Animorphs: 2010 - Chapter Thirteen
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Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Nine (18+)
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve"So let me get this straight. We touch that thing there, and then we'll be able to go all Animal Planet like you can?" Marco looked beyond skeptical, an attitude I shared even if I didn't voice it.
{I don't know what you mean by 'go Animal Planet.'}
"What's the matter, Marco? Are you afraid to try it?" Rachel asked. Unlike the rest of us, she looked positively eager.
"Well why shouldn't I be? Someone whips out a little blue box and says it'll give me superpowers? There's got to be a catch."
{There are many dangers associated with the Escafil Device, but the benefits far outweigh them.}
Rachel held out her hand for the box. "Let's do it, then."
Ax took her hand and placed it on the side of the box, then looked around to the rest of us. Not to be outdone, I stepped forward and touched it as well. I didn't know if it would really do what Ax said it would, but I was willing to find out. Tobias and Cassie were just a second behind me.
"Now what do we do?" I asked Ax.
{You do nothing. I will activate it, and afterward you will have the ability.} He focused all four eyes on the box and it started to glow faintly.
Quite suddenly, Marco's hand reached over my shoulder and rested on the top of the box. I looked back at him and he gave me a glare that dared me to say anything.
A second later it was over, and Ax took the box away. {There. It is done.} His words sounded heavy, full of regret and uncertainty. And a touch of guilt. He'd done something against his better judgment by giving us this power. His judgment, but not his instincts.
I looked down at my hand, but the box had left no marks. "Are you sure it took? I don't feel any different."
{Of course you do not. You are not using the ability right now.}
"How do we use it?" Tobias asked, also staring at his hand. "Shouldn't we...you know, test it to make sure?"
{You will have to touch the creature you wish to acquire before you can copy it.}
Tobias jumped to his feet and went to the other side of the bed. He picked up an ancient tabby cat that I hadn't seen previously and brought it over to our circle. The cat meowed indignantly, but as soon as Tobias set him down, he stretched and wandered over to Cassie to be petted. "Can we use Dude?"
{If you wish. The process is quite simple. Just maintain contact with the animal and concentrate on it.}
Tobias sat next to Cassie and pulled Dude into his lap, a process which the cat suffered with only a little bit of complaint. After Tobias had him for a few minutes, though, he went very still and appeared to fall asleep. Tobias's eyes went wide, and he pulled his hands off the cat and stared at them as if he'd never seen them before. "Whoa."
Marco raised his hand like he was in school. "Question. How does turning into a cat help us again?"
{Well, likely this animal will not help. But if we can find one of the hosts, we can assume their form and enter undetected.}
"Turn into someone else?" Cassie asked. "Like identity theft?"
"Well why not?" Rachel countered. "Then if we get identified while going in, at least we'll have a good excuse for being there."
{If there are other animals native to the area around the entrance, we may be able to suffice with one of those instead.}
"There's nothing around Mel's," I said. "Maybe a few bugs."
Rachel scoffed. "Does this even work on something that sma-"
"AAAAH!"
I scrambled into a defensive crouch, ready to spring, but when I saw what had made Tobias shout I froze instead. He was covered in patches of fur, thicker on his arms than anywhere else, and his face was a nightmare mix of cat and human. His lips had shrunk and changed, revealing sharp teeth, but the shape of his jaw hadn't changed. His nose had started to flatten, his eyes to shrink, and his fingers to retract and form paws. He tried to touch his altered face with his altered hands, as if that would help him somehow comprehend what had happened to him.
Ax was by his side in a second, and he pulled Tobais's hands away and held them at his sides. {Focus on your own body,} he said, his thoughts projecting an image of Tobias as a human. And not just an image, but an entire impression of him. Of the faint smell of paint and a feeling of quiet intensity. {You can change back, just focus on yourself. Don't panic.}
Slowly at first, then faster, the fur on Tobias's body disappeared and his face and hands returned to normal. When he was completely human again, Ax let go of his hands. "What...what just happened?" he asked in a shaky voice.
{You began the morph process by accident. It is a common occurrence with those who have just received the ability. The important thing to remember is that you must keep calm when changing.}
"What happens if you don't?"
{The people around you get really annoyed.}
The whole room was silent, and I couldn't tell if I was more shocked by Tobias's mishap, or the fact that Ax had just made a joke. Apparently, Marco decided to focus on the joke, because he started to laugh. "Oh, well, we wouldn't want to annoy everyone with our screaming, would we?"
{It gets irritating very fast, since there are very few things that can actually go wrong while morphing. If you get 'stuck' in the middle, it is just a matter of calming down and then either continuing or reversing the process.} His words carried his superior attitude and the knowledge that he had never gotten stuck, and distain for people who knew the truth and lost control anyway. Ax turned to Tobias. {If you focus on the animal you wish to morph, it will begin the process again. Just keep your focus all the way through it and you'll be fine.}
Tobias nodded, visibly shaken, and for a moment nothing happened. Then he closed his eyes and took a deep breath. We watched in fascination as he started to change again. This time, the fur didn't come first. First his ears traveled up the side of his head. His nose pushed out and flattened at the same time. His arms lengthened and then shrank, changing shape as they did. And after a significant amount of change had already taken place, he began to shrink down to cat-sized. He was about twice the size of a cat before he finally started to sprout fur.
His clothes did not morph with him, and when Tobias finished the change into feline, he did so while covered by his shirt. Once the shirt stopped moving, we all waited with baited breath to see what would happen next. Tobias clawed his way out of the pile of fabric and sat next to it, fastidiously grooming his fur and ignoring all of us.
Cassie, who was closest, glanced around at the rest of us, before she reached out toward him. "Um, Tobias?"
His only response was to look up, then rub his cheek against her outstretched hand. The real Dude continued to nap in a patch of sunlight outside our circle, and neither cat seemed to notice the other.
"What's he doing?" I asked Ax.
Ax looked between me and cat!Tobias a few times. {I assume he is acting like a cat.} He motioned for Cassie to stop petting him, which she did. {Tobias. You're making your friends worried.}
Tobias started, stood up on all fours, and spun around in a circle. {That was weird.}
"Hey, we can hear him the same way as you," Marco exclaimed, giving Ax an accusatory look.
{You can?} Tobias sat down facing Marco, his gaze oddly intense, even for a cat. {You can hear me?}
Marco flinched. "Yeah, I can. Stop shouting."
I hadn't noticed a change in volume in Tobias's thoughts, but Marco obviously did.
Ax chuckled. Or rather, 'chuckle' is the only word to describe what he did. Though no real sound came through, a clear feeling of amusement did, a kind of...mental tickle. {You do not need to concentrate so hard. Merely direct your thoughts outward to communicate.}
Tobias scrunched up his nose, but didn't say anything. He cocked his head to the side, and I got the impression he'd just tried to say something and failed. "Yeah, we didn't hear that."
{Fuck.}
"Heard that."
This time Rachel chuckled. "Clearly we'll need to practice before we try this for real."
Her comment made me think of something. I turned to Ax and asked, "Will we all be able to do that when we morph? Even if we morph into another human?" After all, Ax could still thought-speak while human. If we could do the same, and if we could do it the way Elfangor did it when he spoke only to us...well, it certainly would be a handy skill to have while surrounded by an enemy.
{I don't see why not. That aspect was worked into the process to ensure that we could still communicate in our natural way even when morphed. It is not connected to the nature of the morphs.}
Once again his words sounded hollow and clinical. Parroted from some textbook, likely. But it told me what I needed to know. We could use this. We could morph into other hosts, we could get in, and we could talk to each other privately while there. "Alright then. Let's get started."
Several hours later, we'd all acquired and morphed into Dude successfully, and we'd also learned how to control thought-speak. It wasn't a difficult skill, but it was impossible to explain, so we learned by trial and error. Even Ax couldn't help in that regard, as whenever we asked him for specifics on how he communicated, he always answered that he 'just did.' To him it was just a natural act.
The act of acquiring and morphing didn't hurt, but it was still unlike anything else I'd felt before. I felt the cat's DNA enter my body, like I was pulling something intangible into myself. I felt each change in my body, heard my bones grind and shift, felt my skin stretch and tingle as it grew fur. Although each stage left the impression that it should hurt, none of it actually did.
By the end, we had six identical cats and one andalite lounging around in Tobias's apartment. Something about stretching out on the floor as a cat was indescribably better than doing the same as a human. The cat that was now part of me didn't want to get up and didn't care about anything in the world. Perhaps it was the lack of a crushing sense of responsibility that kept me in that patch of sunshine long after we'd figured out the speaking angle.
A stray thought from Marco drifted into my mind. I knew it was from Marco, and I knew that only I received it, like a sixth sense than came with thought-speak. But instead of using words like we had been doing, Marco managed to just get across an impression of the six of us lounging about and his amusement at the mental image. We were as lazy as the most stereotypical cat out there.
{It would probably be wise for you to demorph now,} Ax told us after we'd all been quiet for a while.
{Why?} I asked, relaxed and distracted enough to seriously consider taking a nap.
{It's not advisable to stay in a morph for too long.}
{We going to get stuck or something?}
{That is one of the risks.}
That got me to wake up. It worked on the others as well; everyone was on their feet. Everyone except the real Dude. {When were you planning on telling us this?} I demanded.
{Right now.}
I started to demorph immediately, concentrating on my human body. Doing so was difficult while anger at Ax distracted me, but I managed it without any mishaps. Once I had a mouth again, I started in on him, though. "You need to tell us this sort of thing before we start, not just whenever you feel like it. Good God, we seriously could have gotten stuck as cats? And you thought that wasn't an important detail?" As I finished changing back to human, I noticed I was naked and grabbed my pants to put in my lap.
{You were well within the recommended time limit. There was no danger.}
"You don't know that things would have stayed that way! You can't withhold information from us if we're going to work together. We have a right to know the dangers of what we're getting into before we begin."
Marco and Tobias demorphed while I talked, but I noticed the other two cats slink off to the bathroom. No doubt the girls wanted to change back in private.
Ax, for his part, looked stunned by my tirade. {I did not intend to-}
"What you intended doesn't amount to shit if you don't think first." I was in a full-tilt sergeant mode and in no mood to put up with his shit. I couldn't really help my reaction; I wasn't as angry as I sounded, but I was mad, and more than that I was determined to make sure that Ax understood why. It didn't even occur to me that I was treating him like an errant private. "You treat us like children, dolling out little bits of information when you feel they are necessary, and that is going to stop now. If you are going to be with us, then you are going to treat us like peers, because it's our asses on the line here. You keep acting like this and it's going to get someone killed, and I will not allow that. Do I make myself clear?"
Ax held still, his tail posed high over his head, and for a moment I got the crazy idea that he would challenge me with it. A duel between his tail blade and myself would not end in my favor, but I stared him down anyway. There was no way I'd let his arrogance put my friends in danger, no matter how handy his bag of tricks turned out to be.
Eventually, his tail lowered a fraction, and his main eyes darted down to the floor before meeting my own. {I apologize. I was not as respectful as I could have been. It won't happen again.}
I'd been fully prepared to fight over this, so his answer took me off guard, but I didn't let that show. Instead I just nodded and accepted his apology.
From the bathroom, Rachel called, "If you boys are done fighting for dominance, could you hand us our clothes?"
Tobias tossed their clothes in the bathroom and we all got dressed. I wondered if we'd be able to find a way around the nudity issue or if we'd have to just learn to deal with it.
"Hey!" Marco cried out. "My ink is gone!"
Curious, I turned around to see what he was talking about. He held out his left arm, the inside facing up, showing off the unblemished skin there. He'd gotten his first tattoo the past summer, a stylized sun design, only now it was missing.
In a bit of a panic, I checked my right arm. Clear. I checked my left leg. Also clear. My own tattoos were missing, as cleanly as if I'd never gotten them. My scar was missing from my leg as well. I reached up and touched my left ear. Whole and perfect. "What the hell is going on?"
We looked at Ax for an explanation, and he twitched his tail from side to side. {The morphing works based off of DNA. Any disfiguring marks would have been repaired by the process, since injuries aren't coded in our genetic material.}
"Inju- They weren't injuries, they were tattoos!" I couldn't believe what I was hearing. They were gone. But I looked at Ax's fur-covered body and realized that someone with his physiology would probably never even consider getting a tattoo, much less realize why someone would want one intentionally.
Marco, I knew, would only be mildly put out by his loss, but I was in another state entirely. My tats had been extremely important to me. The one on my arm, a replica of a fallen soldier's memorial, had been in honor of the servicemen I'd deployed with who'd died. I had their dogtags included in the design. I'd gone back to the artist three times to have tags added, until there were five total. I carried that tat around as a reminder of my friends, and even though I knew it was just symbolic, it always made me feel like I had a piece of them with me.
And now they were gone.
The one on my leg had been a design incorporating the insignia of all three units I'd served in so far, with room for more. A statement of pride for the surviving men I'd served with. Now also gone. Even my scars were part of me. The one that had nearly taken out my leg tattoo had been from a piece of shrapnel, from the same explosion that had killed Evans. Erased. Erased as if it had never happened, as if I'd never been through that day and lost that friend and experienced that fight. The jagged chunk of my ear that had been shot off by a stray bullet when I stupidly took off my Kevlar one day. Restored as if I'd never learned that lesson or survived that ambush.
"Oh, relax. I never understood why you wanted to ink yourself up in the first place." Rachel came out of the bathroom, running her hands through her hair to make it lay straight even though it was already perfect.
"Relax? Relax? Do you know how look it took me to get those? And what are people going to say when I start walking around without them?"
"Wear long shirts?"
"I work in a uniform. I don't really have a choice." Even though my emotions were stuck on the utter shock of having my body altered, the logical part of my brain knew that my bigger problem was the one I'd mentioned to Rachel. People were going to notice this. Especially the ear, which couldn't be hidden with clothing.
{Why is this a substantial problem?} Ax asked, clearly bewildered. {You were disfigured, and now your scars have been repaired.}
"I liked my scars," I insisted. "And I'm not going to be able to explain why they're gone. I can't exactly tell people that a giant blue alien had me turn into a cat and my DNA didn't like tattoos."
"Jake." Cassie came out of the bathroom and laid her hand on my arm to break my attention. "Calm down. We'll figure this out. It's not an insurmountable problem."
I took a deep breath and willed myself to stop freaking out. Cassie was right. It wasn't impossible. I'd just have to come up with a good excuse. It was spring. I could get my dad to write a note saying I had a skin allergy to one of the million things floating around in the air right now. That would allow me to wear long sleeves and pants at PT. It wouldn't work forever, but it was a start. And as upset as I was, we had larger things to worry about.
Everyone watched me, waiting, so I pulled myself up straighter and turned to Ax. "I think you should fill us in on this morphing ability now."
Ax shifted again between his front and back legs, a subtle sort of rocking, but an action I'd come to realize signaled discomfort. {The Escafil Device imparts the ability to change from one's base form to any other organism that has been acquired. Once an animal has been acquired, it will be accessible for morphing from then on. A person who is morphed is genetically identical to the subject they acquired, so they'll be able to pass any sort of biometric scans or identification. We use this ability for intelligence gathering, and it is only given to select personnel who might need it for planet-based missions. We had a Device on the ship just in case we had to recruit others for such missions.}
"So we use this, we morph into people with Yeerks, and there's no way they'll be able to tell the difference?" Marco asked.
{Well, unless something you do gives away the truth. The morphing ability only copies genetics. A subject's memories and experience and knowledge remains unique to that subject. You will have to deal with instinctual urges, but those are easy to overcome.}
I thought back on how easy it had been to care about nothing as a cat. Only now did I realize that it hadn't been my human brain relaxing. Apparently, instincts weren't so easy to identify unless you were forewarned. "What about this time limit?" I asked.
{They recommend that you never stay in a morph longer than four hours. After that, any further morphing becomes...difficult.} His tone carried through his meaning. After four hours, we ran the risk of getting stuck. Of not being able to or not wanting to return to human. I felt Ax's fear and confusion about those who had run into such a fate. About whether or not the 'stuckness' was voluntary or mechanical or some measure of both. {We have made great strides in eliminating the time limit. It used to be that after two hours, one would be stuck no matter what. Now...well, in theory the limit is completely gone and it is possible to continue morphing indefinitely, but those who stay in a morph too long still experience significant problems. It is...not recommended.}
I shivered from the shared fear that came through on his words. It wasn't well defined, but I got the feeling that even he didn't know the specifics. Perhaps no one knew exactly why it happened. I didn't need to know the why; I just needed to know the four hours. "Any other risks we should know about?"
{Loss of control to instincts and the time limit are the greatest problems. Also finding the proper subjects to acquire. It's not recommended to go into a mission without having everything you need first, in case there are adverse reactions.}
"Reactions like what?"
{Some people react to certain morphs by getting violently ill until the offending DNA material is expunged.} His tone carried a mental image of an andalite, his body going through sporadic half-morphs. Ax was amused by this rather than afraid of it, however. Apparently no one had ever been seriously injured by this reaction, just annoyed and teased. Though it would only be funny if one were in a safe environment, not stuck behind enemy lines.
"Anything else?"
Ax thought for a moment, then flicked his tail over his shoulder. {No.}
"Alright, then, we should focus on how we're going to use this." I looked around the room at my friends gathered there. "We don't have to all go into the Pool for this to work. But if we can manage it, I think it would be best for all of us to have first-hand experience down there, in case we have to go back. I'm not going to force anyone to go if they don't want to, though."
Marco pointedly avoided my gaze, but he also didn't say anything.
"I can draw maps from memory," Tobais said. "But it would be better if we could get some pictures while we're down there."
"Might look too suspicious. We'll have to make that call when we're there. We'll do it if we can, though."
"How are we planning to get in?" Cassie stared at the floor as she asked her question, her voice soft. I knew that look. She had something on her mind and was working out how to come around to it.
"Did you already forget about that whole 'changing to cats' thing?" Marco asked. Rachel, next to him, smacked him on the shoulder for it.
"No, Marco, I didn't forget. But are we still planning on morphing into other people?"
"It's the best option we've got." I didn't see what the problem was.
"Can we really do that?" Cassie shook her head, cutting off my immediate reply. "I mean, I know that we're able to now, but should we?"
"You're getting hung up on morals when there's brain-snatching aliens in town?" Marco looked ready to go into a snark-filled tirade.
Cassie just held his gaze levelly with her own, unperturbed by his comment. "Yes, I am. If we do this, we're going to be these people. Everything we do while morphed will be attributed to them. If we get caught, it won't be us and our families that suffer, it will be them. We're not even talking about Yeerks here, we're talking about innocent humans who were unlucky enough to get caught. They're already going through hell with that, do we have the right to put them in even more danger?"
I hadn't even considered that. Hadn't even thought about the possible repercussions for the people we copied. I couldn't deny that Cassie was right, but at the same time, what she said didn't change the reality of our situation. "Do we have another option?" I asked her. "I'm not saying you're wrong, but really, what else can we do?"
"Can't we use something else to get in?"
"Anything that would go unnoticed would be too small to get a clear view of the pool. This our best option for getting the information that we need."
Cassie still looked uncomfortable, but I could practically see the wheels in her head turning as she tried to come up with an answer. Finally, she sighed and her shoulders drooped. "If we do this, we can't forget that we'll have more than just our own hides to care for. One hint that we're going to get our morphs in trouble-"
"And we'll abort. That's fine." I looked around to the others and they grudgingly agreed as well. "Alright. In that case, here's the plan."
Boys and their Toys
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