Chapter Seven

I flapped my wings hard, desperately trying to gain some altitude. The others were struggling too. It had been easier for them to come down off of the plateau than it was to fly back up it. Especially at night.

Jason was a Quetzalcoatlus. A massive flying reptile, as tall as a giraffe, with a wingspan like a jumbo jet. Emily was just a few hundred feet behind us, a pteranodon.

Menderash was a similar pterasaur with a bizarre shaped head. Jason said it was called a Tapejara.

{So,} I said as we struggled to gain altitude. {"Dinomorphs"? Could you BE any more of an Animorphs fanboy?}

Emily snickered in thought-speak. {Not if he tried.}

{I thought it sounded cool,} he said indignantly.

{Jeeze, how high is this plateau?} I asked.

{Approximately 8, 473 Earth-Meters or 27,799 Earth-Feet tall,} Menderash piped up.

{That's almost the height of Everest!} I said in surprise. {I can't believe the air isn't thin up there.}

{The atmosphere is thicker apparently,} Jason said.

It was true. I could feel that the air was thinning, but it hadn't dipped to levels that were anywhere near the discomfort levels for humans. If anything, it was a freeing sensation. Ever since I had wound up on the island, the atmosphere had seemed almost…Too thick. Not so much that it was unlivable, but it was like being at those "below sea level" points on the planet like death valley.

{It is more oxygen-rich as well,} Menderash said. {Still breathable, thankfully, but the percentage is distinctly different than the Oxygen-Nitrogen atmosphere that modern humans breath.}

We breached the cloud layer, and then suddenly caught a strong updraft that carried us several hundred feet up. No flapping.

{We've reached the jetstream,} Jason announced. {We can ride this current up and over the plateau.}

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A few hours later we were circling a massive domed structure. Jason, Emily, and Menderash had spent the last few hours filling me in some of the things that they had been doing since arriving on the planet.

Muk-Luk the Kelbrid had accompanied us, but had been stoic and quiet. This was apparently the norm.

We landed near the edge of the dome and began demorphing, resuming human shape.

As we did two shapes suddenly bounded out of the forest to us.

{It's cool,} Jason said. {George, Martha! STAY}

The Deinonychus froze.

{We've gotten them to obey simple thought-speak commands,} Emily said. {Doesn't work in human form though.}

{Thought-Speak includes universal symbols as well as words,} Menderash said. {The Deinonychus are intelligent enough to understand the symbols, but not necessarily the words.}

My Nyctosaurus morph melted away.

"Do you want to acquire one?" Jason asked. "Menderash and I acquired George. Emily has Martha. She's the drabber one."

"Well," I said. "Feminist solidarity needs to win out, I said cautiously approaching the dinosaur, which, for all the World looked like a velociraptor from Jurassic Park. The male was a sort of yellowish-orange with reddish-orange stripes and blue streaks on it's snout. The female was darker orange, almost brown, with brown stripes.

I gingerly approached her. She snarled and snapped at me. I noticed Jason was morphing into an exactly duplicate of "George".

{Hold} he said. The deinonychus held still. I placed my hand gently on "Martha's" back. Her eyes glazed over as her DNA passed into me.

{Good,} Jason said.

The Deinonychus broke the trance ten seconds after I broke contact. The dinosaurs circled me, uncertainly.

{Don't be alarmed,} Jason said. {I'm keeping an eye on them, but they're very smart. They seem to get that acquiring is sort of…The pack initiation if you will. We let you acquire Martha, so you're pack now.}

Both dinosaurs sniffed at me rather closely, then huffed, as though I didn't impress them. They let out a series of short chirps.

{They're hungry,} Jason said. {We didn't hunt together today, cuz we were off fighting the One.}

"There's still some fish in the fridge," Emily said. "I'll get it."

{Take Melissa with you. Might as well get her Morph Clones in ASAP.}

"There's a fridge in there?" I asked.

"We found a lot of neat stuff in the middle dome, which is storage. Set up a sort of…Living room in the main dome, though we're pretty sure that it's supposed to be a science lab. It clones our morphs every time we step inside though."

"All our morphs?" I inquired as we approached the door.

"One time only," Emily said. "But every new acquisition gets cloned too. The Ouranosaurs that we picked up in the desert should be cloned tonight along with, like, all of your morphs."

"I have a Hork-Bajir morph," I commented. "Toby Hamee. The seer."

"Huh," Emily said. "Well…I guess a Hork-Bajir fits in as much as anything else does. They are kinda saurian. The clones are artificially aged and then released into the wild. We saw my horse morph a few weeks after it was cloned, though no sign of any of the other cloned morphs. Press the button to the right of the door."

I blinked in surprise but did as she asked. Nothing happened.

"Yeah," Emily said. "Doesn't work for Melissa either."

{Debunks the theory that it detected Menderash's nothlitism then,} Jason said.

"What?" I asked.

Emily pressed the button.

{Authorized DNA pattern detected,} A mechanical thought-speak voice said. The door slid open.

"It only let's Jason and myself in," she said sheepishly. "We're not quite sure why."

{Unscanned Naltron Cell Storage Detected,} a voice said as Emily walked in. {DNA sample scanning commencing. Complete. Biodiversity update.}

"And there's the Ouranosaurus," Emily said pointing towards a tube at the far end.

I stepped through and the thought-speak voice repeated what it had said before.

Fourteen more tubes emerged from the ground on the far end of the room, which had tables, and what looked like beanbag chairs casually strewn about. A single refrigerator with a see-through door was off to the side. Emily walked over to that.

"Last week," she said. "Jason and I were…Um…We were alone together in the forest, and we ran into this thing he called a 'baryonyx'. It's sort of like a cross between a grizzly bear and a crocodile. We acquired it's DNA and have been using the morph to catch fish as a supplement to our diet. We caught a lot, and this fridge is also a stasis chamber, so stuff doesn't go bad."

She pulled out a hunk of what looked sort of like salmon. She walked over to the door and departed with it…Presumably to feed it to the Deinonychuses. I was hungry as well, but far more interested in the tubes on the wall. One did indeed contain Emily's Ouranosaurus morph. But the other tubes…

One had a Spinosaurus fetus, the next, a baby Gooty's Tarantula, Sumatran Rhinocerous, White Lion, White Alligator, Angonoka, Golden Bamboo Lemur, Golden Zebra, Snowy Owl, the Nyctosaurus, the newly added Deinonychus. The mollusk and loch-ness morphs, which I was certain Jason could identify for me, and last, but certainly not least…A baby Hork-Bajir.

"Wow," I breathed. All my morphs before me, in one place. It was a little weird.

"Nice morphs," Jason said behind me, making me jump a little.

"Thanks," I said. "What are these two?" I asked curiously, and briefly described the island I had landed on and the morphs I had picked up there.

"Ammonite," Jason said. "The cephalopod is called an Ammonite. As for that…That's a plesiosaur of some kind. Wish I could be more specific, but there were a lot of plesiosaur sub-species. Elasmasaurus, pliosaurus, nothosaurus, leopluridon, it could even be an unknown plesiosaur. I just can't tell at that stage of development."

"Huh," I commented.

"You found Melissa!" a new voice declared.

We spun around and there was Erica the Chee standing in the doorway. Emily had let her in.

"Yep," I said, grinning. "I've been found!"

"I've found something too," she said grinning.

"Oh?" Emily asked.

"I think I know where the Pemalite research base is," Erica said.

"Melissa and the thing we came here for?" Jason said. "Oh this is a good day."

I suddenly got the weird feeling Jason had just jinxed us.