys. Lying there with her marbles forming a short wall around her, but the girl lamented, “I can't do it. I can't write anymore. I helped one of my friends apply for college with financial aid and it didn't take this many forms.”
“They are rather thorough,” Lucent agreed while pacing back and forth in front of his large computer keyboard to peck at a few buttons. “Though to be entirely honest, in most cases, these forms would be filled out over a period of a couple weeks, and she would not have them all at once. We are, for lack of a better term, cheating the process by filling everything out at once. Once we are finished here, we can take them directly to the judge to be approved. I have a friend who has already cleared a few minutes in her schedule.”
Of course, that made me feel guilty about being bored. Lucent was doing a lot to help us out. And this was for Qwerty, damn it.
No, the truth was that it had nothing to do with the boring and repetitive paperwork. I was just worried about Amber and Izzy, both for different reasons. I had checked my phone several times, but there was no word from Amber. Which, again, wasn't surprising. But it still made me anxious. I just wanted to make sure she was okay. Physically, at least. I was pretty sure she wouldn’t be mentally okay for awhile. But we had no idea how the fight with Whamline had gone other than the fact she ended up winning and he ended up dead. Sure, she was in good enough shape to leave with Pack, but…
Yeah, okay, I was just worried in general. I knew she needed space right now, and time to figure things out. I just hoped she knew I’d be there to talk when and if she needed to. No matter what else was going on. God knew she’d been there enough for me.
Finally, a few minutes after Peyton essentially curled into a ball and protested that she couldn't ever look at another pen again in her life, we finished the whole stack of papers. Once the last one was done, I dropped the pen I’d been using and sat back with a groan. “I know why they all need this information, but is there some reason why we can’t just fill out one form and have all of them share it in their computer files?”
“My dear boy,” Lucent noted with a mix of amusement and regret, “if each of these dozen separate agencies were capable of seamless communication and sharing of resources, the world would be in much better shape indeed.” He focused on Qwerty then. “Before we continue this endeavor toward official citizenship, do you have anything you’d like to ask me?”
Oh boy did he ever. Qwerty instantly launched into an extended list of all the questions he had, which ranged from relevant bits such as if he could own property like a car or if he had to go to school, to what cheesecake tasted like, to what Lucent’s favorite movie was, to whether Lucent had ever tried blueberries, to whether the Minority people were okay after we’d saved them, to how many other TONIs he knew, to whether he wanted to play Checkers, to insisting Monopoly was a better game, to admitting he only said that because he liked to tear up the cards and fake money to fill a nest, and so on.
All of that came out in a short amount of time, before I picked the little guy up gently. “Okay, alright, let’s get this show on the road, shall we? Uh, we’re going over to the courthouse to get this stuff signed off, right?”
Lucent, however, shook his head. “My dear friend has agreed to see you at her home, as it happens. There is a car waiting to transport us there as we speak, if you are all prepared?”
Wren bounced to her feet, absolutely not at all affected by spending the past hour filling out endless forms. “We get to meet a judge?! I never met a judge before! Wait, yes I did, back at the court thing before those jerks attacked the place and took all those hostages cuz they were trying to break into Ten Towers!” The poor kid was clearly a bit overly excited about actually being out and interacting with people. She was cooped up way too much. Not to mention overworked, if the idea of simply filling out papers and going to meet a judge excited her this much.
“Yeah, let’s hope that doesn’t happen again,” I murmured, both about the courthouse thing and about my own thoughts toward Wren being cooped up and overworked for too long. Then I blanched with a glance toward Lucent. “I mean--sorry, I’m sure your friend is fine at home like that.”
Judging from the look the raven-Touched gave, he was well aware of what I was actually thinking. At least the bits involving Wren. “We shall all endeavor to the best of our ability to keep those we care for safe and secure.” Then he added, “And along our way, I shall also endeavor to answer each of Sir Qwerty’s fascinating inquiries.”
Which he did. As we made our way to the Seraphs car that was waiting and then drove a couple miles into the city to find the judge’s house (with me texting Paige and the others to let them know what we were doing), Lucent carefully answered every single question Qwerty had asked, one at a time. He made no distinction between what was ‘important’ and what was ‘frivolous,’ simply taking each in the exact order it had been asked. Through it all, the little squirrel-parrot seemed to hang on every word. From the look of things, he was practically hero-worshiping the other TONI. Which, yeah, why wouldn’t he? My bird-papa was pretty damn great, after all.
And speaking of which, I made sure to take a picture of the two of them together, and a selfie with both of them with me in it as well. Then I posted those on the SPHERE forum to let people know I was hanging out with my bird-dad and that we had a new friend. Part of which was just to show off Qwerty and to play up the fun little thing with Lucent, but it was also an attempt to try to show that things were as normal and in control as possible considering everything that was going on.
Of course, it took approximately three seconds after I posted that before everyone on the SPHERE forum decided Qwerty was my little brother. And honestly, I was pretty okay with that.
Eventually, we got to the judge’s house and went through the whole introduction and explanation in person. Her name was Beverly Tolsen, and she was an elderly lady very close to retiring. She was also incredibly fascinated by Qwerty, and listened to all his extended and excited babbling with the raptness of a kindly grandmother.
And, in the end, after we submitted all that paperwork and she looked it over with her reading glasses, initialing here and there, Judge Tolsen also turned out to be a wizard with computers. She took her laptop and scanned everything in, then sent the forms to the proper organizations along with her own sworn statement as to their authenticity, before typing out a Certificate Of Witnessed Sapience. Basically a TONI’s version of a birth certificate.
Holding the paper up for Qwerty to put his own inked paw print against, I smiled. “See that, buddy? You’re an officially documented person. You exist!”
That was when I got a text on my own personal phone. It was from Simon. He wanted me to meet him at, of all places, the entrance into the Seraphs HQ. Clearly he was going to take me to visit Izzy. Which meant I would leave this judge’s house, change back to my civilian clothes, then go to the same place I had been a few minutes ago but this time as Cassidy instead of Paintball. Hell, I might even run into Lucent again like that.
Wait, ravens weren’t known for their sense of smell, right?