Fluttering back out of the hayloft, not bothering to head for the window on the other side since Slade and Shara were already up, Tobias circled the barn twice; once to determine that there truly wasn't anyone close enough to spy on their meeting – someone that Slade would be entirely too eager to deal with, he knew – and the second time to judge for himself just how close the rest of the Animorphs were. The rest of the group was closing in fast, and as he returned the greetings that Rachel and Jake offered to him, Tobias sighed. Looked like they were all going to get on with this.

Not that he wasn't eager to do whatever damage he could to the Yeerks, but given everything that Rachel had said about the Yeerk Pool, he couldn't say that he was particularly eager to go out on this newest mission of theirs.

Fluttering back into the hayloft, just above Slade and Shara's heads, Tobias spared the siblings a glance. (All right, it's time.)

(Right,) both Slade and Shara responded, nearly at the same time.

Following the two of them as they made their way down the ladder, Tobias sighed mentally. It was time to get on with things.

"All right, Tobias," Marco said, smirking in the way he always did when he was about to say something snarky. "What new and exciting way have you come up with to horrify us today?"

(Oh, you're going to love this one, Marco,) he said, getting into the spirit of things even as the others – with the obvious exception of Slade – all rolled their eyes at Marco. (It's somewhere I'm sure you spend a lot of time; a place that no one who'd not completely paranoid would ever suspect of having sinister alien connections: our local McDonald's.)

"You know, I always did suspect them of having sinister alien connections," Marco said; Jake gave him a Look.

"All right," Jake said, nodding once. "Let's go see if we can find out just what'd going on with this oatmeal the Yeerks have such a hard time dealing with."

"Right, Jake," Slade said, speaking for the first time since the meeting had begun.

"Bird morphs, everyone," Jake said, sweeping his gaze over all of the others as they began their various morphs. "Thanks, Tobias."

"Yeah, thanks a lot," Marco said, the smirk on his face looking a bit more sardonic than usual.

(You're welcome,) he retorted, just as Marco's still-smirking mouth began to push out and harden into the beak of the Osprey he was morphing.

Slade's shaggy black hair seemed to spread over his back and shoulders, twisting together to form feathers as his morph continued; Rachel and Shara's hair turned dead white, but that was the only real similarity between their transformations since they were both clearly morphing different birds; Marco's beak and wings had both formed before the first of his feathers had even started growing in, making for a spectacularly eerie sight as he morphed; Jake's legs were the first thing to start changing on him; Cassie – and, oddly enough – Shara were the only ones who managed to make their morphs look like something other than something out of a particularly high-budget horror move.

For a moment, Tobias wondered just what Cassie and Shara had in common that gave them the ability to morph as smoothly as they did; he'd dismissed the idle musing as soon as he noticed that the rest of the Animorphs had finished morphing, though. Now wasn't the time to think about things like that.

(All right, let's see what we find, here,) Jake said, once all of them had met up in the air. (Tobias, lead the way.)

(All right,) he said, turning his flightpath so that he was headed for the McDonald's that he had marked as one of the many entrances to the Yeerk Pool that stretched under most of their town. (We're going to want to be flies to get in there, though,) he muttered, not entirely happy about the prospect.

Sure, a fly might be faster and more agile than even a hummingbird, but that didn't mean that he enjoyed giving up his hawk body in favor of a tiny, defenseless little bug. Still, he was fairly sure that the others – again, with the pretty obvious exception of Slade – all felt the same way as he did.

(Yeah, we know,) Jake said, not sounding like he was much happier about the prospect of morphing a bug, either

That made Tobias feel a bit better about the situation, even if he was sure he'd never be happy about it.

The rest of their flight to the McDonald's was as silent as air travel by way of bird morphs could ever get, and Tobias occupied his time by picking out the landmarks he recognized as being on the way there. Turning when he needed to, Tobias soon found himself above the same McDonald's he'd marked.

(All right, we're here,) he said, drawing the attention of the strangest not-quite-flock of birds that had ever been almost assembled; every time he thought about the fact that he was traveling in what could loosely be termed the company of a pair of Ospreys, a Bald Eagle, a Peregrine Falcon, a Northern Harrier, a Raven, and whatever kind of bird that Shara preferred to morph, Tobias would always find himself imagining a bird watcher's reaction to it.

Not a Controller's, since he knew what any Yeerk's reaction to seeing any kind of animal acting unlike what they were known to act like, but just a normal bird watcher; they would have been completely shocked, he knew, just to see all of these different birds flying together.

(Let's do it,) Rachel said, diving for a blind spot on the roof in the lull between people coming and going inside the building.

(You heard Xena,) Marco laughed, clearly giddy from the flying, folding his wings back and falling from the sky just as Rachel had. (Let's go!)

Watching for pauses in the flow of customers, just as every one of the other Animorphs was doing, Tobias waited for the rest of the Animorphs to dive down onto the roof; he still wasn't particularly eager to go into that fly morph he'd acquired, but he knew that he could only stall for so long. Once Slade, the second-last of those who'd been waiting for their chance to dive, found his moment and joined up with the others, Tobias sighed mentally.

Well, here goes. Waiting for a few moments as the crowds thinned out again, Tobias folded his own wings and stooped to join up with his friends and fellow Animorphs on the roof of the McDonald's he'd been watching for so long. The others had each been demorphing as they'd landed, so some of them were well on their way to becoming flies; Jake was the farthest along, of course.

Turning away before his so-much-better-than-human vision could begin to spot any of the more disgusting changes, Tobias focused on his own fly morph. At least as well as he could when pretty much everything about that little body disgusted him on several different levels, Tobias felt his own changes begin.

XXX

Once they were all in fly morph, it was incredibly easy for the eight of them to get their fly bodies moving toward the doors of the McDonald's; the smells of greasy fast-food would have been enough to draw any fly inside. Once they had managed to make it inside, flying in above the heads of a particularly large family, the varied scents of frying food and assorted grease and special sauces was nearly overwhelming.

(This was not easy to figure out,) Tobias said, sounding extremely pleased with himself. (Hours and hours of following known Controllers, then I had to through the windows. Finally, I morphed to human to check out the inside. That's how I found out about the Happy Meal.)

The eight of them were buzzing around in random patterns, though there were two flies closer together that she thought might have been Slade and Shara. Still, no one was going to pay enough attention to a bunch of flies to be able to spot something like that. No one, except a particularly paranoid Controller, anyway; and someone like that would have already given themselves away to the general public.

Or at least, if they weren't as rich as Joe Bob Fenestre had been. Rachel sometimes wondered what had happened to the Controller, but not enough to bring it up at one of the meetings. Cassie had had a really bad time after that mission; enough so that Rachel wasn't going to be the one to remind her of it.

(What about the Happy Meal?) Cassie asked, bringing Rachel's attention back to the mission they were all currently on.

(Why is the meal happy?) Ax asked, sounding about as confused as anyone who hadn't been exposed to the sometimes weird naming-conventions of fast-food joints would have been.

(That's the code,) Tobias said, clearly opting to ignore Ax's confusion just like all of the others were doing. (It's how you signal to the cashier that you're one of them. You go up to the counter and say: I'd like a Happy Meal. With extra happy. That's how they do it.)

Flying upside-down along the ceiling, wanting to shut the fly mind sharing space with her own up, if only for long enough that she could concentrate on what was actually important during this mission, Rachel looked for a place that she could feed without being noticed. There was a spot of grease – huge-looking to her fly-perspective, but probably only about twice the size of a quarter in human terms – by a deep-fryer that didn't seem to be in use at the moment.

Turning a back flip, Rachel landed as close as she could to the grease spot without actually standing in it, extended her fly's sucking-mouthparts, and began to eat. Well, to spit out the digestive juices that her fly body used and then to suck up the resulting goo that was left behind in the process. Which was about as disgusting as anyone would think, but at least it shut the fly up.

That was pretty much all she could ask for, under the circumstances.

(After you place the Happy Meal order, you go around like you're heading for the bathroom,) Tobias continued. (But instead of that, you take the other door. The one that goes to the kitchen. You go in – and here's the cool part – you go in to the walk-in refrigerator.)

Shara laughed softly. (Wow, Tobias; when you said that part was cool, I had no idea you meant it so literally.)

Marco laughed. (Ooh, fast on the draw, Shara; I knew there was a reason I liked you.)