Author's Note: The events in this story take place, continuity-wise, directly before Animorphs #36 and mid-season two in "The Suite Life of Zach and Cody". One would expect it goes without saying, but the events of the story will obviously create an AU canon after those points in history. Additionally, bear in mind that there is a disparity in dating between the two series, insomuch as mid-season two of Z&C is supposed to be set in 2006, while the Animorphs series ended in 2001 and was mostly set in the 1995-1998 period. In order to accommodate this, I am waving my magic author's wand and declaring that it is currently the summer of 2002, and that both of my intersection points actually belong to that point in history. This allows the Animorphs to still be 13/14 instead of 25, like they "should" be by Z&C Season 2.

Any other divergences you might notice are either a planned consequence of the timeline changes on my part, or I simply messed up. Ask me about it and I'll let you know which. I will also assume, since this is a crossover, that no one knows anything about either series, which will unfortunately require a lot of background exposition in this chapter and a few of the following ones. Just enjoy it.

"Boston. You're sure of it."

The illusory image of the oddly handsome blonde boy shook his head in response, dejection on his simulated face. Not for the first time, I wondered whether the facial expressions generated by the hologram were deliberate, or whether some kind of subconscious subroutine in the programming for this "boy" was responsible for those little details. "I wish I weren't," he commiserated.

My name is Marco.

I can't tell you my last name, because danger is everywhere. And I can't tell you where I really live, but I can tell you that it's not Boston, Massachusetts. It's not even within a thousand miles of Boston, Massachusetts. And now, the fate of the world likely depended on my finding a way to get there as fast as possible.

That might sound ridiculous, although perhaps a little less-so since the terrorist attacks that were launched from there. But the threat to Boston this time was both much more subtle and much more threatening than a standard act of human malice. What was going to happen in Boston over the next few days could doom the entire world. You see, we humans are not alone on this planet. At least five other species that I know of are present, and currently locked in a deadly struggle, with the fate of Earth in the balance.

Our primary enemies are the Yeerks. Funny looking word, I know. Interesting side note, there's some debate over the phonetics of it in our language. When they first arrived on Earth, it was pronounced like "year" with a K on the end. Year-Kuh. That pronunciation always made me think of bad country singers with a horrible southern drawl, so I've always pronounced it as though it rhymed with "Jerk", which, once you learn about them, believe me, you'll see why that's more appropriate. Enough Human-Controllers must have felt the same way, because the more I overhear the word used in conversations between them, the more I hear it pronounced the way I pronounce it. You'd think the Yeerks themselves would have a more firm opinion on the matter, but bottom line? They've never really had vocal chords this good before. Debating their name is probably loads of fun for them, since this is really the first time they've ever had a choice over how to say it.

See, Yeerks in their natural bodies look an awful lot like snails without the shell. They have those little feely antennae in the front, and they create a mucousy slime whenever they try to squiggle along a surface, which they don't do very well, since they were designed to be an aquatic lifeform. They're usually about four to six inches long, very thin and malleable. It's hard to believe, when looking at one directly, that they could be the greatest threat that mankind may ever face in it's history – or perhaps even be the end of it. Once a Yeerk wraps itself around your cerebral cortex, that's it, game over, you're out. You're nothing but a voice mewling in the back of your own head, watching "your" Yeerk take you down a path that may end up consigning everyone you care about to the same fate. We call you a Controller, then, which is dumb since you're the Controlee, not the Controller, but whatever.

For allies, the Yeerks have Taxxons – horrible yellowish dodecapede monsters that stand over nine feet tall when they prop up their front twelve legs. The smell alone would give most people nightmare. Then there are the Hork-Bajir – a sweet, innocent race with big sharp razor-blades all over their skin. They don't willingly serve the Yeerks, but they do serve them, a constant reminder that the Yeerks have done this "battle for the planet" thing before, and they've won it every time they've tried it. There are only a handful of free Hork-Bajir left in the galaxy, and they're all in a cute little valley about twenty miles from us.

Us. The Animorphs. Six kids in their early teens, only five of them human. Less than a week ago, we were celebrating our graduation from middle school, but unlike the rest of our classmates, we were celebrating the fact that all of us had actually lived to see it. Visser Three, leader of the Yeerk invasion of Earth, was our commencement speaker, undoubtedly invited in his role as head of the Sharing by it's oh-so-prominent adult member, Vice Principal Chapman. Nothing more amusing than listening to your archenemy spew out words about all that you can accomplish as part of a team. There were a lot of wry smiles that day.

Our primary allies are the Andalites, or at least they are in theory. They got their asses handed to them in Earth orbit about a year and a half ago, and no one's really seen much of them since. Ax-man, the Andalite teenager in our group and the only free Andalite on the planet, told us it'd be about 1-2 years before they got here, so I suppose they'd be about due, but we got intelligence recently that the Andalite fleet went to help out the Anati system instead. I suppose if I were an Anati I'd be all sorts of giddy about it, but being a human, I kinda think it stinks. Well, doubly for me, as my mother is a human-Controller and she's going to be facing off against that fleet when it gets there, so… no matter which way it goes, I lose.

An Andalite prince named Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul crashed on Earth on the day they lost their orbital battle, and my friends and I had the misfortune of being in the right place at the absolutely WRONG time. He gave us a clue as to what was happening, and then gave us access to a technology, the power to turn into any animal we can touch and then, for a limited time, become a carbon copy of that animal. We've been using that ability twofold for it's natural weapons, which among Earth animals are many and formidable, and the anonymity it provides to our team, which has managed to delude the Yeerk forces into thinking that we're a small Andalite assault band and not a handful of human kids with maybe a dozen pubic hairs between us. Well… it's been a year, maybe two dozen now.

And then we have the Chee, a race of androids hardwired for nonviolence. They've successfully infiltrated the Yeerk invasion force, acting as double-agents of a sort and providing information whenever they can. It was a member of their race, the puppy-robot cleverly disguised by the realistic hologram of a thirteen year old boy, who had come to give us our lovely graduation present.

I rolled my eyes. "Dad, Nora? I know we had that weekend at Nora's dad's house planned, engagement party hooplah, but do you mind if I blow that off and head out to Red Sox land for a playoff game against the way way WAY foreign team?"

"It's good that we've hurt them so much that they'd need to resort to this," Cassie noted, her back to us as she tended to a raccoon with a broken leg. "Dividing their forces along two fronts are going to make them that much weaker."

"Weaker?" Rachel asked incredulously. "You do know there's only six of us, right? We can't keep going back and forth to Boston every time something over /there/ needs our attention."

"True," I agreed. "But two fronts means messages between them can get scrambled, they can step on each other's toes, there's a lot of room for misdirection and subterfuge." I turned to Erek the Puppy-Bot. "Couldn't the Chee infiltrate the Boston group, make some of that happen?"

Erek nodded. "Eventually, sure. We're already planning on one of our people booking an extended stay at the Tipton hotel starting next month; that's the earliest he can wrap up his old life. But the impression I got was that a small advance team was going beforehand, with the goal of making one incredibly wealthy Controller out of London Tipton herself."

Ax's left stalk-eye perked up at the name, and abruptly, he clapped his seven-fingered hands together and stomped his forward hoof. «Yay me!» he exclaimed in giddy thought-speak.

The rest of us just sort of stared at him. Andalites can be weird at times.

"Sooooooo it's gotta be us," Jake mused, snapping us out of our bafflement. "Some local Chee here can play our roles for a couple of weeks?"

Erek nodded. "As long as two of you can pull off a sleepover tonight. There's only three Chee available before tomorrow, but I can do a two-person hologram that should still feel pretty realistic to the touch."

"Wanna sleep over?" Rachel asked Cassie.

"Sure," she replied.

Rachel grinned at Erek. "Problem solved."

"Why do girls get to pull off these things without even /asking/ parents, Big Jake?" I mused to my only truly human male friend. "With us it's 'what are you gonna do, how late will you be up'…"

Rachel shrugged. "We don't light farts or jump off buildings on our sleepovers," she retorted.

I smirked, jerking my thumb up towards the rafters where Tobias was preening his feathers. "Him jumping off a building doesn't really count as a problem, y'know."

«Right, like I ever had a sleepover,» Tobias whined. He's a red-tailed hawk – I'll explain in a minute.

"So I guess we're going to Boston," Jake said. "Any ideas on how we get there?"

«We took the plane to Web Access America,» Tobias pointed out. «We could always do that again.» I saw Jake physically shudder at the thought, and remembered how close he'd come to dying as a small stain on a jetliner's wall.

I shook my head. "Much as Jake loves that idea," I quipped, "WAA's main offices were a ninety minute flight, which fit into our morph time. Boston's gotta be at least six hours, which makes it impossible. Unless we're talking about grabbing half a dozen connecting flights, which creates over a hundred different opportunities for something to go wrong."

See, morphing's main limitation is the time limit – stay in morph for more than two hours, and you stay forever. Which is why Tobias is a red-tailed hawk, although he was impossibly lucky about it and got the morphing power back a few months later, even though that's technically impossible. I'd never be that lucky. I'm sure I'd spend eternity as a lobster, no possibility of parole, if I was ever to tempt fate at the wrong time, and even if there was a universe-bending exemption in the cards for me, I doubt I could stay sane as a trapped animal long enough to get it. I admire Tobias a lot for everything he's been able to go through and still find a moment's joy in life.

Not that, y'know, I'd ever tell /him/ that or anything.

«Could the Chee do it, perhaps?» Tobias wondered. «Buy the tickets for us?»

Erek shook his head. "We have the money for it, sure, but we'd never be able to get tickets for six unrelated minors, one who doesn't even exist on paper, in time for a flight leaving as fast as you need it to leave. We'd never get past the new security screenings. We have plenty of fake identities in the system, but it would take days to get you guys IDs to match them."

"That's not a problem," said Rachel. "Just get seven tickets under any name, project a hologram of those six people getting on board with you, then keep the hologram up for the flight while we get aboard as flies and demorph into those seats."

Erek rubbed his forehead. "Ugh. You have no idea what would have to go on under the hologram to get that to work… and now I need two sets of sleepovers."

"Better be at my house," I said. "I doubt he's going to let me go anywhere this close to our trip, we have to pack tomorrow."

"And I have to get on the next plane right back," Erek noted, "so that I can be in place to join the impersonation team tomorrow. I can't be any help in Boston."

"Alright, so we have a plan on how to get to Boston, but… what do we do when we get there?" I asked. "Just tap London Tipton on the shoulders and say, 'Hey, don't join the Sharing, they're a bunch of alien slugs'?"

Cassie grimaced. "Assuming they even go the Sharing route," she commented. "They could use a friend, a butler or something… they have no power base in Boston right now, except for the single Controller flying there. Heck, they probably picked somebody she trusts already."

Erek shrugged. "Sorry, I couldn't get a name on the Controller, just that it's an employee or regular resident of the Tipton and that it was taking twenty unhosted Yeerks along."

Jake rubbed the bridge of his nose, something he does when the thinking process stresses him out. I've been seeing him do it a little more often lately. "So there'll be at least one person we can't trust right off the bat, and possibly a dozen by the following nightfall."

I shook my head. "Uh uh, Big Jake. You're not thinking like a Yeerk. He'll go slower than that, and he won't go for London Tipton right away."

"He or /she/,"Rachel remarked. "And why?"

"Containment," I explained, ignoring the gender quip. Not that I didn't agree a female host was a possibility, of course, but the generic he was better for discussion and I didn't feel like quibbling over the semantics of it. "Don't forget, there's no Yeerk Pool where he's going. He's going to need to catch one person fast, someone who can hold his host down and supervise it in two and a half days when it's time for him to feed again, but after that, he'll stop until he can convert an empty hotel room or a back area into a containment section for hosts, which could take weeks. After that… maybe two hosts a day, and no shot at London until he's got at least eight with him, maybe more, depending on how hard it is to approach her."

«You sure you're not a Controller?» Tobias teased.

Rachel grinned broadly. "God help us if he ever is."

I enjoyed my moment of pride at my friends' implied praise, but it would have been folly to let it distract me. "Planning for what /they'd/ do is easy, it's figuring out what /we/ should do that's the tough part."

«Well, there is one obvious idea,» Tobias murmured. «We could make her one of us.»

"London Tipton, Animorph?" Cassie wondered aloud.

«Yay me!» Ax chimed in again, causing another momentary glance in his direction.

I shrugged. "Maybe this is what happens to Andalites when they're sleep-deprived," I offered. "You did say he stayed up all night watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, right Tobias?"

"I'm sure most of us don't like the idea of more Animorphs, if we can help it," Jake noted, cutting off conversation on Ax's strangeness. "But it'd be best if we left our options open. Better bring the blue box with us." He glanced at Erek. "I guess we'll have to set the deadline ourselves, we'll need a Chee to fly back to Boston to escort us home the same way we're getting there. Shall we say… two weeks?"

"As long as I can catch a Red Sox game while I'm in town," I joked. "Erek, do the Chee take expense reports?"

«Two weeks. Sounds right,» said Tobias.

"Sure."

"I think so."

«Yay me!»