My name is Tobias. Just Tobias. I do have a last name, but it doesn't really matter. The way my life has gone recently, having a last name is kind of irrelevant. A last name implies a family to share it with, and I don't have one. At least, not one worth having. Besides, I'm a red-tailed hawk, and hawks don't really need to bother with last names. I used to be human, though. I went to school, lived in a house, walked to get around (because I never had money for the bus), had friends... kind of. There were other kids I kind of knew, but we weren't exactly close friends. Not before we found out about the aliens, anyway.
There were six of us who took a shortcut through the abandoned construction site one Friday night. And I was the first one to look up and see the intense bright light in the sky that kept getting lower and lower. It was a damaged alien spaceship, on its way down to a crash-landing right in front of us. The pilot, a dying warrior named Elfangor, warned us about the secret invasion of our planet. The Yeerks are parasites, slugs that crawl into peoples' brains and take complete control of their bodies. Elfangor's people, the Andalites, fought the Yeerks across the galaxy. But when they came to Earth, they'd walked right into an ambush. Only Elfangor had lived long enough to warn somebody, to ask us to take up the fight.
Before he died, Elfangor gave us a powerful tool. He shared secret Andalite technology with us. He gave us the power to acquire the DNA of any animal we can touch, and then morph into that animal. Six normal human teenagers from the suburbs of Los Angeles - basketball enthusiast Jake Berenson; his cousin Rachel, daredevil shopaholic; sarcastic goofball Marco Cabrera; kind-hearted animal lover Cassie Clark; Lee Hoshino, who'd just moved from New Mexico; and me, Tobias Vogel, perpetual punching bag for the school bullies - were the first non-Andalites to have this power. We're also the only humans who know about the Yeerk invasion who haven't already been captured and turned into Controllers.
The good news is that we're not entirely alone in this fight. There's more Andalites out there, and sooner or later they'll come back. Hopefully, there will still be an Earth left for them to save by then. But we also have some allies already with us. One of them is Toby Hamee, the only free Hork-Bajir in the galaxy. Their entire race was enslaved by the Yeerks many years ago, but we managed to rescue her during an otherwise disastrous raid on the main Yeerk base. The other is Aximili, younger brother of Elfangor, who survived when part of the destroyed Andalite ship crashed into the ocean. Together, we call ourselves Animorphs.
The bad news is that we're still outnumbered by a horrifying margin, and if the Yeerks ever find out who we are, we're doomed. And we have limitations on when and how we fight. The other humans in our group still have to keep up the pretense of living a normal life, and we can't really do much spying on the Yeerks in the middle of math class. And not all of us are morph-capable. Ax was already able to morph, and we shared the power with Toby, but I lost the power. See, there are rules for morphing. And the most important rule is that if you stay in morph for more than three hours, you stay permanently. That's what happened to me.