Chapter One
My name is Melissa Chapman. And I was plummeting to the earth at 900 Miles per hour. Typical Tuesday.
Okay, maybe not so typical. I had just been covered in transparent gelatin that I could breathe, and launched from a green spaceship that was shaped like Snoopy.
Huh. I never realized just how weird my life has become since the end of the Yeerk War until I say it out loud.
It wasn't the first time I'd been falling from the sky with no parachute, though. Six months ago I went skydiving for a charity event. None of the skydivers wore parachutes, and we all morphed into birds on the way down. It was a neat experience.
Nate, my boyfriend at the time, was an Estreen and did some very neat stuff with his Great Blue Heron morph on the way down.
I figured if I was falling at breakneck speeds towards the planet, then I could repeat the events of that charity. I focused my mind on the image of the bird whose DNA was stored within me. The Snowy Owl.
My bones began to get lighter, and my lips began to purse out into a beak…
And suddenly I couldn't breathe…It was as if the gel in my lungs, which I had somehow been breathing before, no longer was breathable. I was choking, asphyxiating.
I reached up to my throat with my half-wings-half-hands, trying to clear an airway.
I started reversing the morph, going back to human, as my bird-like features vanished, I found myself able to breathe again. I coughed a few times to be sure.
I glanced down at the rapidly enlarging planet beneath me. There was a continent, and a large plateau on that continent…And as I fell closer and closer…I missed the continent entirely.
I tumbled past the plateau, through a massive swarm of squawking seagull-like creatures. Down the Cliffside that seemed to go on forever…
Until I hit the ocean. The gel rippled when it hit, and then burst apart into water, and suddenly, my lungs were filled with water, and I was sinking further under water.
Tumbling through the inky blackness, unable to see, I saw a large creature launch past me, as I frantically kicked towards the surface.
I broke the surface and upchucked the water in my lungs, sucking in a very deep breath before spotting the creature that had surfaced alongside me. It looked sort of like some sort of reptilian dolphin. It gave me a scared look, before a second creature, something that looked like a massive, and I'm talking massive as in size of a humpback whale massive shark surged out of the water and gobbled up the scaly dolphin in two bites, before ducking back below the surface.
I could see land not far away. An island maybe 400 feet long, with a grove of trees and little else. I could probably swim to it…If I could swim. I was never a good swimmer. After gaining the power to morph, I just figured if I needed to swim, I'd acquire something that could swim naturally.
Only I never did. Eight ultra-rare, super awesome DNA patterns within my blood, and none of them were swimmers.
Wait, not none of them. I focused my mind on the Alligator within me.
It was a Leucistic American Alligator, collected from a farm in Florida. I had arranged for a similar gator to be shipped up to St. Louis from New Orleans as a part of a deal with War-Prince Escafil a few weeks ago. Now that was a lifetime ago.
Leucistic Alligators don't survive long in the wild. Their white scales and blue eyes stand out in the swamps, and so they get eaten by predators before they can get big enough to defend themselves.
As my legs shriveled up, and my tail formed, this fear was on my mind as well. That shark was big. I was lunch if I didn't get to that island. I began swimming, my legs and tail paddling me forward…But forward slowly…Too slowly. And the saltwater burned at my skin…Alligators prefer freshwater. Swamps and rivers are their preferred habitat. I was not comfortable in the sea.
I felt sand beneath my claws, and surged out of the water, demorphing as I did…Becoming human, and scrambling to the island shore.
I looked back and saw a massive triangle, as big as a sail, slicing through the water before ducking beneath it. The dorsal fin of that mega-shark.
One thing was for sure…Alligator was out.
I slumped backwards onto the sand of my small island. Was that even a shark? I wondered. It was an alien planet. Or it was supposed to be. Erica had said in orbit that the DNA on the planet was registering as earth-based DNA. Could that have been an earth shark?
No…Impossible…No earth shark grows that big. Even the Whale Shark isn't nearly that big.
I suddenly felt a sharp pain in my arm and sat up, pulling my left arm into view.
A small squid-like creature had latched onto my arm. It had a spiral shell, like a nautilus, but its tentacles had wrapped around my arm. I noticed a few more of these spiral shells all along the beach.
I focused my mind on the one that was on my arm. Its tentacles relaxed as it's DNA passed into my body.
I pealed the creature off my arm, and flung the shell, no bigger than a plate, into the water.
I then stood up, digging my bare feet into the sand. This island was going to have to be my home now…For the next two weeks, anyway. Until the Pemalite ship crashed into the planet.
I definitely had my work cut out for me.