Once all of them had managed to escape from Visser Three – an escape that had ended up involving the whale that they'd helped coming back to rescue them all, and then actually carrying all of them on his back to the beach – Tommy sighed in relief as he made his way back up onto the land. Cassie had actually fallen asleep, at least briefly, while all of them were traveling back to shore, and while Tommy was glad that she'd been able to get some rest while she could, it'd still been a bit strange to see someone asleep on the back of a humpback whale.

Not all that strange, compared to everything else he and the other Animorphs had seen and seen and done just today, but still a bit strange.

Morphing back into a dolphin was actually kind of a relief, after everything that had happened today, since the giddy happiness that came alongside the dolphin's mind made him feel at least a bit better after everything that had happened. Once they all finally made it back up the river to shore, back where all of them had left their normal cloths behind, back to where Tobias was waiting for them, Tommy finally allowed himself to relax the rest of the way.

The load of tension he'd been carrying with him didn't fall away just as easily as thinking about it, of course, but at least being away helped to ease some of it.

After deciding what to do with Ax – having the Andalite stay with Cassie really did seem to be the best thing that they could do.

"That still doesn't deal with how we're going to get him there," Marco pointed out. "It's a long walk, people are bound to notice a big blue deer with extra eyes and a scorpion tail."

(I will have to morph,) Ax said, looking around at all of them with both pairs of eyes.

Ax acquired Cassie first, and then moved on to the rest of them, and Tommy found himself wondering just what the Andalite was going to do, before he started morphing into what looked like some kind of merging of the five of them at once. He was fairly tall, the same as, Rachel, Jake, and Tommy himself, with a skin tone that seemed to hover somewhere between the Cassie's dark skin, Marco's mid-tone, and the light skin that the rest of the still-human Animorphs possessed.

Once Ax had had at least a little time to acclimate to his new morph – the lack of a second set of legs and eyes seemed to be the most unsettling to him, while he seemed to think of the mouth as some kind of a toy – all of them dressed up. All of them were a bit too worn down to manage another bird morph and a flight on top of that, or at least Tommy was, and so he couldn't help but be grateful that that hadn't been the plan.

Still, once he found himself back at his house, Tommy found himself once again confronted by an empty building and a note telling him to enjoy having the house to himself and that dinner was once again in the fridge. Narrowing his eyes, Tommy considered something that'd been on his mind ever since he'd realized that there were aliens trying to take over the Earth without anyone noticing until it was too late. As he fixed dinner for himself, Tommy decided that he would ask Tobias to follow his foster parents.

No matter what the answer ended up being, Tommy just wanted to have an answer, in the end.