Chapter 1

Author's note: Hi, this is the nerdiest thing I've ever written. I hope you like it. Also, as far as timeline goes, this takes place post-X2 (but pre/in denial of-X3) in the X-Men movieverse and around book 40 in the Animorphs series. Ish. Also, I used parentheses in place of pointy pointy brackets for thoughtspeak. (I'm sure you could have figured that out.)

Chapter 1

My name is Jake. Just Jake is all I can tell you, because—and I realize that this sounds melodramatic—I have enemies. Dangerous enemies. Of course, so do you, you just don't know it yet. See, Earth is being invaded. I know, I know—melodramatic. But it's all true. My life is one big melodramatic intergalactic soap opera, and it only gets moreso the more you learn about me and my friends. Life-changing alien gifts, long-lost mothers-turned-enemy, long-lost alien uncles… and heck, I've come back from being dead twice.

But I digress.

Earth is being invaded by parasitic aliens. Yeerks. Yeerks are pretty harmless-looking, slugs a couple of inches long. But if that's all they were, we could stop this invasion with a few well-placed stomps. I wish. No, the Yeerks, as I said, are parasites. They crawl in through the ear canals of sentient species and wrap themselves around their brains. From here, they can access your thoughts, your memories. Control your every move, while you remain a helpless prisoner in your own body. The Yeerks have already conquered the Gedds and the Hork-Bajir, and now they're working on humans. They've been here for awhile now and already have thousands of enslaved humans. We call them Controllers, although what they really are is Controlled.

But there is hope. Hope in the form of me and my friends, the Animorphs. Us six kids (including one alien kid and one bird kid) up against an intergalactic Empire. Not the best odds, I know, but we have certain powers to help us fight. Not like the mutants you hear about in the news. Our powers were given to us by a dying alien. See, the Andalites developed a device—we just call it the blue box—that allows us to morph into any living creature we can touch, for two hours at a time. If we stay for more than two hours, though, we're stuck—just ask Tobias, the aforementioned bird-boy.

So, that about brings you up to speed on this little soap opera I call my life. Today was actually a pretty boring episode—the Yeerks had been suspiciously quiet lately, giving us a little time to catch up on homework, not to mention sleep. Maybe even see a movie or something. It was, of course, too good to be true.