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Chap. 3

As Marco walked out of school, he wondered what he was going to have for lunch. A hot pocket, or maybe the good old chef boy-ar-dee man. The choices that life presented us with. It was amazing that people even focused when they had to wake up to those kind of choic-

Hey, Marco. Tobias can be scary sometimes; because he can't communicate by using his mouth, he uses thought speak, which is strange if your hearing it for the first time. It reminded Marco of Jimminy Cricket in that Disney movie Ponnochio. You know, the one where the cricket was Ponnochio's conscience and he told him about all the bad decisions that he was making? And then he got turned into that donkey boy? Actually, now that he thought about it, he could probably relate to that movie more now, then when his mom made him watch it when he was younger. Now, he could turn into a donkey. Weird how life is, huh?

Marco looked up, and spotting Tobias in a nearby tree, smiled and waved. He couldn't talk to him because Tobias was to far away, and talking to a bird might make him look nuttier then even he was comfortable with.

Where are you going? Your supposed to be going to the mall, remember? Your going to go check out the clothing store, and see if you hear anything about the lab. Oh yeah. Marco had completely forgotten about that in his quest for lunch. He quickly changed directions, and headed to the bus station. As he was waiting, he looked up to find Tobias, and saw that he had gone.

As the bus pulled up to the stop, Marco looked around him. I wonder how many of these people are controlled by yeerks. How many people are being taken over in the one place that they thought no one could go. I guess they were half right in believing that. No person could go into their brains, their secret sanctum. Only aliens could. And Marco would do his part in bringing the alien scum down. As the weird alien man in that movie Galaxy Quest said, "Never give up, never surrender." Marco would do never do either.

On the bus ride over to the mall, Marco tried to think of ways to learn about the lab. He couldn't really go up to anyone and just say, "hey, I heard that there was a lab on this island in the middle of the ocean. The people there are being very naughty and are testing animals. Say, do you know if this lab is somehow connected to the recent alien invasion of yeerks?" That would be too easy, and a little to obvious. The second the word yeerk popped out of his mouth, he was a dead man. So what to do?

Twenty minutes later, and two hot dogs fuller, Marco still didn't know what to do. As he approached the clothing store, he decided to just morph, and snoop around. Their was an underground yeerk pool in the basement of the store, and if something major was happening at that lab, the people in the basement would mention it. Marco sincerely thought that the lab was just a lab, but you couldn't be too careful.

Marco grabbed a shirt off one of the sell racks, and went into the fitting rooms. He nodded politely to the sales lady as he went past her, and chose the dressing room closes to the door that said employees only.

Marco concentrated, and as he pictured his morph in his mind, he slowly saw the floor rise up to meet him. As he shrank, his arms and legs shriveled into little tiny sticks, and his skin became hard. The skin on his back slowly began to separate as two wings materialized, and stretched. In the mirror on the door of the fitting room, he stared at himself in shock.

"Talk about puberty," he laughed as his face divided at his chin and spread out into a plier like mouth. From his head sprouted two antennae's and his eyes slowly shrank. Marco closed his eyes as he waited for his insides to finish adjusting, and breathed deeply.

AS he opened his eyes, he quickly looked around. He could smell a thousand different things all around him, and the frantic voice inside his now animal brain took over before he could stop it. He bolted to the next stall over, and didn't hear the shrill scream that erupted from the stall's occupants. He did, however, sense something dark and large looming over him. As he looked up, he saw the bottom of a size eight shoe come hurtling at him through the sky.