Animorphs What If: The Solution

[TobiasMasonPark]

     This was inspired partially by the "What if?" thread on RAF.

     What if David had gotten out of the sewer first?

     DAVID

     The name is David.
     The Animorphs thought they could get the best of me. They thought they could trick me. But they didn’t expect me to wise up to their little plan. I’m a smart guy, you see. I will admit that it was a clever plan. I mean, it took me a while, but I managed to catch on. But it was clever, nonetheless. I have to give those guys credit; they could be downright cruel when they wanted to be.
     You see, I’m what they call the newest Animorph.
     Who are the Animorphs?
     Well, I’ll tell you exactly who they are; names and all. The Animorphs are six teenagers living in a no name town in California. They’re led by a complete stiff named Jake Berenson. But you can tell that his cousin Rachel is the one who gets her hands dirty. Then there’s Jake’s stooge, Marco. In fact, it’s all Marco’s fault that I’m in this mess anyways. The day I met Marco is the day I went from being David the new kid, to David the Animorph. I guess, given the fact that I was the one who found the blue box at the Construction Site in the first place, that I was to blame for my predicament. Well, you can just shove off, because I don’t care about what you think.
     There are three other Animorphs. We have Jake’s resident love interest and group hypocrite, Cassie. Then there’s Ax, the Andalite whose technology gave me the same powers as the other Animorphs. And, finally, there’s Tobias; the bird who used to be a boy—apparently the result of overstaying the two hour morphing limit.
     That was the gist of their plan, you see; trapping me in morph. Like I said, it was pretty clever of them. Sure, they could have killed me, but that would have conflicted with their morals. Besides, the only one of them that would be willing to do the deed would be Rachel. I couldn’t see Big Jake or Cassie stooping to Rachel’s level. Marco or the Andalite might have had the stuff to kill someone, if it needed to be done. But Rachel was the only person in the group who could do so without thinking.
     Instead of trying to kill David, they devised a rouse. They told me that they hid pieces of the blue box—the Andalite device—around the city. One of those pieces was placed at the abandoned Construction Site where I had found it a few days before. Rachel and I were supposed to morph into rats and get the piece and move on to the next location. By the end of the night, I would have the box in my possession. The next day, I would be living out my life as Saddler; a cousin to Rachel and Jake.
     But, of course, the Animorphs didn’t intend on letting me have the box. They had attached a cage to the mouth of the sewer pipe, with the hopes of trapping me inside. I had heard something that tipped me off. It was the sound of metal touching metal; like hitting a pipe against the base of a sewer drain. Like I said, I’m a smart enough guy. I pieced together what they were doing pretty quickly.
     I made a mad dash towards the source of the noise. I scrapped my little rat paws against the dirty sewer floor, chasing after Rachel. I couldn’t let her get out of the pipe first. I had to beat her to the entrance.
     I bit down on something long, thin and pink—a rat’s tail.
     Rachel let out a squeak of anguish. I had stopped her, for now. But she was putting up a fight; thrashing about and waving her fists around. Finally, she turned around and started to gnaw on her own tail! She was going to bite it off!
     So, I let go.
     It definitely caught her off guard. It’s pretty simple really. I was pulling her back, applying a certain amount of force. Once I noticed she was going to chew her way out, I let go; thus, Rachel fell on her little rat butt. That was my chance to strike. I just climbed over the white obstacle in my way and made a mad dash towards the mouth of the pipe.
     I was a white blur, jumping out of the pipe.
     I landed on the trash covered ground of the Construction Site, tasting the fresh air. But there wasn’t much time to enjoy it. I had to get out of sight fast; before the Animorphs noticed that I had escaped. Rachel would warn the others that I had gotten the better of her—through use of thought speech, of course. And I didn’t want a tiger or a wolf chasing after me. So, I just ran out into the night.
     I already had a plan forming in my little rat head.

[NateSean]

I like the idea so far. You've painted David as pretty unstable and desperate. It's a good question and I can't wait to see how you follow through with it.

[TobiasMasonPark]

TOBIAS
     Rachel should have got out of the pipe first. That was the plan. But she didn’t…The white mass of fur that we saw leaping out of the pipeline was not Rachel. It was the real rat, David. If Rachel had warned me earlier, I might have been able to catch him. Maybe I could have had myself a nice mid-night snack. But David got away, like the rat he was.
     ((Jake! Tobias! Somebody! David’s getting away! Close the cage! CLOSE THE CAGE!))
     ((Jake!)) I shouted.
     “I know, I heard!” Jake snapped.
     I watched Jake from the sky. I was about fifty feet up, keeping a lookout, as usual. But he might as well have been right in front of me. With my eyes, I could see anything from Jake, to the Pepsi bottle lying by feet, to the white rat that jumped out of the pipeline and onto the ground. Jake wasn’t fast enough. He slammed the door of the cage about a second too late.
     ((Tobias, Prince Jake told me to tell you--))
     ((I’m already on it, Ax-man.)) I said, quickly. ((I saw him run away from the construction site…I think I lost him.))
     I was circling around in the air keeping an eye out for a white rat. That, of course, was a lot easier said than done. See, during the day, I could see practically anything with a pulse moving down below. I was a red-tailed hawk; a predator by nature. Birds of prey are the very thing that strikes terror into the hearts of a creature like David…Or, at least, the creature David was using as a morph…
     ((Prince Jake is showing signs of anger.)) Ax said. He was the only one who could use thought speech at the moment, so I couldn’t speak to Jake directly.
     ((Jake, I’m trying here.)) I said. ((It’s too dark. I can try, but the chances of finding a rat in the middle of the night--))
     ((Prince Jake wishes for me to tell you to keep an eye out.)) Ax interrupted. ((He has asked the rest of us to morph owls, to scope out David.))
     ((Jake, knowing David, he probably went back to your place.)) Cassie said. She must have finished the morph. That didn’t surprise me. Of all of us, Cassie was the most adept at morphing.
     ((I can’t believe I lost him.)) Rachel shouted. ((He knew I would try to bite off my tail. I didn’t expect him to let go.))
     Five Great Horned owls joined me in the night sky. We couldn’t worry about raising suspicion now, not with David on the loose. Besides, I doubt very much that someone would notice a hawk flying with five owls in the middle of the night. I’m sure there were better things for them to do at this hour. Unless, of course, they were Controllers; then we’d have something to worry about.
     ((We can all beat ourselves up about this later.)) Jake muttered. ((We need to worry about David now. Cassie has a point: David probably went back to my house. I want Rachel to come back with me, since my parents won’t think anything of it. I want Ax to wait outside my place, in case we get there before David does. The rest of you guys keep a look out. David can’t have gotten very far.))
     Jake, Rachel and Ax broke away from the group, leaving me with Cassie and Marco.
     ((We should spread out.)) I instructed. ((David’s in rat morph. Rats are pretty quick, but they can’t out run a bird or owl. We should be able to find him before he gets to Jake’s.))
     ((Unless he demorphed once he was out of sight.)) Marco mumbled.
     That was true. We wasted time morphing and getting our thoughts together. David had maybe ten minutes on us; time he could have spent demorphing and remorphing something much larger than a rat, like a golden eagle, or a lion…The possibilities were endless with David. In which case, we all had to be very, very careful.
     ((Everyone keep an eye out for a golden eagle.)) I said, nervously. ((It’s the middle of the night, but those things are insane no matter what time of the day it is.))
     ((Sounds like David to me.)) Marco said. ((Look, guys, we screwed up. David got away. He knows we’re on to him now. Do you know what’s going to now? He’s going to go to Visser Three!))
     ((We don’t know that.)) Cassie said.
     ((What do you think he’s going to do, Cassie?)) Marco snorted. ((You think he’s going to walk up to Jake’s front door with a freaking bouquet? You think he’s going to say, “Hey, guy. Sorry I tried to kill you all the other day. Let’s just pretend nothing happened?”))
     ((He may just leave.)) Cassie reasoned. ((Like you said, he knows we’re on to him. He saw how far we were willing to go to get rid of him; to stop him from getting the box. He might just decide to leave with Saddler’s family tonight.))
     ((In which case, he keeps his powers and mooches off a family whose real son is probably cut up into a billion pieces by now--))
     ((Marco!)) Cassie cried in disgust.
     ((What do you think he did with Saddler, Cassie?))
     ((I try not to think about it.)) She answered. ((I really don’t want to know what David was thinking at the time.))
     ((Maybe we should just focus on looking for David.)) I said. ((We’re wasting time.))
     ((Tobias is right.)) Cassie said. ((We look for David. Then…))
     ((Then we kill him.))

[SuperBlue]

Love it! Hope David dies this time

[TobiasMasonPark]

     You realize that my favourite character in the series is David, right?

[SuperBlue]

Oh....


*prepares self for an ending in David's favor *

[TobiasMasonPark]

     I'll try to be unbiased when it comes to my love for David

     

[SuperBlue]

lol do w/e you want. I'll probably like it either way

[TobiasMasonPark]

JAKE
     My name is Jake.
     We’ve been fighting this war for a little over a year now. I’ve seen a lot in my time as the leader of the Animorphs. I’ve seen people decapitated by Visser Three himself. I’ve seen the life slip out of the eyes of a Hork-Bajir. I’ve watched Taxxons burst at the slightest scrape of my claws. I’ve seen people in cages down in the Yeerk Pool—hell, being down in the Yeerk Pool is traumatizing as any of the stuff I just mentioned. The point is that I’ve seen a lot of stuff over this past year. Until recently, I thought I had seen it all. Then I met a kid named David, and I saw just how horrifying things could get.
     The Animorphs started off with the five of us; five scared kids who just happened to walk through an abandoned construction site. Those five kids—myself, my best friend Marco, my cousin Rachel, Cassie and a kid named Tobias—met an alien named Elfangor. We were given a powerful gift. It was a gift that a lot of people would give their right hands to possess. We were given the power to morph—to become any animal that we touched. I’ve morphed into plenty of animals—a tiger, a falcon, a ****roach…At first it was jarring. Eventually it became a part of my daily routine.
     It was just the group of us for the longest time. Within a few months we met Elfangor’s younger brother: an Andalite we call Ax. So it was just the six of us against thousands—probably hundreds of thousands—of Yeerks. The Yeerks are the enemy, by the way. They’re parasites, capable of infesting and enslaving the minds of any living creature in the universe. They’re led by Visser Three on Earth, but have bases and pools set up on all sorts of planets. They have only one weakness that we can use against them. They have to feed on Kandrona rays every three days. I was a Controller once. Just a few months after this all started I was infested by the Yeerk who had been controlling my older brother Tom.
     That’s the worst thing about this invasion: nobody even knows what’s going on until it’s too late. By the time you discover the existence of the Yeerks, you probably already have one in your head; controlling your thoughts and movements. Your family won’t know what’s going on either, because the Yeerk have access to your memories. Who knows, your entire family could be Controllers and you wouldn’t even know.
     Things changed just a few days ago. Someone found out about the Yeerks, and the Animorphs, and the existence of aliens. A kid named David found the device Elfangor used to give us the morphing power. We couldn’t let him keep the box; it was far too dangerous. But we didn’t get to David in time. He tried to sell the box on the internet. By the time we got to David’s house most of the walls were torn down. Visser Three had arrived; morphed as some sort of…thing. We managed to get David out safe, but we hadn’t a clue as to what we’d do with him.
     See, we basically had two options. In the first place, we had to stop some of the most powerful men in the world from getting infested, so our judgement was somewhat rushed. We could either leave David to the Yeerks; thus suffering the same fate as his parents. Or, we could give him the morphing power and make him one of us: an Animorph.
     We chose the second option.
     We made a huge mistake.
     “They’ve been down there far too long.” Marco said, pacing around the abandoned construction site where this whole mess began.
     “If anyone can do this it’s Rachel.” I said, calmly. I was playing the leader part, so I had to say things like that. Really, I wasn’t calm. The plan could easily fail. David could get away. And then we’d be in the same mess. We’d still be stuck with the biggest mistake made in this entire war.
     Basically, Rachel couldn’t fail.
     “How long is this going to take?” Marco said. “I’m not going to miss another episode of Buffy tonight. You know, I’m completely lost now? I have no idea what’s going on.”
     Marco was joking around. He really did know how important this mission was. Marco’s the type of person who needs to crack a lot of jokes to get through an uncomfortable situation. You get used to it. But tonight was just not the night for jokes. We were going to do something really big tonight. We were going to trap David in morph.
     There’s one thing you need to know about the morphing technology. You can never stay in one morph for more than two hours at a time. Otherwise, you’ll become a nothlit—a person trapped in morph. Tobias got off easy; he was trapped as a hawk. David wouldn’t be trapped as a predator. That’s why he and Rachel had to morph rats.
     ((So…has anyone thought about what’s going to happen after we get this done?)) Tobias asked.
     “Yes we do.” Marco answered. “We’ll have one less pain in our ass.”
     ((That’s not what I meant and you know it.)) Tobias said.
     I knew what he meant.
     “We can’t just let David get away with everything he’s done.” I sighed.
     ((It would be kinder to kill him.))
     This last part was private. See, there are two types of thought speech: private and public. Private thought speech is when you direct your thoughts to certain people. Tobias was speaking with me privately. He wasn’t on board with the whole plan. He knew that we had to get rid of David—that much was certain. But Tobias knows better than anyone what it’s like to live in a body that wasn’t his own. Trapping David may have been the worst thing we could have done.
     But David wasn’t a Hork-Bajir or a Taxxon or even a Controller. He was a free person. And there’s something about killing another human being in cold blood that sticks with you. You know that you’ve done something really terrible. And it’s not like we could kid ourselves into thinking that it was just another part of the war. It’s not like when we were faced with a battle, and we’d have to kill someone. It would have been pre-meditated murder.
     I know deep down that Tobias was right. I think we all did. We just wanted to make ourselves feel better. If David died, that would have been nature taking its course. So, we put it up to a vote.
     I had to be the leader.
     I gave Tobias a slight nod; just to let him know that I had heard him. But he knew it wasn’t up for debate. It was too late to turn back.
     ((It’s ironic.)) Ax said.
     “What’s ironic?” Cassie asked.
     ((The animal we’ve chosen to trap David in morph.)) Ax said. ((I have read that such creatures are often associated with negative connotations…Most notably traitors.))
     “It’s not ironic, Ax-man.” Marco said, harshly. “Irony isn’t intentional. Irony is supposed to be funny; something you see and think, ‘Aw man, isn’t that a kick in this ass?’ There’s a reason that we chose the rat.”
     ((I understand, Marco.)) Ax said, solemnly. ((But there are many creatures on your planet associated with the connation of traitor.))
     We all sat in an uncomfortable silence.
     “Tobias…you’d better get in the air…We can’t risk tipping David off.”
     The red-tailed hawk that was Tobias flew into the night sky. It was a sight I never really got tired of seeing.
     I turned back to the sewer pipe. We had attached a makeshift cage to the mouth of the pipe. When Rachel got out, we would close the cage on David. And we would watch him for two hours…
     Two terrible hours…

[Darth Zakryn]

Neat. This story is cool. Update soon! But did it go back in time or something?

[TobiasMasonPark]

     The story was going to me narrated solely by David. But I decided to turn it into a megamorphs book. I skipped Rachel's narration for the time being for two reasons: 1) I returned book 22 to the library, and 2) you already hear from Rachel's POV in the latter book. I decided to continue with Jake's POV after I had written and posted Tobias'. So it's not time travel. More like a TMPSU

[Darth Zakryn]

TMPSU?

[Baranth]

TMPSU?

Tobias Mason Park Screws Up.

Kinda like a KASU.

[TobiasMasonPark]

     CASSIE
     ((Then we kill him.)) That was Marco, of course.
     We had a long and hard debate over what to do with David. We knew that there was only one thing to do and that was to get rid of him…for good. The real question was how we would go about getting rid of David.
     ((It’s simple,))  Rachel said. ((We kill him. In and out. Battle morphs. Sure a lion can take on a tiger. But what about a Grizzly? Or a Gorilla? Or a wolf?))
     At the time, we were all in morph. We’d normally hold our meetings at my parent’s barn, but we knew that David would be watching us. Since he could morph like the rest of us, he could become something small; something that a person wouldn’t notice hanging around a farm. So, we all agreed to meet in the park. We would all morph a different animal; something that wouldn’t arouse suspicion.     
     ((Yea, because a bunch of wild animals attacking each other in the middle of the street is something that happens every day.)) Marco said, taking on the appearance of an Irish setter. ((We have to think about this, Xena. We need something subtle. Something a guy like David wouldn’t expect us to do.))
     ((I don’t see you coming up with anything.)) Rachel fumed. Rachel had morphed into a rat for our little get together.
     ((That’s because I’m shooting down all the asinine ideas, like a full attack on a freaking lion.))
     ((Seems to me like a battle’s the only way to go.)) Rachel mumbled. ((David would want a battle anyway. We all win.))
     ((Has anyone thought about who’s going to do the deed?)) Tobias asked.
     Tobias was in the sky, flying in his own body.
     ((I assumed Xena would do it.)) Marco replied.
     ((We’ve never had to kill another human being before.)) Tobias said. ((Do you think one of us would be able to kill David if we had a chance.))
     ((Yes.)) Marco and Rachel, of course.
     ((There has to be another way.)) I insisted. ((Jake, there must be something else that can be done.))
     Jake was morphed as his dog, Homer. He was pretending to bark at a squirrel in a tree.
     ((Obviously there are other things we could do…)) Jake said. ((But killing him seems to be the only option that keeps David out of our hair.))
     ((There is one option…)) I said, slowly.
     ((Well…go on.)) Marco.
     ((It’s like Tobias said. How many of us would be willing to kill David in cold blood? I certainly wouldn’t. Tobias wouldn’t. Ax would just do whatever Jake asked of him. And even if Rachel or Marco agreed to do it, would they be able to carry out the deed?))
     ((If he was morphed, sure.)) Rachel grumbled.
     ((But even if he was morphed as a lion or an eagle or a rat, it would still be David. He would still be a thinking human being. He would still be some scared kid who just wants to go home.))
     ((Scared my ass!)) Marco snorted. ((He tries to off Jake and Tobias and I’m supposed to believe that he’s just scared?))
     ((We haven’t exactly made this transition easier on him.)) I pressed on.
     ((Oh, sorry.)) Marco scoffed. ((I thought we were supposed to be saving a few powerful people from the Yeerks. But, now that you mention it, maybe we should have listened to the whiny kid in the background. Maybe we should have had him over for dinner. Maybe we should have invited him over to Jake’s place to play volleyball with Tom and Visser Three.))
     ((Alright Marco, that’s enough.)) Jake said.
     ((Scared…You know who must have been really scared? Saddler. And who knows what the hell happened to that kid? I bet you he’s rotting away in some dumpster or--))
     ((I said knock it off, Marco.)) Jake shouted.
     For the longest time, all you could hear was the sound of barking dogs and the squeaking of chipmunks.
     ((Jake…sorry man.))
     ((Cassie…What did you have in mind?))
     I attempted to take a breath. But you can’t exactly sigh when you’re in the body of a squirrel.
     ((We’ve been going on and on about killing David. Now we’re considering the fact that most of us might not be up to killing another person. But we haven’t thought about the one other thing that we could do to stop David…Something we’re already familiar with…A weapon that doesn’t need to be seen to be threatening.))
     ((Alright…and that weapon would be?))
     ((We trap him.)) I said, finally. ((We could trap him in morph.))

[Phoenix004]

The fact that you're randomly changing the order of the story is slightly confusing, but other than that it's pretty good so far. I'm not a big fan of "what if?" stories involving David because they tend to be badly done. Hopefully this will be the exception.