FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Written by brazy "birb" seeker

Inspired by K.A. Applegate's "Animorphs"

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PROLOGUE

My name is- well it isn't Tobias. Sorry if you were expecting him, that is if you even know who he is. No one really knows what happened to him after he disappeared that night long ago. No one knows if he's even alive. The world is a dangerous place for a hawk, and they don't live very long anyway.

I can't tell you my last name, well, I can't tell you my first either in fact. It's not that its too dangerous, as those past journals will have you believe, things just aren't like that anymore. First or last, those names just don't exist anymore. I suppose you can call me Thermal. That's sorta what I do now for most of my free time anyway, ride thermals. I've got a lot of free time these days.

Things are different now. The war is over, but it didn't end without its scars. Its been only 5 years now since the fighting stopped and I write this prologue not through my own hands, but through my voice and meticulous editing. Talons aren't really made for using keyboards. We don't have hands anymore, no one in our little group does. Soon, if everything works out, none of us will. Anyone, if we have our way. Soon the human reign will be over, we never deserved it to begin with. Soon it will be nothing but calloused paws and razor-sharp talons; our bodies covered with amateurishly preened feathers, dirtied fur, broken scales, and yet all the same blood. Soon. Soon it will be over. A species far too smart and far too dangerous for its own good. A beautiful species capable of unimaginable good, all turning in towards its own selfish desires. We never deserved it, this world. There were always the good ones, but on their own, they never could lead us to the light. We've all but destroyed the very planet which gave us our chance to live. So, to save this world, to save all the wonderful beauty of this planet, we forfeit our cards. We forfeit our humanity, leaving behind so much potential for good we could have had, and decide to use the Andalite's gift.

To use the Andalite's curse.

Maybe whoever comes next will play their cards a little better.

Maybe.

I should back up a little bit before I get into what all has happened in the last 5 years. What are these journals I'm even talking about? So, the stories go that long ago, there were these kids, five kids and an alien. They called themselves the Animorphs. Cheesy as hell, right? Well, cheesy as it may be, those kids saved the world. Not all on their own though, they had some help. Turns out, we aren't completely alone in the universe, and turns out, those aliens were hiding among us all along. There are many, many species that were all out of reach. Many were good, and a few, well, not so much.

The Yeerks.

The Yeerks were alien species that were very unimpressive on its own, more like large slugs than anything else, but don't be fooled, those slugs almost ended the human species. The Yeerks would climb in through your ear canal, go around and through your inner ear and coat your brain. Their bodies would flatten and seep into the deep crevasses of that soft fragile organ and dig their nasty little nerve tendrils into your tissue and take control. Every synapse, every part of you, became theirs. You became what was known as a controller, a host for the Yeerk. They could see everything, present, and past. Read every memory, control every action, and there was nothing you could do but exist, completely out of your control, watching as you were used as a pawn in their game to take over the universe, as no more than a spectator in a movie theater.

Well, or so I was told at least, through the journals. See, the Animorphs, they were smart, they left behind journals. Thousands of pages, all of them writing from their own perspectives as they went through horrors no one should ever experience. Five human kids and an alien child, terrified and caught up in a war. Trapped for all their own vices in a world they never knew or ever asked for. To fight the Yeerks, and to save the world from a threat no one knew about but them and some aliens millions of miles away, unable to help them for years.

Regardless, I thought the journals were a pretty good idea, so I figured I should do the same, and so here we are. Might be fun. Well, ignoring the fact that using a computer with talons is not exactly what one would consider "normal" fun, more like putting a toothpick under your toenail and kicking a door sort of fun. If I had toenails. Or toes.

The Animorphs were the only ones on earth who knew about them, about the alien invaders secretly taking over the ranks of our own world. Along the way they sacrificed their innocence they knew they would never get back, left scarred and broken inside, all for the greater good. They were given that responsibility by a dying alien, an Andalite, Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul. The Andalites are an alien species known across the galaxy for their impressive intellect which lead to more advanced technology than you could dream up for a Sci-Fi movie, and, ultimately, their war against the Yeerks. They were trying to stop them from the horrors they commited, not out of the kindness of their hearts, but as it was sort of the Andalite's fault the Yeerks ever made it off their homeworld. Though that is a story of its own. I'm sure you could dig up some journals on how that all unfolded.

I've never seen one in person, but from pictures an Andalite pretty much looks like a large blue deer. That is, if that deer had a humanoid torso in place of a neck, slender arms with seven fingers, and a head with no mouth. Their main eyes are large and almond shaped; and yes, I said main eyes, they also had these creepy as all hell stalk eyes on top of their heads which are able to swivel around all directions. There is no such thing as sneaking up on an Andalite. Oh, and how could I forget. Instead of a normal tail, an Andalite has a huge, long, muscular tree branch of a tail that curves up and over their body, and at its tip sits a wicked curved blade. Reminds me of my talons, but huge. I heard they can move it so fast you could be decapitated and dead before you even realized you got hit. Yikes.

Anyways, many years ago, Elfangor crash-landed on the surface of the earth in a fighter spacecraft while trying to fight the Yeerks. He was found and... murdered, by one of the top generals in the Yeerk's ranks, Visser 3. He was, well, eaten alive. Whole. After, his ship vaporized by their dracon beams which were these crazy brutal weaponry made by the Yeerks from modified Andalite technology, they're so powerful it left no evidence to show of the invasion. A terrible way to go... may he rest in peace, but before he was gone he left a gift for those five kids that changed the course of human history, hell, the history of this galaxy. Especially if I have a say in the matter.

You might be wondering how even a sort of large slug could manage to eat someone, even with a host. Well, they didn't do it on their own, even with the ability to take over a host. Visser 3 had an Andalite host, the only Yeerk to ever achieve such a feat, and this, this is where the story gets interesting.

This is where we come in.

The Andalites were able to gain many military and domestic achievements technologically, from their advanced spacecraft able to jump into another dimension known as zero space, or Z-space, a place where the laws of physics were just different enough to allow them to travel many millions of miles very quickly, to their weapons able to shoot a hole straight through a moon or vaporize all life on a planet; but the most amazing in my opinion, and one of the most advanced, is their morphing technology.

It's so bizarre, so awesome in its ability, that I wouldn't blame you if you mistook it for magic. This technology allows a user to simply touch a little blue box and permanently gain the ability to become any living creature they "acquire", simply by touching said animal and focusing on it.

Please excuse my getting carried away for a bit while I nerd out. I read some of the journals about the Andalite tech, if you didn't notice, and the way it works is amazing. The DNA of the creature is "saved" in your body by encapsulating a sample, then when you want to morph, all you need to do is focus on the animal. Millions, probably billions of nanobots that have now built up inside your bloodstream by self-replication and they rapidly start to grab onto the very cells of your body and transport them to Z-space, that other dimension, and hold them there. Your body is torn apart, basically, in a very controlled and elegant way, although the actual mass is nothing but a bundle of cells. The only part that retains its structure is the brain. Some of the nanobots then go back to build the new body you requested based on the DNA acquired before. The new body is built with energy the nanobots stored earlier from chemical food energy, and if it's not enough energy the nanobots begin to... well... tear apart your body held in Z-space, using the energy from your less important cells to create new ones as needed. If that isn't enough, say you're morphing something really really big, the nanobots will harvest energy from anything it can get around your body stored floating in Z-space. I had a hard time understanding exactly how it worked, hell I'm not an Andalite scientist, but it almost seems to "borrow" energy from the fabric of Z-space, transporting it to normal space. Scary stuff. That explains why morphing big is so tiring and takes so long.

Oh, and your body. Its held in stasis in Z-space, your brain kept alive and communicating through Z-space transponders with your now new animal body, allowing you to still think and not be lost as an animal forever. Well, that's the theory at least. Hold on here, I'm getting to something that will be very, very important for the future of the human species.

That all takes a ton of energy to keep functioning and that power doesn't last long. Even with the borrowed Z-space energy, it runs out. You can't borrow energy from Z-space forever, it's borrowing after all, its in the name. The universe tends to get mad when you take things without returning it, and the ability of the nanobots to hold said energy runs out of steam. Eventually, the system starts to break down, the stasis running out of energy, the communication between your real brain and the new animal brain starts to fail. More and more of your body is broken down for energy until all that's left is a floating brain, a brain quickly running out of time. This is about 2 hours after going into morph.

Sound familiar? Well, if you've ever read any of the journals the Animorphs left, it should. Two hours is the maximum time one can stay in morph. If you stay longer, you get trapped, forever. Never able to demorph, never able to morph again, even if you touch the morphing cube again.

I read in the early days, when this was experimental tech, people in morph suddenly, without knowing why, well they simply went feral. They stopped thought-speaking, the way you communicate to other people while in morph, they stopped being.. themselves. Their bodies had been completely consumed for energy, up to and including their own brains.

There was nothing of them left, simply a feral animal now.

Their minds, gone.

Well, that simply wouldn't do. So, the Andalites created a safeguard. There was nothing that could be done to reverse the morphing process once all the energy had been depleted and the user's body destroyed, but there was one last thing that could be done to help save the unlucky user.

Large portions of the nanobots all begin to combine together, right at the base of the current morph's brain stem. They became a very very small, very important computer, which attached to the nerve endings deep into the brain of the morph. The nanobots, using the final little bit of their reserve energy, transport the exact quantum state of your brain in Z-space into the new computer while obliterating the final bit of mass for energy, your brain. This process renders the original body completely and utterly destroyed, and all the nanobots in your body go back to normal space and finish the integration of your mind into the morph.

After that process is complete, it's over. You've become what's called a nothlit, a person trapped in morph.

You are no longer human.

You are your morph.

Forever.

And that, that is exactly what we planned to do. To our friends, our family, to the unsuspecting guy down the street. To all of humanity. To devolve, to forfeit our humanity and become nothlits, and to save the planet from ourselves. At all costs.

Oh, and Tobias? He was one of the Animorphs, he ended up as the first human nothlet. He was trapped in the body of a Red-tailed Hawk on the very first battle. Some say he did it on purpose, others think it was just an accident, a terrible consequence of war. Regardless of how it happened, we have Tobias to thank for what has become of us. I sometimes wonder if he would be proud of us. Maybe, if he's still out there somewhere, he could join us in our fight. After how the war ended up for him, he might need something new to fight for.

Tobias, wherever you are, if you ever read this, I just want to say thank you. I hope the thermals are strong under your wings and the skies are clear.

We will always remember Tobias.