In the days since I had been granted the power to morph, Tobias and I had developed a routine. We were the only two Animorphs without a normal civilian life to maintain. While the others were at school, we were free to scout around the city. Partly, this was meant to help familiarize me with the area - I had lived my whole life here, but that time had been spent underground, in secret bunkers and facilities that normal Humans were totally unaware of. The surface might just as well have been on a different planet. As much as I wanted to just rush out and fight the Yeerks, there was no point in doing so unless I knew where to go. And even then, we would have to pick our targets with extreme caution and choose only battles we knew we could win.
The primary reason for these flights over the city was because of the fact that I knew more about the Yeerks than the others. The Yeerk who'd stolen my body had been very low-ranking, and I'd never been in a position to learn anything particularly important, but there were a few useful things I had to share with the others. As a slave of the Yeerks, I had been used as a guard at three of their secret facilities outside of the Pool. Tobias and I had been attempting to locate them from the air, based on my memory of where they were in relation to the Pool. Needless to say, it was a difficult challenge - I had only ever seen the interior of these facilities, having accessed them through the secret tunnels the Yeerks had constructed. We also tried to follow known Controllers to see if their movements could reveal anything useful. So far, we had a list of a dozen confirmed Controllers, mostly personal relations or acquaintances of the other Animorphs.
There was one Yeerk facility the others had already identified: the headquarters building of the Esplin Foundation, supposedly a facility for conducting research of Earth's oceans. It was not one of the facilities I had been assigned to, but the name alone was enough to confirm their suspicions. 'Esplin' was very much a Yeerkish name, and the organization was likely named after one of their higher-ranking officers. Visser Three, the commander of the entire invasion of Earth, had a personal interest in it. We did not yet know what his interest was, but on more than one occasion he had posed as the Human director of the organization in public. Tobias and the others had already been trying to learn what they could about it for weeks. Located in the part of the city called "downtown", and only a hundred yards from the ocean shoreline, it was a large, cube-shaped building of concrete and glass with blue-tinted windows that we could not see through. Unable to see inside, we had to be content with monitoring traffic in and out of the facility - trying to memorize individual vehicles and people.
Memorizing the vehicles was slightly easier than memorizing the people. The cars at least had a unique sequence of letters and numbers attached to the front and rear, and Tobias had been teaching me how to distinguish between different makes and models. I could distinguish between 'pickup trucks', 'sports cars', and 'vans', and 'Ford', 'Toyota', and 'Chevrolet'. Telling individual Humans apart was more of a challenge. Between skin tones, hairstyles, and clothing, there was an overwhelming variety of physical appearance, and unlike their vehicles, the Humans could change their appearance from day to day, or even from hour to hour. And to Tobias's mild frustration, I could not easily distinguish between male and female Humans.
Unlike Humans, Hork-Bajir have minimal sexual dimorphism. We do understand the general concept of 'gender', but have little use for it. In our language, 'he', 'she', and 'they' are completely interchangeable. And the Yeerks who'd enslaved us reproduce asexually - 'gender' was even more of a foreign concept to them than it was to us. But Humans tend to build large parts of their personal identities over whether they are male or female - there are highly complicated social dynamics and behavioral patterns based entirely on which set of reproductive organs are present. And unlike Tobias, I had not enjoyed the benefit of having been raised in that environment. She had a lifetime of experience to draw on, while I had only been introduced to the concept a few days ago. I wasn't even sure if Tobias was male or female. They'd been trapped in morph in the process of helping me escape from the Yeerk Pool, so I had never even seen her - or was it 'his'? - human body.
We kept up our observation of the Esplin Building for three hours. I left once to find an isolated place to demorph and remorph, safely hidden among the trees by an abandoned construction site. I could have just flown up to the top of a nearby 'skyscraper' and been safe from observation there, but I also needed an excuse to get away from the waterfront for a short time. My dream about the ocean had disturbed me more than I had realized at first, and seeing the open expanse of water behind the Esplin Building had given me a slowly increasing sense of dread. I could handle that emotion, but as long as I needed to demorph anyway, I preferred to do it among the trees - far enough inland that I couldn't see the water.
Nothing noteworthy was happening at the Esplin building, so Tobias led me over to a few other locations that had drawn his interest: a bank, a restaurant, and a hardware store. We'd seen a few of our confirmed Controllers enter all three of these buildings, but so far we had no way of knowing whether it meant these locations were controlled by the Yeerks or if it was just the Controllers maintaining the illusion of the normal lives their hosts had once lived. And of course neither of us could go inside to investigate further - all we could do was watch and see who came in and out.
Strictly speaking, only Tobias was unable to enter those buildings. I, however, was very much capable of morphing a Human. And I had already acquired one. It was perfectly logical. I was a member of a species not native to Earth, and could only go so far by impersonating the local wildlife. At some point, I would have to morph a Human. The difficulty was in deciding whose DNA to acquire. It couldn't be from any random person around the city - even if we could be sure they were not controlled by the Yeerks, it would be too dangerous to reveal my presence even for the few seconds needed to make skin-to-skin contact. I would have to acquire somebody who already knew about my existence and could be trusted to keep a secret. That limited it to one of the five Humans who called themselves Animorphs. For now, though, I would refrain from using a Human morph for our surveillance mission. I did not yet understand Human behavior well enough to be sure that I would not attract unwanted attention.
Author's Note: Genetically speaking, this is still the same Toby Hamee the Seer from the books (and at some point, I do plan to bring Ket and Jara into this story), but because of the way this version of Toby has been brought into existence, their personality is going to be a different flavor than in canon material.