Disclaimer: All things Animorphs belongs to K. A. Applegate and Scholastic.
Chapter One – "How it is supposed to go"
My name is Tobias.
Part human, part hawk, and, somehow, part Andalite. Confused yet? Trust me, it gets better.
Well, it has been three years since the war began. Three long, hard, bitter years. And now, Jake has seen a solution. He has seen an answer to the war. But, before I get ahead of myself, I best start from the beginning, and tell you how it all began. It began on a fateful Friday night, when Jake, Marco, Cassie, Rachel and myself got decided to walk home through the abandoned construction site across the main road from the mall.
Here we met a brave, but dying Andalite Prince by the name of Elfangor-Sirinal-Shamtul. Although I didn't know it at the time, but he was my father. I know, I told you it got better. Anyway, he told us of the Yeerk invasion and gave us the ability to fight, he gave us the ability to morph any living creature that we can touch. Soon after, the Yeerks caught him and Visser One, who, at the time, was Visser Three, executed him.
We found out that Jakes' brother, Tom, was a controller, so we went down to the Yeerk Pool to get him out. The Yeerk Pool is the closest thing to hell on Earth, and that's not an understatement. We, of course, failed. Tom didn't escape and I was trapped in the body of a Red-Tailed Hawk. But we did gain something, I suppose. The yeerks made the mistake of believing that we were Andalite soldiers, a lie that we used to our advantage for three years, until they finally discovered we were humans, and we went into hiding.
Over the course of the war we managed to rescue Elfangors' little brother, Aximili. We learned of the great and all-powerful beings the Ellimist and Crayak, who treat our war as a game, with the Ellimist on our side and Crayak backing the yeerks. We freed a couple of Hork-Bajir and led them to safety and in return, I recovered my morphing ability from the Ellimist. We freed Marcos' mother, the host of the previous Visser One. Protected the free Hork-Bajir from the yeerk onslaught and protected our families by moving them to the new valley. Well, all except for Jakes' family that is, Tom got to them before we did.
And that brings us to the plan, the answer. After we destroyed the Yeerks' ground based pool with the bombs supplied to us by the National Guard unit under command of Captain Olston, they destroyed most of our town so they could land their Pool Ship and feed the Yeerks on the ground while they build a new one. Opportunity number one presented itself, the government had set up a military base near our town to prepare for the start of the fight. We went to the base, and after a brief skirmish with the Yeerks, convinced the commanding officer to join his forces with ours and to provide a distraction. After a raid on the new pool, we found even more unexpected allies, the Taxxons. A race of dedicated cannibals who were sick of their way of life and saw the morphing power as a way out. So after those two meetings, we had almost three thousand allies who were willing to fight. And now, the prize is the Pool Ship. A prize more accessible than ever with the inclusion of Toms' Yeerk, the head of Pool Ship security.
The plan, as it stands, is to hide aboard Erek King, one of the Chee, a race of pacifist androids, whose creators died out millennia ago, and sneak onto the Pool Ship. As we predicted, Tom betrayed us, and the Visser ordered Erek, or Cassie, as he was posing as, to be fed to a Taxxon, me. That's where we are at the moment. But the rest of the plan is supposed to go like this: Jake observes what is happening on the bridge of the Pool Ship, while Erek and the rest of us hack the engine room and take control of the ship. Well, that's the plan anyway. So, as Rachel would say, lets do it. Speaking of Rachel, where the hell is she.
Oh, I almost forgot, the Animorphs. I almost forgot to mention who they are, and what they look like, so that if I ever get round to writing a book, I will have a record of them, although I most likely will not need one.
Jake is the leader, or 'Fearless Leader' as Marco puts it. Before the war Jake was a decent person, who loved basketball and video games and having pointless arguments with Marco over things like whether Spiderman could beat Batman, who's better at basketball and whether it is possible to taste a colour. I believe Marco thought that cheese tasted green, go figure. The first time I met Jake was when I was about to have my head flushed in a toilet, and he told them to back off, and they did. Its not that Jake was a tough guy at the start, but he had an air of authority about him, and you just did what ever he told you.
Jake is tall, not gangly tall, more well-built and big, he has brown hair and brown eyes, and I guess the girls think he's handsome, because he always has had a lot of attention from the girls.
Next is Marco, before the war I didn't know him very well, and he was kind of jerk to me, but I guess everyone was when I was in school. He's the joker of the group, as he will always tell some crap joke or glib remark before and after, and generally during, the fight. He and Rachel are always fighting with each other, I don't know whether they actually can't stand each other, or its just or shits and giggles. I don't know, don't care and that kind of understanding crap falls to Cassie.
Marco is short, and he is really conscious of that fact, and Rachel repeatedly teases him about it. He has a dark, Latino complexion and has long, dark hair and a very suspicious nature. When he was in school, he sent almost all his free time trying to annoy some poor girl.
The shortest of the group, and by far the most understanding, is Cassie, Jakes' girlfriend. Cassie has an amazing ability to understand people, and Jake uses this as one of our most effective abilities when it comes to making deals, although, her morals are so high and unshifting, that she can become impossibly set against something that we can't do it. Cassie's parents are both veterinarians, and Cassie follows suit, helping her dad out in the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center they run from their barn.
Cassie is an African-American, and has short black hair. She is short and stocky, and is usually found wearing jeans stained with about five different kinds of manure and dirt.
Next is Rachel. She's Jake's cousin and it shows, that family breeds strong people. Jake is a strong leader, and Rachel is the fearless warrior, always first to a fight and last to leave. I didn't really know her before the war, although that didn't stop me from having a crush on her. You could go as far as saying that she's my girlfriend, she's a girl and I'm a hawk, you thought Romeo and Juliet had it bad, with their families hating each other, try not being from the same species.
Rachel is beautiful; I mean it. She looks like a supermodel, she is tall, has long blonde hair, clear, sparkling blue eyes, a well defined figure, and the amazing ability to look good in any situation. That girl could be hit by a train, a bus, a tornado and a mud slide and come out without a hair out of place. She also has an unhealthy obsession with shopping, and gymnastics.
Now for our resident alien, Ax. Ax is Elfangors' little brother, and thus, my uncle. He is just an Aristh, or cadet, in the Andalite military, but he is already smarter than most of the scientists on our planet. Trust me, don't get him started on anything scientific, or you'll end up hitting him to make him stop because it is hurting your head.
If you've never seen an Andalite before, you would most likely be scared shitless by what you saw. Picture a large, blue dear, or small horse, with slimmer hooves, and a human torso with weak, thin arms with seven fingers. Then the real shock is the head. The shape is the same as a humans', but minus a mouth and a nose that is little more than three slits on the front of the face. Then there are the eyes. A big pair of normal, sparkly eyes, but the other pair is shocking. They are situated on top of a pair of stalks that can turn in every direction, making Andalites almost impossible to sneak up on.
And lastly there's me, of course, Bird-Boy. Before the war, I was the poor, pathetic loner, who was most likely to be picked on by the bullies; I was the bully magnet, always. I moved school a lot, so I didn't bother to make many friends. Because my father died and my mother ran out on me when I was little, I was passed between an abusive drunk of an uncle and an overworking slave driver of an aunt. During the course of the war I gained a lot of things, friends, an uncle who cared, a girlfriend and I even found out what happened to my family. My father is dead, but he was in fact Prince Elfangor himself, as I found out through a sleaze-ball of a lawyer controller. My mother, on the other hand, is still alive, she had an accident and was diagnosed with amnesia.
When you look at me in my normal form, you'll see a hawk with brown feathers down my back, with a rusty reddish-brown tail and a white chest and golden brown eyes that stare with a permanent scowl. But when I'm human, you'll see a tall, slightly gangly sixteen year old, with dirty-blonde hair and eyes, that I've been told by Rachel, never seem to have the same colour, but mostly sparkly green, like Ax's.