Chapter 1

My name is Cassie.

What do you do when the world won't allow you to be who you are? Do you fight it? Do you stick to your guns, be who you are, and say, "Forget you, world?"

Lots of people would say yes. The people with tattoos and those big piercing in their ears and the ones who wear black trenchcoats when it's 90 degrees outside...those people would all say yes. A year ago, I would have sworn up and down that nothing - nothing - could make me hurt another creature, let alone take a life.

But see, an alien invasion of your species has a way of changing all that.

I'm an Animorph. I'm one of six. Five of us are human.

One of us is not.

The five humans - my closest and probably only friend, Rachel; her cousin Jake; Jake's best bud, Marco; and last but not least, Tobias - the five of us met up at the mall by accident one Friday night and decided to all walk home together.

We made the sort of stupid, impulsive decision that young teenagers have been making since the first monkey figured out a stick could be a tool. We made a terrible (but terribly important, we now know) decision to cut through the abandoned construction site that separates the mall from the rest of town. At the point of that decision, my biggest fear was of the drunken hobos and chainsaw murderers that might be lurking in that place.

Turns out there are worse things out there. Way worse.

An Andalite crash landed his starfighter right in front of us. He explained that he'd been wounded in a fight in the space above our planet. His people were trying to protect ours from the Yeerks. The Yeerks are spacefaring parasites that slither into the brain of any species with an ear canal. They take total control. They can access your brain just like the organic computer that it is, and they can read every memory you've ever had. Every dream. Every feeling. Everything. They do a perfect job of pretending to be you. The people who know you best never even suspect anything might be wrong. The whole thing is terrifying beyond belief.

Anyway, Visser Three, the Yeerk leader of the invasion of Earth, found Elfangor, the Andalite who warned us. He found and killed Elfangor quickly, but not before Elfangor was able to give us the power to morph.

Morphing is so many things. It's wonderful and terrifying. It's total freedom, but it's also the chain that slaves us to this war. It's a great power, but in the face of what we're up against...well, its enough to keep us fighting, but even on my best day, I'm not sure it's enough to allow us to win.

We Animorphs are a diverse bunch. I'm an animal lover. Both of my parents are vets, and that's what I want to be. You know, on the off chance that we actually beat the Yeerks. My mom works at a wildlife park called The Gardens, and my dad runs the Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic. It's a non-profit animal rescue that my dad runs out of our barn. We take in every kind of hurt animal, except for pet type animals like dogs and cats. If we had to, we'd take them in, too...luckily, there are tons of vets for that sort of work, though.

Rachel is my best friend. She always has been, ever since the time in kindergarten where a kid made fun of my clothes and Rachel pushed him into a pile of legos. We are the definition of Yin and Yang. I'm black, she's white. She's pretty, I'm plain. We're not the same people we were before we met Elfangor, but she's still pretty nonchalant and I'm still a worrier. We've always balanced each other out.

Her cousin Jake is our leader. It's not something he asked for, not something he wanted...which is exactly why he's the perfect guy for the job. He's not some egomaniac who's in it for the power. He's not a control freak or anything. He tries his best to run our little resistance like a democracy, but when things get bad and we're in the middle of a life or death fight, he's the one who makes the snap decisions that could either kill us or save our lives. And it's not like he doesn't understand the implications of his responsibility - he does. He just shoulders the burden with as much good grace as I've ever seen. He's smart, kind, thoughtful...handsome...

I guess you could say I like him. As in like, like. We're not a couple, officially, but I have good reason to believe he feels the same about me as I do him. And that's enough for me.

His buddy, Marco...ah, what to say about Marco? I guess there are a lot of similarities between mine and Rachel's friendship and Jake and Marco's. They've been friends for even longer than Rachel and I; the two boys have literally been best friends since they were in diapers. Literally. I've seen pictures.

I've seen Marco terrified, hopeless, bleeding to death, and still trying to crack jokes. Some people call that a defense mechanism. With Marco, it's more of a survival instinct. In the rare event he ever gets serious, he claims laughing is the only thing that keeps him from crying.

Marco's had a pretty rough few years. His mom disappeared and is presumed dead. His dad sort of had a mental breakdown over it, and Marco had to learn to take care of himself and his dad. I think his dad was drinking a lot, so Marco was left to do the laundry and the dishes, feed the two of them, clean the apartment, stuff like that. I feel sorry for him, but I'd never let him know that. Marco's pet peeve is people pitying him. Another defense mechanism, I guess.

Tobias is the last human member of our group. His body is that of a Red-tailed hawk, but his mind is human, so to me that makes him human. If you stay in morph for two hours, you're stuck in that body. I worry about him. A lot. But Tobias seems...well, not exactly happy with the situation, but okay with it. He never talks about it, but I get the impression that his home life was pretty crummy. He's taken to his new life better than I would have expected anyone to be able to do.

Our last member is an Andalite named Ax. He's the little brother of Elfangor, and the sole survivor of the fight between the Andalites and the Yeerks in Earth space. We rescued him from the bottom of the ocean. We were sort of hoping to find a whole regiment of Andalite warriors, ready to take the fight out of our hands...but Ax has been a great asset and a friend. We're lucky to have him.

Anyway, this chapter of our story started off on a Sunday. Me, Jake, Rachel, Marco, and Tobias were in my barn. As usual, I was doing rounds - checking on our patients, making sure they were all okay. Ax wasn't there because there really wasn't much going on, as far as the fight with the Yeerks. They'd been sort of quiet lately, which wasn't really like them. I think we were all just sort of taking the breather while we had it. We hadn't been in this fight long, chronologically...but stress and pressure and fear has a way of stretching time out like taffy. A day could feel like a year.

We were already falling into patterns, which Marco always stressed that we shouldn't, but even he didn't argue too hard against our now-weekly Sunday meetings at my barn. We had to get together and strategize some time, and early Sundays were about the only time all five of us humans were all free at the same time.

Speaking of Marco, he was pessimistic as usual. "Hey, I'm all for a break. I love this. I actually get to be a kid? Read car magazines and eat Doritos and wander around the boardwalk looking for the world's smallest bikini? I'm into it. But you know good and well that the more rest we get, the bigger the bomb is going to be when the Yeerks finally do let on what they're up to."

Rachel did her thing. She jabbed Marco. Their big personalities couldn't help but to collide every time they got together. "I don't get you, man. You want to relax, but you don't want to relax. You want to enjoy the break, but you don't want to. Make up your mind."

He gave her a dark look. "I'm not saying I want to go poke the bear with the stick. Which you would know all about." Rachel has a grizzly bear morph that she is very, very fond of. "I'm just saying we can't sleep on this, as bad as we might want to. The longer the lull, the bigger the storm. That's all I'm saying."

She rolled her eyes. "Been reading Poetry for Dummies again, Marco?"

(He's right,) Tobias said before Marco could keep it going. (This isn't the first time we've seen this. When the Yeerks slow down on the surface, it's because they're gearing up for something big.)

"So what is it?" Jake asked. "Anybody have any clues? I mean, we all know the signs...weird stuff in the papers and on the news. Anybody seen anything like that?"

Nobody spoke up, but I could tell everyone was racking their brain, trying to think of anything that might tip us off to what the Yeerks might be up to. Funnily enough, it was my mom who sort of showed us the way. Tobias, from his spotter's perch in the barn's loft, called it out.

(Cassie's mom is coming, guys. Keep it natural.) He flapped to the top of a lofted bail of hay, so he wouldn't be visible from the ground.

"...and that's why the Jets will absolutely lose to the Chargers tomorrow night," Marco improvised right as my mom walked into the barn. Jake made a farting noise with his mouth like he disagreed with Marco, and I had to turn around to hide a smile. The cloak-and-dagger was absolutely necessary, but it still tended to make me laugh.

My mom wasn't paying attention, though. "Hi boys, Rachel," she said distractedly, which caught my attention. Normally my mom would have been full of questions for them, like how school was going and whatnot. "Cassie? We have to go. Got a call from fish and game...they've got a beached manta and they don't know what to do with it."

I stared. "Mantas don't beach themselves, mom."

"This one did."

"Why don't they know what to do with it?" I asked, confused. The solution seemed pretty simple to me. "Why don't they just get it back into the water?"

"Because it's got roughly a twenty-five foot wingspan and it's approximately 3,000 pounds. We don't have time to discuss it, Cassie, let's go. We'll talk on the way." She was impatient to get out there and see what she could do to help...and to be honest, so was I.

"Can Rachel and the guys go?" I asked. I heard my dad honk his truck's horn impatiently.

"Of course...they'll have to ride in the back of the truck, but we're staying on back roads to the beach anyway. Come on, kids!" She nearly sprinted out of the barn.

I looked at Jake, who was stone-faced for a moment...then he grinned ruefully and shrugged. "Guess we're saving a manta ray. Let's roll."

Author's Note: Hi! Just wanted to say thanks for reading, and I'll be working on The (New) New Dawn simultaneously. I don't really have time to sit down and bang out five chapters a day like I used to, and when I can't get into a flow, it's easier for me to work on more than one story at a time. I'll be updating as often as possible and I'll try not to leave anybody hanging for too long on either fic! Another note...I'm sure some people have read the series-style fics I've written before, under an old screen name. I re-read a couple of them lately and realized they were mostly missing a big ingredient from the real books - new morphs! I stayed away from doing them because I was more concerned about squeezing the books in canon and didn't want people to wonder why the Anis would only acquire and use new morphs for one book. Then I got off of my egomaniacal high horse and remembered that these stories I write are /not/ canon, lol. So anyway, I hope you can forgive series inconsistancies and just enjoy them for what they are - fanfic! Thanks again for reading, and /please/ take the time to leave your thoughts in a review. They really do motivate me to update faster. That's not a bribe, just a fact -) Thanks!