My name is Chapman. The Yeerk in my head is named Iniss.

I won't tell you my first name . . . It's not a secret. I just never liked it. I'd change it if there wasn't such a ridiculous amount of paperwork involved. It's easier just to have everyone call me Chapman.

It's difficult to know where to begin this story. I suppose I should start at the very beginning, with my teenage years.

To summarize: In my senior year of high school, I, and a girl I barely knew, were abducted by aliens. We were 'rescued' by other aliens who really weren't any better than the first set. Then we were dragged along on an adventure to find the most dangerous weapon in the history of the universe. It was a long adventure. Bad things happened - which to this day I insist were only 30 percent my fault, at most.

Then worse things happened. We don't talk about it.

In the end, only three of us made it back to Earth alive. Me. The girl, Loren. And an Andalite soldier named Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul.

We had found the weapon, the Time Matrix. And we understood that the time machine was too dangerous to be used by anyone, including ourselves. The three of us hid it away on Earth and vowed to never tell anyone its location. We were the only three beings in the universe to know the secret.

By the time we got to Earth, Elfangor had become so disillusioned by the ways of his people that he chose not to go home. This decision was influenced by the fact he and Loren fell in love - for some reason.

Elfangor used his morphing power to take the form of a human, and he made a new life on Earth. He could have kept the morphing power forever as long as he returned to his true form every two hours. But he chose to stay in his human disguise permanently. That's known as becoming a 'nothlit', and it meant he could never undo his decision.

What could drive someone to become a nothlit on purpose? I wouldn't mind cutting ties with my old self. But how could someone be so desperate to escape their old life that they would willingly trap themselves in an unfamiliar body forever? I just couldn't understand it.

That inability to understand him was one of several reasons he and I never really got along.

He renamed himself Alan. Al Fangor. Loren began calling him that too. But in my mind, I always think of him as Elfangor the Andalite.

.

Space is huge. People underestimate just how huge. To put it in perspective, if you could travel at the speed of light - which you can't - it would still take years to get to the star system right next door.

Fortunately, there's anti-space. Also called zero-space. It's another dimension where physics work differently. Aliens use it as a shortcut to get to the planet they want. But zero-space is also huge, it shifts around sometimes, and some paths are faster than others.

No one knew the Time Matrix was on Earth. It was dormant. But its mere presence warped zero-space all throughout the area. Alien explorers would go, "Darn, z-space currents are so slow! It takes forever to get anywhere. Oh, hold on! The current leading to this particular city on this particular planet is nice and fast. Let's go check it out!"

As the years passed, word spread. Eventually, Earth became the go-to tourist spot of the galaxy. And it became our job to make sure the tourists didn't cause trouble.

I didn't necessarily want to become the city's secret defender. It's just that, whenever there's a problem, I didn't trust that anyone else was competent enough to fix it - except maybe Loren and Elfangor.

We may not have been best buddies, but we were allies. We put aside our differences and repelled hostile invaders, helped lost travelers, salvaged the technology they left behind, and above all, made sure no one got too curious about the Time Matrix's hiding spot.

All things considered, we made a pretty good team.

.

Ufology was just our night job. We still had lives outside of it. Loren and Elfangor lived happily ever after with each other. And I found a nice girl of my own.

I was nervous when Alison got pregnant.

It wasn't like when Loren and Elfangor got pregnant. They were thrilled. They loved the idea of becoming parents. Me? I was always the guy who looked out for Number One. I never really wanted kids.

But I had no intention of abandoning the baby. I wasn't that much of a selfish jerk - anymore.

I married Alison. I admit we made it official after we learned she was pregnant, but it's not as if we weren't considering it before. I did love her. Maybe not as much as I do now, but back then it was a lot for a guy who didn't like anyone.

The idea of having a baby scared me - not the idea of supporting a family financially. I wasn't worried about that. I could be responsible. I could raise a child, and protect her. I could go through the motions . . . But I was scared that I wouldn't love her.

That fear was in the back of my mind right up to the day Melissa was born.

I remember the first time I held her in the hospital. She was crying, her face scrunched up under the unpleasant fluorescent lighting. Without even thinking about it, I angled my body to block the lights, giving her shade. Then Melissa opened her eyes. The newborn in my arms looked right at me. Right into my eyes.

My own eyes started watering. I swear, at that moment, it's like I became someone else.

Oh . . . I get it now.

.

Elfangor and Loren also had a child. A boy. They named him Tobias.

The poor thing was barely a toddler when Elfangor died. It was a car accident. A random, pointless, accident that was the other driver's fault.

It was hard to imagine. Elfangor had survived countless battles. He stayed on Earth mostly to get away from all the bloodshed, but he was once a terrifying, unstoppable warrior. His enemies threw everything they had at him to no effect. To this day, there are people on other worlds who have nightmares about 'Beast Elfangor'. Even after becoming a human on Earth, we survived some close calls against alien invaders. But in the end, all it took to kill him was an ordinary car accident.

I hate irony.

Miraculously, baby Tobias survived. Loren also survived, but not unharmed. She had severe brain trauma that both blinded her and made her lose all her memories. The doctors said, though they couldn't know for sure, it was unlikely she would ever get her memory back.

I checked. I visited her in the hospital after the accident. Without revealing anything myself, I confirmed that she couldn't remember her husband, or his true nature. She knew nothing about aliens. Most importantly, she no longer knew the location of the Time Matrix.

From that moment on, I was the only one on Earth, possibly in the whole universe, who knew the secret.

Fine. The fewer who knew, the better.

That was the only silver lining. Elfangor was buried under a fake name, in a body that wasn't even his, eighty-two light-years from home. I suppose that was his choice though - except for the part where it happened so soon.

Loren had a long recovery ahead of her. Physical therapy and learning how to live as a blind person. Tobias would be placed into foster care until she recovered.

But even after Loren got discharged, I had no intention of contacting her again. I wasn't going to drag her back into our life of fighting alien invaders. She was blind. She lost her husband. She deserved to retire.

I was on my own.

.

Let's skip ahead a few years.

A ship crashed in the woods. It wasn't an invader, or a lost traveler, or even a tourist. It was a refugee ship on a mission of mercy.

Eighty-nine Yeerks in the pool, plus two Yeerks bonded to Hork-Bajir pilots. As far as they knew, they were the last Yeerks left in the universe. The ship had crashed because of a malfunction in the engine. By the time I arrived and helped them fix the problem, the Hork-Bajir hosts were exposed to a lethal amount of radiation.

Those two brave Hork-Bajir were the only ones left protecting the Yeerk species from extinction. And then they were gone. But the Yeerks they were bonded with survived. And so, I chose to become the new host for the Yeerk pilot, Iniss. I couldn't save his old partner; I felt like I owed him something.

It wasn't quite that Iniss and I merged into a single entity, like some Yeerk-host duos tried to do in the past. After the death of his Hork-Bajir host and good friend, Iniss didn't mind a little emotional distance with his new host. We could still hear each other's thoughts. And we got along well - he was certainly better company than the roommates I had in college. But he was him, and I was me.

Almost immediately, Eva - one of the few people I consider an actual friend - got involved in helping the Yeerks. She bonded with Edriss. Soon enough, I explained everything to my wife Alison, and she chose to bond with Niss. And then Tidwell. With Illim. And then Tom. With Temrash.

As alien visitations became more frequent than ever, I was finally part of a team again. A much larger team than I ever had before. It wasn't bad.

.

I was now thirty-five. People told me I looked older, but what do they know?

My day job was Vice Principal of a junior high school. I worked under Principal Arlington. She mostly worked with the staff and administrative matters, while I mostly dealt with disciplining the students. We divided our duties that way for the simple reason that I was better at being scary.

Melissa was thirteen. She was now a student at my school.

There was also someone else I knew who was now a student. Obviously, I couldn't keep track of every single person who goes here. But when I looked over the roster at the start of the year, I noticed a name I could never mistake.

Fangor, Tobias.

A blast from my past.

Author's Notes: I don't intend to ever write the full backstory about Chapman's first adventure with Loren and Elfangor. All you need to know is that it was exactly like what "The Andalite Chronicles" would have been if there were never any Yeerks involved. Probably. And the details are irrevelant. Probably.