My name is Lee. Just Lee. You know the drill by now: it's too dangerous to tell you my last name, what school I go to, what state I live in, and if I did, then they could find me, and it would all be over, and you know what? If you're reading this at all - if you've read the other parts of this story - then you already know too much. You already have enough details to figure out what's going on and where it's happening. So, let's start over.

My name is Lee Hoshino. Three months ago, my parents and I moved from Albuquerque to the suburbs of Los Angeles. I wasn't happy about moving, especially on such short notice (only two weeks, can you believe that?) but I tried to make the best of it. I didn't exactly make friends, but I did find a couple of other kids to hang out with. One night, we took a shortcut home through the abandoned construction site near the mall. And that was when our lives changed forever.

We saw a UFO land right in front of us. The pilot, an Andalite warrior named Elfangor, was dying, and had just enough time to warn us that Earth was secretly being invaded. Not something big and obvious like in the movies. No meteors landing on the town square and dispensing Martian tripods. No flying saucers going around to demolish our national landmarks. No Navigation Guild Heighliners delivering the Sardaukr hordes. No Imperial Stormtroopers chasing us down. No, the Yeerks are more subtle than that. They're parasites, crawling into peoples' heads, plugging into their brains, and seizing control of their bodies. The host remains completely aware, but absolutely powerless to stop the Yeerk from impersonating them almost flawlessly. And then they look for more people to lure in and turn into Yeerk slaves. We're not the first planet they've done this to. They've already conquered the Gedds, the Taxxons, and the Hork-Bajir.

There's no way to tell just by looking who's a Controller and who isn't. They could be anyone. They could be anywhere. It might be your history teacher, the waiter at the restaurant. It could even be somebody in your family. Both of my parents are Controllers. So is Jake's brother, Tom. And we've managed to identify a few others, too.

The good news is that we're not alone in the fight against the Yeerks. Elfangor's people, the Andalites, are fighting them all over the galaxy. The bad news is that the Andalites who were sent to Earth... well, they're all dead. Their battleship was ambushed, and only Elfangor survived long enough to make it down to Earth. The Yeerks followed him, but before they caught up with him, he was able to warn us - and give us a weapon to fight back with. Hopefully, it will be enough to buy us time until more Andalites come.

Six normal teenagers - Jake and Rachel Berenson, Marco Cabrera, Cassie Clarke, Tobias Vogel, and myself - were given the ability to morph. To acquire the DNA of any animal we could touch, and then turn into that animal. Apart from us Animorphs (animal morphers - Marco thought of the name), only the Andalites have this power. And for that reason, the Yeerks think that we are Andalites who survived the destruction of their ship. We've already fought one battle against them. After a week of carefully spying, we found a way to get into their secret underground base. See, they can't stay inside their hosts indefinitely. Every six days, they need to go into the Yeerk Pool to absorb Kandrona rays and whatever else they need to stay alive. We thought that we could go in there, smash the place up, and maybe free some of their hosts. You know, do something to ruin their day.

Going in and smashing things worked just fine. The hard part was getting back out alive. We almost didn't. The problem is that we hadn't realized how big the place was. I'd expected to find some kind of like, well... you know those kind of movies where somebody's about to start a nuclear war, and there's all these Army generals in an underground command center? We thought we'd find something like that. But the Pool turned out to be a lot bigger. Big enough to put a couple of sports stadiums inside. Or a couple of aircraft carriers. I don't know how many Yeerks are on Earth, but we're outnumbered badly. There might be thousands of them. We managed to free a lot of their hosts, but only for a couple of minutes. In the end, only three or four actually got out of there. We might have been able to save more, if it wasn't for Visser Three.

Elfangor told us that only one Yeerk has succeeded in capturing an Andalite. Only one shares our power to morph. Visser Three, leader of the forces invading Earth. I don't know how many Vissers there are, but we've got the impression that the number Three spot must be a pretty high rank. And I wouldn't be surprised if he killed some other Vissers to get that rank. We've seen him up close twice now, and I swear he radiates pure evil. He can also morph some rather disturbing alien creatures. Such as the abomination with eight legs, eight arms, and eight fire-breathing heads. That's why we barely escaped with our lives: he got between us and our first-choice exit, then tried to collapse the next exit.

It was while we were running away from Visser Three that we suffered our first casualty. Tobias got separated from us, then got knocked out by flying debris. When he finally came to, he'd been in morph too long. That's the catch about morphing: there is a time limit. Three hours, and not a second longer. Tobias is alive, but he's trapped in the body of a red-tailed hawk. And that's why, two days after our disastrous first battle, I was sneaking around inside his house.


Author's Note: I figured out that Animorphs was probably set in California long before the series ended. It was the only place where the geography made sense. Mountains and forests right up against the ocean, with dried-out grasslands being an evening's drive away. And then "Visser" stated outright that The Sharing started operating pretty close to Hollywood (although I didn't actually read that one until after I started writing "The Extraneous"). Lee's description here of being in the suburbs of L.A. is hyperbole, though. He just thinks that everything on the coast from San Francisco to San Diego counts as a suburb of Los Angeles.