Being called out to the church tower where the rest of his fellow Animorphs had landed while they'd been playing around with their bird morphs, Tommy found himself finding out just why they'd all been so eager to do something like that. Flying actually was the most exciting thing he'd ever done; nothing really compared, not any of his martial arts tournaments, not the sparring he'd done with his fellow martial artists, and not anything else he'd done in his life.

Once the church tower came into view, Tommy caught sight of his fellow Animorphs landing, then demorphing once they'd made it down to the ground. Rachel was just beginning her own demorphing, as Tommy folded his wings and dropped to the ground to start his own.

"You know what we need?" Marco asked, looking around at the six of them at their various stages of transformation. "We need to find a way to coordinate these morphing outfits. I mean, Cassie's wearing green patterned leggings and a purple stretch top, and Jake's got on those awful bike shorts, Tommy's wearing black and green the way he always seems to be, and Rachel is stylish, as always, in her black tights. Put it all together, and we look pretty scruffy."

"What do you want?" Jake asked, seeming about as impatient as Tommy was starting to feel with Marco and his babbling. "You want us all to dress up in blue with a big number four on our chests? Become the Fantastic Four?"

"No; how do you think that would even work?" Marco retorted, folding his arms as he gave Jake a weird sort of superior look. "There are five of us, aside from Tobias. No, what I was thinking was an X-Men sort of thing; it's not about being identical, it's about having some style. Right now if anyone saw us, they wouldn't think 'oh, cool, superheroes,' they'd think 'man, those people do not know how to dress'."

"Marco, I think it's time to get over this fantasy of yours," Rachel said, glaring plainly at Marco where he was standing. "We are not superheroes, and this is not a comic book."

"Yes, but I really, really want it to be a comic book," Marco admitted, sounding like he was trying to protest as hard as he could without actually sounding like it. "See, in a comic book the heroes don't get killed. I mean, okay, they killed Superman that time, but it was only temporary."

"Can we deal with reality here?" Jake demanded, again sounding about as annoyed as Tommy felt. "We have business to discuss."

"That sounds good to me," he said, sweeping his gaze over the rest of his fellow Animorphs.

There were times that Tommy could let himself forget that these kids were three years younger than him; this wasn't one of those times.

Eventually, after a bit more messing around, Rachel brought up the idea of going back into the Chapman house so that she could try finding out where the Yeerks' Kandrona – something that was apparently used to beam energy or nutrients into the Yeerks' underground strongholds and the Pools that they seemed to live in normally – was. That is, if anything like that even came up during the course of their conversation.

Sure, something to do with the Kandrona's guards had come up during the course of the last conversation that she'd managed to overhear, but that probably wasn't going to happen a second time.