After getting himself registered with the new school he was going to go to for… However long the Yeerks controlling his foster parents were assigned to stay in this place, Tommy found himself meeting the usual round of new people he usually did when he and his foster family would move to a new city. It was still a bit strange, knowing that even though no one here was likely to be a Controller, he still couldn't talk to them about anything that was happening to him.

The first people they were likely to talk to about that kind of thing were his foster parents, after all.

The next day, Tommy went to participate in the martial arts exhibition match he'd signed up for as another way of keeping up his cover; even in a place that didn't seem to be under direct attack by the Yeerks, he still needed to keep up his cover. Not just because of his foster parents, but because they might have easily been carrying more Yeerks along with them. It wasn't something Tommy liked to think about, that more people might end up trapped in their own minds like his foster parents, but it was still something he had to keep in mind.

He ended up tying with his opponent in the exhibition match, which while it was interesting, wasn't the what had stuck in Tommy's mind from the encounter. No, it was the group of friends his opponent seemed to have gathered around him. They'd reminded Tommy a lot of his fellow Animorphs; a bit older, sure, and there had only seemed to be five of them all told. But the similarities still seemed to be there, for the most part.

He'd found himself smiling, thinking about that, even as he went back to his new house and began unpacking more of the boxes in his room; he'd at least some hope that he'd have the chance to settle into this place for a bit, since the Yeerks enslaving his foster parents had been sent here to investigate something.

Later, at the new school he'd enrolled at, Tommy found himself meeting one of them. The two punks hassling her didn't really make much of an impression, honestly, but even the brief conversation he'd been able to have with her in their short time between classes had served to remind him more than a little of Cassie. Sure, she seemed to have Rachel's fashion sense, but overall she seemed a lot more like Cassie.

She'd introduced herself as Kimberly; he'd done likewise, though neither of them had used their last names, which was another thing that reminded him of his time in Century City with the rest of the Animorphs.

After school that day, on his way home, Tommy found himself group of… Well, he didn't know quite what they were, since he'd never encountered anything like them before. They looked the most like humans out of every other kind of alien he'd encountered, and they were clearly hostile, since the first thing they did was block his path and try to attack him. He wasn't in any kind of position to morph, since he wasn't just plainly in sight of them, he was actually in combat with them.

It'd been a long time since he'd had to fight anyone or anything in human form; it'd been even longer since he'd had to use martial arts for anything but sparring.

Once he'd knocked the last of the weird, gray figures aside, Tommy tensed as the entire group vanished. That was the last thing he'd been expecting to happen, but before he could think too much about what might have been going on, a familiar voice drew his attention to an entirely too familiar figure appeared on top of a nearby building.

"Rita?"

Tommy only had time to get the one word out, before the strange woman used some kind of a beam to…