Epicurius posted:

Tree Bucket posted:

On that note, is it possible to morph a plant?

Acebuckeye13 posted:

Oh, that book I remember in explicit detail, and I cannot wait to revisit it.

Tree Bucket posted:

On that note, is it possible to morph a plant?

freebooter posted:

Plants have RNA not DNA

Shwoo posted:

Wait, is it possible to morph a fungus? They're more closely related to animals than plants are.

Tree Bucket posted:

I'm trying to imagine the usual Animorphs narration after morphing some kind of fungus...

Tree Bucket posted:

On that note, is it possible to morph a plant?

HisMajestyBOB posted:

A redwood morph would be a hell of a way to break into a building or facility. Just lean slightly towards it and morph.

quote:

Buster:The best book in the series is 'The General.'

Arthur:I like 'The Specific' better. And what about 'The Random'? It was so unpredictable!

quote:

I was on my back. I was indoors. I opened my eyes. Staring down at me was an alien. A pale, ghostly oval face with two enormous eyes. It looked like a little kid, with weak arms and legs. It looked like one of the aliens from that old movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In fact, it looked exactly like one of them.

I blinked and looked again. It was a life-size cardboard cutout. Standing just behind the alien was Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

I sat up. All around me were shelves piled with Star Wars masks - Wookiees and Darth Vader and Imperial stormtroopers, along with Star Trek handheld phasers and Spock ears. There were posters everywhere - Mulder and Scully from X-Files, Mike, Crow, Servo, and Gypsy from Mystery Science Theater 3000, Jane Fonda as Barbarella, and movie posters from Plan 9 From Outer Space, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and, of course, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

But mostly there were posters, mugs, ashtrays, pencils, and T-shirts, all emblazoned with a redand- white logo dominated by the stencil letters spelling “Zone: 91.”

“She’s awake,” Rachel said. She sauntered over, carrying a short stick in one hand.

“What’s going on?” I asked her.

“You were knocked out. You know, when that totally unexplainable explosion happened.” She arched one brow and gave me a meaningful look.

I understood. Rachel was reminding me that we had not seen what we had seen - there had been no Yeerk crawling from a horse’s ear. There had been no Dracon beam.

My father came rushing over, followed by Crazy Helen. He knelt and began feeling my head.

“Ow!”

“Looks okay,” he muttered. “Superficial cut. Serious bruise, but I doubt there’s a concussion.

Still, I’ll take you by the hospital emergency room on the way home. Have the doctors there check you out.”

Rachel winked. “Doctor Carter may be there. Noah Wyle. Oh, yeah.”

“What happened?” I asked my dad.

“Well, honey-”

“It was the aliens,” Crazy Helen interrupted. “They have these exploding rocks they spread around out there. BOOM!”

My father rolled his eyes. “We’re on the edge of an Air Force facility. They have a base way back in the Dry Lands. You see the jets flying over all the time. I suspect they may have lost a bomb or a missile or something. That snake-bit horse must have set it off. The blast caught you.”

“That sounds logical,” I said.

“It was the aliens!” Crazy Helen screamed. “They keep the aliens out at Zone Ninety-one! That’s why it’s all so secret out there. That’s why the Air Force won’t talk about it. Zone Ninety-one is the secret base where the government keeps the aliens it has captured. They have ‘em out there in cages.

They get secrets of technology from them. You think computers just happened? All that stuff was from aliens. Here, have a souvenir mug. Normally ten-ninety-nine. But you can have it because you got hurt.”

quote:

Helen grabbed a mug from the shelf, wiped it off on her sleeve, and handed it to me.

Rachel held up her stick. “I got a pecan log,” she said.

“You want a mug?” Helen asked her.

“No, the pecan log is great. But I don’t really believe in aliens.” Rachel said this with a perfectly straight face.

Helen just smiled. “Lots of people do, young lady. Very smart people, too. Out at Zone Ninety-one they know. Oh, they know! The government doesn’t want us telling. They watch me. They listen in through the microchip they implanted in my head. They’re listening right now! One of those black helicopters of theirs is listening in and transmitting everything we say to the New World Order headquarters in the Azores, which is where Atlantis is, you know.”

This tirade left us all temporarily without anything much to say. We just kind of stared.

“Well, we may as well get out of Helen’s hair,” my father said, breaking the spell. “Cassie, honey, do you feel okay? Can you focus your eyes?”

“Um, yes,” I said. “But how about that horse?”

My father shook his head, mystified. “Strangest thing. There isn’t a trace left of her. Not a trace.”

“Hah. It’s the Martians,” Crazy Helen said. “It’s all the fault of those darned aliens.”

Rachel and I exchanged a look. We were both having the same thought: It’s a very strange world where a person called Crazy Helen is at least partly right.

quote:

“You’ve never heard of Zone Ninety-one before? It’s the Holy Grail of conspiracy nuts,” Marco said in between slurps of a Mountain Dew. “Man, don’t you ever go on the Internet? The Internet is full of people who think there are aliens at Zone Ninety-one. It’s called the Most Secret Place On Earth.”

“I go on the Internet,” Rachel said. “I just don’t hang out in chat rooms, call myself ‘Studboy,’ and try to convince people I’m an incredibly handsome thirty-year-old millionaire.”

“Excuse me,” Marco said, “but I do not use ‘Studboy’ as my screen name. Give me some credit. I use BaldwinBoyFive. You know, the missing fifth Baldwin brother. The really cool-looking one.”

We were all at the mall food court, the day after the incident in the Dry Lands. I was clutching a shopping bag. Inside were several smaller bags from The Gap and J. Crew.

It was all Rachel’s doing. Despite everything, she had actually remembered my stupid promise. Now I owned outfits. Not just clothing, mind you. Outfits.

“Even I’ve heard of Zone Ninety-one,” Jake said. “And unlike Marco, I’m a fairly normal human being.” Marco threw a french fry at Jake. Jake ducked. And with a quick movement, Ax snagged the french fry out of midair, popped it in his mouth and said, “Mmmm. Grease. Greassss and salt!”

Just then a boy walked up to the table. He seemed nervous, edgy. Like he was a little scared by the experience of being in the mall. He looked over his shoulders a lot. And when he looked right at you he squinted, as if he was nearsighted.

“Hey, Tobias,” Marco said. “We were thinking about ordering some pizza. You want mouse meat on yours?”

Maybe I should back up a little and explain who all these people are. Because otherwise you’d never guess that this bunch was the Animorphs.

First, there’s Jake. Jake is pretty much the leader. Not that anyone really treats him that way. And not that he’d want anyone to treat him that way. See, that’s part of the reason Jake is our leader - because he’s the kind of guy who doesn’t need anyone sucking up to him.

Then there’s Marco. What can I say about Marco? Not as much as he would say about himself, that’s for sure.

Marco is our sense of humor in the group. But he is not the class clown. There’s a seriousness to him, way down beneath all the glib jokes and teasing. Marco sees things other people sometimes miss. He is very smart and very wide awake, if you know what I mean.

Marco is Jake’s best friend. They’ve been best friends forever. No one even remembers when it started. But ever since their friendship began, they’ve been arguing with each other about the most completely idiotic things in the universe: whether you should use more pedal or higher gears to win
this dumb driving video game they love; whether Spiderman could beat Batman; whether basketball takes more teamwork than football; whether cheese tastes yellow.

I’m not kidding. They once spent an entire Saturday arguing whether something could taste like a color. I seem to remember that Marco thought cheese actually tasted green.

quote:

Despite this, Jake and Marco, along with Rachel and me, are the most normal members of the Animorphs. The other two are definitely weirder.

Take Tobias. Tobias is a kid trapped in the body of a red-tailed hawk. That happens if you stay more than two hours in a morph. You stay in that morph permanently. Tobias lives in the forest near a meadow. He still lives by hunting mice and rabbits.

But a vastly powerful creature called an Ellimist just recently gave Tobias back his power to morph. So now Tobias can morph like any of us. Except that just as we each have to return to our human form before two hours, Tobias has to return to his hawk form.

So the human body Tobias was in at the mall was actually a morph of his old human body. That’s why he seemed nearsighted: He was used to his laser-sharp hawk eyes.

He could stay forever in that human body, but then he’d be trapped as a human, unable to morph. Confusing? It gets worse.

The last member of our group is not a human at all. His full name is Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill. We call him Ax.

Ax is an Andalite. But he also has a human morph he created out of bits of DNA from Jake, Marco, me, and Rachel.

Ax in his human morph is shockingly pretty for a boy. And extremely weird. See, Andalites have no mouths. No sense of taste. So when Ax is in human morph and has a mouth, he has no resistance whatsoever to flavors.

Ax is dangerous around cinnamon buns. And chocolate. And popcorn. And the paper boxes the popcorn comes in.

Basically, Ax in human morph should not go anywhere near anything that can be eaten. We’ve had to stop him from eating the butts out of ashtrays. Don’t get me wrong. Ax is brilliant and decent and honorable and brave - when he’s in his own body.

quote:

“So. What’s up?” Tobias asked.

Six sets of eyes casually scanned the area around us. The mall was not busy, and it was too early for a big dinner crowd at the food court. But we had to be sure that no one was even slightly within range to overhear.

Our enemies could be anyone. Anywhere.

“Rachel and Cassie went out to Zone Ninety-one and found horses making phone calls,” Marco said.

Tobias’s eyes darted to me, then to Rachel. He looked very serious. He had mostly forgotten how to make human expressions with his face. But he was still Tobias. “Can someone interpret from Marco-babble to normal language?”

“I think I like you better as a chicken, Tobias,” Marco said.

“Red-tailed hawk,” Tobias said tolerantly.

Marco shrugged. “Chicken, pigeon, hawk, whatever.”

“Um, how about if we get down to business before someone interrupts us?” Jake suggested.

“Okay, Dad,” Marco said. Then, becoming instantly serious, he quickly and efficiently summarized for Tobias what we knew.

“Yeerks in horses,” Rachel said. “It makes zero sense. Why would Yeerks want to make Controllers out of horses?”

“Do horses have some special powers? Pow-werz-zuh?” Ax asked. In addition to enjoying taste, he finds speaking words out loud to be strange.

I shrugged. “They’re herd animals. Not very smart. In fact, pretty dumb, really. They can run fast, but there are lots of faster animals. They’re strong, but there are lots of other animals that are stronger.” I shrugged again. “I can’t see why the Yeerks would be wanting to infest horses.”

“Maybe they think they can win the Kentucky Derby,” Rachel joked.

“Maybe it’s some kind of strange Yeerk entertainment,” Jake offered. “Maybe it’s fun for them.”

“I don’t believe Yeerks do anything for fun, Prince Jake,” Ax said. “They would have some reason.”

“Ax, please don’t call me ‘Prince Jake.’ Especially not in public.”

“Yes, Prince Jake. Jay-kuh.”

“Are you two sure about this?” Jake asked Rachel and me. “It was a Yeerk you saw? Not a snake or a snail or something?”

“And what if your dad is right, and it was an exploding artillery shell, not a Dracon flash?” Tobias suggested.

“We’re not doubting you,” Jake added quickly. “It’s just that there’s no good reason for Yeerks to infest horses.”

I looked at Rachel. I was sure of what we’d seen. Mostly. “Well … I guess I could be wrong. But I’m pretty sure.”

“Yeah. Pretty sure,” Rachel echoed.

“So? What do we do?” Jake asked. “Take a look around out in the Dry Lands? See if we can get some more proof?”

“Very good flying out there,” Tobias said. “Lots of sweet thermals.”

“And plenty of delicious snakes and toads?” Marco asked with mock innocence.

“I can’t go tomorrow,” Jake said. “It’s my dad’s birthday. We’re all going out for dinner.”

“Even Tom?” Rachel asked.

“Tom says he’ll be there,” Jake said darkly. “But who knows? He spends a lot of time at meetings of The Sharing lately. All the more reason why I have to be there. My dad is not going to celebrate his birthday without at least one of his sons there.”

“What did you get your dad?” I asked, trying to lighten the mood.

Jake grinned. “Haven’t done it yet, but I think I’m going to clean the roof gutters for him.”

Marco shuddered. “Actual physical labor? Couldn’t you just get him a nice Hallmark card?”

“I am kind of curious about this thing with the horses,” I said. “But we could put it off till the weekend.”

“It could be worth checking out,” Jake said. “But we don’t need everyone to go along. Who wants to go flying with Cassie tomorrow after school?”

In the end Tobias, Rachel, Marco, and I decided to go. Jake was busy, and I don’t think Ax saw any point in it. We broke up and went our separate ways.
We try not to spend much time together in public. We don’t want any inquisitive Controllers to start thinking of us as a “group.” So Rachel and I
left together.

“No one is taking this seriously, are they?” I asked her. “I get the impression Ax thinks we’re nuts.”

“Yeerks in horses? Horse-Controllers? It is kind of hard to see where that’s some big threat.”

“Yeah. I guess that’s true.”

“But hey, any excuse to go flying, right?”

quote:

“Very good flying out there,” Tobias said. “Lots of sweet thermals.”

Synesthesian Fetish posted:

At this point Tobias is probably rusty with socializing with humans. If you took him to a party he'd corner someone and talk their ear off but instead of what IPAs he's into it's all about thermals

Grammarchist posted:

I'm tempted to guess that some Yeerks are planning to decapitate some horses, spray-paint the carcasses and tell Visser-3 "We got'em."

Crazy Helen posted:

You think computers just happened? All that stuff was from aliens.

Synesthesian Fetish posted:

At this point Tobias is probably rusty with socializing with humans. If you took him to a party he'd corner someone and talk their ear off but instead of what IPAs he's into it's all about thermals

freebooter posted:

So you're saying he'd be a cool person to talk to at a party

quote:

The next day I wore my new outfit to school. I hooked up with Rachel before first period and we walked to class together. Down the main hall. Me and Rachel, the Goddess of Clothing and Good Grooming.

“You look great!” Rachel said.

“Hi, Rachel,” a boy named Charles said, smiling awkwardly. “Oh, and hi, um … Carla.”

“See? Charles smiled at you.”

“He called me Carla.”

“Has he ever even spoken to you before?” Rachel asked.

“I guess not.”

“See? Progress.”

Marco likes to tease Rachel, calling her Xena: Warrior Princess. And when I’m with her I guess I’m Gabrielle. The sidekick. Guys see Rachel first, second, and third. They see me fourth.

Personally, I don’t care. Looks and clothing don’t matter even slightly to me. And the people who matter are the ones who see past all that.

“Hey, Rachel. How’s it going?” a boy named Jawan asked, smiling shyly.

“Fine,” Rachel said coolly. “Cassie, you’ve met Jawan, haven’t you?”

I shrugged. “Hi, Jawan.”

“Hey, Kendra,” he said. “See you later in English, Rachel.”

“Kendra?” I asked Rachel.

“He gave you a definite look,” Rachel said. “So what if he isn’t good at remembering names?”

“He remembers your name pretty well,” I pointed out. Then I spotted a guy named Joe. Joe was a friend of mine from when we both took riding lessons together. He would remember my name.

“Hey, Cassie. Whoa! Whoa! Something different about you.” He stepped back and stared at me.

“New outfit?” Rachel suggested.

Joe shook his head. “No, that’s not it. Oh, I know what it is!” He snapped his fingers. “You look like you’ve gained weight! Have you been trying to bulk up?”

Rachel reached with one elegant hand and pushed Joe disdainfully out of her way.

“That proves nothing,” Rachel said.

“Uh-huh. I look fatter.”

“Guys are idiots sometimes.”

“Not Jake,” I said.

Rachel rolled her eyes. “Jake is the exception that proves the rule,” she said. “And there he is now.”

Jake was cruising down the hall, joking and talking with some non-Animorph friends. Part of what we have to do is maintain normal lives as much as possible.

quote:

“Hi, Cassie,” Jake said, peeling off from his buds. “Hey, Rachel.”

Rachel stood back, and held her hands out toward me like a fashion designer showing off her latest supermodel. “So?”

“So what?” Jake asked blankly.

“So the outfit! The outfit!” Rachel exploded in frustration. “Doesn’t Cassie look great in these new clothes? These clothes that actually fit, and have no raccoon poop stains? Doesn’t she look fabulous?”

Jake smiled his slow smile. “Of course she looks great. She always does. You guys have fun in the Dry Lands this afternoon. And try to be careful.”

He walked off down the hall leaving me with a nice, warm glow.

Rachel stared at me. “Okay, he’s an idiot, too.”

“No, you were right the first time,” I said smugly. “He’s the exception.”

We reached first period class. I sighed deeply, my usual reaction to first period. The classroom was stuffy and airless. The windows just looked out at the blank brick wall of the gym.

I went to my seat and tried to remind myself of what we were supposed to have studied the night before. Did I do my homework? Oh, yeah. I had. It was in my -

“No! No! It can’t be!”

Marco’s voice. He sits two rows over. But now he leaped clear over one row of seats and slithered into an empty desk next to mine. He stared at me, wide-eyed with wonder. Way too much wonder.

“Who is this vision of loveliness? Who is this fantasy come true? Excuse me, but are you Tyra Banks? No, no, you can’t be any mortal girl. So much perfection could never be achieved by a mere human. You’re an angel descended from heaven! I mean, they say clothes make the man, but these
clothes make you an angel.”

I took out my homework and placed it on my desk. “Are you done?” I asked Marco.

He thought for a moment, then nodded. “Yeah. That should be about enough.”

“What did Rachel pay you?”

He grinned. “Two bucks. Girls are such idiots sometimes. I’d have done it for a dollar.”

quote:

We met up at the Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic.

I quickly doled out the meds to the caged patients. It was a slow week. Half the cages were empty, which is totally unusual.

“You ready?” Rachel asked.

“Just have to check this opossum’s bandage. Good. The stitches are holding. Good boy,” I said to the opossum with the mangled paw. “Okay. Now I’m ready.”

“Why do they have that extra o in opossum?” Marco wondered. “What’s the point of it if it’s silent?”

Tobias was up in the rafters. He was in his hawk body once more. A red-tailed hawk with a brown back and tan front and reddish-brown tail. His eyes were gold and inhumanly intense.

Since he was in morph, he communicated in thought-speak. <Everything’s clear,> he said to me. <Your mom just went inside the house carrying groceries. Your dad’s truck is just coming through the intersection by the Exxon station. It’ll take him five minutes to get here.>

I didn’t doubt Tobias. Hawks have amazing vision. From his position in the rafters of the barn, Tobias could see out through the open loft door. If he said my dad was five minutes away, my dad was five minutes away.

“Let’s morph,” Rachel said.

She removed her outer clothing and folded it neatly into her backpack. Beneath she wore her morphing suit. See, we haven’t figured out how to morph bulky clothing. We can only morph something fairly skintight. Like Rachel’s black leotard. Or my somewhat more colorful aerobics outfit. Or Marco’s bike shorts.

I focused my mind on the morph I wanted to do. It was an osprey, a type of hawk that usually eats fish and lives by water. It would be good for distance flying.

Rachel was morphing her own big bird of prey, a bald eagle. Marco has an osprey morph, just like mine. In fact, identical to mine, since we acquired the same bird’s DNA.

I began to focus on the osprey, and as I did, I felt the changes begin.

Morphing is still exciting to me. I’ve done it dozens and dozens of times, but each time I realize how lucky I am to have the power. I will never get tired of it. I’ll never get bored with it. It is an experience of total, complete, utterly amazing change.

Each morph happens differently. Things happen in unpredictable ways. It isn’t always smooth and gradual. Often it’s unbelievably illogical, and you never know quite what will happen first.

This time the first change I noticed was my legs. Without getting smaller, they began to morph into bird legs. My five small toes melted together. And from those melted toes grew long talons. Three long talons forward, one turned back.

Looking down, I could see why people say birds descended from dinosaurs. A hawk talon looks exactly like the foot of a Tyrannosaurus or some other big predator dinosaur.

A hawk talon is one of those things where you can just look at it and know it’s a weapon. They’re fleshless and without feathers, so that the blood of prey animals doesn’t stick and turn nasty; they’re quick and powerful at gripping, but weak and reluctant to let go; and the claw at the end is designed not just to hold a branch, or to walk on, but to be squeezed directly into the flesh of the prey.

Nature, as I learned from my parents, isn’t always warm and cuddly.

“She’s got le-egs, she knows how to use them.” Marco sang the line of an old song. Then he laughed, but the laugh was cut short when his mouth erupted into an osprey’s beak.

The next change was my skin. It lightened toward medium gray. And all across the skin of my arms I saw patterns being drawn. Feather patterns, like tiny trees pressed flat. Networks of tiny veins that overlapped like shingles on a roof.

Then, rippling across my body, the patterns became three-dimensional. The patterns seemed to swell up and become full-fledged feathers.

It itched. But it did not hurt. I resisted the urge to scratch. Because already my fingers were not exactly fingers anymore. The finger bones had begun to elongate. At the same time my arm bones contorted and shrank, becoming lighter, air-filled, hollow.

Bones make a sort of grinding sound when they morph. It’s disturbing the first few times you do it. To put it mildly.

Finally, I began shrinking. The ground began to rush up toward me. Even though I’ve done this many times, I still can’t quite shake the feeling that I’m falling and falling and falling without ever quite hitting bottom.

I had left my boots standing right near me. They’re rubber boots that come up to about midcalf.

But now, as I shrank, the boots grew. From midcalf height to waist height in less than a minute.

And I was still shrinking.

At the same time my internal organs began to shift and rearrange. My long, twisted human intestines became the much shorter digestive tract of a bird. My slow, plodding human heart became the rapid-fire heart of an osprey. Kidneys, lungs, liver … nothing stayed the same.

Then … SPRROOOT! My lips bulged out and out and very suddenly became harder than fingernails. I had a curved, ripping hawk’s beak.

I felt my teeth sort of shrivel away. I felt my forehead recede and my chest narrow. All the fat on my body disappeared, leaving me little more than skin and muscle and hollow bones wrapped in feathers.

I noticed several of the animals in the cages watching us with great intensity. None more intense than an injured fox who seemed mesmerized by the way we had gone from being huge, threatening humans to small, tasty birds. He watched me with hungry, glittering eyes.

<Better get a move on,> Tobias said. <We should be well clear before Cassie’s dad gets here.>

<Yeah,> Marco said. <We look like we’re here to break into the cages and bust the other birds outta here.>

I spread my arms. But instead of arms I had wings. <I’m ready. Rachel?>

I looked at Rachel. Her human eyes were just changing color. She stared back at me with an eagle’s intense gaze. <Ready.>

<Let’s fly,> I said. I opened my wings and beat them downward, hard. And again. And again. I drew my talons up and beat several times more.

I rose from the floor of the barn. It was a struggle. We were inside, in a cramped area with no headwind.

I beat my wings and rose to the loft to perch beside Tobias. Rachel came to rest just across from us. She was nearly twice our size, with wings that stretched six feet from tip to tip and a blazingly white head and tail.

I looked out through the open hayloft. I looked with osprey eyes. It’s as if humans are blind. I saw my dad’s truck coming down the dirt road to our farm. I saw through the windshield. I saw his face. I saw the individual hairs on his head. If a fly had landed on his nose right then, I’d have been able to see its antennae twitch.

My dad was still two hundred yards away.

Then I lifted my gaze toward the rectangle of blue and white sky.

I opened my wings, launched myself forward, swooped out through the window, caught just enough of a breeze, and soared toward the clouds.

There are times when being an Animorph is pretty bad. But definitely not when you’re flying.

SirSamVimes posted:

marco fuckin rules

quote:

There is a lot to know about flying. Fortunately, the osprey’s brain took care of most of that. It trimmed my tail. It adjusted the angle of my wings. But my brain was there, too. And I flew.

We flapped hard to get some altitude and rise above the barn and my house. In a few seconds we were high enough for me to spot the orange Frisbee I’d accidentally thrown onto the roof of my house.

We circled, fighting gravity, and I could see my dad pulling his truck up to the mailbox to check for letters. Higher still, and I could see through my own living room window and see my mom tilting her head back, eyes closed, relaxing after a day at work.

<This way,> Tobias called to us, and Rachel and I followed. The sky is home to Tobias. He knows his way around. Rachel and I are just visitors to the clouds.

<See over there? Off to the east?> Tobias asked. <See the way the clouds are piled up? The slight rippling in the air?>

I looked with my incredible osprey vision. And I did see the air ripple from heat. The same way you sometimes see heat waves rising from the pavement on a hot day. But these heat waves were half a mile away.

<Yes,> I replied. <I see them. Is it a thermal?>

<A serious thermal. We’ll ride that a mile straight up!>

After all this time, Tobias is still excited by flying. I guess I would be, too. It is the coolest thing in the world.

quote:

We flew hard, separated by a few hundred yards so we wouldn’t look like we were together. See, red-tails, bald eagles, and ospreys don’t exactly fly in formation together.

I felt my wing muscles grow tired. Flapping is hard work. But when we reached the thermal it would be easier. A thermal is a pillar of rising warm air. You spread your wings in a thermal, and you can soar with very little energy.

Then, wonderfully, we were in it. I felt warm air billow up beneath my outstretched wings. And up I soared. Up and up and up!

<Hah-hah! Oh, man I love this!> Rachel yelled. <I love this, I love this, I love this! Yeeeeehaaah!>

<So, you’re saying you love this?> Marco asked her.

Up we went, circling over and under and around each other. We were doing an airborne ballet of incredible gracefulness.

The ground fell away beneath us. Now even our excellent predators’ hearing picked up no sound from the cars and houses and stores below us.

Up we went, till the tallest trees looked like tiny bushes. Till lawns became postage stamps. Till roads became shimmering streams of hot concrete.

And yet, even though everything below us became small, I could still see in startling detail.

Especially anything that moved like prey: cats, dogs, mice, other birds.

<Look,> Tobias said. <A flight of geese!>

I saw them up above us. They were going the same direction as us, but moving in a tight V-formation.

<Let’s go catch them!> I cried.

Tobias laughed. <Yeah, right. See the way they fly? They never stop flapping. They’re like machines. They can fly hundreds of miles. You ever watch a dog try to catch a passing car? That’s what it would be like, us trying to catch those geese.>

He was right. The geese just kept power-flying. Soon they were way past us.

<How long till we get to the Dry Lands?> Rachel asked.

<Long time,> Tobias said. <But we’re getting some great altitude. That will help.>

<This will be so cool,> Marco said. <Zone Ninety-one! We will penetrate the very heart of the government conspiracy to cover up alien visitors!>

<Marco, just how dumb are you?> Rachel asked. <We know about the real aliens. We know they don’t look like E.T. or the guys you always see on alien books. And we know the real aliens, the Yeerks, don’t go around kidnapping backwoods goobers and doing medical experiments on them.>

<Maybe there are two different bunches of aliens,> Marco said. <Maybe there are these aliens who crash-landed back in the fifties. Plus the Yeerks more recently.>

<Yeah, right, Agent Mulder,> Rachel grumbled. <Earth is the crossroads of every passing alien. We’re the McDonald’s next to the highway of the galaxy.>

quote:

They argued on for a while, and, not for the first time, I realized my life had gotten weird. I was flying a mile up, listening to a thought-speak debate between a bald eagle and an osprey over the existence of aliens.

Good grief.

After a while I tuned them out. It is very quiet in the high air. No noise from the ground. None. Sometimes you hear the engines of a jet flying by, five miles farther up. But mostly all you hear is the soft rushing of wind over feathers. And the sound of your own wings beating.

We used the altitude of the first thermal to jump from thermal to thermal. We would fly out of one gentle vortex of warm air, descend to the next, and let it raise us up again.

And after a while, I saw the roads becoming fewer and smaller. The houses thinned out. The gas stations were miles apart. I saw cows and sheep standing around in random patterns far below.

And then even the cows and sheep were left behind as were the last homes and businesses.

Below us the ground was dry, covered with yellowed grass, and marked out by barbed-wire fences.

Tobias said, <Hey. Check out that sign down there. The one by the dirt road.>

I aimed my osprey vision and read:

STOP!
GOVERNMENT PROPERTY. RESTRICTED AREA.
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT.
ALL OTHERS ARE SUBJECT TO ARREST AND
PROSECUTION. THIS MEANS YOU.

<I’m guessing this is the beginning of the famous Zone Ninety-one,> I said.

<Friendly, aren’t they?> Rachel said.

<If you were trying to conceal a vast government conspiracy to hide an alien spacecraft, you’d be paranoid, too,> Marco said.

I wasn’t sure whether he was joking or not. Sometimes it’s hard to tell with Marco.

I could see the base called Zone 91. It was a cluster of squat, unattractive buildings that all looked as if they’d been built forty years ago. There were three very large buildings that looked like aircraft hangars. And there was an airstrip. But I could also see lots of vehicles: trucks, Humvees,
even some tanks.

And there were horses, just scattering, sauntering through the base like it wasn’t there.

<Marco, I know a lady you’d love,> Rachel muttered. <Her name is Crazy Helen. Crazy, because she sounds like you.>

<Let’s look for those horses,> I suggested. <I think that’s the place to start.>

<The phone-using horses,> Tobias said. <Horse-Controllers.>

Something about the way he said it made it sound like he doubted the whole thing.

<We did see a Yeerk crawl out of that horse’s ear,> Rachel said defensively.

<And we did almost get fried by a Bug fighter’s Dracon beam,> I pointed out.

<You didn’t actually see a Bug fighter, though. And with pathetic human eyes, who can tell if it’s a Yeerk slug or just a plain old snake? Now that I can become human again, I can really remember how blind humans are.>

<I cannot believe you don’t believe us, Tobias,> Rachel complained.

<I didn’t say I don’t believe you. It’s just that it doesn’t make any sense. I mean, why would Yeerks want to infest some skanky wild horses?>

<I don’t know,> I admitted. <But I know what I saw.>

<There!> Rachel said. <A bunch of horses. Over by the water hole. Maybe that’s them.>

We banked sharply left and headed toward them. There were half a dozen mares, two gangly colts, and one big stallion who stood off by himself on a slight rise. The stallion sniffed the breeze, head high.

<That’s not them,> I said.

<How do you know?>

<Because they’re acting exactly like horses, that’s why. They have colts. And the stallion is behaving like a stallion. The horses we want won’t act that way.>

<Okay. Well, you guys need to demorph,> Tobias said. <You’re nearly at the two-hour limit.

There are some rocks over there. You’ll have shade and privacy.>

So we headed for the rocks and landed. They were just a pile of rocks like any other jumble of boulders.

Except that we’d overlooked one vital fact: They were on the far side of the sign. The sign that said THIS MEANS YOU.

quote:

We flew down into the rocks and demorphed.

It was a nice little enclosure, with tall, rounded boulders all around us and clean, dry sand under our feet. We were completely hidden from anyone coming in any direction.

Tobias came to rest beside us as Marco, Rachel, and I returned to our human forms. Of course, as always when we came out of a morph, we were in our morphing suits, and barefoot.

The sun beat down, but we were mostly in shade. A warm breeze blew and whistled between the rocks: WHEEE-HEEEEEE-WHEEE-EEEEE-WHEEE

“All we need now is a picnic lunch,” Marco said. “Tobias! Go rustle us up some juicy rats and toads.”

<No need,> Tobias said coolly. <Just eat that snake you’re sitting on.>

“Yaaahhh!” Marco screamed as he leaped to his feet and began slapping his behind frantically.

A small black snake slithered away from the pocket of warm sand where Marco had been sitting.

“I’m bit! I’m gonna die! A rattler bit my butt!”

<It’s not a rattler, and he didn’t bite you,> Tobias said. <He’s just a harmless bull snake.>

“No snake is harmless,” Marco muttered. “But keep your hawk eyes open in case a rattler does come for me.”

<I will protect your butt from snake bite, Marco,> Tobias said solemnly.

quote:

“Let’s just morph back,” Rachel suggested. “We don’t need to rest. I feel fine.”

“There’s no rush, is there?” I asked.

Morphing is tiring. It wears you out. Sometimes we’ve had to morph very quickly with no rest between shape changes. But that’s not the best way to do it. You feel much more energized if you wait a little while.

Rachel shrugged. “No. No rush.” She stretched up on her toes and looked around at the boulders. The WHEE-EEING wind caught her hair and blew it in her face. “It looks like some scene from an old Western. The good guys are up here in the rocks hiding from the bad guys. All we need is six-guns
and rifles.”

CHICK-CLICK!

<What the -> Tobias cried.

CHICK-CLICK! CHICK-CLICK!

I froze at the sound. I’d heard it before in real life. And I’d heard it on TV a thousand times. It was unmistakable. It was the sound of weapons being cocked.

I looked upward and there above us, pointed straight at our heads, were the black muzzles of automatic rifles.

I was so busy staring at the guns, it took a few seconds before I even noticed there were people holding the weapons. They wore helmets covered in camouflage fabric. Desert-style camouflage in shades of tan and beige. Their uniforms were desert camouflage, too.

Their faces were not friendly.

One of the soldiers stood up and put his hands on his hips. “Okay now, here’s what we’re going to do. The three of you are gonna lie down, facedown in the sand, and place your hands behind your heads, fingers laced together.”

I thought, The three of us? Of course! They thought Tobias was a hawk.

“But we’re not doing anything,” Rachel protested, sounding pretty much like I remember her sounding years ago when her mom would catch us rifling through her closet looking for clothes to try on.

“You have illegally entered a restricted government facility,” the man said. “And you are in a world of hurt. Sergeant! Search them for weapons or contraband. And someone chase away that big old hawk there. He’s staring at me.”

“Yes, sir, Lieutenant.”

<You guys, just go along with them,> Tobias said as he opened his wings and began to fly off.

<I’ll keep an eye out for you. Just play dumb.>

“You heard him, Marco,” Rachel whispered with an exaggerated wink. “Be yourself.”

Naturally, Rachel was completely unafraid. But then, Rachel is never afraid. I was afraid. But that’s because I’m sane, unlike Rachel.

The soldiers leaped down from the rocks and quickly searched us as we lay facedown in the sand. It was a quick search: We were wearing our morphing outfits.

“All right, get up. Put on your shoes,” the lieutenant said.

I winced. Shoes! Oh, man, we’d never be able to explain this.

“No shoes, sir!” the sergeant said.

I saw the frown form on the lieutenant’s face. “Hey. Wait a minute. It’s a couple of miles back to the road. How’d you get here without shoes? For that matter, there hasn’t been a car down that road all day. How did you get here at all?”

I looked at Rachel. Rachel looked at Marco. Marco put on a big grin and said, “It was the Martians, Lieutenant. We were dropped here by aliens.”

Bobulus posted:

I'm more curious how they can reference so much pop culture, but have to rename Area 51.

Bobulus posted:

I'm more curious how they can reference so much pop culture, but have to rename Area 51.

Bobulus posted:

I'm more curious how they can reference so much pop culture, but have to rename Area 51.

QuickbreathFinisher posted:

They way they use "skanky" in this series is absolutely fascinating

Comrade Blyatlov posted:

Fwiw i remember skanky being used that way, and it only seemed to take on a sexual connotation in the early 00s.

MrNemo posted:

It's interesting how slang takes on sexual meanings. Slut used to just be the feminine form of slob (and still did in the UK up until the 80s or so). Makes some older films/books seem a lot more aggressive than they intended.

Epicurius posted:

Right. Skanky just means dirty.