As I approached the barn for another meeting, I heard voices coming from inside. I stood outside the barn door, not wanting to interrupt.
"Cassie, why is there an anteater in my barn?" I heard the voice of Cassie's dad. He sounded confused.
"Dad, you asked me to take care of the ant problem," I heard Cassie's voice answer. "You didn't say how, and I told you I'd take care of it."
What, was Cassie renting anteaters now?
"Okay," Cassie's dad said, sounding weirded out. "But we have ant poison in the shed…Anyway, your mom and I need to head out to The Gardens. We will be back tonight."
I heard footsteps walking away, and shortly after that, the sound of her dad's truck driving off in the distance. Made me think of the time I borrowed Cassie's dad's old truck. Unfortunately, he never got it back.
I walked inside. There was Cassie, crouched over an anteater.
"Cassie?" I asked. "Where's everybody else? I guess maybe I'm early?"
I watched as Cassie's skin lightened, and her hair grew longer and brighter. Suddenly I was looking at Rachel. Her morphing outfit had seamlessly transitioned from Cassie's to her own. I don't know how clothes work with the morphing power. Clothing doesn't have DNA, but I had a headache thinking about it. I decided not to.
"What?" was all I could ask.
‹Hey, Marco,› the anteater said, and I now realized it was Cassie. ‹I'm down here.›
"Just trying to do a normal thing, Marco, okay?" Rachel said, sounding defensive and a tad jumpy. "Cassie had a problem with ants, I thought I'd help her without raising suspicion with her parents. Is that alright with you?"
She stepped toward me and I fake surrendered, putting my hands up to diffuse the situation. I didn't need Xena mad at me right now. I wasn't going to poke holes in their overly complicated plan.
Just then, Tobias flew in through the barn window, and I heard Ax clip-clopping his way into the back barn entrance. Then Jake walked in, and oh goodie, we could start talking about Zenguh again.
I could tell we were all restless. Well, at least the rest of the group was restless. I had my family back, which made things a bit more cheerful for me. Hey, if Zenguh came back and destroyed the world, at least I'd die with my family. Gotta look at the bright side.
Everyone else was a bit standoffish. Jake looked tired and Rachel looked worried. I don't know about Ax and Tobias. Andalites and hawks are tough to read emotionally. And Cassie was an anteater, still digging through the walls looking for ants.
‹Do we have any plan of attack, Prince Jake?› Ax asked, looking at him with all four eyes, and not questioning Cassie's morph choice.
Jake sighed and focused on Ax. "I don't know, Ax, I don't know how we can contend with space flight. I suppose we've stolen a ship here or there in the past, but we wouldn't even be able to find the guy. Should we just...leave it alone?›
"No," Rachel said, her head snapping up. "There's got to be a way to bring this guy down."
Well, Rachel didn't specifically use the word "guy," but I didn't feel I should repeat her language.
‹I agree with Rachel,› Tobias said from the rafters. ‹But I don't have a plan, either.›
Rachel stood up and kicked a metal bucket. It crashed hard against the barn wall.
"This is so FRUSTRATING!" she yelled. "We need to go kick Yeerk butt for real, but all you guys want to do is wait around in hopes that Zenguh will come find US?!"
And right then, distracting all of us, a tiny toy-looking ship flew in through the window, zipping right past Tobias.
"No," I said in awe, staring at the ship. "Just, no."
We knew this ship. It was the Helmacrons. A tiny race of annoying aliens that we thought were long gone, for good.
‹Greetings again, puny humans!› came a grating voice from the ship. ‹We have returned, and we are more powerful than you can possibly imagine! We are like gods to you now!›
‹Yes! Grovel before us, underlings, or be annihilated! Witness our power!› came another tiny voice from the ship.
With that, a small opening on the side of the ship widened, and inside we could see a glowing blue light.
‹Is that...is that the shard?!› Tobias asked. ‹No way!›
‹Yes, slaves, this a piece of the blue energy device, and it is in our possession at last! The previous undeserving owner had no chance against us, so we stole the technology from him!›
THWACK!
Ax's tail, fast as lightning, sliced the Helmacron ship in half, longwise. It fell to the floor.
‹Apologies for acting without orders, Prince Jake,› Ax said, not sounding remorseful at all. ‹But these Helmacrons are not something I want to deal with, currently.›
Now I had an idea, a rather convenient idea, given Cassie's current morph choice.
"Cassie!" I laughed. "Finish these guys off!"
‹No problem! That I can handle!› Cassie yelled, still thankfully an anteater.
As I watched her inexplicably demorph, she added, ‹I have the perfect morph!›
Cassie went wolf. Cassie always goes wolf. She nearly dove into the wreckage of the Helmacron ship when Jake stopped her.
"Guys, our problem last time was keeping track of these guys," he explained calmly. He then began morphing to...Howler?
"I don't know about you," he added, looking over at Rachel. "But I could take out some frustration on these Helmacrons. And the heat vision of the Howler will make sure we get every last one of them."
‹Fools!› the Helmacrons cried.
We attacked.
I grabbed a shovel and slammed it repeatedly, flat side down, onto the ground as hard as I could. As I smacked what I hoped were scattering Helmacrons, I morphed gorilla to gain more power behind my swings. Next, Rachel grabbed the ship roughly off the ground and smashed it into the wall, harder and harder until it broke apart like a Lego set that I used to own. Ax used his tail for precision strikes into the miniature Helmacrons, under the specific direction of Jake and Tobias, whose current eyes were far better than any of ours. Cassie watched, growling her wolfy growl.
We were yelling quite a bit. The barn was loud. Weeks of pent-up anger at Zenguh was being one-hundred percent directed at these meddlesome Helmacrons.
In less than five minutes, we had destroyed the ship to scrap, and no Helmacrons had escaped as far as we could tell. They would surely be yelling their overlord nonsense at us, if there were any left. It was by far our quickest defeat of the tiny alien race. Cassie grabbed the morphing shard with her teeth, pulling it from the rubble of the ship.
We sat in silence, demorphed and panting, thinking back on what we had just done. Somehow, we weren't that torn up about it.
An hour or so passed as we threw around half-baked ideas about what we could do next. We were even laughing together again. The atmosphere felt more relaxed. That had been a very satisfying way of working out our stress.
