A/N: Yes, this was once posted before, but it needed editing. Anyway, this is an Animorph/Digimon crossover. Sadly, the plotbunny would not leave me alone. So it had to be typed up. I guess this first chapter is just getting into Jake's character a bit...
Chapter One
My name is Jake.
Just Jake.
No 'prince' or 'leader' or 'commander' or whatever the others might have you believe. You don't need to know anything else about me like how old I am or where I grew up, not even what my last name is. You can't know those things. I'm just an ordinary kid leading an ordinary life. Well okay, maybe that last bit's a lie. I can turn into any animal I touch as long as I acquire its DNA. I'm one of the only five kids on earth who can do that, so I guess that rules out me being ordinary. Oh, and me and those other four kids, we're fighting an alien invasion. Not alone mind you, we have the help of Ax, or rather Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill (I guess you get why we call him Ax), our resident Andalite. It was his older brother, Elfangor who gave us the power to morph, who gave us the mission to save the earth, right before he was murdered.
See right now, Earth's being taken over by these creatures called Yeerks. Don't get me wrong, this isn't a computer game, bombs, blood and guts, big monster aliens vs. the army type take over. The Yeerks are smarter than that, sneakier. They're small parasitic creatures that look a hell of a lot like slugs, so they take host bodies.
They slither into your ear, wrap themselves around your brain, seep into all those crevices. And then you're theirs. They open up your mind, see all your thoughts, all your dreams, all your memories, your deepest secrets and your darkest desires. They see it all.
Then they control you. You can't do anything about it. You can still think, you can still see, you can still hear things and feel pain. You're just not in control. The Yeerk controls everything you do, everything you say, every move you make. I think you get the idea.
It's hell.
And I'd know.
I'd know because I've been there.
I was a Controller for a few days once, before me and my friends outsmarted it. 'Controller', that's what we call anyone who's been taken over by a Yeerk. My brother's one too. Still is. We've never been able to save him. He's part of the Sharing; I guess that's how they got him. The Sharing's a big cover organisation for the Yeerks, always trying to recruit new members with promises of innocent and wholesome family fun.
If only.
So it's us against them. Me, my best friend Marco, my cousin Rachel, her best friend Cassie, Tobias and Ax the Andalite, five kids and an alien - who in all fairness is just a kid himself - against a growing race of alien slugs who could be controlling anyone, and they want to take over the world. Eventually the Andalites will come again and help us, but so far we've heard nothing from them.
In fact, we hadn't heard anything from anyone in a while. There hadn't been any big missions, no new Yeerk plans revealed for quite some time, and after the disaster that was the last mission I think we were all fairly relieved. This meant of course that we hadn't all hung out together in a while and I certainly hadn't seen Tobias or Ax for a few days. See there's something I didn't tell you about Tobias, he's a red-tailed hawk. He was a kid, but with this morphing there are rules, and you can't stay in morph for more than two hours, Tobias had. Now he's a red-tailed hawk for the rest of his life. Except for those two hours every so often when he morphs into something else, or even back to his old human self.
Anyway, considering we had no saving the world duties to comply to, there Marco and I were blowing it up. Not literally of course, we were sitting in front of his TV playing video games, just what any typical teenage boys would be doing on a sunny Saturday morning. The plan was to go out later, hit the arcades, grab some food, maybe shoot some hoops. Yeah, that was the general plan until all the weirdness began, and after fighting aliens and turning into animals, weirdness is hard to achieve.
It all started when one of the monsters on the screen attacked me with some sort of green lightening, but instead of staying on the screen like it's supposed to, it came out of the screen, whipping over me and Marco before the attack ended, literally right into Marco's lounge. It had reached me and touched me, feeling a little like pins and needles, for some reason not causing anymore pain. Stunned, I looked warily at Marco, whose eyes were wide, staring at the TV, at me, then at his hands.
"That did just happen, right?" I asked, voice a little croaky.
He nodded slowly, "Uh huh,"
We looked at each other in utter disbelief for a few seconds before going on.
"But… how?" I managed.
"Maybe the monster's pissed you're winning," Trust Marco to make a joke out of it.
"Seriously, what on earth just happened?" I rolled my eyes.
Marco's eyes trained off me for a second, looking past my head.
"What the…" He trailed off.
I turned around to see what he was looking at, almost expecting the monster to be standing right there, but there was nothing, nothing there except the usual sofa, curtains and window looking out on the snowy street. Wait… snowy? What the hell was it doing snowing?!?! It was the middle of summer for God's sake, and half an hour earlier the Sun had been glaringly hot. I ran over to the window and opened it, sticking my arm out to see if I was just imagining things. Tiny wet flakes of snow fell softly on my arm, cold, sending brief chills down my spine, it hadn't started sticking to the ground yet, and I was no weatherman, but it seemed heavy enough that it might soon.
"Marco… why is it snowing in the middle of summer?"
"Who knows? Global warming?" He suggested. I gave him a confused furrowed brow look. Wouldn't that mean it stopped snowing as much? Then again he was probably joking.
"Wanna go out in it?" I flashed him a semi-wicked smile, probably over spooked and eager to get out of the house after the whole green lightning thing.
And so we did.
Not half an hour later we were running towards the mall, swaddled in warm clothes, spinning and laughing, letting the snow fall gracefully on us, leaving the green lightning drama behind us.
We eventually made our way to the arcade in high spirits, Marco and I went head to head on some gun machine, the radio played loudly in the background, drowning out everyone else's chatter. We were down to our last few quarters and I was totally beating him until something unexpectedly grabbed my shoulders from behind and made me jump a few feet in the air.
"Hey Jake!" the thing attached to my shoulders laughed as Marco took my shock as an opportunity to beat me. I turned around and glared at my cousin Rachel as the words Game Over flashed across my screen. She removed her hands from my shoulders and grinned at me sheepishly.
"Well, I guess we can safely say the better man won," Marco chuckled proudly.
"Whatever," I scowled, "You know I was totally winning. Can't help it if I'm a little jumpy after this morning,"
"What happened this morning?" Rachel asked curiously.
We quickly filled her in on the green lightning saga, but her being Rachel and us being us, I don't think she quite believed us. Instead I quickly changed the subject and asked her where Cassie was, after all it was her Rachel would normally be out with.
"Oh, we decided it would be nice to take Ax and Tobias out, so now Cassie and Tobias are supervising Ax in buying a donut," she explained.
"Doooo-nut," Marco and I simultaneously joked. Ax wasn't used to having a mouth to speak through, so when he was in human morph he made the most of it. That generally involved continuous eating and playing with words.
Rachel rolled her eyes, "Anyway, I saw you guys come in here and figured I'd join you, its been a while since we all hung out,"
I nodded, but I was already sliding another quarter into the machine, "I'll beat you this time Marco," I challenged as he took hold of his gun. Somewhere behind me I heard Rachel mutter something about boys and toys.
Yet again, I was doing great, beating Marco hands down, that was until there was some shortage of electrics. The screens went fuzzy, the radio turned off and a surge of energy shot through me, feeling just like pins and needles, just like the green lightning. I turned to the others, from their faces I could tell they'd felt it too.
"Why is weirdness following us around today? I don't like it, I don't like it one bit," Marco groaned.
"Oh chill out you wimp, it's probably just a power cut," Rachel said cool-headedly.
"Yeah, yeah that's why the lights are still on," Marco scowled, his voice full of sarcasm.
Rachel was about to retaliate when the machines crackled back into life and the radio turned on full blast. I tried to put it behind me, waiting for the game to start up again so I could kick Marco's ass, but it didn't. Instead it was just the grey and white snowstorm resembling fuzz you get on your TV when the receptions gone funny. I groaned before another surge of pins and needles shot through me, and I felt myself falling. Except I wasn't falling downwards, oh no, I was falling into the machine.
I screamed. I could hear Marco and Rachel screaming too. Whether they were screaming because I was falling into the machine or because they were as well, I didn't know, because then everything went black.
---
"Ow, ow, ow!" I moaned, raising my hand to rub the back of my head. In fact, I seemed to be in pain all over. My eyes were still shut, in such pain I had no desire to open them. I was expecting myself to wake up on the floor of the arcade with a crowd watching me, or maybe in hospital or my bed with Rachel and Marco gathered around ready to make some nice sardonic comments. Not exactly what I wanted to open my eyes to, nor what I did.
"Jake, you're up," Marco stated roughly, voice broken in something that sounded like confusion. No sarcasm, no joke like 'Enjoy your trip?', just a plain voice, nothing that sounded remarkably like Marco, and that meant things were bad, things were very, very bad.
I forced open my eyes only to have them flooded with light. I winced, and sat up, looking around. Definitely not what I was expecting.
I was in a forest, typically green and bushy, plenty of plants and trees, but none I recognised. The ground was soft and dusty. Marco stood up in front of me, still dressed in the warm clothes we'd dressed in for the snow. He looked at me as though waiting for some sort of explanation and I gazed back at him with the same confused expectancy. Why should I know what was going on any more than him?
"What happened?" I asked.
"We decided it would be nice to take a daytrip to the Amazon, dressed up in our snow clothes, and then knock you out," Well at least he was using sarcasm now, not that that was any more comforting.
"In other words you don't have a clue either?"
He shook his head sullenly.
"Is Rachel here?" I asked, changing the subject.
"Over there," He said, pointing behind me. I turned around to see Rachel lying on the ground a few feet behind me looking fairly unconscious. "She's okay; I checked her breathing and stuff,"
I nodded, still completely bemused at the day's events, half expecting to wake up and find it all a dream. But I knew better than that, everything dodgy that happened to us always turned out to be real.
That's why my eyes popped out and my jaw dropped open in complete and utter shock the minute a miniature orange T-rex strolled round the corner.
-- Even Gods Dream 2007
