Chapter One
Tobias's POV
My name is Tobias. I'm thirteen years old. And I had just seen the girl of my dreams.
Let me tell you a little bit about myself. I'm the son of Alan Fangor, whose business competes with Microsoft, even though he's good friends with Bill Gates. One of my best friends was Flurit Eight-One-Three. He lives in my head.
Oh, sorry, you might not be familiar with this new phenomenon. I'd better explain myself. No, Flurit isn't a figment of my imagination. He's a Yeerk, a symbiotic species that needs a host body to really experience life. Yeerks can numb your inner ear and crawl inside, wrapping themselves around your brain, and see everything you see, hear everything you hear, etcetera. They don't have any control, though. They just tag along for the ride.
In exchange for the permission to stay inside you and experience stuff, whether the host is Andalite, human, or Hork-Bajir, the Yeerks are healers. They're not miracles, so they can't cure some deadly diseases. But if you've got depression or you break your leg, they can do things like even out the chemicals in your brain or help your body to heal the leg in half the time. It's pretty cool.
It was around thirty years ago when the Andalites and Yeerks and all their alien friends landed. Sometime in the 1970s. Andalites are like blue centaurs with a strong, scorpion-like tail that can behead someone in a fraction of a second, but they're a pretty peaceful species. Hork-Bajir? They look like walking death traps, because they're practically covered with blades, but they're the sweetest species you'll ever know of. The blades are just for cutting bark off trees because bark is what they eat. Most of them aren't the most intelligent beings, but some are what they call seers.
Andalites, on the other hand, are smart. They are maybe one hundred years more technologically advanced than humans. They invented the Escafil device, which is a cube that can give you the power the morph. Morph to any animal you touch, as long as you acquire its DNA. The DNA swims around in your blood with your own, and so you can just concentrate and start changing. It's really creepy but also awesome. Not a lot of humans have the power yet, but I do. That's because my father was an Andalite. He became a human nothlit—that's what happens when you spend longer than two hours in morph. He did it so he could be with Loren, my mom. They met when the Andalites came to Earth. Mom was one of the people who was there when they landed, willing to be acquired. The story goes that Dad acquired Mom's best friend and a few other people, mixed the DNA together and morphed. As soon as he was fully morphed, he looked around and saw Mom, and fell instantly in love. They got married maybe five years later and then I was born a while after that.
I didn't used to believe that Dad fell instantly in love with Mom. I thought that love at first sight wasn't real, that my parents were being melodramatic. Now I believe.