Hello again! Wow, that was a very short time between updates… if you are reading, please don't expect them to be this often. I'd already had most of this chapter written when I put up the first one.

In response to the reviews…

Gpshaw- Thank you! I'm trying not to stray too far from her writing style, but kinda blend it with my own at the same time. Yes, my name is interesting. I made it up awhile ago and it's been my alias since. :D

Wottabout- See above. Too much?.. Oo I'll try to embellish it with my own style from now on.

Elrondtook- I thank you for pointing that out, so I explained it a bit in this chapter.

LilManiac- Wow! Thank you so much:) You have a lot of stories… oO I'mna hafta take a look at those!

Dormouse- Score! I'm shooting for some KA-Applegate-age here.

Medha- Thanks! Funny, I'm putting up the second chapter the same day you left a review… Less slang? Oo I wasn't aware I used all that much… maybe I did it subconsciously. Sorry!

Chapter Two

"Wow… now I remember why I don't come here." I looked around at the masses of people, shoving past each other, eating pretzels, hanging out, and most horribly of all, shopping. "You realize I deserve a trip to EB Games for tolerating this."

Rachel looked maniacal. "This is my element… Feel fear, department stores. Rachel will find your sales. And crush you beneath her fashionable heel!" She let out the craziest evil laugh I think I've ever heard, thoroughly frightening a passing middle-school kid.

"Don't refer to yourself in the third person anymore, Rachel," I said delicately, rolling my eyes. "You're frightening children."

"Smart kids, then."

((Can we hurry up?)) Tobias said testily. ((I don't want to be in this place any longer than I have to. And this bag smells like Fritos.))

"Sorry, Tobias. We're going."

So that's how I ended up in a dressing room with my arms crossed, bored, on one of those little stools they put in there.

I think they make them uncomfortable on purpose.

Tobias, the lanky, human Tobias stood in front of me, squinting at himself in the mirror. If I didn't know any better, I'd think he was half-blind. Well, I suppose, compared to his normal hawk-sight, he was. He had on quite a nice suit, a Lord West creation, I believe. He looked extremely uncomfortable, but I suppose that's normal for someone who spends most of their life in a suit of feathers and nothing else.

"How are you supposed to dance in this much starch?" He asked me, lifting one arm and waving it in a very wing-like manner.

"Uh, not like that." I said, shaking my head. "You do know how to dance, don't you?"

Tobias remained silent.

"Aw, man. Well, hopefully no one else will either." I stood up and stretched onto my tip-toes, my back popping. "I suggest you don't flap anymore, though. That wasn't the most graceful thing I've ever seen."

Tobias eyed me, his face blank. Hawk-faces are always scowling, so sometimes he forgets facial expressions. "You know I'm taller than you, right?"

"Only for two hours."

There was suddenly the rattle of plastic and metal against the door, halting whatever Tobias had been about to say. He whipped his head around and focused on it intensely, looking very much like a bird.

"Chill, man." I cracked the door and peered out, my eyes finding Rachel with a large amount of clothing over her arm.

"I'm sorry, madam, peeping is illegal. My client could have you sued for harassment." I said wittily. "You'll have to come back later."

"I will indirectly be responsible for your demise, Marco." She said, eyes flashing. "Did the Lord West work?"

"I think so. The starch is apparently a bit irking, though," I said.

"I can fix that later. Come on outta there, I want to try some stuff on while we're here."

"Oh, of course. I'll get out and leave you two alone…" I grinned devilishly at Rachel. She clenched her unoccupied fist and held it in my face.

"Violence is not the answ-OW!" I was rudely interrupted by what felt like a foot kicking my derriere. I drew back in hastily and rubbed the offended area, looking at Tobias with pained eyes. "Why would you do that to me, Tobias? Your friend? Your comrade? Your fellow male?"

"I'm a chicken, remember?" His face remained blank for a moment, but then he remembered that teasing comments like that were generally accompanied by a smile. His lips spread, but he retained the ever-present distant look.

"Whatever. I'm skedaddling." I slipped out of the dressing room and, in a burst of maturity, stuck my tongue out at Rachel as I passed her. She ignored me utterly and entered the room, closing the door with a slam. "I was kidding about that change-together thing, by the way!" I called before I left the fitting rooms to mingle with the commoners. I knew where I was headed.

Junior's section. IE, girl-central. The trick is to hang around and look like you have better things to do, but you're being nice and coming here with your sister or something. That makes you look cool and considerate at the same time.

In theory.

I ran my fingers through my hair and leaned against the wall, putting on my best sexy-bored expression.

"E-Excuse me?"

I turned to look at the speaker. A blond, with deep brown eyes. Timid-looking. Gorgeous.

Oh yeah. I was rakin' 'em in already.

"Something I can do for you?" I said in a low voice, smiling.

"Er, no." She looked at me strangely. "You're blocking the bathroom door."

"Oh. Oh, sorry." I stood aside instantly. She passed me, casting one last bemused look at me, before the door swung shut.

I slapped myself mentally and paced in front of the door, furious. "Perfect, Marco." I muttered to myself. "Perfect. You are now officially Lord of the Stupidly Pathetic. I'm surprised she didn't laugh right in your face, you dumb- "

"YAAUUUUUUUUUUUGHHHHHHHH!"

My naughty words were drowned out by a loud, quite unnerving screech from back in the dressing rooms. Sounded like some human chick. Probably just read a price tag for this insanely expensive department store in which I stood.

"Get out my head, you bloody parasite! I won't let you take me!"

Well.

Needless to say, I forgot very quickly about the blond girl.

Instantly tense, I moved back towards the dressing rooms. I heard the sounds of a struggle. There were a couple other human voices yelling in surprise. Then another familiar noise.

TSEEEEEW!

Dracon beams! I hurried myself up considerably. Heart thundering in my ears, I hesitated beside the dressing room entrance. Should I duck into an empty stall and morph? No. I didn't know what the situation was yet.

What the hell would Yeerks want with the mall? I thought to myself, panicky. They're not all that worried about the latest fashions. I put my calculating mind to work.

Suddenly a human girl dashed past me out of the dressing rooms. She stumbled, falling to the ground. I saw in her side a perfectly circular cut, like someone took a razor sharp spoon and just took a scoop out of her. The beam must have simply grazed her. It was bleeding, but not much. High heat tends to cauterize wounds.

I froze, abruptly panicked. Was this girl a Controller? Crap, she'd seen my face! But, she didn't know I was an "Andalite bandit"…

So I acted human. "Hey, you okay?" I half-crouched and extended my hand, like any decent human being would.

She rolled to face me like I was a predator about to attack her. She looked up at me in terror and defiance of... of what? Something. She fixed fierce, sharp grey eyes on mine. She seemed to read my very thoughts, know what I was thinking as I stared at her. I felt like my brain was like a book to her. Kinda… kinda like a Yeerk. In a very different way.

I knew, looking into her pale eyes, that she was not a Controller.

Then the momentary trance was broken, and she seized my offered hand in a somewhat violent grip. She hauled herself up in one smooth movement, though her pale face grimaced in pain. Her eyes flicked from my face over my shoulder, into the dressing room hall, and then back to my eyes.

"Run," she whispered in a haggard voice. "Run. Don't let them take you. Run."

Without another word, she dragged herself away, ignoring the searing pain she must have been feeling and running.

Running for her freedom.

Wishing quite thoroughly that Jake was here to give orders, I started back into the dressing room. And ran smack into two men on their way out. Two very large, scary, WWF break-you-into-kindling men. With Dracon beams.

Where was Jake when you need to be told what to do?

I plastered on the most innocent, confused human expression I possessed. "Sorry," I said politely, noting that the two men stowed the Dracon beams instantly. I pretended not to notice.

"S'alright." Hulk Hogan grunted. I think all men that large grunt. "Did you see a teenage girl with red hair run out of here? She's… my niece. She's not taken her medicine today… she's mentally unstable without it."

Hm. Mentally unstable. Is that what you call knowing the truth now?

I played the dumb bystander. "Oh, yeah, I saw her." I pointed in the opposite direction the girl had headed. "She ran off that way, babbling."

Hulk glanced at his buddy the Rock. He nodded once, and then smiled—forcedly—at me. "Thank you, son." He shoved past me and ran off in the direction I had pointed, followed by his large pal.

"Not your son," I mumbled irritably to no one.

I threw a glance back into the dressing rooms. Rachel and Tobias were smart kids; they'd get out alright…

And something told me that it was imperative the Yeerks not get that girl.

Stupid mall. Ruining my weekend.

I followed the girl's path. It was kinda obvious; she hadn't done that spiffy a job of hiding it. Knocked stuff over, dripped blood. I wanted to find something funny about this situation, but it's been harder and harder recently to find any humor in the happenings of my life.

To make a long, boring story about how I tracked my prey mercilessly through the department stores short, I'll cut to where I found her.

She'd managed to get outside before she'd collapsed in agony. Maybe she thought she could find a better hiding place. I knew that she would have had a better chance inside, where people could have wondered why exactly two big scary men were trying to catch a screaming, bleeding girl. Here, there were much fewer witnesses.

Thankfully for her, I, Marco the Animorph, was there.

The girl was huddled under some of those pathetic bushes you see outside malls. She was breathing heavily and shaking. Her almost inhumanly pale red hair was spread down over her face. The burn wound looked worse, now. All her movement had caused the blood to flow through it again.

Now that I'd found her, it occurred to me that I didn't know what I was going to do about her. I stood, frozen, staring at her limp form under the bushes.

Most of the time I am a brilliant person. At the moment, I was drawing a blank.

"Need some help?" A familiar voice spoke behind me.

I jumped and whipped around. "Holy baked beans, Erek…" I muttered, though relief flowed through my limbs. "You can't just pop up and scare people."

Erek, who I mentioned earlier, was a kid who went to some school other than mine. Only, not really. Yeah, more extraterrestrials pretending to be what they're not.

Erek is part of an ancient, alien-created race of androids called the Chee that got dropped off on Earth by their dying masters a couple thousand years ago. How's that for a sentence. Like the Yeerks, they live among us, unknown. Unlike the Yeerks, they merely create holograms of people instead of infesting them. A Chee minus the hologram looks like a big silver-and-ivory dog propped up on its hind legs.

See why they use holograms. They might stand out a wee bit.

Long story short, the Chee found us and have joined us in the fight against the Yeerks by being our spies in Yeerk organizations. They can't actually fight, however, due to their anti-violent programming. But that's another long story. And, on a tangent, they are wildly obsessive over dogs.

Erek's holographic face simply smiled. I've wondered before if they have to think about making their hologram smile, or if it's really tied to their emotions.

"And why're you here at the mall, anyway?" I said in a chipper tone, jerking my head subtly towards the girl in the bush. Erek's eyes found her and he nodded slightly in understanding. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her flicker and disappear under Erek's hologram.

"A girl from your school invited me to the dance. I needed an outfit. She's one of us," He added softly.

"That's a lie. You can just poof yourself an outfit."

Erek shrugged. "I can still go to the mall and look at which one I want to use in the hologram, can't I?" He said innocently. I felt like there was something there I missed, but I had things to worry about other than cryptic metal doggies.

"Sure. Now, you offered little-ole'-me some assistance a minute ago…" I lowered my voice. "Can you help me get her out of here?"

Erek's answer was plain as he shimmered. His hologram expanded around me and the girl behind the bushes. "Everyone looking at us just sees a couple of teenagers hanging at the mall," He said cheerily though his metal muzzle. He knelt and with his inhuman strength quite easily picked the girl up out of the bushes. She remained limp. Must have passed out somewhere along the way.

"My thanks, Robo-Pooch. I'll get you a puppy for Christmas."

"See that you do," Erek said placidly.

We moved off quickly down the sidewalk, bound for the place we usually take oddities: Cassie's barn. I knew no one could really see us, but I still felt strange. Walking beside an android from another planet, carrying an unconscious girl tied somehow to an alien invasion. I tried to imagine seeing this from a normal person's point of view. It was hard, harder than I thought it would be.

Guess I'm not normal, and never will be.

I looked at the girl again. She was quite assuredly human, but there was something equally inhuman about her. For one, she was…pale. No other way to say it, really. Her skin was almost white, and her hair was more of a silver-red than red. But despite her paleness, she didn't look old. She was a bit lanky. Probably taller than me. She was pretty, but pretty in the way a diamond is pretty—delicate, carefully cut, but hard and cold.

Her eyelids fluttered. I half-held my breath as the silver-grey eyes moved slowly up to reach mine again. They quavered, somehow blank and full of some un-readable emotion at the same time. Once again, the moment was brief, and she lowered her head.

I let out my breath and glanced at Erek. He hadn't noticed her movement, or if he did, he hadn't shown it. Probably the latter, knowing the Chee.

I had a fleeting thought of Tobias and Rachel. I hoped they would know I was alright.

"So much for a simple trip to the mall," I muttered to myself.

Jake is so going to kill me for this.

End of Kapitel Zwei. (That's chapter two for non-german speakers!) Reviews welcomed with open arms.:) May be awhile before I can update again…