Sender: Rachel
To: Everyone
Which: Passive dream recording
Warnings: Death, blood, child soldiers, serious injuries. Nothing in great detail, but still present..



The environment is sterile. Artificial. She recognizes the interior of a spaceship, but it barely registers to her. All she sees are enemies. Targets. Humans and aliens alike, the lead human barely more than a teenager himself, all concentrating on a viewscreen on the far wall. All oblivious to her presence until she’s nearly finished the transformation into a grizzly bear. Only then does one of them see her and yell the word “Animorph!”

And Rachel’s thought-speak voice, cocky as ever, replies <That’s right, genius: Animorph.>

The bear charges for the leader, barreling into him and knocking him across the room. A burst of light- a laser of some sort- hits her shoulder, but the assault on the boy doesn’t relent until he manages, with great difficulty, to slip past her.

Other animals have emerged from the humans and aliens around her then. Two lionesses, a polar bear, a buffalo- the boy she was after turned into a cobra. Outnumbered five to one, and yet they’re all waiting for her to make the first move.

<Well? Scared? You should be.> She sounds like she’s laughing as she says it.

She charges, and everything goes to hell.

A confusing jumble of violence and chaos. The polar bear goes down first, retreats. The buffalo keeps charging her, but she refuses to stay down. The lions both latch onto her, teeth and claws sinking in to try and drag her to the floor. Another voice, from somebody on the screen, keeps yelling a name, but she can’t respond. The screaming voices begin to blur together, the boy on the screen and the boy in the snake’s body, as she tries to fight against the menagerie arrayed against her. It’s not until a different voice speaks- a voice that those in Reverein might recognize.

<Rachel!>
<Help me, Tobias.>
<I can’t, I->

Urgently, she cuts him off.

<Help me get him! Help me get him!>

Another jumble of voices- directions from Tobias, a swipe of her blood-stained paw, and the snake is impaled, screaming, begging the other boy on the screen for mercy.

<Jake! Stop her!>

And then she bites down on his head, and he stops moving, stops speaking.

Everything gets blurry after that, dimly visible as she struggles to become human again despite the fog of her wounds. And then, once she is, once she spits the broken cobra skull out of her human mouth, she realizes it’s over. An ordinary human, surrounded still- polar bear, buffalo, lionesses. She can’t fight them. She doesn’t have to. She got the job done.
She looks at the screen. Tobias is there- human now. Crying. She tries to smile for him.

“I love you.”

Behind her, a voice says <You fought well, Rachel.> A young man’s voice. The voice from the screen. The wrong voice.

Jake’s voice.

Confused, she turns back around to see a Siberian tiger standing where the polar bear had been, swiping a massive paw at her head.