Disclaimer I do not own Animorphs or Ben 10
Chapter 26: Confirmation
Ax's POV
I and the other Animorphs had gathered to Cassie's barn a few days after our confrontation with Ben to plan our next move.
(I'm still not sure if we should trust Ben.) I said, starting the discussion. (I may not be well versed in human psychology, but I can at least tell that there is something off about him.) There was just something in his eyes that unnerved me, I know I've felt something similar before, but I can't remember where exactly.
(I agree with the Ax-man on this one. There is something definitely up with Ben.) Said Tobias.
"Guys, I know I don't like the situation we're in either, but there's not much we can do about it." Said Prince Jake. "I think it's in our best interests to try to get Ben on our side."
"Yeah, Jake's right. Right now it's just the six of us and we need all the help we can get if we want to hold out until the Andalites get here." Said Rachel.
"You know this is starting to sound very familiar." Interjected Marco. "I specifically remember someone saying something similar when we decided to add David to the Animorphs."
"That was a totally different situation and you know it, Marco." Riposted Rachel, just as Cassie was about to say something. "We hardly even knew David at the time, so it was no surprise we didn't realize that he'd end up betraying us for his own selfish needs. But we've known Ben for a while now and from what he had told us before he's had that morphing ability all his life. Besides if he was gonna abuse it like David did, he'd've done it a long time ago."
Rachel was correct, this time with Ben is very much different from when we had to make David an Animorph. He stated that he had the ability before we discovered him, as well as a history that he doesn't want to share with us yet. Our advantage now is that we now have the luxury of time, time to plan ahead, something that we didn't have with David.
"You may be right, Rachel. This situation we're in now is different to the one with David, and I'll admit that I trust Ben more than David when he got involved." Said Prince Jake, and Rachel smiled. "But that still doesn't mean we can completely trust him."
"I think we should keep Ben out of the loop for now." Said Marco, I looked at him with my main eyes, while my stalk-eyes were looking around the barn. "We can keep an eye on him and see if he can really be trusted, if not then we just need to make sure he keeps his knowledge of the invasion to himself; also if it comes to that we have to tell him how to avoid being turned into a Controller for his own safety."
(Yes, we shouldn't involve him directly yet and keep observing him first. There are less pros than cons and too many unknowns at the moment.) I said, and it's true. On one hand if we decide to include Ben then we gain one powerful ally with superior morphing ability as well as very powerful morphs, we could use him to damage the Yeerks on a much greater scale than we could ever hope to achieve by ourselves. But on the other we hardly know his past and he also seems to not wish to discuss it, what his motives are now, we are unsure if he is totally trustworthy, he also seems to be hiding something other than his past, will he even be willing to help, and is he even prepared to join the fight? (We have to know what he wants and what his motives are now that we know his secret and he knows ours.)
"Things are pretty complicated at the moment." Stated Prince Jake. "But let's just be glad that we don't have to worry about Ben for now. We can relax a bit while we find out what the Yeerks are planning next."
"So what do we do if we can actually trust Ben?" Asked Cassie.
"I'd say we let him be an Animorph." Said Rachel.
(And what if he doesn't want to?) Asked Tobias.
"Well if Ben is trustworthy and if he does want to help us we'll let him, we really need all the help we can get. And if he doesn't then we leave him alone, it's his choice we can't force him to fight a war he doesn't want any part of." She replied.
"So that settles it then." Said Prince Jake bringing the discussion to a close. "We'll do nothing for now, see where this goes and hope for the best." I silently gave my affirmative to Prince Jake. Whatever decision he makes I will support it.
With the meeting over the others started to talk about Earth things that I don't understand, I heard the words "concert" and "backstage pass" but they didn't make any sense to me. I walked over to Cassie and said. (Cassie, may I have a word with you?)
"Sure Ax. What is it?"
(I want to ask more about Ben.) I answered. (Could you tell me more about him, I need to know as much as possible.)
"Alright." She replied, settling down on the bale of hay she was sitting on. "What do you want to know?"
Hm, what should I ask her? I have heard many things about Ben during our previous meetings, but they have all been small in disjointed snippets nothing I could use to form a complete idea of him. That's when it came to me. (I want to know everything you know about him.)
Cassie looked pensive and sat quietly for a few moments before saying. "Well there's both a lot I can say and not a lot to say about him, so I'm not sure exactly what you mean, Ax."
My stalk-eyes lowered themselves close to the top of my head as I thought so ask something more specific. Then I said. (Tell me anything about him, even if it's something trivial. Ah, why don't you tell me about your experiences with him over the past months, just start from the beginning.)
She leaned back a bit, hummed for a moment and started. "Well I first saw him at school about nearly three months back. So like we've all said he's pretty new to town. . ."
And with that she told me everything that she knew from her personal experience with Ben. From what she tells me Ben is a proficient fighter having subdued a pair of bullies as well as four others who practiced "Karate". I'm not exactly sure what Karate is, from Cassie's description it was a method of fighting for humans, I will have to research more on that on a later date. Ben also seems to be familiar and well known with nearly all social circles of the school. Before we had discovered his identity as the creature we were searching for in the forest, he has gotten along very well with Prince Jake and the other Animorphs.
From what I can gather from what little information Cassie had for me, my mind went and hypothesized that Ben could be a weaponized human, altered by a very advanced species, as unlikely as it is. This may sound improbable, but even on the Andalite Homeworld our professor in Xenobiology had told us that it is not uncommon where humans have been abducted and subjected to experiments by a number of Alien races; the Skrit Na in fact have even made a hobby out of abducting humans and other species then bringing them back. Ben may possibly be one such experiment, but maybe something like a sleeper-agent with his memory altered so that he would blend-in with society. It may be a bit of the stretch of the imagination, but with what I've seen during my time on Earth, I've come to terms with expecting the unexpected.
After a short while of listing the things that she knew about him, then paused before saying.
"That's all I know about him. We don't really know a lot about him, he rarely talks about himself so that's pretty much it." She paused again and hesitantly said. "Ax."
(Yes Cassie?) I asked nearly absentmindedly, shaking out of my thoughts. Wondering what she was going to ask about.
"There was something that Ben said and the way he said it back at the mall that really stood out."
(What did he say?) I asked, I didn't seem to catch anything during our meeting with Ben, but I was quite tense at the time so it was likely that I had missed something.
"Well he said that his 'life was happily normal for a change' and that 'he was already tired of all this'." She replied. "But I'm not exactly sure what he meant by that."
(It may very well have something to do with his past, the part of it that he doesn't want to talk about.)
"I guessed that much, but it almost seems like he wants to forget it more than anything."
(If my hypothesis about Ben's past turns out to be accurate, then he may very well want to forget about his past as much as possible.)
"What hypothesis?"
(The evidence and signs seem to point that Ben may be or may have been some kind of weapon or experiment, not by the Yeerks. But maybe some other race that not even the Andalites have heard of.)
"That kinda seems like a stretch, even by Marco's standards Ax." So I went and explained about what I had learned back at the academy, with cases and examples of abductions and experiments along with the Skrit Na and their unusual hobby to Cassie. She seemed skeptical at first, but was eventually convinced as I explained to her the details of what I knew on the subject. "I guess that makes sense, so it seems like most of those people raving about being abducted by aliens and being anally probed." Scoffing at the idea.
(Well, we have never really gotten a lot of details as to what they do to humans they abduct, but it may be plausible.) I said.
"Whatever his past is, I think we should let him tell us when he's ready."
I had my doubts when she said that, but if my time on Earth has taught me anything. It's that its proved my wrong before.
(Ax-man?)
(Yes, Tobias?) I responded, turning my stalk eyes back to see him perched on a branch. There was something off with him today. Though it's easy to feel the inflection in one's thought-speech, I had also just started to notice the small nuances with his appearance that gave insight as to his state of mind. At that moment Tobias was uneasy. His feathers were puffed out slightly, his wings were twitching, and he was shifting his weight from one foot to the other which was reminiscent of the human side of his consciousness. When I saw his unease, I turned towards him and looked at him with my main eyes. (Is there something wrong, Tobias?)
(Yeah, kind of. I mean this whole Ben business still feels unfinished to me.) He answered.
(Unfinished in what way?)
He gave the thought-speech equivalent of what I think a human sigh or groan would sound like. (I know we got bigger things to worry about other than Ben, but I get this weird feeling around him and I don't know whether it's good or bad. I just can place it, and it's freaking me out.)
(You're not the only one that's still uneasy about our encounters with Ben, I too feel similarly. But we must not let that take priority over out main objective.) It was true. While Prince Jake and some of the other Animorphs were fine with leaving Ben be and simply waiting for his decision. I still sense that there is something more to him than we think. Full Princes and Warrior-Princes often talked about a certain feeling whenever they were in enemy territory or were on a mission. They told tales where this feeling had helped them escape a trap or turn the tide of a battle. They often described it as a chill running up their back, the twitching of their tail, or even a tingling in their hooves. I think humans also have a similar sense, they call it a gut-feeling. What I feel now is as my hearts were sinking into the ground, and from what I remember of those stories is that whatever was coming it's that it is never a good thing.
It had been a few days after our adventure in the northern pole of Earth where we foiled the Yeerk's plan to set up a satellite array to turn nearly every body of water on Earth into a serviceable Yeerk Pool as well as their Bioengineered Venber. It had also been a few weeks since since we had confronted Ben. I had been informed by the others that things between them and Ben had seemingly gone back to the way that it was before. Ben hadn't brought back up the topic of them being the Animorphs or the Yeerks. At the time, it would seem that he really does wish to stick by his words, that he just wants to live a normal life.
But then something happened that put me back on edge especially since our time of rest wasn't long, as they say back on the Andalite Homeworld. "Away from the Yarith pack, and into the Se'etenokril's den."
We were at Ben's house and his words set off the alarms inside my head.
"I want to fight the Yeerks."
Author's Notes: Well this is awkward. . . four months. That's a new record. Well it's summer vacation now! And now I have all the time in the world to write, yippee! Already working on the next chapter and I know what I want to do with it so it will be fairly long, will have quite bit of development. Not gonna say what, just that there is gonna be. It will also becoming out soon. The reason why this took so long was that I was once again swamped from College with lots of stuff to do(I won first place in the Bullwhip event in a rodeo competition!), also I just wasn't sure what I wanted to do with Ax past the part where they had the meeting which is why this took way longer than I would've preferred. I am also a beta-reader and editor for several of stories and I'm kind-of/sort-of a co-writer of one particular story, so I have that on my plate as well.
p.s. Any of my readerships a Brony? If so mention it in your review!
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