Rose let the shopping cart put up the groceries in the pantry and walked into her bedroom and stopped. She put her hands on her hips and asked,"WHAT is THIS?" Her oldest son grinned at her and said, "Mom! Sunny made a friend!" Sunshine blinked and said in a carefully measured tone,"I went to the roof with Thena. I was good and found HIM in the birdbath. He followed me home.He NEEDS me! Can I keep him?" Rose scanned the strange creature. What she found shocked her. She snapped,"NO! Absolutely not! I am detecting a Hyper-frame from that animal! Get away from it, Sunny!" Rose levered up her left arm with the Hyper-frame breaker warming up in it. Sunny wrapped her arms around it and shrieked,"NO! I WON"T LET YOU HURT COODLE!" She twisted around on the sofa and curled protectively around the creature. Jalisco held his hands up and said, "WHOA,Mom! He seems harmless and fond of her. Hyper-frame? Are you sure?" Rose sat down next to Sunny and patted her on the back and nodded. She said, "It's alright ,Sunny. I wasn't going to shoot him! I was just surprised. I DO need to take a look at him, though. 'Coodle' ...why did you name him THAT?" Sunny twisted back around and uncurled. Coodle was bristled up took a little calming from Sunny to calm down. Rose extended a hand at him to sniff. The little creature cooed. In spite of herself, Rose petted him and though back on memories she hadn't touched in decades. Sunny blinked in shock. Jalisco said in alarm,"MOM! You're crying! Are you alright?" "I had a kitten when I was Sunny's age. It was an aberration in my limbic system to care for an animal. One of the other Cyclops children killed it during a target practice game. I was... DEVASTATED. It hurt so bad, my mother feared it had done an injury that might never heal. No other Cyclops in the history of our species had ever had a pet before, or since. 'We are machine-life! We DO NOT invite parasitic animals into our homes!'" Rose looked up at her son and daughter. "So I followed the line until now. FIRST off--we need to do a search on where 'he' came from. "He'? How can you tell with a big bug? Anyway-- if someone is missing him, there will be notices posted on the net somewhere. That he has a HYPER-FRAME...THAT is big news all by itself! He might belong to a Galactic Alien species! Wait.... he MIGHT BE an alien!" Rose did a radar survey of his organs and limbs. Jalisco said, "Seems unlikely. Brain's too small and NO manipulative appendages. Unless you count the feelers and trunk? Hey...didn't Toxic have a bug pet named Coodle at one point? I remember her talking about how she missed it when I was a kid." Rose said, "Seems to be an animal, NOT an alien species. This animal is not a standard Panchetta bug, plain or poisonous. It DOES have colors like one, though. Let me collate data for a moment. JEET! Jeet had brought Coodle onto MY ship,Transport 110 in a backpack while it was in a cocoon, transforming after ingesting some of Toxic's blood. It emerged on Adamesh in the midst of us saving Friggia from the crustal collapse." "We put it into a specimen container and brought it back to Balaam afterwards. No WONDER I didn't recognize it! I never saw it, it's all second hand information. Let me see. After a disastrous reuniting with Toxic (while her spirit was inside Snowflake), it was shipped off to the Scav Biolab on Shalmiraine to be studied by USCOMM scientists. It's listed as escaping about the time the recovery unit was chasing people around Elevator City. Weird timing." Rose finished and looked at Sunny, who was sad and bright eyed. Sunny said, "He NEEDS ME! I'm small and always need people looking after ME. I NEED someone small to look after! He needs ME!" Tears ran down Sunny's cheeks. Rose patted her on the head. "We'll give him back in the morning. Alright?" Sunny was overjoyed. --To be continued!--