ransom disappears into the kitchen

That would be amazing! God knows Tobias doesn't have nearly enough problems, and definitely needs more.

The obvious one would be a night mission that forces him to give in and just acquire a damn owl already. It's so funny to me that he goes the whole series without that morph, despite its obvious utility, out of sheer stubbornness. But even Tobias would (grudgingly) use owl if there was a mission that needed a very skilled flier at night. Heck, he might even enjoy it despite himself.

I could see him being forced into golden eagle morph if they need to carry a lot of weight in raptor shape — maybe he's assisting a fellow Animorph in snake form to the battle, like in #21. Tobias would haaaate it, but he'd probably also see the point in needing a shape that big.

i have seen so many miserable hawks falling out of trees under the pingpong barrage of enthusiastically deranged alpha bro blackbird aggro. i have seen an owl waddling along the edge of a cornfield as these guys do highschool jock crimes to their head. i have seen a blue heron get bodychecked into the water. i have seen so many ravens go down like cool goths getting hit by a firehose. i have seen falcons doing us airforce evasive maneuvers to get away, and failing. i have seen an actual factual bald eagle making the sad piccolo noise of a baby elf forsaken by god as it desperately tries to gain altitude with these tiny monsters hanging off its ass.

i can only surmise that tobias's feelings for red-winged blackbirds can't be printed in a middle grade novel series about wartime bodyhorror atrocities because the entirety of the thought is just:

>recognize it as part of my divine punishment

You think a grocery store red delicious is bad but that’s because you haven’t eaten enough apples that sprouted when someone hucked a core into the woods off a dirt road or planted a lil cider orchard or some kind of bird or bear consumed and shat out an apple seed. WOW do those apples run the gamut of awful from mushy to wooden to mealy in new and different ways and bitter and sour and somehow utterly flavorless. “Oh no this apple is a little mealy when you leave it out for two weeks and otherwise pretty wooden and has no depth of flavor”. Yes ok well then go buy an orange or something. “Why do you keep eating apples that have a 95% chance of being terrible?” Everyone needs a hobby.

However.

Sometimes in the woods I’ll see it, the twisted limbs and gnarled trunk, the silver and green leaves, fruit with a beautiful tapered shape, the green flecked with red where the sun hits, all covered with a gentle gray bloom. The ground below is full of birds and bees and bugs and wasps and small mammals enjoying the bounty of the most gracious fruit, the apple that always breeds true, the prize of the abandoned homestead, the red delicious.

"I had not touched a cat in 15 years when an orange kitten wandered over to sit with me in the grass one day. I was left without adequate words to describe that experience. It reminded me that I am alive. It instilled in me a raw, unbridled happiness that I had never felt before, not even as a child. 

I have spent many hours with those cats, and still I am amazed at how perfectly they reject everything it means to be in prison. They are playful and unselfconscious, curious and silly, soft and cuddly.

Sometimes it is even more interesting to watch my fellow prisoners interact with our cats. All those hard cases doing hard time melt like butter on a summer sidewalk when they visit the felines, feed them, watch them chase the birds and bees, and when they make toys to entice the cats to play with them. 

I don’t think about the past when a cat hops in my lap. I don’t think of what I should or could have done. I don’t think about courts or life sentences or parole boards. What comes to mind is peace, and a sense that everything is going to be OK. What’s in the past needs to stay there if I want to have a future, if I want to be grateful for today and for the fact that I am no longer the person I once was.

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro.

The Papyrus of Ani, 1400 B.C. Why do you return? What could they mean to you now— this flesh, these openings, these candles burning at each end of my body as if warmth and light could reach me? What is it you desire? What lack is there in Heaven? I always thought it would be terrible to be beyond change. Now we are both beyond change; there is nothing I can give you. You have returned to me in the form of a bird; your wings are large, they would enclose me. How tremulous and soft you are, your slow, feathery turnings of love, of desire. My arms are rigid at my sides. There is so much I do not want to remember. You remember everything, and cannot rest. Each transgression. Each lily slowly opening. How so many times you watched me move from innocence to bitterness, from bitterness to rage, and then forgiveness. It's strange how I had to forgive the earth for not loving me, each rock and tree, knowing all the while I did not matter, that the inanimate is beautiful because it cannot feel. Now I am inanimate. Your longing a flame that cannot wound me. Your wings embrace an emptiness like air.