She hadn't been particularly eager to go on this mission in the first place, but now that she was here, she wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible. She had timed her dive so that she would start falling just as the driver left, so they would all have plenty of time to get into the truck where no one could see them.
Jake and Shara were quick to join her, but Rachel herself was still leading the way. The three of them swooped neatly into the back of the truck, opening their wings and tilting their spread tails down to kill their speed. With the last of the momentum from her dive, Rachel swooped over the low stacks of cardboard boxes in the back of the truck.
Shara and Jake weren't far behind her.
(That was dumb, Rachel,) Jake said harshly. (You should have waited.)
(I knew it was going to work,) she said, annoyed and a bit defensive about being called dumb.
Sure, Jake was their unofficial leader, and he did tend to worry about all of them when they went out on missions like this, but that didn't give him the right to go insulting people who didn't do everything the way he wanted them to.
(I agree that that wasn't your best idea, Rachel,) Shara said, tilting her pigeon's head slightly. (Still, it was kind of fun.)
(All right, let's demorph,) Jake said. Rachel winked at Shara in lieu of saying anything else; she knew how Jake would get if they stayed in one place for too long. (But, this space looks pretty tight back here, so everyone watch your knees and elbows.)
"I'm telling you, I saw some birds fly in here," an irate voice from outside the truck filtered back to them.
"You see birds? I don't see any birds," a second voice, sounding about as annoyed as the first, answered. "Let's just get this unloaded. I'm on overtime here, and my company don't pay overtime."
(Let's hear it for stressed, underpaid drivers,) Shara said, sounding amused.
Rachel, focusing as she was on her human form, was still kind of amused by what Shara had just said. Still, she put all of that out of her mind so that she could focus more completely on the changes as they happened. She wanted to get this mission over with, and the sooner the better.
Still, the back of the truck they had just flown into was really no place for three humans, especially tall ones like her, Jake and Shara. This was proved in a pretty dramatic way when Shara's emerging finger-and-arm bones forced Shara's hand into Rachel's eye.
Her eyes hadn't yet started sliding toward the middle of her face yet, and to make matters worse her seagull beak hadn't morphed away yet and was even then jammed tightly into a space between two of the boxes. She couldn't even un-jam it, since there was even less space in the back of the truck than there had been when she had noticed the problem in the first place.
As her seagull's beak pulled back into her emerging human face, Rachel began to notice a sharp pain in her back. She worried; that wasn't supposed to happen when people morphed. The Andalite morphing technology was supposed to block out all sensations of pain, or at least numb them to the point where they wouldn't be registered as pain. was something wrong?
Right as she was starting to wonder about that, however, the pain she had been feeling resolved itself into the sensation of... someone's knee being driven into her back.
(Hey, does one of-) she began to ask, but was cut off by the loss of thought-speak as she crossed the arbitrary line from morphed to unmorphed.
(Does one of us what, Rachel?) Shara asked, and there was obvious concern in the other girl's voice.
"Never mind," she said, as her human mouth and lips and tongue reformed at last. "I know what it was. Thanks." However, when she tried to move and couldn't manage even the slightest motion, she frowned. "This is ridiculous."
"Morph to cockroach," Jake said, then he seemed to realize what he'd just said. "Wait, Shara, you do have a cockroach morph, right?"
"No," the girl in question said, smiling slightly. "I could use my fly morph again, though."
"All right," Jake said. "Well, let's get to it, then."
For once, Rachel was only too happy to concentrate on the squirming little bug that she could still remember acquiring. She'd never been particularly fond of the morph itself, and she still wasn't, but in this case smaller was in fact better. A lot better, in fact.
As she continued with her morph, Rachel was acutely aware of the information that Ax had shared with them; the information about where all of their mass went when they morphed something so much smaller than themselves. The fact that all of their extra mass went into some other dimension, some kind of non-space or null-space, called Z-space. The fact that it just hung there, or floated there, or something; some kind of random wad of flesh, guts, and bone.
She didn't particularly like the thought of that.
Still, the morphing itself was disgusting enough that she didn't have much time to worry about anything else; even the fact that the morph she was taking on to protect herself was one of the ones she disliked most. However, as bad as morphing any kind of bug was, it was always worse when you had to watch someone else morph right along with you.
She'd been staring at Shara's face, a face that made her think of a softer version of her own, when Shara's violet eyes – actual violet eyes, which she hadn't thought were possible on a normal person until she had seen Shara's – widened and flattened out and expanded into the compound-eyes of a fly. And, even as all of those changes were going on, the lower half of Shara's face was spitting and changing into the creepy, tube-like fly mouth that Rachel had never particularly liked seeing.
(Not the most attractive morph in the world,) Shara said, and Rachel got a definite sense of whimsy from the other girl. (Flies have never been my favorite thing, really.)
Rachel tested out her own thought-speak, but it didn't seem like she was far enough over that arbitrary line to use it just yet. So, focusing her thoughts more firmly on the roach, Rachel hurried the morph along. She could barely see Shara at all, both because of the roach's comparatively poor vision, and because the space between them had become so vast as they had shrunk down; she couldn't even see Jake at all.
(You guys still there?) she asked, knowing that she had long since crossed whatever arbitrary line there was between morphed and not-morphed.
(I'm here,) Shara said, using thought-speak that time.
(Yeah,) Jake said, though he seemed to be thinking about something else. (Now, let's take cover inside this box.)
(Right,) she heard Shara answer, as Shara's fly morph took off and the three of them began to move.
She hadn't thought much about the box directly in front of them much while the three of them had been morphing, more out of necessity than anything else, but also because she hadn't been particularly interested in it. It was one box out of the many that had been stuffed into this truck and that were most likely filled with food. But now, it was what was going to get them inside this place.
So that she and Shara would finally be able to put all of this Edelman business behind them.
Falling into line with her fellow roach, thinking for a moment about just how gross any normal human would find the thought of two roaches – or any number, really – crawling into a box of food, Rachel made her way over to the gap in the box that would be their way in. it was probably about an inch wide, which made it incredibly, unnecessarily large as far as any of them were concerned.
One thing that held true for roaches: no matter how gross they were, they only needed the smallest of spaces to work with.
Climbing up and over the side of the box, the three of them slipped into the box and settled themselves down just over the top of... whatever kind of food had been packed inside it. None of their roach eyes were good enough to pick out just what that was, especially in the kind of darkness they were all dealing with. Still, she could smell it, the scent wafting up from the gigantic-looking space beneath them.
(Let's do it!) she called out, charging at full roach speed for the opening in the top of the box they'd been resting on.
Shara laughed, sounding both amused and a bit excited. (You know, Rachel, even after just knowing you this long, I'm starting to think that's your battlecry.)
(You know, you might just have something there,) she said, and she would have smiled if she could; she was really starting to like working with Shara.
She was really starting to see how much they had in common.
As she fell the seemingly huge distance – probably a whole three inches – into the darkness of the box, Rachel wondered for a few moments just what they were going to find when they landed. Soon after that, though, the three of them did land, and Rachel looked around in an effort to see just what it was that she had been smelling for so long. The scent that had tantalized her cockroach senses.
(So, does anyone have any ideas about what might be below us?) Shara asked, after a few minutes of mental silence.
(I don't know,) Rachel said, not having enough information to venture a guess. (But it's some kind of food, and it smells sweet.)
Sudden vibrations through their cardboard surroundings preempted any further conversation; there was a massive-seeming, jarring thud that reverberated through the stack of boxes they were all standing on.
Looking down at what she'd just landed on, Rachel found that it was some kind of a cylinder, though not quite a perfect one; it also curved ever so slightly upward when she looked closer at it. There were more of them, pressed tightly together; each one probably about ten times her current size. Taking another look around, Rachel found that there were more of the strange, faintly curved cylinders; they were all over the place, enough that Rachel wasn't going to bother with counting them.
They each tapered down to a blunt tip, Rachel realized, looking back down at the one she had ended up on top of; each of them gathered together at the ends by a small lump that she could just barely see in the far-off distance, just like a bunch of...
(Oh; bananas!) Shara exclaimed suddenly, evidently having been studying their surroundings just as hard as Rachel herself. (We're standing inside a box of bananas,) she laughed softly. (I almost didn't realize what they were from this scale. Everything looks a bit strange. Sometimes very strange, through these eyes.)
(So that must have been what we were smelling,) Jake put in, speaking up for the first time since the three of them had morphed. (That sweet smell. Good; this should be easy. They're moving us now, so we should be inside in a few minutes. Maybe less, depending on how fast these guys are.)