<Next time you think you can morph unnoticed.>

<I am sure I am being monitored> Matirin says, but he curls up on the ground and wraps his tail around him and concentrates on a rushed bug morph.

<Now.>

There is a brief fight and they take the area and land an armored helicopter.

If the bug is informed he should unbug he will do so.

Now works.

Unbug. <Do you have the box.>

"Yeah, over here." Box.

They are flanked by other helicopters as decoys, some of which provide cover fire, and zoom away.

<It is not even obvious to me what they wanted morph for>, Matirin says disapprovingly.

"Maybe they didn't want to tell you," Kalana suggests, when he is back on Anitami soil.

<Well, of course not. It might have been obvious to me anyway. You are getting - more legible. Not perfectly so but tolerably so.>

"Practice!" she says. "I can figure out some of the tail swishes now."

Pleased tail-swish! <When we arrived we made the Mioleens so nervous with that.>

"I bet, it's kind of intimidating."

<You should see a Hork-Bajir. Terrifying and if they are not infested with a Yeerk totally harmless.>

"Have you got pictures?"

He does! On the computer.

"Wow, spiky. What're the spikes for if they're sweethearts?"

<Stripping the bark off herbaceous vegetation on their home planet.>

"...seems excessive, but all right."

<They are a designed species. An evolved one would likely have found it a bad tradeoff.>

"Designed? By whom?"

<Another species on their planet, called the Arn. They designed an ecosystem they liked and then a species to take care of it.>

"What kind of trees need their bark spiked off?"

<I have never been to the Hork Bajir homeworld. Analogizing from the sort of Andalites who would design sapients to maintain their genetically engineered gardens, they might have been showing off.>