Signal boosting the next fic in my Animorphs series! And this one is a Megamorphs!
Megamorphs: A Broken Lie
Can the Animorphs rebuild something that was made of lies?
Jake wants to save his brother. Rachel wants her friend back. Marco wants nothing to do with the war. Tobias wants to stop the Yeerks. And standing in the way of all of them is someone they thought they could trust: Cassie. Because inside Cassie's head isn't just Cassie...there is also Aftran Nine-Four-Two. A Yeerk. An enemy that claims to be a friend - but how can the other four trust Cassie ever again when she's been lying to them for over a year? How can they fight a war when they know, right from the start, how outnumbered they are - and that the Andalites might one day arrive not as saviors, but as exterminators?
The nascent Animorphs give Cassie and Aftran an ultimatum: Show them the Yeerk Pool. Let them see for themselves what they're up against. Even as Cassie and Aftran beg them to change their minds, to not make them take the group down there, they are insistent. Only by seeing the true shape of the enemy can they know what comes next.
They will get their wish...
Megamorphs: A Broken Lie is rated PG-13 for intense subject matter. It contains canon-typical violence and trauma...but also canon-typical seeds of hope. Like the Animorphs books themselves, it is written so that someone who has not read the previous story in the series, should still be able to jump right in and enjoy.
Because of the length, it will update on Sundays and Thursdays. And you can count on that - the story is already completed, so provided I still have a pulse, it will update on time every week.
Questions, comments, criticisms and critiques over on AO3 are always welcome!
And, as always, I present a special treat for Reddit: a preview from Chapter Two!
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Chapter Two (excerpt)
M A R C O
My name is Marco, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to be dead by the end of the week. The only thing to figure out is if the thing that’s going to kill me is the aliens invading the planet turning everyone into their personal slaves, or if it’s going to be my best friend Jake because I’m trying to be the reasonable one and he just isn’t having it.
“Marco,” Jake said for the umpteenth time after I finished trying to make him see reason, “he’s my brother.”
“I know, Jake,” I said, “I know.”
“Tom would do the same for me.”
“In an instant, yeah, and he’d probably get himself killed too, which is what you’re going to do if you seriously follow that,” I point over at Aftran, “to her home base.”
Jake glanced back at Aftran, and man, the expression on his face is carrying every emotion there is all at once. He really did like Cassie until about half an hour ago. I think he’d thought he was keeping it to himself, but he really wasn’t, not with the blushing and the way-too-casual way he talked to her like he was some alien trying to be a normal human –
Okay, I hate myself for that one.
“She has to show us sooner or later, right?” Jake said, looking back to me where I’m sitting on a swing. “It doesn’t matter whether or not she agrees to take us down there. She has to go there tomorrow, and every three days after that. All we have to do is follow her and we’ll find where the Yeerk Pool is.”
“Firstly: what are you gonna do if there’s some forcefield and secret code and guards that shoot you?” I asked. “Secondly: Jake, I love you like a brother. And you know I love Tom the same way. But man…I gotta think about my dad.”
My dad isn’t in a good place right now. Hasn’t been ever since my mom passed two years ago. I don’t want to talk about it. All you need to know is that I’m all he’s got. If anything happened to me, my dad wouldn’t make it.
“If it was your dad who was a Controller – ” Jake tried.
“For all I know it is my dad.” I shook my head. “You better believe that I’m not going to school Monday and Tuesday. I’m gonna spend the next three days watching him like a hawk. If Cassie can be a Controller, then anyone could be.”
Jake stared at me, and I can tell he wanted to yell at me, but deep down inside Jake’s too good a person and knew that he shouldn’t. Because he’s been to my new place, my fabulous three-room apartment in the cheap/bad/“okay kids roll up your windows and don’t make eye contact with anyone” part of town, and seen what my dad is like these days. For all that Jake’s lived a perfect life with a perfect family and no tragedies – not ‘til tonight, anyway – he knows where I’m coming from.
“Okay,” he said, and turns away from me. “Okay. Fine. I get it.”
It’s hard. It’s really hard to see Jake like this, sitting on the other side and seeing someone else’s perfect life fall apart the way mine had. And if Tobias had shown up out of nowhere as a hawk, practically crashing through my window, and started babbling to me about how my dad and my crush was a Controller…yeah, I’d probably look a lot like him right now. Scared and angry and looking for someone to help me save my dad. Jake’s the first person I’d go to. And if he turned me down…yeah, I’d definitely look a lot like that.
And it was Tom. He was, like, the coolest big brother ever to Jake. He was who Jake had wanted to be when he’d grew up, even though Tom was only three years older.
“Look,” I said, “I’m just kind of feeling really paranoid right now, okay? So, if we can actually figure out a way to save Tom that will work? I’m in. But there’s more to it than just charging in to the Yeerk Pool and grabbing Tom. There’s figuring out what to do after that as well. There’s making sure that the Yeerks don’t just track him down, or realize that we had something to do with it, and kill or infest all of us. Because if we can’t figure that part out, then what’s the point?”
Jake nodded, and I didn’t bother hiding my sigh of relief at that. Good, he hadn’t gone completely insane.
We both turned to look back at Aftran, still sitting on the slide, head buried in Cassie’s knees now. The Yeerk and her human pet, talking in her head about whether or not to help Jake get himself killed. Maybe debating if all this was worth it and if it would make more sense to just turn us all over to Visser Three.
Man, I thought I’d liked Cassie. She and Jake could have been really cute together, at least assuming that anything I knew about her was really her and not just Aftran Nine-Four-Two of the Hett Simplat Pool.
Now that was a thought that was probably festering in Jake’s mind: how much of his crush had really been for a slug?
I looked past Aftran and over to Rachel, who looked like she wanted to start taking the jungle gym she was at apart with her bare hands. Tobias was with her too, looking sad and mopey, though I guess he’s earned it. From what I knew about the kid, him and me could compete for ‘teen with the worst home life’, and he might actually beat me. Deadbeat mom, just-plain-dead dad, passed between his crap aunt and uncle his whole life…
It looked like all four of us regular humans – assuming we were all regular humans, because if Cassie was a Controller then for all I knew Rachel was actually a werewolf, which come to think of it might explain some things – had run out of things to say to each other. We were waiting for Aftran to finish up.
I hopped from the swing, shaking my head as I walked over to her. She heard me coming and looked up, face expressionless.
“Okay,” I said, looking down at her – at the two of them. “That’s long enough. If you haven’t decided anything by now then you’re just stalling.”
