Standing in front of the statues at the bottom of the ranks of stadium seats that seemed to have replaced the Yeerk pool entirely, found that he couldn't quite manage to keep himself from shuddering. Not only were their statues of every one of the Animorphs' battle-morphs – with Ax set apart from them, just enough to let anyone looking know that he was a part of their group – but standing behind each of them was some kind of strange figure. They all seemed to be carved from the same kind of stone; seemingly in the shape of people wearing skintight outfits, each of them with elaborate helmets that looked like stylized animal heads.
"What even is this?" Tommy found himself asking.
"This feels wrong, you guys," Cassie said, arms crossed and shuddering.
Tommy was about to ask what she meant, when he felt a strange tingling running over his skin, his vision was suddenly overwhelmed with colorless light, and Tommy found himself and the rest of the Animorphs standing somewhere… else.
"It looks like you were right," a rough-voiced woman said, sounding like she was trying to be nice, but as the strange light cleared from his eyes, Tommy found himself feeling the same, creeping sense of dread that he'd felt during those – mercifully few – times when he'd been forced to confront Visser Three in person.
Whoever this woman was, Tommy knew that they couldn't trust her.
"This was the day you kids came to see the new world we made together," the woman continued, smiling in a way that she probably thought was either inviting or kind; though given how much she reminded Tommy of Visser Three, it didn't go over well.
"What do you mean?" Jake asked, taking up the thread of their conversation.
The strange woman laughed. "Yes, I suppose I should start from the beginning, shouldn't I?"
The story she told them was a strange one; even after everything he'd seen and done, Tommy still thought so. Apparently, the strange woman – who had introduced herself as Rita Repulsa, and then went on to tell them that she was some kind of a witch – had been trying to take over the Earth, too, only using more overt methods than anyone but Visser Three would have probably been in favor of. It also involved some group called the Power Rangers; it seemed like Rita had sent them after the Rangers, taken whatever powers they used, and then handed the powers over once the last of the Rangers was dead.
Rita seemed only too pleased to tell them about that, as well as the fact that Tommy himself had been the one to tell her about them in the first place, back in whatever kind of citadel she maintained on the Moon. Given what she was saying, he'd been searching for the Yeerk mother ship, and when she'd asked him what he was doing he'd told her. Maybe that was why the Ellimist had sent them here.
He'd have to remember not to tell her, whenever they met.
Speaking to the older him was more than a little unnerving, considering how off all of them seemed to be – they were eerily like Controllers, or at least the ones he'd encountered at The Sharing; the ones who were pretending to be normal humans – something that all of them agreed on, so they were trying to keep from saying anything that could be used against them. Tommy was just starting to wonder when the Ellimist was going to take them all back, when they appeared back in the woods behind Cassie's barn.
"Well, that was weird," Marco said, once all of them were standing together in the woods.
"It seems like the Yeerks aren't the only ones after Earth," Jake said, folding his arms and narrowing his eyes.
And I might be meeting them, for some reason or other, Tommy found himself musing.
"As if we didn't have enough problems," Marco said, rolling his eyes.
