ANIMORPHS

The Changover

This Animorph is fighting her battles. Alone… AU; crossover eventually with canonverse.

Hello. My name is Sarah. That's it. Just Sarah. Sarah No-name. I used to have a last name, a pretty ordinary last name really, nothing special. That doesn't mean I'm going to tell you what it is.

See, aliens are out to kill me. Not that they know this. They think they're out to kill another alien. Not an alien like them though. I'm different. Not the human alien that I am, in reality; the alien that they think I am.

Maybe I should start over.

The aliens who want to kill me (the alien me that I'm not) are called Yeerks. And the reason they want to kill me is because I am preventing them from carrying out their goal, which is total domination of earth, enslaving every human being on the planet.

They are slugs. Worms, maybe. Or maybe I shouldn't try to classify them by Earth animal standards since they are, in fact, aliens. But that's what they look like. Old gum on someone's sneaker. A really big wad of snot. A slug.

Except, these unshelled snails are pretty pimped out for things that don't have arms or eyes. They've got laser guns. They've got spaceships. They've got portable mini-suns, and they take their swimming pools with them wherever they go.

And also, they can crawl into your ear and take over your brain.

I guess it's better than crawling up your nose. Or maybe they do . . . However they do it, you end up a slave, prisoner inside your own head, with some snotty, chewed-gum alien sneering at you from inside the wrinkles of your brain.

I am fighting these snot-rags of the universe, and I am doing it alone. Well, alone is not quite right. But I am the only human. My friend, Anifal, is the only other person who knows about this invasion of personal rights and privacy. And she's an alien too!

Not a slug-alien of course, don't get me wrong. She's a different kind of alien. I'm not sure exactly how many kinds of aliens there are, but clearly there's at least two. She calls herself an Andalite, like I'd know different if she wasn't, but the first Andalite I met called himself that too, so I guess I'll have to take her word for it.

She looks a bit like a purplish-blue centaur, except without a mouth. And she doesn't have any hair except for her fur. And she's got a long tail, with a small but wickedly sharp scythe-blade on it. Come to think of it, that's a lot of things a centaur wouldn't have, so maybe she doesn't look like one after all. But she has a vaguely humanoid body attached to a vaguely horse-like body, so maybe she is.

I've had to do things during this silent war that were hard. For example, two years ago I faked my death.

I did this by turning into a fish.

It was the hardest thing I've ever done, faking my death. Don't get me wrong, the actual deed was easy. I just 'fell' off of my family's boat when we were all taking a fishing trip together, and while I was underwater being dragged away by the rough current, I simply morphed into a fish and swam away.

It was afterwards that was hard, knowing my family was suffering and crying and combing the waters for my body which they would never find… That was the hard part.

But enough about that. You probably want to know how I was turning into fishes to begin with. It started with an alien (yes, another one) who was dying. I happened to run into him while I was walking home through an abandoned construction site. Many times since then I've wished I had just taken a different route, but more often than that, I've simply wished I hadn't gone that way alone.

So this alien, this Andalite, this Andalite called Elfangor, lands heavily damaged in this nasty ex-construction site, and decides that this one little girl (that's me) had a chance of at least holding back the Yeerks until the rest of the Andalites arrived to wipe out the Yeerks.

He had me go and fetch something from his cabin, a small blue box. He had me put my hand on one of the panels, and bam boom pow, I had the ability to turn into any animal I could lay hands on, something he called morphing.

He told me everything I've just told you, impressed upon me the need to fight, and then urged me to run. The Yeerks were coming for him, and I couldn't just die there.

Run! Run! he urged me telepathically (how else would a creature with no mouth talk?) and I did run, but not very far. I had to see the rest of these aliens.

Ah yes, that reminds me. Hork-Bajir and Taxxons. Hork-Bajir look like maybe a species of dinosaurs that never went extinct. A blender mix of big lizard body, sharp snapping beak, oversized claws, blades growing out of the arms, legs, tail, and head, and big, T-Rex feet. Put them all together at about eight feet tall, and ladies and gentlemen, you have a Hork-Bajir.

A Taxxon must be what centipedes want to be when they grow up. The size of a large man, with a wormy body, hundreds of little clacking legs, and a big round hungry mouth.

In case you missed the memo, these all have Yeerks in their brains, their every move directed by a little muddy tyrant lodged in their heads.

That is what I fight, every day.

[Princess Sarah!] Anifal called from the sky. She was perched in a tree above me. Not as an Andalite, you understand, which; as a horse-person-centaur mix would be a very awkward sight; but as a red cardinal. Anifal has a very limited knowledge of earth species, but she has admitted that the cardinal is her favorite bird thus far.

"Have you found anything out?" I demanded. A little snappy perhaps, but it had been a week since we had last found a way to strike at the Yeerks, and they were bound to have recovered from the damage we dealt them by now.

Anifal fluttered to the ground and began to demorph, explaining as she did so. [I have found another entrance to the Yeerk Pool. It was hard to find. The Yeerks are becoming more and more careful.]

I recognized that it was time for a leaderly word of wisdom and encouragement. The reason that Anifal calls me 'Princess' is because she decided (a bit arbitrarily, in my opinion) that I was to be her leader, and that she would follow my orders. Although apparently Andalites don't usually hold with female leaders, and I'd had to tell her what the feminine form of 'prince' is. Typical. Male-dominated universe. Except some species on earth have the female as the dominant one. So maybe it's not as bad as I thought.

Keeping all this in mind, I maintained eye contact, which Anifal had let slip is reassuring for an Andalite, and, smiling, told her, "Yes, but you're smarter than they are careful. They're not going to be able to slip one by you."

I didn't use wimpy words, like I think, or I'm sure. Because, no matter how subtly, those words expressed doubt. I think you can, but maybe you can't. I'm sure you're on the right track, but maybe I'm wrong. If she didn't sense doubt from me, then it was less likely that she would doubt herself. Psych 1 01. Effective on humans and Andalites alike.

When it comes down to it, that's what being a leader is. Manipulating people. I wish Anifal would've just announced herself leader. Then she could do the planning and leading and manipulating, and I could have a break.

"So where is it?" I asked.

* * *

It was in a mall. In a clothing store. The Gap®, to be precise. The Gap® dressing room, to be even more precise. And Anifal was right, the Yeerks were being more careful. The entrance was a door on the back wall of the dressing room. The whole thing, including the keypad, was hidden by a hologram. And the door was locked, only the right password would open it. But if you wanted to see the keypad and door, you had to step into the hologram. Which meant that Anifal had to stand with her face squished up against a wall for nearly three minutes while she hacked in.

Just then, the door rattled. No, not that door, the dressing room door. "Anybody in here?" a voice of indeterminate gender asked.

"Piss off!" I shouted.

"Sorry, geez," he-she muttered, possibly trundling off.

"I have it," Anifal whispered as the door silently swooshed open. We paused for a moment, looking into our unfamiliar human features, and then we entered into the Yeerk Pool.

When you're a hungry wolf near a herd of sheep, what's the best route to take? Go in as a wolf? Hardly. Disguise yourself as the shepherd? Only if you're bold. No, the best route to take is to become another sheep. Almost every time we engaged the Yeerks, we grabbed another random human morph. Perhaps later on during the skirmish we would reveal ourselves as the wolves, but first we infiltrated.

As humans, we could have been any random Yeerk-infested controllers coming back to the pool.

We had mastered the art of looking like we belonged here. If approached, we could even engage in small talk without fear of being exposed. If asked, I would tell them my name was Seplin 9466.

We would purposefully make our way to a less occupied place, and then begin the process of whatever sabotage we had planned.

Today, I had a particularly ruthless plan in mind, one that would kill a lot of Yeerks. It was also absurdly simple in premise.

The Yeerks crawl into people's heads. But they also need to come out again and feed, which they do by soaking up the rays of their artificial sun, the kandrona. When these humans and aliens are uninfested they can't just leave them lying around, they'd escape. So they're placed in big metal cages, where they let out the most wretched, gut-twisting moans and screams of misery that you can't imagine.

When a Yeerk is done feeding, the host is dragged over to the pool, and their head stuck in the water so that the Yeerk could just slide on back inside.

Well, not this time.

Anifal and I found our little solitary corner, and we began to demorph. I'll tell you something, as wonderful as it is to be able to change shape, the getting-there part is something else. Since I was only morphing from human to human, nothing remarkable happened, a little stretching, a little blurring, some unidentified grinding sounds.

But Anifal…

Have you ever seen a long blue tail sprouting out the rear end of an ordinary-looking human being? Watched tiny little hoofs sprout out of that person's stomach as they gained about a foot in length in the waist, as their spine curved, as hair sucked back into the scalp, replaced by golden eyes on stalks, as their mouth sealed over?

No, I don't think you have. It's pretty shocking. Morphing is gross. You have to morph back to your own body to morph a different one. And you can only stay in morph for two hours or you can never morph again, and you're stuck in that morph forever. It was a risk we took every time we morphed.

Now we were going to morph Hork-Bajir. And it will never stop being weird and disgusting, watching a four-legged creature become a two-legged one.

As for myself, my height was what changed first. I shot up over three feet in seconds. My feet turned hard and scaly, two toes retracting on each foot.

Snikt! Snikt! Snikt! Deadly blades spat out through my skin. My skull, elbows, and ankles were now all decorated with razorblades.

Sproot! My spine shot out through my back, white and naked. A moment later it was covered in leathery Hork-Bajir skin, but it left me feeling sick anyways.

My eyes travelled around to the sides of my head, while my lips and nose hardened and extended into a toothed beak.

I was almost completely Hork-Bajir except for the shaggy mop of brown hair on my head which had yet to disappear. Anifal, who had finished morphing first, saw this and snickered, giving me a stiff Hork-Bajir grin. Of course, if I accused her of snickering, she would deny it vehemently. Something about it being below an Andalite's dignity.

[Very funny. Come on, let's just do the thing.] I grumbled.

Two Hork-Bajir marched purposefully up to a cage, and rattled the bars intimidatingly, making leering faces as best as can be made with stiff Hork-Bajir faces. This of course was a timesaver while we explained to the terrified human occupant the plan.

[We're here to help! We have a plan! We are the Andalite bandits! We're going to help you get away!] we chanted at the poor man, repeating it until he finally nodded. He was shaking like a leaf.

I reached for the cage door, and immediately came across a problem. It was; of course; locked. I dithered helplessly for a moment, my brain grinding to a halt. What now, what now?!!

Anifal calmly reached over, hooked her wrist blade into the lock, and twisted sharply. The lock fell apart with a sad little ding. Gathering my self control, I reached in and lifted the man to his feet, who simply stayed limp and looked at us.

"Struggle!" I hissed at him. For a moment he just flopped about a little as we pulled him over to the murky pool, but then he got the right idea, and started twisting and yanking. Then he really got into it and started howling and shrieking, his eyes bulging, veins popping out on his neck, and his face turning bright red.

"Nooooooooooo!" he howled dramatically, kicking his feet and flailing his arms. My sensitive ears were ringing. I tried to resist glancing around, but from what I could tell from my very excellent peripherals, nobody suspected that we didn't belong out here. As long as we looked like we knew what we were doing, nobody would jump out yelling, "Hey! What are you doing with that host?"

We finally got him to the murky pool. Together, we suspended him over the water-like stuff and started to lower him. But here was the trick, we didn't let his head actually go beneath the surface of the water, although it was difficult now that his kicking and screaming had become real.

Using his body as a cover, Anifal casually pressed a few buttons on the grey cylinder she had snagged earlier, and then, casually, oh-so-casually, dropped it into the Yeerk Pool.

[Stop screaming] I commanded.

He stopped.

We pulled him back up. Anifal turned and wandered off. I patted the man on the shoulder for appearances, and began giving him instructions. [Act normally. The way your Yeerk would have you acting. Be casual. Be calm and cool. The exit is that set of stairs to your right. Make your way out through there. Do NOT get caught again!]

He nodded shakily. I clapped him gently on the shoulder again and went to join Anifal. This part was crucial, we had to get OUT of there, and quickly.

So of course we were stopped.

Not by anyone who suspected us. Not by Visser 5, come to kill us. But a disgruntled Human-Controller, who wanted someone to listen to him complain.

"Can you believe the shifts the Visser is having us work? Practically three days to the minute. I almost didn't reach the pool in time!" the balding, middle-aged man groused sullenly. "But of course, he can return to the sulp niar whenever it suits him!"

"Ghanfresh ils Visser hears harktet complain," Anafil said, drawing her finger across her throat significantly. A habit she had picked up from me. Fortunately she knew a smattering of the Hork-Bajir's native language.

"Yes, well," he said, suddenly ill at ease. "I have work to do." And scuttled off.

We scuttled off too. We made it back to our corner, only to find it occupied. Anafil let out a string of what I've been led to believe was particularly foul language, and we both whirled around. The clock was ticking, we could no longer afford to be subtle.

We rushed about like loons for nearly half a minute (which is much longer than it should be, even if it doesn't sound like it) until we finally found a place suitable for morphing.

[Human?] Anifal panted. She sounded afraid. We had hoped we would be able to leave right away.

[No. No time to walk out. Morph hawk!] I snapped out. But first we had to morph out of Hork-Bajir bodies. Wasted time, precious time.

I felt the changes, but I hardly noted them. I was too busy pushing my morph to go faster. Human again! Now to morph my Northern Goshawk. Skin itched, feather patterns popped out of my skin. My feet dried up and began shrinking ahead of the rest of me. And the eyes, laser intensity, burning red glare. Now all of me was shrinking, with a gurgling, popping, schlooping sensation.

I raised my wings. They weren't quite finished. Anifal had finished before me (again) and was taking off, flapping madly trying to get lift in the dead air.

And then everything went to hell.

The cylinder Anifal had dropped in the pool was a dracon beam, or phaser for you trekkies. She had set it on a timer so it would fire in exactly five minutes. But a dracon beam cannot function correctly with water, or in this case sulp niar, inside its casing. Normally it has a waterproof cover, but Anifal took care of that. The result of all this would be an explosion, killing perhaps thousands of Yeerks.

The problem? The concussion would be serious enough to damage the rest of the facility. The facility that we hadn't managed to escape from yet.

I took advantage of every instinct that hawk had and did my best to coast on the concussion itself. Several yards away, Anifal was doing the same. The air was full of debris, and we were twisting and swerving like gymnasts to avoid it all.

Just then, a support from the ceiling smashed into Anifal, as if a giant fist had come out of the sky and simply swatted her away.

[Anifal!] I screamed, moments before my vision went dark