Chapter Two

As told by Aximili

Dark, damp, dark, damp and to top it off it was dark. But not dark enough to see the tiny cell that I was in. Too small. Way too small. You see, we andalites are claustrophobic, and hate to be in confined spaces. That is why I was here, in the cell of no escape. Specially prepared for the "Andalite bandits" that had plagued the Yeerk Empire for nearly 2 years.

I was one of those bandits, but not all of us were andalites.5 humans joined the fight with me. My brother, Prince Elfangor-Sinural-Shamtul gave the humans the morphing technology of the andalites, against the law of his own people. And thank goodness that he did. The humans I have been fighting with are perhaps the only reason why this very strategically decisive planet has not fallen to the yeerks.

But, perhaps the countless battles were in vane? Our last battle to gain actual control over a yeerk fortress backfired into 2 of our members, my prince, and me Jake, being captured. To some sadistic side of the Visser One's personality, he decided to torture us, rather than infest us. Prince Jake had managed to quickly morph back to human and then back to tiger before becoming a nothlit and behind the Visser's back. But it didn't matter. The situation was hopeless.

Prince Jake? I asked him in the adjoining cell. Fortunately, the Visser was careless enough to forget about a thought speech force-field barrier between cells.

Ya? He said grimly. Even if he was a human youth with no military training, he was my prince, and a very good one at that. If he were an andalite, he could become a destroyer ship's captain, with a bit of luck.

I am scared. I admitted. I was, in a sense beyond normal comprehension.

Me too, Ax-man, me too. He replied. Our only hope was that the remaining 4 of us could pull off a rescue attempt in time, which seemed impossibly difficult.

I stared blankly at the wall, ignoring the wave of fear because of the situation. Why? Why can't we escape? Why must all our efforts go unrewarded?

And suddenly, I wasn't staring blankly at the wall. I was looking at a pine tree, no, several hundred of them. I was free! I somehow accomplished what I thought was impossible to do! It didn't seem real enough to be reality, but who cared? The claustrophobia was gone. The fear was gone. I was free!

Wait, I couldn't be. The Ellimist and the Crayak played a game with rules in it. This had to be against the rules for one of them. It just had to be. But then, who could have done it?

ME.

Ellimist? I asked suspiciously. As Marco would say, it scared me half to death. But, taking a sidestep, what if you get scared half to death twice? I have always wondered about that.

YES. I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE THINKING, BUT THIS MOVE IS PERFECTLY LEGAL IN OUR GAME. YOU ARE FREE, IN FACT, FREE OF YOUR CURRENT TIME IN HISTORY. CRAYAK ACCEPTS THAT YOU BE PLACED 430 YEARS FROM NOW IN THE FUTURE FOR YOUR FREEDOM.

I pondered this for a moment. Will I be returned to my own time?

The Ellimist chuckled. OF COURSE! WELL, ONLY WHEN YOU HAVE RESTORED THE BALANCE IN THE FURTURE. CRAYAK'S SIDE OF THE BARGAIN WAS TO PLACE A YEERK FORCE UP AGAINST THE LAST HUMANS.

Dying of technological weakness? I chuckled at my own joke. It was a mean thing to say, but to put it simply, humans were very primitive. It was understandable that the first of their modern species came about 2 million years ago, but still, they were primitive. (Later on, I had learned that they were only 20,000 years old! Almost impossible by evolutionary standard, yet, true.)

NO, THE CONTRARY. DIEING OF TECHNALOGICAL STRENGTH. THEY HAD SURPASSED THE ANDALITES IN SPACE TECHNOLOGY 100 YEARS BEFORE THE TIME YOU ARE BEING SENT.

What? It was impossible. But then again, nothing was technically impossible from what I had seen.

YOU KNOW PERFECTLY WELL THAT I'M TELLING THE TRUTH. NOW, YOU WILL BE SENT ALONG WITH THE REST OF YOUR BAND, AS THEY SAY. MEET THE HUMANS AS EQUALS, EVEN THOUGH THEY ARE VASTLY SUPERIOR IN 400 YEARS. THEY WILL BE EXPECTING YOU, AND EXPECTING YOU TO FIGHT ALONGSIDE WITH THEM. GOOD LUCK.

And then, in the semi-reality I was in, a blue vortex about 5 feet in radius appeared before me. It seemed like a quantum anomaly of some sorts, but there was no way to tell. I stepped through into the blue disk and into blackness. I plunged.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

As told by John Leeroy

"So what your saying is that these Animorphs, or, whatever you call them, are coming now to restore the balance of this timeline?" I asked, looking frightfully into the blue man's eyes.

I was sitting in one of the caves in the mountains of the great northern plains of Lapios. About 700 people were killed by the attack of the mysterious menaces 4 days before, and we were not going to take a risk of loosing any more of the precious few humans we had left. So, we set up somewhat primitive camps in the enormous caves, and began searches through every database ever constructed to find any info on the Animorphs. Even in the Andalite databases, no information that we hadn't known about had been uncovered.

Until now.

I had encountered the strange being that called it the Ellimist when I was sending out an SOS call to a neighboring system for help. We had detected a sentient species on one of the planets, but there was no guarantee of their ability to build spacecraft.

The creature told me to gather Pete, Buttons, Amazon, Jaguar and Incinerator to listen to what he had to say. But for some reason, he didn't speak. He rather communicated telepathically in a way that was indescribable.

We had come together in the main cavern to hear what he had to say. He told us everything we needed to know about the Animorphs. It fit the puzzle pieces that we had uncovered perfectly. So uncannily perfectly that I believe that he put the information in the databases for us to find.

The Animorphs were a group of humans that fought around the turn of the 2nd millennia. In fact, they were simply teenagers, which is almost impossible to believe. An Andalite war-price named Elfangor gave them a technology called "morphing", where the genetical nucleolus of a DNA strand was exploited to create a fluctuating bond between Hyper-space, or maybe Z-space, I forgot, and real-space, looking like the person just turned into an animal. We had discovered the technology, but never really used it, deeming it deadly.

For nearly 4 years, the Animorphs had fought undercover amongst their own society, until an Andalite task force drove all the Yeerks away. For some reason, they never went public, as they used to say. For the remainder of their lives, they used their morphing ability in private, using several genetical tweaks to enhance their animal's strengths. And then, they died. That's all he told us.

YES, THEY ARE COMING TO RESTORE THE BALANCE. A FOE OF MINE, CRAYAK, HAS PLACED THE YEERKS WHERE THEY ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE. HERE. IN YOUR TIME. THE ANIMORPHS WILL TEAM UP WITH WHATEVER YOUR FORCES CAN COBBLE TOGETHER AND DESTROY WHATS LEFT OF THE YEERKS. GODSPEED.

"Hmmm, so, where exactly are these Animorphs going to be?" asked Incinerator. He was a part of my exploration team, and somewhat of a friend.

THEY SHOULD BE HERE IN ABOUT 20 MINUTES.

"20 minutes? I can't wait that long!" The ever-impatient Buttons yelled.

YOU MUST.

Buttons sighed. He sat back on his rock/chair and started mumbling. He was always the first into battle, and it drove me nuts. Insane, completely insane.

With that, the blue creature disappeared and left us to ponder over what we could do.

"Well, they obviously can morph, right? Why don't we scan for the leftover bio-switch project and see what we can come up with." Amazon suggested. He suggestions were as crazy as here long hair was black, but it could work.

"It could work," Pete said, taking the words straight out of my head.

"Well, we have 20 minutes to revolutionize technology on a barren planet with little or no life. Let's do it!" Incinerator said. He was almost too rash in the way he did things.

And so we began. For the first 5 minutes, we gathered all the previous work that was done on the bio-switch project, about 40 years ago. Even with the damaged computers, it seemed to go quickly, and we got the research that was needed to be done.

Then came the problem of annihilating pain when our bodies changed. Buttons suggested using the Morpine437C drug that had been perfected 17 years before, and so we started to craft the process slowly. But, it became evident that we could possibly build the necessary "genetic-tech" components in time. Even though we all realized it, we still worked furiously.

HA! IT IS VERY INTERESTING HOW THE HUMAN PYSCHE HAS EVOLVED. VERY DARING, VERY OVERESTIMATING. BUT IT AMUSES ME. I SHALL GIVE YOU THE NECCESARY TIME.

What was that? Oh, wait, it was the Ellimist talking. And I sure hope that what he said was true, because we had almost gotten the parts we needed.

So far to that point, we had cobbled together a sphere that looked like a giant Easter egg. Amazon insisted that we delivered a flux-neutral flow to it, making it seem to have many different colors. It didn't seem necessary to add the FNF, but still, it looked cool.

"Well, thanks, Ellimist," I shrugged after his comment.

He didn't reply.

For what seemed like a half-hour later, we worked as hard as we could until the sphere that we named PAJCIB, incorporating all of our names. It was Pete's idea, don't ask me. Until finally, it was completed.

But we had a problem.

You see, in order to become an animial, we had to absorb its DNA. And the only way that we could do that is to manually create extinct animal's DNA that has their genetic code in the databases. It would take about 3 minutes, but would be notoriously difficult to do so. Even then, we had to invent someway to inject it into our bodies. But, we managed to duplicate 5 animal's DNA, randomly selected from the "Earth's Dangerous Land Animals" section of the database.

"So," I asked, "Who gets DNA numeral uno?"

Jaguar volunteered. "Okay, so, Buttons and Pete, do ya have the system up and running?" I asked.

"Affirmative. Just touch the PAJCIB, and then form a mental concentration on the DNA. While touching it, obviously," Pete said.

Jaguar, even though I considered him the bravest guy on my team, looked pale as the moonlight. His shaking hand inched forward towards the oddly colored sphere that contained the newly created morphing technology.

His face started to sweat as his touched the PAJCIB. Almost instantly, an electrical jolt raced up his body, so powerful that even we could see that static blue jolt. But he didn't seem to feel it at all. We were stunned at the creation that we had made.

"Whoa, now, that's a rush. So, show me sample number 1, guys," Jacob said.

We handed him a gooey, but stable clod of DNA. Pure DNA. We had no clue what the real name of the creature was, but its official name was [000.343.123FG.A54.A.95]. Which, obviously, did not bring us very far.

After he "formed the metal link" that he was supposed to do, Jaguar asked, "Now what?"

Amazon answered. "OK, if I'm correct, you should think about whatever this animal is. Since all we know about it is that it's dangerous, think about Earthen styles of danger. Teeth, claws, speed, etc."

"Here goes nothing."

And then he started to change. I could tell what it was at first, mainly because I never visited Earth for more than 10 days, but it seemed like a mammalian feline. Jaguar's face started to bulge out in a grotesque way, but I could sense that he was feeling no pain. Or at least showing any.

Whiskers sprouted out from his head. A tail shot out from his backside making a dampened squishing sound that made me nauseous. A tan fur blanked his body, and soon, like a pen dipped in ink, spots began to appear all over his body, like an Ancient Chinese calligrapher writing the perfect scroll. His jaw jutted out as needle-teeth began to spurt out.

Wait a second, wasn't this a jaguar that Jaguar was morphing? I couldn't tell, until Pete said, "Hey Condor, check it out! Jaguar went jaguar, how cool is that? What if you morphed a condor?"

"Don't count on it," I replied, "What'll you morph, a peon?" He nudged me back.

All of a sudden, the jaguar leaped at me with claws outstretched, teeth glistening. What the hell was Jaguar doing?

"AHHHHHHH!" I yelled, pinned to the floor under 325 pounds of furry feline fury. This was odd, why was he doing this? I lay there petrified as the jaguar just stood there. On top of me. Teeth glistening. I could even smell his breath. And then, a voice sounded in our heads.

AHHHHH! What am I doing? Jaguar yelled in our heads.

I could barely force out, "Uh, you are a jaguar which is pinning me to the ground." I tried to cough, but the pressure didn't allow it.

It was weird; it's like your animalistic instincts come with the DNA. Be careful, guys, when you do this morphing thing.

"We will, okay, could you change back? This is kinda freaking me out."

Sure thing, Jaguar said.

His quadruped body started to shift upwards towards his normal, human self. The skin-tight regulation suits we were in came with the demorphing process, so we didn't have to worry. Eventually, after another minute of watching in amazement, Jaguar was human.

"Okay, who's next?" Incinerator asked.

"Forget having a line, everyone get a DNA sample as run!" Pete yelled frantically.

"Why?" Amazon asked.

"Why?! I'll tell you why! Because if we don't, in 4 minutes our outer FF's will be down and the yeerks will start a mass killing spree. Now, as commander of the Utopia and the remaining humans left in this sector, I order you to RUN!"