PART 1:
Why does the Summer Day Delay? (When will time flow away?)



Two minutes left, Rachel. I could hear the worry in Tobias's thought speak.

I also felt the blood running down my head. I looked up, squinting to make out Visser Three's Andalite form towering over me, the bladed tail poised ready to strike. I was in bear morph, but a long fight had tired me out, and that's when the Visser had delivered the
fatal blow, his tail cracking my protective skull.

Rachel, demorph. Come on! That was Tobias. I visualized his face in my mind. The strong, fierce hawk's gaze, or the troubled, emotional human eyes. Of course, right now he was a dragonfly, watching from someplace farther away, safe. Why didn't he come rescue me? It was getting so hard to think.

Where has all your Andalite bravery gone? The Visser's voice sneered in my head. Looks like the proud warriors aren't so tough after all. His stalk eyes looked down at my cowering form on the grass, already turning red with blood - my blood...

Visser! You don't know HOW tough we are! A distraction. It must be Tobias, yelling from his dragonfly morph. Everything was so fuzzy, but it could't end this way. I heard Tobias again. Don't be foolish, Rachel - demorph! We can fight him again another day!

The moment the Visser had turned, looking for the source of the second voice, I brought my large grizzly paw around and smacked him. My blow hit his front legs, causing him to collapse forward.

But I had forgotten about the stalk eyes.

The one thing that allowed Andalites to look in more than one direction at once.

With the lightening speed only Andalite tails have, he brought his tail up and sliced off my head.

The picture faded away like an old T.V. set.

"Simulation over." The dull mechanical voice came from the computer. I pulled off the simulation goggles and turned to see Tobias, grinning at me.

"Looks like someone could use some more practise, huh, Rachel?"

I hung my goggles on a hook near the computer panel and turned to him. "Yes, but someone else was cheating a little." I pointed to the screen. "Difficulty level 25?"

He grinned at me and shoved his blond hair, which hadn't been cut for a while, out of his face. "Well, the highest is 30..."

"Sure." I grinned back at him and left the simulation bay.

Let me explain to you who I am. My name is Rachel. I could tell you my last name, because now the Yeerks know my identity, but it woudln't feel right. That part of me is gone. That part of all of us is gone. There used to be six of us. We didn't sound very formidable, Jake, Cassie, Marco, Tobias, Ax the Andalite, and me, but we were given the power by a dying andalite prince, Elfangor, to morph into any animal we touched. What are the Yeerks? They're an alien parasite from outer space that squeezes into your ear and takes over your brain. Fun, huh?

Not half as much fun as what we've been through.

I read somewhere that the trial and tribulations human kind goes through shapes their characters, and can either make them stronger, or weaker. You know the old saying, .what doesn't kill you makes you stronger'. I think that happened to me. I am stronger inside. I can kill innocents without remorse, and look forward to chances to kill my enemies. Let me tell you how I came to be like this.

We fought the Yeerks for a long time. Probably too long. This would have happened sooner or later, but the newly promoted Visser One, the same Visser Three I fought in the simulation bay, figured out the most carefully guarded secret of the six of us.

Five of us were human.

They figured out our identities, so we had to take our families and retreat into hiding. Jake went into the biggest guilt trip in history and blamed himself for everyhting. Cassie tried to talk to him, we all did, but when Cassie tried she ended up calling him a coward. He went kinda crazy on her and walked away.

Right into an advancing line of Taxxon Trackers and Hork-Bajir warriors.

They killed him before he could so much as scream.

Pandemonium erupted as soon as the attack became known. A few Chee along with some Hork-Bajir readied a ship to take us into space un-noticed, at least, until the Yeerks decided to look there.

So far we've been lucky.

Tobias and I decided to join the Chee and others on the ship. We managed to convince Cassie to join us. She was really upset overJake, and it changed her a lot. Gone was the empathetic, sympathetic, animal-lover I used to know as my best friend. Cassie became more withdrawn and spent a lot of time by herself.

Marco wouldn't come with us. He wanted to stay on earth with his dad. We said his dad could come too, but they both insisted on staying there.

I watched them both die together, already leaving for space. They fought bravely, but the Hork-Bajir fought harder.

And now we come to Aximili. The Andalite we rescued from under the sea, who fought alongside us for a long time, lost his will to keep battling. Ax 'fell on his own sword', you could say.

Except in his case the sword was a tail blade.

So that leaves us with the three remaining Animorphs, Tobias, Cassie and I, on a ship that combines Chee and Andalite technology, as well as a little of the Hork-Bajir's primitive technology and a few human advances. Passengers on the ship are the three remaining free humans, and a handful of Hork-Bajir. Our little ship, dubbed Titanic when I was in a Marco-like mood, could only carry that many.

And then there was my family. They didn't kill my family. They just waited until the battle was over and infested them. My Mom, my sister Sarah, and my sister Jordan.

So you see, I've seen death, I've seen worse than death. It's toughened me up, outside and inside. Tobias thinks it's somehow done more. If the old Cassie was around I could ask her for advice. She could see how I've changed. But not even the new Cassie is around anymore.

Shortly after the whole leaving on a ship thing, Cassie fell apart. We found her one morning, halfway into wolf morph, with an empty tylenol bottle in her still human hand.

As if she got scared and tried to morph to keep it from happening, but was too late.

If my mom was here, she'd tell me that no matter what happened, as long as I kept going everything would work out eventually. Maybe it did.

Tobias morphed human and stayed that way, so he was a nothlit again. But he was human. When he told me he did it so he could spend his last days as a human I smacked him - but I, too knew that it wouldn't take long for the Visser to find our little ship, with a primitive cloaking device, unable to get out of orbit. We did the only natural thing for the last two members of a species to do. We procreated. Our blond haired, blue eyed boy was born nine months later, March 15, for the record, we added Christofer Frederik to the ship's passengers. We made sure we had made provisions for his future - If the Visser found us, we only had one way out, and then, six months later, it happened.

The Visser found us.

The Hork-Bajir sounded the alarm, and we quickly prepared our escape plan - it was not for any of the Hork-Bajir, and not for Tobias or myself either. When we built the ship, we used up our limited resources on one small escape pod - big enough to hold a baby or small child. It was powerful enough to fire out of this solar system, at least, and it would drift hidden for about a month, and then come down on the first habitable planet it found. A computer inside would perform the necessary tasks to keep Christofer alive, and talk to him as well - we didn't want our baby to grow up mute.

We loaded our baby into the escape pod, and Tobias shut the door. I wanted to give my son one last kiss, hold him a little longer. But that would be showing weakness. We needed all the time we could get. I squared my jaw and pushed the button that would detach the pod from our ship, and it would shoot into space, unnoticed.

"Live to fight another day, my son." I whispered to the departing pod as I watched it through the viewscreen. Then, Visser's voice thundered into the ship.

You didn't even have the sense to run, did you, humans? He laughed. Let me finish now what I should have one year ago.

I shivered. He had no reason to keep us alive - he had earth. But I was not about to go down quietly. I started to morph grizzly. "Rachel..." Tobias started.

But that was as far as he got. A beam of white light incinerated the ship, and all that was on it.

And that's where my story ends. But the escape pod shot through the blue-black sky. His story was just beginning.

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Note: I do not in any part own the Animorphs or their characters.
Read part 2, coming soon, for Christofer's story.


Hope you liked it!
~LadyBianca