ANIMORPHS - (Extinction)
Author's Note: This story takes place roughly between Books 14-17. It is designed as a Megamorphs edition, with rotating narrations from all of the characters. I do not own anything in regards to Animorphs and this is merely meant to be for entertainment purposes only. The characters and trademarks and all that belong to K.A. Applegate, Scholastic and anyone else who has anything to do with Animorphs. I'm just a weirdo who likes to write stories and loves Animorphs.
(ONE) - JAKE
My name is Jake.
If I told you anymore about me, then I would be dead. Not kidding. See, I have enemies. A lot of them. Some of them are pretty powerful. And scary. You think you've seen scary? Sure, you've probably seen a few horror movies. Maybe you've even had a few nightmares. But nothing compares to what I deal with on practically a daily basis. The Yeerks are worse than anything you could imagine.
What are the Yeerks, you ask?
Think slugs. That's basically what they look like. Big, oversized snails without a shell. If you saw one crawling across the ground, you'd probably step on it without even thinking about it. But the Yeerks' power is not in their size or appearance. No, they have a much deadlier ability. They are parasites. They crawl into your ear and enter your skull, wrapping their squishy bodies all around your brain, dialing in and completely take you over. Control you.
You become a Controller. One of them.
I've been there. I know what it's like to look out through your own eyes and not get to choose what they focus on. To feel your hands grasp around one of your friend's neck, strangling them, and all you can do is sit in the corner of your mind, howling and crying and praying for freedom.
That's the terrifying thing about Yeerks. They look just like you, but you aren't you anymore. Not even close. They can access your memories, they know everything about you. They can impersonate you to the tee, so no one even knows that you aren't in control anymore.
And they're invading. Slowly but surely, the Yeerks are enslaving the human race. They've already done it on other planets. The Hork-Bajirs used to be a peaceful, vegetarian race who lived in relative peace, until the Yeerks showed up. They took over, and now almost every single Hork-Bajir is a Controller. And the Taxxons, the cannibalistic gigantic centipede-like monsters who would sooner eat their own kin if dangled before them. The Taxxons, however, willingly chose to join up with the Yeerks.
And now they've got their sights set on us. Humans.
How do I know all of this?
Because one night, I was just goofing around with my friends and we happened to find ourselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Cutting through the construction site on the way home from the mall seemed like a good idea at the time.
Wrong.
I, along with my best friend Marco, my cousin Rachel and her best friend Cassie, and Tobias, a lonely kid from school none of us really knew, ended up caught in the crossfire of an alien war that night.
Prince Elfangor, an Andalite war-hero, had crash landed. He was badly injured, practically already dead. He told us about the Yeerks, and that they were coming. That they were already here. He said that the humans wouldn't stand a chance.
Unless…
Unless it was possible for someone to fight back. That's when he presented us with a choice. By using Andalite technology, he could give us the power to morph. To absorb the DNA of any animal we touch and then change into it. We made our choice that night. Each one of us. None of us really wanted to take on such a huge responsibility. I mean, we're only kids. But we didn't see any other choice. Someone had to fight.
So it may as well have been us.
That's how we became the Animorphs. Since then, we've been through a lot. We've seen our fair share of battles. It hasn't been easy fighting the Yeerks. But we've hurt them. Sometimes it seems like we might even win. I try not to think too far ahead, though. We have to stay realistic.
Our only hope is that perhaps, someday, the other Andalites will come to Earth and help us stop the Yeerks. Ax believes that it will happen. Ax is Elfangor's younger brother. He joined up with us soon after we started fighting the Yeerks, after we rescued him from a fallen Andalite Dome ship that had crash landed into the ocean after a devastating battle with the Yeerks.
Now he fights with us.
One day the Andalites will come. They've been busy fighting the Yeerks in other parts of the galaxy, but soon, they'll see that the true threat is here on little old planet Earth. In fact, we were starting to think that that day was coming a lot sooner than we'd previously thought.
I had just received a phone call from Cassie. She told me that Tobias had given her word that Ax had some extremely big news for us all, and that he wanted all of us to meet up at Cassie's barn as soon as possible. Cassie and her dad run the Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic at her farm, which sort of acts as a home base for us. It's also a very useful place for acquiring new morphs.
So now, I stood in bedroom facing the open window, the fresh air sweeping across my cheeks. I shivered slightly, getting that queasy feeling I usually feel when I'm about to make the change.
I had done this morph hundreds of times, so I wasn't worried.
Moments later, I burst from my house not as a normal human boy, but as a fierce peregrine falcon. My wings beat fast and I caught a firm breeze, soaring up, up, up. I spread my wings wider, soaring across the bright blue skies above my neighborhood.
Sometimes being an Animorph could be pretty cool.
Author's Note: I know it's just the standard intro stuff, but I hope you will enjoy this story as it goes along. The upcoming chapters will most definitely have more going on in them once we get through all the setup.