Chapter 2

Disclaimer: I don't own Animorphs or Stargate SG-1

They didn't even have enough time to look surprised before we struck.

As a bald eagle, I was the biggest of the six of us. I could carry the heaviest load.

I raked my talons forward.

I opened them wide.

"Tsseeeeeer!"

Tobias's hawk let loose an intimidating shriek. My talons hit the gun barrel and closed on it.

Tobias slashed the ponytail guy's head with his own talons. Ponytail shouted in pain and surprise and loosened his grip on the rifle.

"Hey!" the second guy yelled.

Zoom! I was out of there with the rifle in my talons.

With the additional weight of the rifle, it was a struggle to get any altitude.

"That bird has your gun, Chester! And that other one stole my beer!"

I glanced over and saw Marco. At least I think it was Marco. He had the beer can in his talons, half-crumpled.

(They're way to young to be drinking,) Marco said in his most parent-like voice.

I heard the ponytail guy complaining down below. "That ain't right. It ain't right that no bird should take my rifle like that."

I caught a little breeze and gained just enough altitude to get above the trees.

(Bald eagle with rifle,) I heard Derek say, (Good grief Rachel, you look like an NRA poster. Charlton Heston would be proud.)

I was still having a hard time flying with this heavy gun in my talons. My wings were beating the still, dead air of the woods and not getting very much lift. I scraped the top of a tall pine tree and emerged from the wood. Still flapping hard to carry the weight of the rifle, I made it out toward the beach, over the low cliffs at the water's edge.

The blessed thermals were there. They lifted me up, up and out over the water. I relaxed, letting the warm wind carry me higher.

I dropped the rifle about a mile out in the ocean. I figured any jerk that would shoot at a bald eagle didn't need a gun. Marco dropped the beer with amazing precision right into a trash barrel. He looked as proud as he would have if he'd just thrown the winning basket in the NBA championship.

(It's been almost two hours,) Cassie warned us as we lazily drifted back to shore.

Two hours is the time limit. If you stay in morphs for more than two hours, you're trapped.

Forever.

There's an old, run-down church no one uses anymore not far from the beach. It has bell tower, although the bell is gone. We flew there. That's where we had started from. Our clothes and shoes were still piled there.

Five pairs of shoes for the six of us.

Cassie, still in her osprey body, peered down at her watch lying on the floor. (Good. An hour and a half. We should try never to go over an hour and a half.)

We began to morph back into our human bodies.

Morphing takes concentration. When you're going from human to animal, it's harder. You really have to focus. But going back to human is easier.

I focused on my human self. I formed a picture in my mind—tall, thin, with blonde shoulder-length hair. I focused especially on the hair, because I didn't like my last haircut. It was uneven at the bottom. Not that it mattered. I just wished I could do something about the hair when I morphed. Unfortunately, morphing doesn't work that way.

The changes began quickly. The feathers that covered me began to melt. They ran together like hot wax. In some places when my skin reappeared, it would have this beautiful feather pattern for a few seconds.

My yellow beak sucked back into my mouth to become white teeth. That part sort of itched. It made me want to grind my teeth a few times.

My lips grew out around my teeth. My eyes went from pale gold to my normal blue. My legs grew quite a bit, from about three inches to normal size.

I looked over at Jake and saw similar things happening to him. Let me just tell you—watching someone morph is not a pretty site. It's the kind of thing that would give you screaming nightmares if you didn't know it was going to be all right.

When Cassie morphs, she always does it kind of artistically. Like when she changes into a horse, she does it so it doesn't look totally creepazoid—she has a natural talent for morphing. If there is such a thing. The rest of us just let it happen however it happens. The results can be disturbing. Don't ever watch Derek morph into a ferret.

I happened to see Marco at the moment where his hairy boy legs came shooting out this little bird body and I yelped. "Yah! Gross."

"Ay, nyew donk luk so good yourself, Rachel."

His mouth was morphing even as he spoke. So the first few words were garbled and the last were normal. I think what he said was "Hey you don't look so good yourself, Rachel." He was probably right. I was glad I didn't have a mirror.

My tongue grew fat in my mouth. My eyesight grew faded and dim. The eagle mind evaporated leaving me alone in my head. My wings became arms. My talons became toes. The scaly yellow eagle legs became my own legs, only they were still scaly at first.

"Nice look chicken legs," Marco said. "Do those come in extra crispy, too?"

I smiled at him. "You're not on to talk Marco." I pointed down at the floor. See, his legs had changed back, but he still had huge osprey talons instead of feet.

As my skin began to appear, so did my morphing outfit. Fortunately after a few tries, we had all learned to morph some very minimal clothing. Usually nothing more than skintight workout clothes, or a tight pair of sweatpants or leotards. Not enough to go walking around in, but enough to keep us from dying of embarrassment when we morphed in front of each other.

I checked out my friends. They were mostly normal again, with just a few remaining hints that they'd been birds a minute earlier.

Jake is kind of a big guy, strong looking, with brown hair and serious, dark eyes—although at the moment, his eyes were shining with excitement. Sometimes being in morph just totally breaks you out. Jake was a lizard once, and he still hasn't gotten over the fact that he ate a live spider. But I guess he enjoyed being a falcon, because he was babbling on and on about how great it was.

"That was so absolute!" he said. "It's like now being back in a human body, feel like I'm handicapped or something. I feel like I'm glued to the ground."

"And the speed," Derek said. "I've never felt so fast in my life! I had to be going around two hundred miles per hour in that dive!"

Derek was tall, though not as tall as Jake. He had long dark hair, and copper skin tones. Oddly enough he also had piercing blue eyes. I hadn't really known him all that well before we had become Animorphs. He liked to do Extreme Mountain biking, and didn't really socialize at all. Although a few months back, when he'd first moved here, my friend Melissa Chapman said he was cute. Britney and Allison, the school gossips, had said that Derek liked Melissa as well. That I didn't know, I relied on Cassie for those kinds of subtle character evaluations.

Derek comes from this religious family, and he feels like God called us to fight the Yeerks. Me I don't know, I tend not to think about those meaning-of-life-is-God-real-or-not questions.

"I feel so slow now," Derek said.

"And blind," Cassie agreed. "Human eyes are so lame for seeing things far away."

She grinned and spread her wings. She had managed to keep her wings till the very end. Now she looked like some strange angel. Oddly the look worked for her. The osprey's five-foot, gray-and-white wings were incredibly cool.

"Whoa!" Derek said noticing her.

"Do you think you could fly?" Jake asked her. He looked a little awestruck.

Cassie laughed. "No Jake. This body weighs about eighty pounds. These wings aren't designed for that kind of weight."

She morphed her wings into arms in about three seconds and laughed gaily.

Marco shook his head. "Great. When we morph we look like some mad scientist's genetic experiment gone totally crazy. And Cassie gets to look like an angel."

Cassie and I have been friends for a long time, although to look at us you wouldn't think we'd hang out together. Cassie is casual to the extreme the girl just doesn't seem to care about clothing or style. I swear she would wear overalls to a wedding if someone didn't stop her.

Cassie lives on a farm and her whole family is massively into animals. Her dad used the barn to run the Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic, which is a kind of hospital for injured animals. It's always full of birds and skunks and opossums and coyotes and every other animal you can think of.

Cassie's mom is a vet too. She works at The Gardens, this huge zoo and amusement park. So maybe Cassie was just born with an instinct for understanding animals. All I know is she's always finished morphing while the rest of is are still looking like creepy half-human, half-animal monsters.

As for me, well, it's not that I'm Miss Fashion or whatever, but I do like nice clothes. I guess that, plus the way I look, makes a lot of people think I'm stuck up or something. People do think I'm pretty. But to me that's just an accident, you know? Looks are not the important thing. It's what's in your head that counts, and that's what I concentrate on.

Of course that's another area where Cassie and I are a little different. I guess she would say, "It's what's in your heart that counts." She's a natural peacemaker. If there's ever a hassle within the group, it's usually me and Marco who caused it, and Cassie who got us all calmed down.

"Personally, I'm glad to be back to my regular body," Marco said. "The flying part is great, but it's not a good idea to be able to see that well."

"Why" Jake and Derek asked at the same time.

"Look, Jake, how many times have you been walking around the mall or whatever, and you'll see a girl who seems good-looking from far off, but when you get closer she's a skank? I mean if you could see this well all the time—"

"Excuse me?" I interrupted. "I'm sure that I didn't hear you say what I thought you just said."

"I wasn't being sexist," Marco protested. "It goes both ways. See, from far off, I look taller than I am."

Marco is a little self-conscious about being short. He has long brown hair and a dark complexion, and most girls think he's really cute. But being small bothers him.

"Your problem isn't with people seeing you too well," I said. "It's with people hearing you too well. You look like a fairly smart guy. Then you open your mouth…"

"Children please," Derek said. "Can't we all just get along."

Marco just grinned. Marco lives to annoy people. He really is smart and basically nice, underneath it all. It's just that the boy loves to provoke people.

Marco and Jake are best friends, even though Jake is serious and thoughtful and always trying to do what's right, while Marco is sarcastic and temperamental and is the most reluctant of the Animorphs. Marco still thinks we should just give up the battle against the Yeerks and try to stay alive. But with Marco you never know if he really believes that or is just saying it to be contrary.

"Listen," Derek said, "I hate to break up the party, but I've got to get home and baby-sit my sister."

"Yeah," Jake said. "And I've got homework to do."

"Me too," I said. "And I have gymnastics class this afternoon and I'm totally unprepared."

Cassie sighed. "It's such a drag. The chores and the homework all come rushing back as soon as we all change back into our boring human selves."

As soon as she said it, Cassie bit her tongue. She cast a regretful look to Tobias.

See, while the rest of us had changed back, Tobias had not. Tobias was still a hawk. Tobias who had once had unruly dirty-blond hair and eyes that seemed hurt and tender and hopeful all at once.

Tobias had been trapped while trying to escape from the hellish nightmare of the Yeerk pool. He had stayed more than two hours in that morph.

We had all returned to our human forms, but Tobias was still a hawk.

Tobias will always be a hawk.

Author's notes: I'm going to take this time for some Q&A. To Omegadramon sorry about your name, it wasn't me, it was Spell-Check. I used to be a Digimon fan myself. (My favorite was Patamon/Angemon/MagnaAngemon/Seraphimon) To answer your questions: No, Derek's last name is not O'Neil or Hammond. Derek has an American Indian Father and a Jewish mother and he was raised a Christian. (Confused? Imagine how he feels.) O'Neil is an Irish name, and I don't know what Hammond is but it isn't American Indian. A lemur is a small primate native only to the island of Madagascar. They look something like a monkey; the most famous breed of lemur is the Ring-tailed Lemur, which looks somewhat like a raccoon. As many of my reviewers know I recently came back from a trip to Madagascar (The country not the movie) and I had some close encounters of the lemur kind there. (You can also spot several species of lemur in the movie Madagascar) To Lady Imperialdramon: The Ellimist (That blatant Dues Ex Machina) and Crayak are in the series, though they might not appear in the same books. They will meet Erek at some point. Rachel will still be allergic to crocodiles, No Derek is not based on David, don't compare him to that rat. That little tidbit comes from me. I grew up in a military family, I moved around a lot as a kid. Also most military are right wing, anti-gun control. No Derek is not related to Captain Torelli. First of all, his dad is a Lieutenant Colonel, and second I do have a last name for Derek, but just like Jake Berenson, I'm not revealing it just yet. As for Melissa joining the Animorphs? Why would I tell you something big like that? Spoil the whole fanfiction…you'll just have to guess. You are right in one aspect though. A relationship between Melissa and Derek is going to develop. I believe that one of the only mistakes that K. A. A. made in her series was not using Melissa more, she had the potential to do so much, and yet she did so little. She was one of my favorite characters, but she only appeared in two books. And she wasn't even mentioned in The Beginning. I for one would like to know what happened to her. I suspect that after the Yeerks declared open war she was made into a Controller since Chapman didn't need cover anymore. BTW Quillian, if you want to cover that in your fiction I'd be a very happy guy. Now, on to Quillian: Yes, I mentioned book four would remain the same last chapter, because the Animorphs aren't the Animorphs without the Ax-man. (Ax's human morph will be different though, a combination of Jake, Rachel, Cassie, Marco, and Derek's DNA) Yes, all of the chronicles were slightly different thanks to the existence of Stargates, (Even Visser) I may or may not end up writing a Chronicles piece to describe the Animorphs past with the Stargates. Let's see, would the Andalites send a bomb through the Stargate to "Fix their mistakes"? Hmmm…That would be completely out of character for the Andalites wouldn't it? (Sarcasm) HA ha! You are one perceptive guy. The only problem with that plan is that Earth's Stargate has an iris, which won't let a bomb through. But there are ways around that. And finally to aizxana: I figured the Animorphs chose their bird of prey morphs from what was available in Cassie's barn that day. The Osprey, which was also mentioned in book one. The Bald Eagle, the Falcon, and the Red-tailed hawk that Tobias's morph is made from. I think that none of the Animorphs wanted to be Tobias's hawk. Rachel chose to be an eagle, Jake chose the falcon. That left the Osprey, which Cassie and Marco both chose to do the Osprey. Thus I had Derek choose from those four birds and he picked the falcon. I almost went for a Goshawk morph BTW.