<I,> says Bella, <will try the whale morph first to see what the shape of its brain is, since I can do that without letting it take me over. I'll report on that and then you guys follow suit, maybe a ways away from each other so you don't all get into a fight or eat the slow morphers before you get control of yourselves depending. If I'm not sure how well you guys will handle the whale Trouble can go second, he seems to lose his head less than anybody but me in new morphs. Then we follow Trouble to the distress signal. I looked up the moonset time - if we get home when I expect to and continue to the ocean right away after checking the clock, that'll be one almost-two-hours mark for demorphing and remorrphing, when the moon sets, it's due to do that at a quarter after two in the morning. If we don't find the Andalite before moonset, we turn back and attempt to set up another try another day.>
Eventually, they reach the Swan household, and duck under the garage door gap for demorphing-clockchecking-remorphing-
He demorphs, swims out to meet her, and morphs the orca.
<Oh, cool. Yeah, this is like a bear. A friendlier bear. In the ocean. And...> He kicks his tail and moves out a little farther from the shore, then circles back. <Happy. I'm a happy ocean bear. Who wants to play?>
Andi's an orca very quickly; she gets the colors first, then smooths out into a mini-whale and then grows. <I like this morph! Best morph. I'm gonna see how high I can jump!> she says, and then she races away and dives and leaps and splashes.
<We are here to ->
<Lighten uuuuuup!>
Until -
<So I guess that's what a Dome ship is,> says Trouble.
It's a dome. Slightly tilted, resting on the ocean floor, a huge bed of blue-green grass under a shimmering transparent hemisphere that looks like it might possibly be a force field. Their whole group of orcas could fit in it just fine with room to swim and play, and considering the size of orcas, that's saying something.
"Okay, new modus operandi is acquire everything you can get your hands on, and Ax - can we call you that? - can teach us the mixing-DNA-thing and then Trouble can combine a few people and be able to go out in public and Charlie can too and we won't be impersonating anyone specific - we should all have 'generic human' morphs, I'll brainstorm situations where we can quietly acquire people especially if they're asleep and won't notice the sedative effect."
<I'm... only an aristh. Too young and untrained to fight. That's why I was in the Dome when it fell instead of in the main part of the ship. An aristh must have a prince. Something like one, under the circumstances, will have to do.> He tracks gazes, then bows his head to Bella, tail low. <I will fight for you, Prince Bella, until I can return to my people.>
"Female form of 'prince' in English. I'm not sure why thoughtspeak is rendering it as anything that specific to begin with, but there it is. Perhaps you can't tell - me and Andi and Robin are female, Charlie and Trouble and Ethan are male. I can't really be sure about you, come to think of it."
"Well, the history of human females and how we interact with combat is long and complicated, but the current situation is, if you want somebody to take orders from, I'm it, and I don't want to be called 'Prince', plus if you go around visibly hesitating to presume human women competent at whatever they happen to be doing because they are female this will be considered degenerate and rude behavior."
"Humans prefer to wear clothes and be only around clothed humans, as a general rule," Bella says when she comes out of her trance. "We didn't think to bring any spare clothes, and we won't be able to check over your combined morph very well in this dim light anyway. Let's see if we can catch you a sleeping seagull, or at least an insect, and then you can fly home with us."
<What is a house?> inquires Ax.
<...Just follow us,> Bella says.
<Yes, Princess Bella.>
<It rains,> says Bella. <The temperature fluctuates outside of our favorite ranges. There's wind and small unwelcome creatures. It's easier to control the environment in an enclosed house. Speaking of temperatures - how cold or hot do Andalites like it? It's cooler here than it is at the latitude where most of us usually live.>
<I do not know your temperature scale. It was a little colder than I would have liked on the beach but that may have been because it was dark and I had just come out of the water,> says Ax.
<Okay. Hopefully we can find someplace comfortable for you to sleep, even if you can spend most of your waking hours in this or that morph like Trouble does. We might have to tell Renée everything, but if you don't like to be enclosed I guess 'keep you in the basement' isn't a good long-term solution.>
<...Andalites do not share technology.>
<Elfangor shared technology. Telling us how it works isn't going to get anybody anywhere, we aren't physicists or engineers, but something down there is generating a force field. If it would become convenient for us to have a force field somewhere other than off the coast of Washington, can that be arranged?>
<I - don't know. I'm not a technician. I know where the generator is but not how to remove it or how its power supply works - and I would need to have hands, to work on it, and if it failed ->
<Okay. I'm not telling you 'do things likely to disable the force field while it's protecting you from a few hundred feet of water'. I'm just asking, what's there, what can we get, do you need anything from it, would any of it make it easier to hide you. How much sleep do you need? How bad is the claustrophobia?>
Ax hesitates.
<Elfangor said the limit on morph time was two hours, does that help?>
<Then when I'm adjusted for Earth's daylight cycle it will be about six hours a night, although in the long term I would do better with occasional midday naps because the Earth day is longer than I am used to. The claustrophobia is - bad but not unendurable. I will be able to tolerate any space with enough room for me to stand up and turn around if it's the only safe way for me to get sleep and demorph.>
<Okay. And?>
<...If I go back down in my sea creature morph - yours are too large to go through the airlock - I can collect two shredders, have a small chance of removing intact the thoughtspeak amplifier I used to call for help, and could collect a personal computer left in the Dome that doesn't belong to me that I might eventually be able to hack into, as its owner may be presumed dead, though I don't know what I'd do with it besides play pilot simulators, here. I don't specifically require any of the plants. I should be compatible with local flora.>
<A shredder is...?>
<A handheld beam weapon. It is intended for hands with the Andalite number of fingers, but it would be easier for a human to handle than a Dracon beam meant for a Hork-Bajir hand.>
<Bird morph?> exclaims Ax. <A Yeerk with the power to morph?>
<Not any more,> says Bella. <Trapped. Stayed two hours and then some.>
<But - but ->
<Is there some accepted Andalite protocol for dealing with live, helpless Yeerk prisoners? I had her in a bowl of water,> says Bella. <I would have killed her if I believed she'd be dangerous, but she made a convincing case for wanting to fly away and never bother anyone again.>
<I - that's - but ->
<And, you know, she was in my head,> says Trouble. <You get to know a person pretty well that way. She's all right. Her own side played enough nasty tricks on her that she was pretty well fed up with them - I don't think she would've gone back even if she'd thought she was going to live through it, as long as there was another way to go.>
<Ax,> says Bella, <I don't know what your personal history or the history of Andalites in general has been or where this anti-tech-sharing sentiment comes from, and even if I did, I wouldn't feel particularly attached to abide by comparable guidelines of anti-Yeerk warfare. I am absolutely, one hundred percent against letting them go on infesting people of any species, or for that matter disintegrate fleeing hosts or whatever other nefarious things they've been getting up to - but I do not go in for gratuitous slaughter of harmless prisoners because they belong to a species that has earned a bad name. Not when I have an alternative. The Andalite reluctance to share tech doesn't apply to me, especially when it let me turn a parasitic slug who was going to starve or otherwise die into a duck. Are we going to have a problem? Do you want to reconsider placing yourself under my command and negotiate as an independent agent or something?>
There is a long pause, and then Ax says, <No, Princess Bella.>
<Of course they don't,> says Ax indignantly.
<Was it invented recently?>
<...Not that recently. No.>
<Someone met a race of friendly brain parasites, who - they have to have hosts on their home planet, right, there's no other way you get brain parasites like that, is there?>
<...The Gedds, yes,> supplies Ax.
<Someone meets a race of friendly brain parasites who prefer to spend most of their time controlling not-brain-parasite-shaped bodies. And decides to be nice to them. And gives them beam weapons and space travel and not morph tech and a few of those six-winged birds or something.>
Ax is silent again.
<I didn't get many details,> says Trouble. <Could be the people who had the morphing tech weren't friends with the Yeerks and the people who were friends with the Yeerks didn't have the morphing tech. But I do know almost all Yeerk technology is built on Andalite stuff, with some tweaks here and there. Aspret knew that, but she didn't guess why - it was just background info to her; she's too young to have seen it happen. But I mean, where else would they have gotten it that would leave you guys with a rule about handing out technology to strange species? It just fits.>
<Sure,> says Bella. <At this point I wouldn't like to trust the Yeerks with anything more complicated than a paperclip. I just can't figure out the mindset behind 'here, have spaceships and guns, but no turning into animals; if you want eyes and hands you have to steal them'.>
<The ships and weapons were stolen,> says Ax stiffly, <from one who had been merely educating the Yeerks about the wider universe.>
<That makes more sense,> says Bella.
<What d'you hope?> asks Andi.
<...>
<Seconding that question. You may speak freely outside of crisis situations where distraction is dangerous,> Bella tells Ax, <with me, I don't know what the rules were in your previous outfit.>
<Ah. I hope this... sympathy for the Yeerks won't... It appears that...>
<I am willing to kill Yeerks. We starved Charlie's out. I'm even willing to kill hosts if it comes down to it, the innocent-person-shield is a tactic that cannot be allowed to work, although I'd rather find ways around the need - maybe you know of good ways to sabotage Kandronas or poison pools? You don't know what I had to do to chase Aspret out of Trouble. I didn't have the luxury of starving her.>
<She was acting pretty out of it because Trouble's brain isn't a comfy place for unwelcome guests,> says Bella, <so I had a chance to surprise her, and once she was down it got more unpleasant from there. It involved a lot of blunt force trauma. She decided not to hang around.>
<Oh.>
<I can keep time,> explains Ax. He completes his morph. He's an odd blend of the bunch - a little Swan family resemblance, but not enough that people would think them definite cousins. A little Trouble, in the hair, around the eyes; Ethan's nose, Robin's chin, a mixed build that's too short for the clothes. He is pretty puzzled by the clothes.
Ladies cease to shield their maiden eyes. "It'll do," sighs Bella. "Okay. Ax, let's go in and you and me get each other up to speed on - everything - and then you can sleep in here in your normal form, I hope you were paying attention to how the clothes worked for future reference."
Ax, who communicates mostly by thoughtspeak but occasionally pauses to pronounce things in fascination, answers her questions, explains what he can about the Frolis maneuver and how to perform it, watches a clock with a second hand for one minute and announces that the actual limit on morph time is two hours, four minutes, and thirty-one seconds, but it will begin to be difficult to demorph if one approaches too close to the end of that time. He is also confused about how Bella has been able to conduct so many experiments in such a short time; apparently morphing is more tiring to Andalites than it seems to be for humans.
"Kind of. It's complicated." He sits down at the kitchen table. "I kind of get where he was going with that, but I don't think I can make myself talk that way - I don't want to - and I wasn't sure which way anybody was gonna swing if I pushed it, except that Ethan predictably doesn't give a damn, and it was so much easier to just bail on the whole conversation. I do that sometimes." He quirks a smile. "Maybe you've noticed."
"She's - I think she's avoiding doing this with everybody else? Out loud anyway, God only knows what she's writing down, but I think she's kind of - turning herself into a - she thinks she has to - I think she'd drive herself insane if she thought that would get the Yeerks to go away, and she doesn't think it would, but maybe she thinks using herself like she's some kind of - very creative tactical computer program operating a lightly armed Transformer? - will - does that make sense?"
"So kind of hard to carry in bird forms, at least ones we have. We could make another Seattle trip to acquire everything in the zoo, or make a few trips with a bag we can share the load of, or we could get the stuff, hide it on the shore, and get Renée to drive us there and back and smuggle it away that way."
"Plenty," he says. "Getting a lot of practice helps with that, it turns out. Morphing's easier than it used to be. I don't have hard numbers, but if I got fucked up and had to morph, like - ten times, I wouldn't expect that to be a problem. As long as they weren't all in the same five minutes."
"Elfangor scored a few hits on Visser Three. Me and Andi and Trouble all acquired from the blood, and Trouble also thought to ask Elfangor before the Visser landed, so he has two. Nobody has acquired you, although if you'd let at least Dad and Robin and Ethan, that would be convenient."
<If a morph is bitten, yes. The body is reconstructed the next time that morph is accessed. If one's natural form is poisoned or bitten, the toxins will remain in that form, although they will not affect others, until they have had time to leave the body in whatever way they normally do. Are we going to acquire venomous creatures?>