Discovery of Horror
I had seen a giant spaceship pull up next to the mountain, and begin Draconing a large bit of the mountain, so that it became a large cave. About a minute after it was done, Bug fighters appeared out of the big ship's hatch and flew into the cave. I saw the Big ship shimmer and disappear.
I believe, Tobias, that they are carving out a great cavern in the mountainside. I also
believe we should contact Prince Jake as soon as possible, especially as this cavern is within half a mile of the Center from which Jacqueline came. But most importantly of all, we should land, for Jaqueline and myself have approximately fifteen minutes before we become trapped in our morphs.
We landed, demorphed, and remorphed wolf. I asked Tobias why wolf. He told me wolves can run faster and longer than birds can fly. So he and Ax morphed.
I started to morph.
Just for fun, I made my fur grow down my back and around my neck, to look like a fur coat. Then I let fur grow everywhere on me, then my knees reversed direction. My nose bulged out in front of my eyes. Now I know what Pinocchio felt like.
Suddenly the morph was done. I didn't have any trouble controlling it, because Jake had forced me to practice all of my morphs before this.
We raced through the woods, at top wolf speed. We ran for half an hour. When we reached Jake's house, I demorphed, then remorphed as the little girl, and went inside.
Jake's mom told me that I could find Jake in his bedroom.
Jake's house was really nice. It was two stories, had nice carpeting and beautiful wallpaper. I walked down the hall, and opened the second door on the right, like Jake's mom had told me. Jake was sitting on his bed, reading a comic book. He looked up.
"Hi Jake!"
"Hello, Jackie." Jake said uneasily. "What are you doing here?"
"Well, Tobias, Ax and I were…"
Jake looked up sharply. I stopped, then heard a voice.
"Hey Jake, what's up?"
I turned around, and saw what looked like an older version of Jake.
"Jake, who's your girlfriend?" Tom teased. I knew it was Tom, Jake's brother, the controller.
"Tom, this is Jacqueline. Jackie, this is my brother, Tom."
Tom bowed, then took my hand and kissed it.
"A pleasure to meet you, my lady. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go and change the tires on my Father's noble steed. Farewell!" He laughed. I gave him a weak smile. Jake forced a laugh that sounded more like a cough.
I froze, until I heard the door slam.
"Tobias and I were wondering if you could get as many of your friends together as possible and come for a hike with us in the woods? We're meeting where we saw those two trucks the other day. Can you come?"
Jake looked puzzled, then shocked.
"Sure. Can I bring Cassie along? And Erek too?"
"I think you should bring him, even though he would probably leave early. We're going to do some mountain climbing, and he hates mountain climbing. Bye!
Meet you there!" I walked out of his room, to bump into Tom in the hall.
"Were you listening to us?" I asked him, laughingly.
"No, of course not." Tom said, sarcastically. His eyes looked a little suspicious.
I walked out, wondering: 1. What the Yeerks were doing, and 2.How we could stop them without Rachel and Marco.
We met, Ax, Tobias, Cassie, Jake, Erek and I got together where the trucks had crashed a few days earlier.
"Now, Jackie, Tobias, what is this all about? What is the big hurry?"
Tobias, Ax and I explained as quickly as possible what we had seen.
"A cavern? That close to the Center? Ax, what do you think about this?"
I don't know, Prince Jake. I really don't know.
"Listen, Erek, what's been going on at that Center?"
"Jake, 97% percent of the kids are controllers, and the rest have joined the Sharing. Whatever project the Yeerks are working on there, they've almost completed it."
"Then our only answer is to get inside that mountain! We have to see what is going on in there." said Cassie.
Cassie.
Time froze again for me as I thought.
Cassie. She was really pretty. Jake liked her, and I could see why. Her love for animals, her quietness, her sensitiveness, but she was firm about her beliefs. She was a great person.
I snapped back to attention.
Jake said, "Ok, real quick, we need two people to fly up there and check it out." He picked five pieces of grass, and shortened them to the same size. He then made two of them shorter then the rest. "Short straws go in."
Cassie picked. Long. Ax picked. Long. Tobias picked. Long. I picked out of the two left, and got the short one.
"Looks like it's you and me, Jake."
I started morphing. First, I held my arms out in the air. My fingers became feathers, then feathers stretched down my arms. My hair turned dark grey, and melted into my back. I was covered in feathers. Then my feet morphed into talons. My legs shrank into my body and became bird's legs. My eyes grew big. Then I shrank down to bird size. Finally, my beak sprouted from my face.
I noticed that Jake hadn't started to morph. He was staring at me.
In fact, everyone was staring at me.
What! What! Did I pick the wrong morph or what? What's wrong?
Ax was staring at me with all four eyes. It was strange.
Jacqueline, you are very good at morphing, and I believe the others are shocked at seeing you morph so well. Ax told me in private thought-speak.
Oh.
Jake morphed his falcon. I could see the differences in our morphing.
His morph sort of happened all at once. He shrank while feathers sort of appeared all over his body at once. He morphed slower than me, too.
We flew up above everyone else, trying to rise as fast as possible. Finally, we got up to the level of the cavern. We saw long tunnels into the mountain side, and heard Dracon beams firing at the end of these caverns. While we were circling, we saw that the road from the Center to here was filled with trucks. Some had different company names, like Pepsi and McDonalds. They pulled up underneath the mountain.
What are they doing? Jake said.
I have no idea.
The lead truck, which was from Burger King, stopped in front of this big boulder, and the driver got out. He stepped up behind the boulder, and fiddled with a control panel. The boulder disappeared. Completely.,
A couple bugs fell to the ground where the boulder had been.
Hologram with force field. Jake informed me. The bugs crawled on top of what they thought was a real boulder.
The boulder-hologram had covered the entrance to a huge tunnel, that led up, into the mountain. There were about twenty trucks all together.
Let's hitch a ride. Jake said to me.
Huh? Oh.
I dove down, and landed on the last truck. Making sure no one was watching, I demorphed and morphed to fly as fast as I could. Jake did the same. We were both flies by the time the truck pulled into the tunnel.
I could sense we were going upward, at a slant. Like we were travelling up a big hill. I smelled something awful. Suddenly, the tunnel we were in opened up into a huge space. I could sense many humans, and some Hork-Bajir.
Humans, Hork-Bajir, a weird smell. What do you think is going on, Jake?
I've smelled that before. Jake said. His thought-speak sounded grim.
Where?
The Yeerk Pool.
We flew into a closet where we didn't sense any people.
I will demorph first, then you.
What morph will we be using?
Umm. Not battle morphs, but we need better senses then this.
How about bats?
Yeah. Bats.
Jake demorphed, then morphed a bat really quickly. I did the same.
We flew out, echolocating, trying to stay inconspicuous.
The bat was cool. It was almost blind, but when it gave off it's high-pitched squeaks, you could sense everything for a split second.
I fired round after round of squeaks. Back came round after round of line-drawings. It was like the best artist in the world took a pen and made sketches of this place. It was cool seeing stuff this way; so cool, in fact, that I didn't even notice what I was seeing at first. When I did notice, I was shocked.
Human controllers and Hork-Bajir everywhere. And more than half of the Controllers were kids! Kids I used to know!
There was Rebecca Stevenson, the girl whom I'd watched get turned into a controller that night in her bedroom. She was carrying boxes over to this big pit, that was still being Draconed out by other kids from the Center. Those kids were using Dracon beams to cut through the rock, making a huge pit, about ten feet deep and thirty feet wide. There were also some kids hammering down boards, sort of making two piers over the pit. Still other kids and adults were making things that looked like…
Cages? Jake, why would they want a pit, and piers, and cages?
It was a few minutes before Jake answered me again.
A Yeerk Pool, Jacqueline. They are building another Yeerk Pool.
After-school jobs
We flew back down the tunnel, and landed in the woods. We morphed back to human, then again to wolf. We ran as fast as we could back to the others.
As soon as we could see them, we started calling out to them.
AX! CASSIE! HURRY UP AND MORPH TO WOLF! WE HAVE SOMETHING VERY IMPORTANT TO TELL YOU! I yelled in thought-speak.
Cassie screamed. I think I startled her a little bit. But then she started to morph to wolf. Ax too.
Cassie was pretty good at morphing, but I had the feeling that she wasn't as good as me.
Her hair turned silver, and her knees changed directions.
Ax was even cooler to watch.
His four legs became paws. His arms kind of melted into his body, while his fur on his tail grew long and shaggy. His tail-blade sort of folded into itself, and his tail grew shorter. His nose(or whatever you want to call those slits on his face that he breaths through) stretched outward and split open. His stalk eyes slurped into his head.
We ran back through the woods. (Boy! All this running through the woods gets really boring after a while, you know? But it was necessary.)
We reached the mountain, only to realise that the tunnel was blocked by the rock hologram. It may have only been a hologram with a force-field, but it was still impenetrable. We demorphed, and tried to morph into birds and fly up to the big opening, but that was blocked up too. We couldn't find anyway into the mountain. So we gave up.
As we flew home, we talked.
Why would they want another Yeerk Pool? The one they have is huge enough. Jake wondered.
Yeah, and why would they want it up here in the mountains?
As we flew, each of us about a hundred yards away from each other, we each circled around and around.
Prince Jake, they may not have room for the many Yeerks they need in just one Yeerk Pool. There were exactly nineteen thousand four hundred and forty-two Yeerk Pools on the Yeerk home world before Andalites discovered it. That was when Yeerk technology was primitive at best, and their hosts were only semi-intelligent Gedds.
But why up here? In the mountains?
I do not know, Jacqueline.
Ax, why don't you call me Jackie like everyone else does?
Jacqueline, why do you not call me Aximili like all Andalites on my home-world do?
Jake laughed in thought-speak.
Ax, you just made a funny joke! Congratulations! Boy, is Marco going to be mad that he missed Ax's first joke!
We went home and had lunch with our families. Except me.
I went into town(in my human morph) and started asking around for an after-school job.
I didn't find a job, but I did wash the windows of a gas station, and got paid five bucks for it. On the way out of the station, I overheard two men talking. One was saying:
"Now, if we can just get some kids to join up, we can get them over to help with the work. Start putting up signs that we're hiring, alright?"
Alright! I would just follow the men, and get myself a job!
I followed the man with the posters for a long, long time. He finally stopped at the beach, where some kind of party was going on. A lot of kids were playing volley-ball. Some were at this huge grill that was set up, heaping their plates with barbecued chicken. He finally hung up one of the posters. I went over and read it.
It said:
NOW HIRING!
All members be on the alert!
Now Hiring kids ages 12-18
Exciting new Job!
Tell all your friends about a cool new way to hook up with our club, and make some extra money! All you need to do to apply is come!
FRIDAY FROM 4-7
WE WILL BE HIRING!
BRING ALL YOUR FRIENDS!
We need kids like you to help us out!
Fun! Excitement!
The Sharing
I read through the poster excitedly.
When I got to the last words, I frowned.
The Sharing?
The Yeerk Organisation?
The Sharing was hiring? Why? Why would it want kids?
It had just taken over the Center, with all the kids there.
Why did it want more kids?
I looked more closely around the park.
Tom! Tom, Jake's brother was talking to some friends! Tom was a controller. I walked over to him.
"Hey! Hi Tom!"
Tom looked up, startled.
"Hi, Jackie. What are you doing here?"
"Looking for an after-school job. I saw the poster, and I was wondering if you knew anything about the job. It doesn't say exactly what the job is, or how much it pays."
Tom smiled.
"Of course. The job pays about ten bucks an hour. All you have to do is help load trucks with stuff, and ride with the trucks to this place in the mountains. It's really neat."
"Ten bucks an hour! Why do you need kids to do it? Why not the adult members?"
"Because, kids have more spare time."
Great. That answered my questions.
I was starting to get frustrated.
"Tom, you think you could get me some info to take back to my parents?"]
"Sure! Give me your address.""
Uh-oh. Better think quick.
"I'll, um, I'll be seeing Jake at school. Why don't you just give it to him?"
"Alright. Hey, would you like to join me and some of my friends here for a little game of volley-ball?"
"I have to be back home by five. What time is it?"
"About four-forty-five. You better split."
"Yeah. Hey, thanks! I'll see you all later!"
I walked casually away. Once I was far enough away, I hid and demorphed. I remorphed the osprey, and flew away.
I'd have to check out this job offer.
What was the reason behind this scheme? Why would they need kids to help load and unload trucks? I mean, surely they had enough controllers to do that.
I would have to check it out.
I had seen a giant spaceship pull up next to the mountain, and begin Draconing a large bit of the mountain, so that it became a large cave. About a minute after it was done, Bug fighters appeared out of the big ship's hatch and flew into the cave. I saw the Big ship shimmer and disappear.
I believe, Tobias, that they are carving out a great cavern in the mountainside. I also
believe we should contact Prince Jake as soon as possible, especially as this cavern is within half a mile of the Center from which Jacqueline came. But most importantly of all, we should land, for Jaqueline and myself have approximately fifteen minutes before we become trapped in our morphs.
We landed, demorphed, and remorphed wolf. I asked Tobias why wolf. He told me wolves can run faster and longer than birds can fly. So he and Ax morphed.
I started to morph.
Just for fun, I made my fur grow down my back and around my neck, to look like a fur coat. Then I let fur grow everywhere on me, then my knees reversed direction. My nose bulged out in front of my eyes. Now I know what Pinocchio felt like.
Suddenly the morph was done. I didn't have any trouble controlling it, because Jake had forced me to practice all of my morphs before this.
We raced through the woods, at top wolf speed. We ran for half an hour. When we reached Jake's house, I demorphed, then remorphed as the little girl, and went inside.
Jake's mom told me that I could find Jake in his bedroom.
Jake's house was really nice. It was two stories, had nice carpeting and beautiful wallpaper. I walked down the hall, and opened the second door on the right, like Jake's mom had told me. Jake was sitting on his bed, reading a comic book. He looked up.
"Hi Jake!"
"Hello, Jackie." Jake said uneasily. "What are you doing here?"
"Well, Tobias, Ax and I were…"
Jake looked up sharply. I stopped, then heard a voice.
"Hey Jake, what's up?"
I turned around, and saw what looked like an older version of Jake.
"Jake, who's your girlfriend?" Tom teased. I knew it was Tom, Jake's brother, the controller.
"Tom, this is Jacqueline. Jackie, this is my brother, Tom."
Tom bowed, then took my hand and kissed it.
"A pleasure to meet you, my lady. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go and change the tires on my Father's noble steed. Farewell!" He laughed. I gave him a weak smile. Jake forced a laugh that sounded more like a cough.
I froze, until I heard the door slam.
"Tobias and I were wondering if you could get as many of your friends together as possible and come for a hike with us in the woods? We're meeting where we saw those two trucks the other day. Can you come?"
Jake looked puzzled, then shocked.
"Sure. Can I bring Cassie along? And Erek too?"
"I think you should bring him, even though he would probably leave early. We're going to do some mountain climbing, and he hates mountain climbing. Bye!
Meet you there!" I walked out of his room, to bump into Tom in the hall.
"Were you listening to us?" I asked him, laughingly.
"No, of course not." Tom said, sarcastically. His eyes looked a little suspicious.
I walked out, wondering: 1. What the Yeerks were doing, and 2.How we could stop them without Rachel and Marco.
We met, Ax, Tobias, Cassie, Jake, Erek and I got together where the trucks had crashed a few days earlier.
"Now, Jackie, Tobias, what is this all about? What is the big hurry?"
Tobias, Ax and I explained as quickly as possible what we had seen.
"A cavern? That close to the Center? Ax, what do you think about this?"
I don't know, Prince Jake. I really don't know.
"Listen, Erek, what's been going on at that Center?"
"Jake, 97% percent of the kids are controllers, and the rest have joined the Sharing. Whatever project the Yeerks are working on there, they've almost completed it."
"Then our only answer is to get inside that mountain! We have to see what is going on in there." said Cassie.
Cassie.
Time froze again for me as I thought.
Cassie. She was really pretty. Jake liked her, and I could see why. Her love for animals, her quietness, her sensitiveness, but she was firm about her beliefs. She was a great person.
I snapped back to attention.
Jake said, "Ok, real quick, we need two people to fly up there and check it out." He picked five pieces of grass, and shortened them to the same size. He then made two of them shorter then the rest. "Short straws go in."
Cassie picked. Long. Ax picked. Long. Tobias picked. Long. I picked out of the two left, and got the short one.
"Looks like it's you and me, Jake."
I started morphing. First, I held my arms out in the air. My fingers became feathers, then feathers stretched down my arms. My hair turned dark grey, and melted into my back. I was covered in feathers. Then my feet morphed into talons. My legs shrank into my body and became bird's legs. My eyes grew big. Then I shrank down to bird size. Finally, my beak sprouted from my face.
I noticed that Jake hadn't started to morph. He was staring at me.
In fact, everyone was staring at me.
What! What! Did I pick the wrong morph or what? What's wrong?
Ax was staring at me with all four eyes. It was strange.
Jacqueline, you are very good at morphing, and I believe the others are shocked at seeing you morph so well. Ax told me in private thought-speak.
Oh.
Jake morphed his falcon. I could see the differences in our morphing.
His morph sort of happened all at once. He shrank while feathers sort of appeared all over his body at once. He morphed slower than me, too.
We flew up above everyone else, trying to rise as fast as possible. Finally, we got up to the level of the cavern. We saw long tunnels into the mountain side, and heard Dracon beams firing at the end of these caverns. While we were circling, we saw that the road from the Center to here was filled with trucks. Some had different company names, like Pepsi and McDonalds. They pulled up underneath the mountain.
What are they doing? Jake said.
I have no idea.
The lead truck, which was from Burger King, stopped in front of this big boulder, and the driver got out. He stepped up behind the boulder, and fiddled with a control panel. The boulder disappeared. Completely.,
A couple bugs fell to the ground where the boulder had been.
Hologram with force field. Jake informed me. The bugs crawled on top of what they thought was a real boulder.
The boulder-hologram had covered the entrance to a huge tunnel, that led up, into the mountain. There were about twenty trucks all together.
Let's hitch a ride. Jake said to me.
Huh? Oh.
I dove down, and landed on the last truck. Making sure no one was watching, I demorphed and morphed to fly as fast as I could. Jake did the same. We were both flies by the time the truck pulled into the tunnel.
I could sense we were going upward, at a slant. Like we were travelling up a big hill. I smelled something awful. Suddenly, the tunnel we were in opened up into a huge space. I could sense many humans, and some Hork-Bajir.
Humans, Hork-Bajir, a weird smell. What do you think is going on, Jake?
I've smelled that before. Jake said. His thought-speak sounded grim.
Where?
The Yeerk Pool.
We flew into a closet where we didn't sense any people.
I will demorph first, then you.
What morph will we be using?
Umm. Not battle morphs, but we need better senses then this.
How about bats?
Yeah. Bats.
Jake demorphed, then morphed a bat really quickly. I did the same.
We flew out, echolocating, trying to stay inconspicuous.
The bat was cool. It was almost blind, but when it gave off it's high-pitched squeaks, you could sense everything for a split second.
I fired round after round of squeaks. Back came round after round of line-drawings. It was like the best artist in the world took a pen and made sketches of this place. It was cool seeing stuff this way; so cool, in fact, that I didn't even notice what I was seeing at first. When I did notice, I was shocked.
Human controllers and Hork-Bajir everywhere. And more than half of the Controllers were kids! Kids I used to know!
There was Rebecca Stevenson, the girl whom I'd watched get turned into a controller that night in her bedroom. She was carrying boxes over to this big pit, that was still being Draconed out by other kids from the Center. Those kids were using Dracon beams to cut through the rock, making a huge pit, about ten feet deep and thirty feet wide. There were also some kids hammering down boards, sort of making two piers over the pit. Still other kids and adults were making things that looked like…
Cages? Jake, why would they want a pit, and piers, and cages?
It was a few minutes before Jake answered me again.
A Yeerk Pool, Jacqueline. They are building another Yeerk Pool.
After-school jobs
We flew back down the tunnel, and landed in the woods. We morphed back to human, then again to wolf. We ran as fast as we could back to the others.
As soon as we could see them, we started calling out to them.
AX! CASSIE! HURRY UP AND MORPH TO WOLF! WE HAVE SOMETHING VERY IMPORTANT TO TELL YOU! I yelled in thought-speak.
Cassie screamed. I think I startled her a little bit. But then she started to morph to wolf. Ax too.
Cassie was pretty good at morphing, but I had the feeling that she wasn't as good as me.
Her hair turned silver, and her knees changed directions.
Ax was even cooler to watch.
His four legs became paws. His arms kind of melted into his body, while his fur on his tail grew long and shaggy. His tail-blade sort of folded into itself, and his tail grew shorter. His nose(or whatever you want to call those slits on his face that he breaths through) stretched outward and split open. His stalk eyes slurped into his head.
We ran back through the woods. (Boy! All this running through the woods gets really boring after a while, you know? But it was necessary.)
We reached the mountain, only to realise that the tunnel was blocked by the rock hologram. It may have only been a hologram with a force-field, but it was still impenetrable. We demorphed, and tried to morph into birds and fly up to the big opening, but that was blocked up too. We couldn't find anyway into the mountain. So we gave up.
As we flew home, we talked.
Why would they want another Yeerk Pool? The one they have is huge enough. Jake wondered.
Yeah, and why would they want it up here in the mountains?
As we flew, each of us about a hundred yards away from each other, we each circled around and around.
Prince Jake, they may not have room for the many Yeerks they need in just one Yeerk Pool. There were exactly nineteen thousand four hundred and forty-two Yeerk Pools on the Yeerk home world before Andalites discovered it. That was when Yeerk technology was primitive at best, and their hosts were only semi-intelligent Gedds.
But why up here? In the mountains?
I do not know, Jacqueline.
Ax, why don't you call me Jackie like everyone else does?
Jacqueline, why do you not call me Aximili like all Andalites on my home-world do?
Jake laughed in thought-speak.
Ax, you just made a funny joke! Congratulations! Boy, is Marco going to be mad that he missed Ax's first joke!
We went home and had lunch with our families. Except me.
I went into town(in my human morph) and started asking around for an after-school job.
I didn't find a job, but I did wash the windows of a gas station, and got paid five bucks for it. On the way out of the station, I overheard two men talking. One was saying:
"Now, if we can just get some kids to join up, we can get them over to help with the work. Start putting up signs that we're hiring, alright?"
Alright! I would just follow the men, and get myself a job!
I followed the man with the posters for a long, long time. He finally stopped at the beach, where some kind of party was going on. A lot of kids were playing volley-ball. Some were at this huge grill that was set up, heaping their plates with barbecued chicken. He finally hung up one of the posters. I went over and read it.
It said:
NOW HIRING!
All members be on the alert!
Now Hiring kids ages 12-18
Exciting new Job!
Tell all your friends about a cool new way to hook up with our club, and make some extra money! All you need to do to apply is come!
FRIDAY FROM 4-7
WE WILL BE HIRING!
BRING ALL YOUR FRIENDS!
We need kids like you to help us out!
Fun! Excitement!
The Sharing
I read through the poster excitedly.
When I got to the last words, I frowned.
The Sharing?
The Yeerk Organisation?
The Sharing was hiring? Why? Why would it want kids?
It had just taken over the Center, with all the kids there.
Why did it want more kids?
I looked more closely around the park.
Tom! Tom, Jake's brother was talking to some friends! Tom was a controller. I walked over to him.
"Hey! Hi Tom!"
Tom looked up, startled.
"Hi, Jackie. What are you doing here?"
"Looking for an after-school job. I saw the poster, and I was wondering if you knew anything about the job. It doesn't say exactly what the job is, or how much it pays."
Tom smiled.
"Of course. The job pays about ten bucks an hour. All you have to do is help load trucks with stuff, and ride with the trucks to this place in the mountains. It's really neat."
"Ten bucks an hour! Why do you need kids to do it? Why not the adult members?"
"Because, kids have more spare time."
Great. That answered my questions.
I was starting to get frustrated.
"Tom, you think you could get me some info to take back to my parents?"]
"Sure! Give me your address.""
Uh-oh. Better think quick.
"I'll, um, I'll be seeing Jake at school. Why don't you just give it to him?"
"Alright. Hey, would you like to join me and some of my friends here for a little game of volley-ball?"
"I have to be back home by five. What time is it?"
"About four-forty-five. You better split."
"Yeah. Hey, thanks! I'll see you all later!"
I walked casually away. Once I was far enough away, I hid and demorphed. I remorphed the osprey, and flew away.
I'd have to check out this job offer.
What was the reason behind this scheme? Why would they need kids to help load and unload trucks? I mean, surely they had enough controllers to do that.
I would have to check it out.