"Arrr, this be me last quarter! If you lose us this round, it's comin' outta yer paycheck!" Harry sighed and rubbed his temples. He'd never been very good at video games to begin with - that was more his cousin Dudley's area of specialty - but playing them with Mr. Krabs was extra stressful. Mr. Krabs had the annoying habit of concerning himself much more with the quarters they spent on the game than the gameplay itself, which was very distracting.
On the screen, Harry's character exploded in a shower of reddish pixels, and the words "YOU DIED" blinked red against the black background. "Noooo!" cried Mr. Krabs. He began to sob, defeat apparently too anguishing to bear. "Look, Mr. Krabs, don't cry. I'll - I'll pay you back," said Harry. Mr. Krabs cheered up at once.
"Do you know what the exchange rate is between Galleons and quarters?" Harry asked. But Mr. Krabs wasn't sure, so they agreed Harry could pay Mr. Krabs back after they'd looked it up on the Internet. For now, though, the pair was out of money, so they turned to leave the arcade and the mall.
But as they approached the great oak front doors, a familiar face came bobbing towards them through the crowd. "Arrr, don't look now, but it be that ghost from Algebra. That ghost whose name is Terry," Mr. Krabs told Harry, keeping his voice low. But it was too late, the ghost whose name was Terry had already spotted Harry and Mr. Krabs, and he was approaching them morosely.
"Hello, Harry. Hello, Mr. Krabs," said the ghost whose name was Terry. "Hi," said Harry and Mr. Krabs. The ghost whose name was Terry seemed tall at first glance, but that was only before you realized he cheated a bit by floating a foot or so off the ground. He was vaguely transparent and pretty much white, shaped like an oval who'd been cut in half with a jagged edged scissors. Or like a sheet that had been draped over a floating basketball, and then the bottom half had been snipped by a jagged edged scissors. Or like a valentine, but the person who made it accidentally cut on the wrong side of the paper (the side they didn't fold on) and then they took one of the heart halves and turned it white and somehow stretched the pointy side back out to a full rectangle and then cut off the bottom with a jagged edged scissors.
"So like, maybe I'll walk home with you guys," said the ghost whose name was Terry. "Maybe you won't, though. You don't have feet," Harry pointed out, and this was true. Mr. Krabs nodded in agreement. "Arrr, it be true, lad," he muttered. But Harry and Mr. Krabs didn't want to be rude, so they let the ghost whose name was Terry accompany them outside and they all began to walk/scuttle/ethereally bob in the direction they all happened to live in.
The unlikely trio stopped when they reached the edge of an abandoned construction site. "What is this?" asked the ghost whose name was Terry. "It's an abandoned construction site," said Harry, trying to be helpful. And this made sense to the ghost whose name was Terry, and they started to walk through the abandoned construction site, but Harry stopped when he realized Mr. Krabs had hung back. "What's wrong, Mr. Krabs?" asked Harry.
"Well- ergh- it's just that- well," began Mr. Krabs. Harry waited patiently, and the ghost whose name was Terry gave Mr. Krabs an encouraging sort of nod. "Well, lad, this abandoned construction site is dangerous. There could be killers, or pirates, or even Plankton!"
Harry considered it. "Well, I don't think we have to worry about any plankton out here," he said thoughtfully. "From what I know, plankton lives mostly in the ocean, and we are not in the ocean right now." (He glanced around to be sure.)
"Yeah, and I don't have to worry about killers - I'm already a ghost," shrugged the ghost whose name was Terry. The logic seemed sound enough to Mr. Krabs, so he nodded and stepped cautiously into the abandoned construction site behind the other two. He was still a little bit nervous since they hadn't quite ruled out the possibility of pirates, but he didn't want to be rude, so he accompanied his friends deeper into the construction site anyway.
Suddenly, a spaceship dropped out of the sky and slammed, hard, into the ground in front of them. A door or something opened up on the front of it, and an alien stumbled out. Harry and the ghost whose name was Terry didn't have any experience with spaceships or aliens, so they weren't quite sure what they were looking at. But Mr. Krabs, swarthy sea dog that he was, recognized the situation at once.
"Ooh! Lads! It - it be a space alien!" he cried, his voice coming out in a strangled whisper. Harry nodded in approval. "Hello, alien," he said cordially, stepping forward and extending a hand. The alien took it, and they shook.
The alien was unlike anything Harry or the ghost whose name was Terry had ever seen before. He looked mostly like a centaur, so actually quite a bit like something Harry had seen before, but covered in blue and tan fur. His face was mostly humanoid, featuring eyes and ears where they should be, if slightly larger and more angular in shape. On top of his head, two stalks poked up towards the night sky, with eyes mounted on the end of each one. The eyes swiveled this way and that, surveying the darkened construction landscape around them. The alien's tail was long and prehensile, sporting a powerful, dangerous-looking, and definitely curved blade somewhere near the end. His burn was dark and smoldering, lightly smokey, covering most of one flank and smelling of charred meat. His hooves were almost dainty in the way that they carried him, stumbling, to meet our heroes.
"Greetings. I am Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul," said the alien in regular quotation marks because the author was way too lazy to use less-than and greater-than symbols. "I am an Andalite. I have come to warn you of a terrible doom about to befall your entire species."
Harry, Mr. Krabs, and the ghost whose name was Terry recoiled in shock. "Oh no. Mama Krabs!" exclaimed Mr. Krabs in definite worry. Harry threw him a look. "Wait, what?" he said.
"I'm concerned for me mother, Mama Krabs. She doesn't deserve terrible doom," explained Mr. Krabs.
"But he said our - I just, I thought he was talking about people," said Harry.
Mr. Krabs looked confused. "What?"
It didn't matter. "What can we do to fight this terrible doom?" Harry asked, addressing Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul once again.
"You may use the power of Andalite morphing technology," said Elfangor-S-S, and he produced a small, bluish cube which glowed faintly with an otherworldly light. Literally otherworldly, thought the ghost whose name was Terry, because it came from another world.
Harry, Mr. Krabs, and the ghost whose name was Terry stepped forwards and pressed a hand, a claw, and a spooky white appendage against different sides of the cube. Only the spooky white appendage actually went right through the cube, so nobody was sure if the ghost whose name was Terry could really receive the morphing power. Harry and Mr. Krabs felt a kind of electric shock, only pleasurable, run through their fingertips. (The ghost whose name was Terry could not feel, so again, still not sure if he got it or what.)
"With this power, you may transform into any creature you can touch," said the alien with the long name.
"Awesome!" said Harry.
"Coral!" said Mr. Krabs.
The ghost whose name was Terry looked dismayed.
"Now, go! The Yeerks approach!"
The three took off running. As they ran, Harry glanced over his shoulder to see more alien spacecraft touch down, another Andalite step out of one, morph into something gigantic called an Antarean Bogg, and take a bite out of Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul.
"Don't stay in morph longer than two hours!" called Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul.
The next day, when Harry woke up, he was sure it had all been a dream. "Harry? Mr. Krabs is here," came a voice from out in the hall. Mr. Krabs came scuttling into Harry's room. "Arrr!" Mr. Krabs exclaimed. "Good morning Mr. Krabs. You're in high spirits today," said Harry, switching on the news.
"...still no information confirmed as to the identity of the thief," the reporter was saying. She turned to a bank teller, who was rather short and had to stand on tippy-toe to be seen in the frame.
"Bank teller, can you share what you know regarding the break-in?" asked the reporter, tilting the mic towards the teller.
"Yaa, it was weerd, you know? Loke, we had the money, n then the safe just opened, like from the inside? Like somone morphed something real small, and just went in, and took all the money, and opened the saf, and left again. But we dono for sure."
"There you have it, folks," the reporter was saying, but Harry wasn't paying attention. Instead, he was focused on Mr. Krabs's bulging pockets, over which hung the distinct odor of American money.
"This probably isn't what we should be doing with this power," Harry said thoughtfully. "Now, look, I'm pretty sure I saw the assistant principal of our school at the construction site last night. We should follow him and look for clues."
"Arrr, it be true," admitted Mr. Krabs, slightly ashamed of himself for robbing a bank.
Later that day, when school started up, Harry climbed into his locker and morphed a green anole. He slithered into the assistant principal's office. He demorphed to be sure he was in the right place, and then remorphed. Luckily the assistant principal didn't notice.
"Look, all I'm saying is that you should sell chairs that are more accessible to people like me, alright?" the assistant principal was saying irritably into the phone. He slammed it down on the receiver and rubbed his temples. There was a knock on the door - or at least, there would have been, if the ghost whose name was Terry had had corporeal hands. Instead, a sliver of white appeared silently on this side of the door a few times.
"Yes, yes, come in," said the assistant principal, and the ghost whose name was Terry floated in through the door.
"Um, hello, Mr. Three? I just wanted to know, how is your day going?" asked the ghost whose name was Terry.
Assistant principal Three sighed. "Not well," he remarked. "It's just very difficult to sit in standard human chairs with Andalite hindquarters, you know?" He adjusted his tie with his tail blade as he spoke, rubbing his sore rump with one many-fingered hand.
The ghost whose name was Terry nodded. "Yes, I can imagine," he said sympathetically. It HAD been quite progressive of the school to hire a genocidal species-enslaving space alien as their assistant principal, but really, they could have taken SOME measures to make things more accommodating for him. At times it felt like his hiring had been nothing more than a political move by the school board to appear more diverse, but assistant principal Three didn't like to think like that; he preferred to believe it was based entirely on merit.
"So, what can I do for you, ghost whose name is Terry?" asked assistant principal Three.
"Well, I'd like to know, were you in any abandoned construction sites last night?"
Aha, Harry thought, now they had reached the heart of the matter. The ghost whose name was Terry had reached the same conclusion Harry had; there had been something suspiciously familiar about the Andalite who had turned into an Antarean Bogg and eaten Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul last night. Harry watched closely to see if assistant principal Three reacted at all strangely to this line of questioning.
Assistant principal Three stiffened. His hand crept towards the Dracon beam he kept taped under his desk at all times. He began to sweat, and loosened his tie further still. He swung his tail blade at the throat of the ghost whose name was Terry, but it passed harmlessly through. "Drat, that didn't work," was written all over assistant principal Three's face. Still sweating, he needed to come up with an answer, and fast. The kid was on to him.
"Um, no," he offered.
"Oh, okay. Bye then," said the ghost whose name was Terry, and he floated back out through the door. Harry slithered after him, reasonably disappointed. He had been so sure that assistant principal Three had been there at the construction site. As Harry left, he heard assistant principal Three mutter, "Phew, that was close. He really bought that story about me not being in any abandoned construction sites last night. Luckily, since I'm quick on my feet, I managed to falsify information which led him to believe that someone else was the one who ate Prince Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul. Little does he know that really, it was ME who ate him." But Harry wasn't sure what this meant, since assistant principal Three had already cleared himself of any wrongdoing. He shrugged his little lizard shoulders and kept slithering, doing his best not to connect what he was doing with dastardly Slytherin house.
Later, Harry followed assistant principal Three into a supply closet and discovered a passage into the Yeerk Pool. After that he convened with his two friends.
"We have to go down there, guys. It's horrible. People screaming and everything."
Mr. Krabs was rubbing his chin with a claw. "Arrr, is there money down there?"
Harry hadn't thought to check, and he considered the question at length. "Well, judging by the sheer number of people I heard begging for death, I would say it's likely that at least some of them have pocket change. Maybe some have even dropped some money on the ground." Mr. Krabs was all in, after that. And the ghost whose name was Terry didn't really have anything better to do, so they all headed back to school and went down to the Yeerk Pool.
"Uh-oh," commented the ghost whose name was Terry. It was a nightmarish hellscape of torment and agony down here, complete with brain-stealing aliens, monstrous worms, construction equipment, screaming children, piers, and everything awful.
"Gosh is this ever bad," observed Harry. But there wasn't anything they could really do. They tried mounting an escape plan, but they failed.
"Arrr, I guess we be havin' to try this again some other time," said Mr. Krabs as they made their harrowing escape. It was true.