Words of Another Time: #1 - The Restart

Chapter 1


If you're reading this, then you probably don't find the existence of aliens shocking at this point. Either we won, and everything is out in the open since the Andalites arrived, or we lost and Earth is part of the Yeerk Empire. Maybe you're a part of a resistance, or maybe you're a Controller yourself, and the Yeerks are keeping this record for their own reasons. Personally, I hope you're free and you're reading this because you want to know more about what happened. Maybe we're New York Times bestsellers. Maybe Marco's story has been made into a blockbuster – weirder things have happened.

Either way, this time around we're keeping these journals and the plan is to copy them and hide caches of our efforts all over the planet. That way even if the worst happens, if this copy is destroyed, there will be another, and another, and another, until one day Earth is free once more. To be honest, the original idea was just to have a way to write things down to deal with everything that's happened, some of it twice. After what happened, Cassie thought it would help. I guess it does – I feel a lot better just putting these things down. Knowing that no matter what happens to us, a part will live on.

My name is Jake. Me and my friends had been in a secret guerilla war with the Yeerks for a year and a half before everything changed. It doesn't really matter what we did, as you won't remember it. But basically an Andalite Prince, Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamsul crash landed right where five kids were taking a stupid shortcut home from the mall. He told us about the Yeerks, and gave us the ability to transform into any animal we touched – a complicated process of copying its DNA and creating a connection to a dimension of infinite space… I don't pretend to understand it no matter how many times Ax explains it (and to be honest, I doubt he understands it anymore than your average high school student really understands how space ships or atom bombs work – the morphing technology is pretty much the most advanced thing his people have ever invented, which is saying something). Long story short, five scared teenagers were going to use lions and tigers and bears to fight a guerilla war against a space traveling race of parasite body-snatchers.

To drive the lesson home, the first thing we saw was the Yeerk leader of the Earth invasion, Visser Three as he was at the time, kill Elfangor. Visser Three was the only Yeerk to control an Andalite, and so our first experience of this morphing technology was watching an Andalite turn into some nightmarish monster and eat Elfangor. Marco threw up.

It feels weird writing like this, as odds are if you know who I am you know who my friends are. But briefly – there's me, Jake. My cousin Rachel was with us, and in fact the reason we were in that construction yard in the first place was because I had mouthed off about needing to 'protect' my cousin, which of course I said precisely because I knew it would piss her off. She was with Cassie, a friend of both of ours going way back and who I had a bit of a crush on at the time. I don't remember what they were doing at the mall before we ran into them; I had been hanging out in the arcade with Marco, my best friend. And at some point as we were leaving we ran into Tobias. Of all of us at the time, Tobias was definitely the odd one out. He wasn't really a friend just a kid at school who I had helped out against some bullies a few times. It's funny to think that of all of us, me helping out Tobias was the most random thing that led to the formation of our little group that night.

Ax, short for Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill, was Elfangor's brother and had been stranded under the Pacific ocean when the dome on the Andalite Dome Ship (sort of like if aircraft carriers had detachable living quarters) was damaged during the battle over earth and half fell half, auto-piloted down to the planet. Ax was the only survivor, and the first time around it was a few weeks before we were even aware of him.

Anyway, the point is that we fought the Yeerks for over a year, winning some battles but not doing much but slowing the Yeerk invasion down a little bit. The first few months, the morphing power was more dangerous to us that it was to the Yeerks. Marco almost got bitten in half by a shark while morphed as a dolphin. We almost got ripped apart by a hostile ant colony. We almost lost ourselves as termites. We almost got locked in a giant Yeerk equivalent to a water cooler trapped as trout. We almost got stuck as wolves and Tobias did get stuck as a hawk. That's the big catch to morphing – stay in a form for more than two hours, and the connect to Z-space or whatever is lost and you're trapped in the morph forever.

So there we were, half the time almost dying in the most gruesome ways imaginable, and the other half scoring a few hits against the Yeerks but other than a few good hits nothing really slowing them down much. And then we met Visser Four. Sort of.

Visser Four found the Time Matrix, a time machine so powerful that even interdimensional beings that could crush Earth out of existence in a second stood up and took notice of it. We were offered the chance to follow Visser Four, and prevent him from changing the past so as to make humanity easier to conquer. The cost was my life. I actually died crossing the Delaware with George Washington, though it happened so fast I don't remember it. Tobias told me about it later, the others don't really like to talk about it, especially not Marco, who was right beside me when it happened.

Fortunately, with time travel there were all sorts of loopholes involved, and Cassie figured it out the big one. But it was Marco who modified her plan. Cassie just wanted to go back and make Visser Four's host never exist, never be born. It was Marco though who pointed out that getting rid of Visser Four's host didn't stop Visser Four from existing, and just doing everything he did before in a different body. And it was Marco who suggested that perhaps the reason we had been put on this mission wasn't just to stop Visser Four… but to use the Time Matrix for ourselves.

Maybe it was a bad idea. Maybe not. I don't know. Because of the whole me dying in the past, I wasn't there when the decision was made. Except that I remember it because once the decision was made, I never actually died. It gives me headaches just thinking about it.

I like to think Marco made the choice because he knew that we needed the restart. There were just to few Animorphs, and therefore too few Animorph manhours and Animorph coverage to meaningfully stop the invasion. Even if every Yeerk on Earth only managed one hour a day of Yeerk Invasion on top of pretending to be a normal human being, we were outnumbered thousands to one. And that didn't include the Hork Bajir and Taxxons and various odds and ends we occasionally came across, or the entire Yeerk battleforce in outer space.

But Marco is the most ruthless of the Animorphs – and I don't mean that in a bad way. I've been in war too long to see ruthlessness as a purely bad thing. Marco is the best at doing what has to be done. But I think in that moment he slipped. Not to boast, but his best friend had just been killed. And Marco's mother, the host of Visser One, had presumably drowned on an alien world. I think he just saw a chance to change that, and he took it.

Anyway that brings us to the beginning of the story that you might have some idea of.

Five teenagers hiding in a construction yard while Visser Three ate Elfangor, only with a year's worth of memories that now technically never existed. Nobody screamed. Nobody threw up. I think we were all just trying to remember how exactly events panned out last time, how exactly had we escaped without being killed or turned into Controllers ourselves. In retrospect, it would have been better to have gone back in time to the day after, but the Time Matrix doesn't exactly have a manual, and that was the moment we were all thinking about when it activated and shot us back across the threads of time. And anyway, the Time Matrix was gone.

I don't remember how we got away the first time. Vaguely I think we just ran. I remember a homeless man, it's literally the first time I've thought about him and wondered what happened to him. I don't mean to sound heartless, but that night… there was a lot going on, that's all I'm saying.

But what I'm 100% certain didn't happen was Visser Three morph back to his Andalite form and declare. ((Search the ship and quickly. There is much to be done – the fool Elfangor won't have been the only Andalite bandit to have landed on the planet.))

I don't know where the Time Matrix went. But it looks like intergalactic forces weren't through playing with us yet. Because Visser Three had come back with us, even though right then we couldn't know that for absolutely certainty.

It's weird, trying to write this with two sets of memories of the same time. You'll have to give me some leeway if I don't get them quite right, switch things over maybe or can't quite remember everything. Some things I'm leaving out in case despite everything these journals get found before they really should. And part of it is that fighting a guerilla war involves a lot of waiting. Being terrified that something is going to happen sure, but it's not all guns blazing. Most of what we do is planning and research – we can't afford to mess up. But it does make it hard to remember exactly what happened one day and what happened the next without those big gutwrenching landmark battles.

The next morning though we all went to Cassie's house. Her parents live out on the edge of town, right along the edge of a national forest, and they've got a barn that's always full of sick and injured animals that her dad (and by extension Cassie) take care of an extension of his work with the veterinary school. I honestly can't remember if we did that straight away last time. I remember Tobias coming over and morphing a cat and I morphed my dog Homer, but this time I called Marco's house and he answered to let me know he was already on the way. We didn't say anything specific – we never do on the phone, but Marco came over and by the time we arrived at Cassie's everyone else was already there; even Tobias, who lives the furthers out of all of us with his uncle.

"We're really doing this, then." That was Marco. We all just nodded – not like we had a choice anymore. In a way it was even weirder than the first time we found out what was going on. Rachel's eyes though were shining. "We can really do it this time," she half-whispered, but her tone no less fierce for it. "We know so much more right now. We can smash the Kandrona this afternoon! We can-"

"No!" Marco interrupted her. "Visser Four thought he had a golden ticket to just rewrite anything he wanted and look how it ended for him. We have to be smart."

"It's not just that," I added, interjecting myself between the two of them before they could start going at each other. Marco and Rachel are as polar opposite as any of us got; that's not to say they weren't friends or didn't have each other's backs, but they tended to have the most different ways of looking at things. Except Cassie I guess, but Cassie has always been the… poetic one of us, in a way. She sorta sees everything through her own lens, something that's been dangerous to us at times but also a huge asset as well.

Marco nodded. "Visser Three… he knows something. Do we think, you know, that maybe.?" He trailed off.

Rachel deflated slightly, but nodded. She's impulsive, but she's also very smart and quick on the uptake. "Do we think that Crayak offered him the same deal that the Ellimist offered us? Maybe."

My blood ran cold, and Cassie voiced my fear. "Does he know who we are?"

Nobody said a word for a minute. I know what we were all thinking – were we about to bring the Yeerks down upon us, and all our families.

"No," I said after a moment, shaking my head. "No." More forcefully after seeing Marco's look of doubt. "If the Visser knew who we were, he would have contacted Tom last night. We'd already be dead or controlled." Tom's my brother. He's also a Controller. A Controller to a very up-and-coming Yeerk, as a matter of fact.

It's a testament how much our lives have changed that thinking we could have all been killed in our beds the night before actually had a calming effect. "And it's not really their style, is it?" Marco added after a moment. "They like to screw with us, but they don't like to really fill us in." He paused. "We still don't know if we were supposed to do what we did."

"Screw them," Rachel hissed. Of all of us, she disliked the Ellimist and Crayak the most. Maybe because of how she is and their attempts to control us just hit her the wrong way magnified to eleven. Or maybe because when we first met the Ellimist, it was Rachel who he manipulated the most, even if it worked out well for us. "We did it, and we're going to make it count."

"I guess a trip to The Gardens is in order," Cassie broke in, shifting the topic. "We've got some old friends to meet up with," she said with a slight smile. We all grinned at that, despite everything. Morphing an eagle or a tiger or a wolf is cool. Right away, let me just say: I know some people are going to look back and ask why we didn't all acquire tigers and bears and alligators and gorillas. Well, barring the alligator which Rachel can't morph anyway because of an allergy to – I know it's weird – alligator DNA – the truth is that morphing is a lot more personal than that. I know that sounds silly. But in a way, the morphs become part of us. And even then, it just felt wrong that anyone but Marco should acquire Big Jim, The Garden's resident male Silverback Gorilla, or that anyone should go through the terror of acquiring a Siberian Tiger but me. Eventually we stopped being so sentimental… mostly, but even then it was still very much a part of us. I could see the others were reminiscing too on their favorite morphs, their favorite extensions of themselves.

And speaking of – one person had been very quiet over this period. Tobias. I turned to him, asking him what was up, only to find him staring at a wounded Red-Tail Hawk encaged along with the assortment of birds and small animals along the far side of the barn from the horse stalls.

"Tobias, you there?" I asked, giving him a slight nudge. "Huh? Yeh…"

"Well, I guess we have our first morph this time round," Rachel joked, but there was an edge to it. "Just… be careful, Tobias." He snapped out to look at Rachel and give her a nod.

"I will." He replied. Nobody said anything – the first time around, Tobias had been trapped as that exact hawk, the one I mentioned earlier. But personally, though I never asked him directly I think it might have been on purpose. His homelife is to be blunt, crap. I think it was an impulsive choice to just leave that all behind. It's not my place to say what happened after that, but all you need to know is that Tobias did get his morphing powers back courtesy of the Ellimist who was now such a big part of our lives, but with a catch. Tobias could morph out of hawk for two hours, or else be trapped. He was a hawk with human mind with the ability to become something else. Now though, he was himself again… for a weird definition of himself. One I wasn't sure he wanted to be again. All of us were wondering even if we didn't say anything if Tobias would end up trapped as a hawk in a week. I don't know what that would do to us, and I hoped not to find out.

Tobias acquired his hawk. The Bald Eagle, Peregrine Falcon, and Osprey that the rest of us would choose as raptor morphs weren't in the barn yet, and it felt wrong to acquire what really was the other half of Tobias. Plus, birds of prey aren't exactly pack animals, so it wasn't the best choice anyway. Instead, we all (including Tobias) picked up a new morph, the Common Raven. Cassie had one on hand which was obviously a necessity, and ravens are common everywhere in the country and fly together, for another. Tobias grumbled about acquiring a 'rat with wings', which is his go to insult for every bird this side of hawk, but he acquired it anyway.

"I guess though if we're going to The Gardens, having a hawk looking out for us wouldn't be the worst idea," I mentioned sorta offhand and that seemed to brighten his step.

Before we morphed though, the police officer showed up. Oh he'd shown up the first time to, but after everything that had happened over the past year it just wasn't that big of a memory for any of us. Seeing Cassie's dad lead the police officer was honestly the most terrified I've been in a long while, and it took a second to click that this was nothing out of the ordinary. In fact the last time had been worse, because Cassie had been in the process of demorphing from her horse when he showed up.

"Hey sweetie… hi Jake, Rachel, everyone – this is Officer Jones – he has a couple of questions for you." And sure enough just like last time he asked about if we'd been near the construction site behind the mall last night. I think last time he said something about some kids being seen setting off fireworks or something. I don't really remember and nothing really came of it but we pegged him for a Controller because of it and later had seen him at The Sharing, a Yeerk front organization to recruit new hosts. I kept my face from showing any anger – that's where they'd captured Tom.

This time he was much more serious. Apparently they'd already run security footage from the mall and were contacting anyone who might have seen anything. He didn't come right out and enact the magic word terrorism but he did everything short of that, insinuating something really bad had happened and if we knew anything we really needed to cooperate. We probably said something along the same lines as last time, how we didn't notice anything before we left the mall but we'd be sure to call if we did. He didn't look pleased though.

"You sure you didn't see anything," he asked for the third time. Cassie's dad was starting to look agitated, like he was torn between asking the cop to leave us alone or start grilling us himself. Cassie stepped forward, looking flustered. " Well um, I mean gah this really isn't how I wanted you to find out," she looked up at her dad and her cheeks… well, Cassie is black so she didn't blush exactly, but her cheeks do this cute thing, I can't really describe it but they did it. She turned to me and slipped her hand into mine. I clasped it. "Jake and I started dating last night, officially." She gave me a quick peck on the cheek and now I was the one going red.

Cassie and I had kissed before, and I guess we weren't really dating being in the middle of a war but we'd had something, so it wasn't like this was entirely new to me too. I kept my face straight and looked at Cassie's dad for a moment giving an awkward nod then turning to the cop. "Sorry, it's just… yeah."

It worked. The Yeerk had no interest in teenage romance and after a reminder to say anything if any of us remembered anything, he took off. Cassie's dad gave me a look and said it would be nice to have me over for dinner sometime soon, which I agreed to right away. Marco held back a snort.

But then he left too and it was clear to us that we needed to get a move on. Clearly, something on the Yeerk side had changed to, beyond our suspicions. Visser Three wasn't the kind of guy I figured to keep everyone else on the up-and-up about his new position as a time traveller, but clearly he was kicking things up a notch. We left the barn, heading out past the horse ring and the meadow beyond it to where the woods starts properly.

"You think this time round we can figure out how to morph shoes?" Marco grumbled as we took off our outer clothes. I doubted it. Funnily enough, we had all worn fairly skintight underclothes, even if not our usual 'morphing clothes'. Cassie I guess didn't own a leotard yet, and Tobias only had a regular Tee, although clearly the smallest size he still owned by the looks of it. I guess we all knew we would be morphing today, or maybe it's just force of habit by now.

"Save it," Rachel grumbled. "You have no idea how much I spent on new clothes last year, what with all the leaving things behind and getting stuff ruined and slashed and bloodstained. At least you boys can just pick up a pack of briefs and tees and call it a day."

I didn't say anything – there wasn't any real heat in their argument, just something to say to avoid the awkward tension.

"I'll go first then," Tobias said. We all nodded. If anything deserved a right of passage into this new world of ours, it was Tobias and his hawk. He shrank. His legs shriveled and shrank and his toes splayed out even as his arms got longer and then flattened like put in a pancake press. His face elongated and fused together, turning glossy but still obviously human skin. His eyes shrank and then his whole body exploded in feathers that were still Tobias' own darker blond. And then at last, he became a more bird than hawk, and in less than two minutes Tobias was… well, he was Tobias again. I didn't say that though.

((It's good to be back.)) He said to us, so clearly I wasn't the only one thinking it. ((Huh.))

"Huh, what?" Rachel asked, protectively. "Tobias, what's up?"

((Nothing bad, just different. I have the hawk's instincts down pat but this is a bit like acquiring a new morph. Weird.))

"Guess we have to relearn the muscle memory," Marco commented after a second. "Or morphing memory or whatever."

((No, it's not… it's not like that, just like being a bit rusty.))

"It'll be fine," I said, clapping my hands once in show. "And a raven can't be any different than what we've done before."

The others nodded. We morphed. It was the usual grotesque horror show, except for Cassie who managed to sprout an entirely human sized set of wings out her back before transforming into a bird. Cassie by far is the best morpher of all of us, and it looks like even with whatever we had to relearn she could still make it look artistic. And a few minutes later our little flock of ravens soared off, Tobias a ways further out both to calm the raven's mind – which was as cool and calmly intelligent as anything I've ever morphed this side of dolphin – and to keep any observers from wondering why a flock of ravens were so calm with a hawk up ahead.

Fortunately, while we don't understand exactly how thought-speak works we do understand that without any barriers in the way, our thought-speak can communicate over some fairly hefty distances, so it's not like Tobias was totally out the loop as we made our way back into town.

Mostly, we talked about what we needed to do, and what we needed to never ever touch again with a twenty foot pole. Rachel wanted to hit hard and fast at the Yeerk Kandrona. If for some reason you've gotten this far and don't know what the Kandrona is, it's basically a replicant of the Yeerk sun from their homeworld; like a giant UV light only it emits a special kind of radiation that Yeerks need in order to survive. They also have what are called Yeerk Pools, which are a sort of nutrient rich soup that the Yeerk needs to bathe in while being exposed to Kandrona radiation. If they don't get it every three days, they die. So in side one of the largest buildings in the city was currently a giant radiation emitting machine, and under about twenty blocks of the city there was a giant artificial cavern that included not only the Yeerk Pool but, from previous trips to that hell, a shipyard and even a canteen filled with McDonald's and Wendy's and stuff.

Anyway, Rachel wanted to go after the Kandrona. Cassie pointed out that we needed to rescue Ax, but Marco countered there was a good chance Ax would get himself out and come find us; he had been with us when we went back in time after all. Tobias added that we couldn't necessarily count on that, so it was agreed that in addition to our battle morphs we needed to go ahead and pick up dolphins and maybe a few other aquatic morphs besides. Nobody mentioned going back down to the Yeerk Pool – nothing good had ever come of us doing that. The first time around, that was the very first thing we did. We did it in part because it was the first thing we found out about the Yeerks, and also as a rescue mission for my brother, Tom. I actually ended up with Tom's Yeerk in my head for three days, and I knew my brother was fighting and screaming every step of the way even as he was forced to do the Yeerk's bidding.

But as much as it pained my inside, I knew that we weren't up to pulling off a heist in the Yeerk Pool. And I knew that even if we could, the Yeerks would never leave Tom alive after that. If anything, they'd come straight after my mom and dad. And me. There might be ways around that, but it would put Tom in hiding. Which understand, I would prefer that over having my brother be a slave to the Yeerks, but it just wasn't an option right now.

((Don't forget the hospital,)) I said, coming back to the conversation. That was where the Yeerks had taken me over, by accident. ((We need to make sure they can't use that as a base of operations again.))

((What about The Sharing?)) Cassie asked, slightly hurriedly – I guess she remembered what happened at the hospital to. ((We've never really done anything there except infiltrate a few events, should we try to shut it down too?))

We paused at that, each mulling it over. ((Something to think about.)) Marco said at last. ((How much advantage does it give us knowing we can infiltrate it, compared to the cost of the Yeerks having a recruiting front in place.))

It went like that for awhile. I haven't mentioned everything we talked about but you get the idea. And then at long last we were soaring over the amusement park that makes up about a third of The Gardens. It was time to enter the world's strangest arsenal this planet had every known.