Preface/notes

After rereading the first 23 Animorphs books, I got inspired to write my own. I did it mostly for myself, but I figured I might as well share it, right?

Since some of the real Animorphs books were ghostwritten, I found it interesting to try to mimic the style of the original books as well. I don't have a style of my own, anyway, as this is the first serious thing I've ever written. There's no modernization, no weird characters (in fact there aren't any new characters at all), the plot isn't crazier than the real books, etcetera. If I succeeded in my goals, it should read just like an original Animorphs book. I think I did, otherwise I wouldn't even bother posting this, but I'll leave it up to you to decide.

Continuity-wise, the story starts after book 22 (the David arc). I don't know how many more books can fit between 22 and this story exactly, because I never read past 23 yet. I can tell you with absolute certainty though, that it does not join back into the canon continuity.

Update: I've since continued writing, so there are sequels now. I also went back and fixed some spelling mistakes in The Hunt here and there, including two embarrassing name mix-ups…

Note that while I explicitly advertised The Hunt as having no OCs, The Anomaly introduces some. So, should OCs really not be your thing, you might want to stop after this story. I promise they're not flat or self-inserts, though.

The series so far:

1: The Hunt (Rachel)

2: The Anomaly (Cassie)

3: The Rescue (Jake)

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Chapter 1

My name is Rachel. That's all, just Rachel.

I have a last name, of course. But I'm not going to tell you. I'm also not going to tell you where I live. See, I have some very powerful enemies. Telling you who I am would make it way too easy for them to find my friends.

Not that it would be all that difficult to find out who I am after I've told you my story, if you're one of my enemies or turn into one later. But I'm at least not going to make it obvious.

I'm sure I sound like I'm either paranoid or involved with the mafia or something. It's not the latter. Maybe a little bit of the former. But I'd say that's healthy for someone in my position.

My friends all say I'm fearless. Marco keeps calling me "Xena: Warrior Princess". I'm still not entirely sure whether he's trying to flatter or mock me, but I guess it's not that far off. Except I'm younger, blond, I try to dress sanely, and I'm not quite fearless. Especially not now that my family is involved.

I just don't like showing my fear.

But right then, I really wasn't scared. I was right in my natural habitat: the mall.

"I'm not sure about this," Cassie said, holding what must be the millionth dress I picked out for her in front of her.

Cassie's my best friend. You wouldn't think so, though. Cassie hates shopping, and she normally really does not care about how she looks. You'll almost always find her in a torn-up pair of jeans about two sizes too small, an old stained shirt, and boots. Not stylish boots, mind you, but the kind that you wear when you know you're going to be walking around in a combination of mud, hay, and animal poo. Which is normally where you'll find Cassie. That's her natural habitat.

But recently she's started to care a bit more. She and my cousin Jake have a thing. Neither of them will admit to anything, but it's painfully obvious.

She tried to be casual about it when she asked me to help her buy some new clothes. Her excuse was that she just needs new clothes because, well, we go through clothes a bit quicker than your average teenager. But when we got to the mall, she kept eyeing the more fancy sections. And all the while she was blushing.

I'd made it sound like it was my idea. "Maybe you should get something nicer this time. How about a dress?" I'd said. She'd have denied everything and gotten something plain otherwise. And what can I say, they're cute together.

"It just doesn't seem very practical," Cassie added.

"This particular dress or a dress in general?" I asked, getting just a little bit desperate.

But Cassie just stared off into the distance. If we were just your normal everyday teens, you'd think she was just worried Jake wouldn't like it. But we're not everyday teens. More likely, she was worrying about having to run for her life while wearing it, or something of the sort. After all, those powerful enemies of mine are hers as well.

"Why don't you try it on? I'm sure it'll look good on you," I added, trying to distract her from those thoughts. We all get them, but we can't let them rule our lives.

After another second of staring she blinked, sighed, and looked at me again.

"Okay, fine. No harm in that."

Then, just as we started heading for the changing rooms, a Hork-Bajir burst out of one of them.

Literally burst. Hork-Bajir are bigger than humans, a lot stronger, and a lot sharper. The thin wooden walls separating the changing rooms never stood a chance. Fortunately, the adjoining changing rooms were empty.

I guess I should back up a little and explain.

Earth is under attack from aliens called Yeerks. It has been for a couple of years. But no one who has even the slightest chance of doing something about it knows. Except for my friends and me, but our chances aren't all that great, either.

If I would just show you a Yeerk, you probably wouldn't be very scared of it. You'd be disgusted by it, maybe. They don't look very impressive, they're just gray slugs. Somewhat larger than normal Earth slugs, but not enough to be worried about it. You could easily squash it under your foot if you wanted to.

And if you knew what it was, you'd want to.

Yeerks are parasites. Sentient parasites. But they don't just live off of other beings like Earth parasites do. They live as them. Their little gimmick is that they can get inside your head and control you. Literally inside. They enter through your ears and then wrap themselves around your brain somehow. And literally control. It takes them a couple minutes to figure out how your brain works, but after that, their control is absolute.

With a Yeerk inside your head, you no longer control your arms or legs. You no longer control your mouth or vocal cords. You no longer control what your senses focus on. You become what we call a Controller.

You can still think for yourself though. The Yeerk can't control that, not directly anyway. But that just makes it all the more horrifying. Because that means you know what's going on. What the Yeerk is doing with your body. It could make you hurt your friends and family, and laugh at you while it's doing it. And you can't even look away.

You become the embodiment of helplessness.

But what it can't control, it can observe. It can read all your thoughts, memories, and emotions like an open book. That's why I can't tell you who I am. Not only is there no good way for me to be sure that you're not a Controller right now, but even if I could be, the moment the Yeerks decide to target you and make you one of them, they'll know everything I told you.

And that goes for everyone. My neighbors could be Controllers. My teachers could be Controllers. The police. The army. Even close family. So we keep this side of our lives secret.

"But Rachel," I'm sure you're thinking, "I'm pretty sure I'd know if my mom or dad was suddenly being controlled by an alien." Think again. With access to their minds, they can behave exactly like your mom and dad.

They don't always do, of course. Just when you start feeling safe, think their hosts are normal, they'll start doing and suggesting things to work toward their goal. To control every single human being, so they don't have to fake anymore. Then they'll make Earth just like their home world. Destroy all that we humans worked to accomplish. Kill every living thing that they don't strictly need to keep us alive. And then move on to the next species unfortunate enough to be big enough to carry a Yeerk.

Yeerks do have one weakness. At least every three days, they need to leave their host to swim around in what's known as a Yeerk pool, to soak up nutrients and Kandrona rays. If you can prevent a Controller from doing so, the Yeerk will starve, and the host will be free again.

I've seen it. Jake was infested once after a mission. If it weren't for Ax, we wouldn't even have realized before it was too late. But we did, and kept him locked up in this abandoned shack out in the forest for three days straight. It wasn't exactly a pretty sight when the Yeerk finally gave in, but it sure was satisfying.

Ax, by the way, is an Andalite. His full name is Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill. Giving you his full name doesn't really matter – Yeerks will attack any Andalite on sight anyway. That is, if the Andalite gives them the chance.

Andalites look a bit like blue deer, but have a pair of human-like arms in addition to their four hooved legs, a very alien head, and a deadly scorpion's tail. They have an astonishing amount of control over that tail of theirs. It's so fast that humans can hardly see it move, yet you won't ever see one cut anything that its owner wasn't intending to cut. And their tail blade is very sharp. If you get on an Andalite's bad side, you won't even know what hit you. Even if you're looking right at him.

You'll also have a hard time sneaking up on one. Andalites have four eyes. Two of them face forward, not dissimilar from human eyes. The other two are on stalks above their head, like crab's eyes. They constantly shift around, independent of each other, scanning for possible threats.

You won't hear an Andalite either if he doesn't want you to. They can run very quietly, and they don't have to talk to communicate with one another. They don't even have a mouth to do that with; they just have two slits where a human mouth would be. Instead, they communicate telepathically, and absorb nutrients through their hooves.

Yeerks and Andalites hate each other indiscriminately. They're at war. So, in a way, that makes the Andalites the good guys of the galaxy. But they're not infallible. In fact, an Andalite called Seerow was the one who gave the Yeerks spacefaring technology. Before the war, of course. He felt sorry for them. You'll have to ask Cassie to explain how anyone could pity those monsters. Pity for Yeerks is not my strong suit.

The Andalites won't be making that mistake again any time soon though. They instated a law known as Seerow's Kindness, forbidding them from giving any of their technology to any other race. I guess the Andalites feel responsible for the Yeerks because of Seerow, so they're doing all they can to revert his actions.

Unfortunately, they seem to be losing.

They lost, for instance, when they sent one of their great dome ships to help Earth. And it'll be at least another year or so before they can spare another ship.

They were vastly outnumbered and slaughtered at a battle we witnessed on the Leeran home world. Although they did manage to blow up most of the remaining Yeerks with our help, so I guess you could call that one a tie.

But they definitely lost trying to protect the Hork-Bajir from the Yeerks. Now there are very few free Hork-Bajir around. In fact, there used to be none for a very long time, until an Ellimist intervened and used us to free two of them. Ellimists are… hard to explain. They are virtually all-powerful, like gods, but they say they can't or won't intervene with mortal affairs. They do, though. At least one of them does. He wants to protect all forms of life from the Yeerks, but he's doing the absolute bare minimum to help. And he'll deny doing even that.

The Yeerks use Hork-Bajir as soldiers. They were a good choice for the job: Hork-Bajir are almost as dangerous as Andalites. They have several horns and blades protruding from their heavily armored bodies, feet like a tyrannosaurus, and a beak that's close to a falcon's. In their natural form they're actually docile and not very smart, but that hardly matters now, because Yeerks are smart, and are anything but docile.

So there we stood, frozen. Staring in disbelief at the sight of the Hork-Bajir, the shattered changing rooms, the poor woman who happened to be changing two stalls over, and the dark tunnel entrance that the Hork-Bajir exposed. There must have been a secret entrance to the Yeerk pool underneath the city there. We know there's at least one other entrance like that in the mall, but I wouldn't have been casually shopping at this store if I'd known about this one.

Everyone else froze, too. Most people froze because it's not every day you see something as scary and obviously alien as a Hork-Bajir. Other people froze because they know Hork-Bajir aren't supposed to show themselves in broad daylight, and there will be hell to pay for it later. Cassie and I froze mostly because we weren't sure initially if this Hork-Bajir was still a Controller, and if so, if he was out here because the Yeerks found out about us and stopped trying to be discrete.

Even the Hork-Bajir froze. I don't know what he was expecting to happen after escaping from the pool through a mall entrance, but apparently it wasn't this.

The woman in the changing room was the first to start screaming. Then everything just exploded. The Hork-Bajir blazed right past us toward the exit. Most people panicked and ran off into random directions, but some just kept staring, and some hesitantly started running after the Hork-Bajir.

Suddenly it was pretty clear who was a Controller and who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was also clear now that this was not in any way planned by the Yeerks. Which means that the Hork-Bajir must have escaped while his Yeerk was swimming around in the pool.

"We have to help him," I heard Cassie say.

I wasn't so sure about that. I mean, I wanted to help him, too. But he wasn't our problem either. Truth is, I wasn't really sure what we could do to help him right then, anyway. Two teens who have to hide their identity from the Yeerks can hardly stand up to the hundreds of human- and dozens of Hork-Bajir-Controllers that'll soon be swarming around the mall.

Not that we're entirely helpless. See, Ax isn't the only Andalite who survived the destruction of the dome ship. Ax's brother, Elfangor, was still alive when his ship crashed in the abandoned construction site near the mall. Cassie, Jake, Marco, Tobias, and I just so happened to be cutting through there right then.

Elfangor was hurt in the crash, or maybe by the weapons fire that caused it. We tried to help, but there wasn't anything we could do. He was dying. Instead, he helped us. Well, not exactly us specifically; 'us' as in humankind. With what little time he had left, he told us all he could about the Yeerks. And then did something that no Andalite had done since Seerow. He gave us some of their technology.

Specifically, he gave us an ability that almost all Andalites have: the power to morph. To change into any animal that you can manage to acquire through touch.

In case you're wondering what good that does, well, try standing up to me when I turn into a grizzly bear or an African elephant, or try figuring out that I'm spying on you from a mile away as a bald eagle. We even get the same telepathic thought-speak abilities that Andalites have while we're in morph. Also, because morphing is based on DNA, and DNA doesn't get damaged when you get hurt, morphing will heal you. That's pretty important in our line of work.

There are a couple of limitations to morphing though.

First and foremost, you can't stay in a morph for more than two hours at a time. If you do, you get stuck. That's what happened to Tobias. He got trapped in his red-tailed hawk morph on one of our first missions. He's since regained his power to morph, even back to his old body; a reward from the Ellimist for helping him to free those two Hork-Bajir that I'd talked about. But his hawk body is now his natural form. So that means that he can only stay human for two hours, or he won't be able to morph ever again. And he wants to help us fight the Yeerks, which he can't do if he can't morph.

Secondly, you can only morph skin-tight clothing. Shoes and loose clothes don't work. Since we can't exactly go walking around in public wearing spandex superhero suits, we always end up having to hide our clothing somewhere when we have to morph. Usually we can retrieve it later, but not always.

Third, you can't go from one morph directly to another. You have to go through your natural form. Very inconvenient when you have to hide your true identity. Morphing also isn't instant. It takes at least a minute to do. And while you're doing it, you're very, very vulnerable. That's why we couldn't just morph to something big and dangerous right there and then.

All Elfangor had to do to give us our morphing abilities was to have us touch a small blue box known as an Escafil device. We'd figured it got destroyed in the explosions that followed soon after, but we recently recovered it. Well, David did. But I don't really want to talk about David. He brought out the worst in me. Well, in all of us. We ended up having to maroon him on a small, deserted island a mile or so off the coast, far enough away from civilization that no one would hear his thought-speak screams. We'd first gotten him stuck in a rat morph, so there's no way for him to get out of there alive.

The alternative would have been to just end him. Because he was trying very hard to sell us out to the Yeerks or just kill us himself. And he got way too close.

Anyway, just after Elfangor gave us our morphing abilities, the Yeerks showed up. They don't like leaving evidence behind.

It's not a happy memory. I still get nightmares from it, even after all the other stuff that I went through since, and I probably will for a very long time yet.

We had to hide and watch helplessly as Visser Three morphed into some huge alien and ate Elfangor alive.

Visser Three, the only Yeerk in existence to have ever succeeded in taking an Andalite, morph-capable host.

Visser Three, the current leader of the Earth invasion.

Visser Three, who has tried to kill me and my friends more often than I care to remember.

"Don't just stand there, you idiots," I heard a human voice behind us call. "Visser Three will have us all for lunch if we don't get that Hork-Bajir and get this whole place on lockdown before half the city's seen him!"

A Controller. He sounded desperate, and he was right to. Visser Three, who frequently kills his subordinates, Yeerk and host alike, just to make a point. We've seen him do it for much less important screw-ups than letting a Hork-Bajir escape and free-roam around the mall.

We still just stood there. We watched as the Hork-Bajir ran out of the store – not through the door, through a display window – into the Saturday afternoon crowd of the mall plaza. The store's clerks rushed out after him, while its customers scattered out in various directions. The clerks must have all been Controllers, the store being a Yeerk pool entrance and all.

As if all of that didn't cause enough of a ruckus, the window shattering also set off the burglary alarm of the store.

Suddenly, a hand on my shoulder! It jerked me around!

"Are you deaf?"

Time seemed to slow to a crawl. It was the Controller who I'd heard yell. He was yelling at us, apparently. Behind him stood a whole contingent of armed Controllers. A mix of humans and Hork-Bajir. They must have followed the Hork-Bajir out through the Yeerk pool entrance, which we'd turned our backs to in order to watch the escaping Hork-Bajir. Stupid!

They were all carrying Dracon beams. A handheld Dracon beam is about the size of a pistol, but looks more sci-fi than that and shoots lasers that completely evaporate what they hit. Or stun, they can do that too. But they don't use that setting very often.

My mind was racing, trying to decide between fight or flight. But neither would really accomplish anything. They'd kill or infest us either way. Unable to make a decision, I was completely frozen again. And I hated myself for it. Doing something, anything, would have been better than doing nothing!

So that was it. We were done for. They'd realize we weren't Controllers in no time. Yet we'd clearly seen a Hork-Bajir before. I mean, all normal people had run off by now. We were the only two idiots just standing there gawking at it. And free humans aren't supposed to see anything Yeerk-related.

He must have been able to read the shock and defeat from my face. If he couldn't, I'm sure Cassie's face would have sufficed.

They'd force us down into the Yeerk pool and infest us. I've been down there before, except that was on missions. Even when our plans backfired completely, and they almost always did, we still had some degree of control. But this would be different.

I've seen them do it. They would have two Hork-Bajir for each of us, dragging us down to the infestation pier over the pool. Once there, they would kick us in the back of our legs to force us to kneel down. Then they would push our heads down into the pool. Finally, we'd feel the Yeerk slither into our ears.

And once we'd be made Controllers, they'd know who we are. They'd come for Jake, Marco, Tobias, and Ax. Our families too, I'm sure, just to spite us. Maybe they'd make us kill them ourselves. Or maybe they'd just make them hosts to the lowliest of Yeerks, make them clean up their dirty work or something. Or just torture them outright, and make us watch them break. Whatever they'd do, I'm sure it wouldn't be nice.

You have no idea just how much Visser Three hates us. And he's not a forgiving kind of being.

But then the man just shoved a Dracon beam in my hands and ran off after the Hork-Bajir, along with the other human and Hork-Bajir Controllers from the Yeerk pool.

He just gave me a weapon that no free human is ever supposed to get their hands on. Just like that.

"Wh… Wha?" I managed to say when he was gone.

"Uhh," Cassie affirmed, staring at the Dracon beam. Her face was as pale as it could get.

"H-how about we just get out of here?" she stammered, and gingerly hung the dress back on a nearby clothing rack. She was visibly trembling from the fear and adrenaline rush.

So was I, actually.

"Y-yeah, good idea."