Flea Ax

I felt a sudden, sharp pain on my arm. What had Marco said they were? Fleas? I swatted it absentmindedly.

Wait!

A flea? Hadn't I heard Jake say he had done it? Yes. I was sure it was a flea. He had morphed a flea!

And he was, after all, just a human. Surely . . .

I reached for the flea. Easier said than done. It hopped away. I found it again. Again it escaped. On the third try, I caught it.

I squeezed the flea carefully between my fingers. I focused on the flea.

Yes! It might just work. We had very few animals that small on my own world. Perhaps the same was true of the Yeerks. The Visser would not expect me to morph something so tiny.

In which case, I might have one slim chance.

I had morphed a fly. And I had morphed an ant. But as small as they were, they were not small enough. An ant is far larger than a flea. Many times larger. But a flea is nearly invisible.

It was time to get very small. Time to morph.

I began to shrink at a startling rate.

Each morphing is unique. Things don't happen logically. Some parts of your body change in shape when they are still far too large in size.

Other times the parts of your body shrink down, becoming very tiny and only changing shape at the last minute.

This explains why, even as I was still a couple of feet tall, I suddenly felt two long tusks come shooting out of my mouth. Two long teeth. And I knew immediately what they were used for: These were what the flea used to pierce my skin and drink my blood.

Why a flea should have a taste for Andalite blood is a mystery. But now I knew how the little monster did his dirty work. And I really did not want to dwell on that image.

My legs and arms began to segment. Joints appeared where they should not have been. Primitive joints that scraped as I moved.

My tail withered away and my body swelled. I was bloating up. At the same time, my blue and tan fur gave way to an exoskeleton - a shell. I could hear my bones dissolving. I could feel sickening lurches as my internal organs all disappeared. My complex Andalite hearts became something that was barely a valve. Long, spiked hairs shot from my jointed legs. A sort of shell helmet fringed with backward-raked spikes replaced my face.

And all the while, the floor of my cage grew vastly wider. And closer and closer. I felt I was on an endless landscape of smooth black glass.

My stalk eyes went blind as they became short, stubby antennae. My sight in my main eyes dimmed and shattered into a thousand points of gray light.

I was almost blind. What I could see was nothing but shades of gray. Dots, not shapes.

I could not hear in the usual sense, but I could pick up subtle vibrations through my antennae and through all the hairs on my minuscule body.

I stood on my six invisibly small legs, protected by plates of shell armor. Almost blind. Almost unable to hear. Afraid.

The next move was up to the Yeerks.