taxonomites | [01] Arrival

Rachel's memorial service has come and gone. Tobias has disappeared into the woods with her ashes. Jake is depressed and speaks to no one, not even his best friend Marco. Aximili's only remaining ties to Earth are Marco, Cassie, and his fondness for his adoptive home. It is not enough to keep him. He hasn't seen his parents or his homeworld in three and a half Earth years. The war is over, and he will return a hero. It's time to go home.

He's made his farewells to Marco, Cassie, and Jake. He even saw Tobias overhead on his way to the ludicrously makeshift spaceport. He boards the Dome ship that will take him home, and -

Confinement. A small room. Not the Dome ship at all.

<Commander Galuit?> Aximili reaches out with his thought-speak. <Captain-Prince Asculan?> Then, after a pause: <Jake? Marco? Cassie? Tobias?>

Those watching on the tablet will see something they've never seen before. Aximili is visibly alien: he stands on four dainty hooved legs, like a deer, except with blue fur. Instead of the delicate neck and head of a deer, however, he has a narrow, blue-furred torso, frail many-fingered arms, and a flat face. He has two pointed, swiveling ears, three slits instead of a nose, two large green eyes, and no mouth. Which explains the telepathy. But that's not all. On top of his head, he has two eyes mounted on stalks, which are now pivoting in all directions, taking in the room where he's found himself. Then, of course, there's the tail.

Take one look at that tail, and you know it's a weapon. It's long and coiled with muscle, ending in a blade the size of a steak knife.

Aximili is thinking fast. It appears that he is now isolated from the Andalite fleet and his human friends. Much as he hates to admit it, teleportation is beyond the reach of Andalite technology. In fact, it's beyond the reach of any species he knows, except -

<The Ellimist? Is this another one of your games?> No response. Of course, that doesn't mean it isn't the Ellimist. He has the infuriating tendency not to appear when directly summoned. In that case, he has no choice but to play along. Aximili first directs his attention to what appears to be a teleportation device over his head. He points his stalk eyes up at it, while his main eyes keep scanning the room. To his annoyance, he cannot even begin to guess at the mechanism behind it. His best guess is that it makes use of Zero-space, but how could it overcome Z-space's inherent temporal anomalies for instantaneous transportation? This avenue of escape is a dead-end.

Aximili steps toward the pedestal with the tablet, his hooves clacking against the metal floor. He inspects it with his main eyes, keeping the stalk eyes scanning. Then, when he reaches for the tablet, he notices the bracelet on his slender wrist, made out of an alloy he doesn't recognize. He reaches for the bracelet with his other hand and pulls. No effect. It appears to have been embedded in his flesh. To Aximili it seems like a vile Yeerk invention, but if he really were captured by the Yeerks, surely he'd have been infested by now. Besides, they didn't have anywhere near this level of technology, let alone enough remaining military strength. In any case, Aximili has a strategy for getting rid of this bracelet and for getting out of this room.

<Surely you do not believe that you can keep your crude tracking device on me for long,> he announces to whoever has abducted him, though it's mostly bravado, since he still suspects that he's in the Ellimist's power, and there is nothing he can say to intimidate the Ellimist. <Disable it now and show yourself, or I will simply rid myself of it.>

No response. Anyone watching now is about to watch a truly weird spectacle, because now Aximili is focusing on an image of something small, brown, and disgusting: a cockroach.

Tough, chitinous armor crawls its way up Aximili's legs as he begins to morph.

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Charley's stare is unabashed curiosity, and she's silent for a moment or two longer than might be considered polite.

"Well, I don't know any Ellimist, but this place is someone's idea of a game. It's a sort of prison... or zoo, perhaps. Sorry to have to tell you, but we all seem to be stuck."

If Charley's being impolite, it's a good thing that Aximili doesn't know much about human etiquette. He learned it from a group of not-particularly-polite human teenagers.

«A zoo,» Aximili repeats thoughtfully. He seems remarkably unruffled for someone who's just been kidnapped and is rapidly transforming into a cockroach. «The Ellimist once proposed housing part of the human population in a zoo of sorts. He, or rather it, also has the power to abduct me and everyone else here.»

Aximili's stalk eyes are now thinning and lengthening into antennae. «The Ellimist, or Ellimists, have incredible power. It, or they, is to us what we are to bacteria. Its motives are beyond what we can surmise. I have been abducted by the Ellimist before. Every time, it resulted in terrible danger.» He is now the size of a rat and still shrinking; he wonders if the human speaking from the communication device can still see him. Perhaps it is better if she can't. He knows how humans can get around cockroaches, especially females. «Are the inhabitants of this "zoo" safe? Is there anything unusual happening?»

Privately, he wonders whether his friends are here somewhere. The Ellimist has never singled him out. No matter what strange place he found himself, the other Animorphs were there with him. Still, if they didn't hear him call their names and they were here, that meant they didn't want to be seen. If they didn't want to be seen, then they wouldn't be found. There's no point in asking.

"No one seems to know what the creatures who have trapped us here are called... they're not very chatty, whoever they are."

She can't see him any longer, but she does hear him, so he must still be there somewhere, mustn't he? She frowns at the tablet's screen.

"It seems safe, I suppose... but lately, well, some people have been having premonitions of something bad coming. I'm not sure what to believe, myself."

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<Premonitions? What does that mean?> Premonitions or no, where the Ellimist is, trouble is sure to follow.

Aximili is now fully cockroach. The cockroach instincts scream for him to find a crack in the wall to escape from the light, but he can find none. The room is hermetically sealed. <Remarkable. Even in cockroach morph, I can find no means of escape. Have you found a way to leave your cell?>

"Oh. Like a sort of... vision of the future. I can't say I understand it, really."

What an odd place he must come from, where shapeshifting is commonplace yet the concept of premonitions is unknown. She peers curiously at the projection, but it only shows the room, seemingly empty; nary a cockroach in sight.

"If you pick up this communicator thing -- the one we're talking on -- a door should open and let you out. There's a whole city here... though it's not much more than a very large cell."

If Aximili had the right kind of head, he would nod. Upon the Andalites' return, he'd taken the opportunity to research Sario Rips, since they seem to be a surprisingly common fixture in his life. «I believe I understand. Sometimes, in the case of a temporal anomaly - » He pauses to rally an explanation that the human will understand. «The warping of spacetime caused by a person being present in two entirely different times can destroy the rules of cause and effect as dictated by the direction of entropy. The result is that the person can briefly access different moments in his personal timestream. It would seem that there is a temporal anomaly surrounding this place.»

When he hears Charley's explanation of how to leave the room, he begins to demorph. His legs begin to lengthen and thicken, and to his interest the bracelet grows along with his limb, which is sprouting blue fur. He can feel his hearts begin to beat again as he says, «A city? Are there any open spaces? Vegetation?» He feels slightly nervous now, in a way being kidnapped by the Ellimist could not make him feel. He could not last long in his Andalite body if this were a completely urban space. With no open spaces or grassy areas, he would starve, and his mind would rebel from the constant enclosure. He would have to spend almost all of his time in morph. The thought doesn't make him happy.

"It's a very odd city... There's a bit of everything here, all jumbled together."

Is Aximili disconcerted by this? Charley can't imagine why, but then again she's not exactly an expert on the mannarisms of shapeshifting aliens. But, well, she has an answer regardless.

"There is rather lovely forest along the southern edge of the city. Nothing on the other side of it, but it's certainly large enough that you might forget you were trapped, for a time."

Aximili is completely demorphed. He lifts the tablet, his stalk eyes focused on the wall in front of him as it opens, and his main eyes finally taking in the sight of the kind human female who has guided him thus far. «Ah. That is good to hear.» As long as there's a forest, Aximili can tolerate this place until he finds a means of escape and confronts his captors.

The sunlight coming in from the door calls to him. He steps outside. The human on the communication device was right: the cityscape around him seems to be constructed from many different human architectural styles. He even sees some buildings that don't seem human at all. He keeps his main eyes trained on the screen even as he scans the city with his stalk eyes. «Thank you for helping me. If you should ever require my help in return, I hope I can provide it, on my honor as a prince.»

[01] Arrival | Holo

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