"Nurse, are you aware that this room is full of mosquitoes?"

"So wait a minute here," Rachel said.

"We get zapped back here through Zero-space, one by one, at different times. But when we get back here, we all arrive at the same moment?

And no time has passed?"

I nodded my human head. We were at the mall. At the place where the excellent food places are. I was in human morph. Behaving perfectly like a human. "Exactly, Rachel.

Eggs-Act'-lee. Zactly. We arrived back at the precise moment when we were snatched away. We were all yanked away at the same moment, so naturally we all arrived back at the same moment. Yanked. Yanked is a strange word. Yank. Yank-kut."

"Yeah," Marco said. "That's what's strange: the word "yanked." Us turning into mosquitoes to suck some guy's blood so we could morph into him and instead ending up in the middle of some war to control psychic yellow frogs, and oh, by the way, blowing up a small continent full of Yeerks, saving an entire species, then getting back here to find out Coma-man woke up from a mosquito bite delivered by a morphed alien-slash-deer-slash-scorpion-slash-four- eyed centaur, that's all totally normal.

That's just an average day. Dear Diary: another boring average day, till someone said "yanked.""

I recognized his tone. Sarcasm. It is a form of humor. So I laughed using mouth-sounds.

"Hah. Hah-hah. Hah. Hah." I considered, then added, "Hah."

Prince Jake, Cassie, Marco, Rachel, and Tobias, in his own human morph, all stared at me.

"What was that?" Rachel demanded.

"I laughed."

"Don't ... don't do that, Ax," Prince Jake said. "It's disturbing somehow."

"Yes, Prince Jake."

"Don't call me prince."

"I will call you "The Jake formerly known as Prince.""

Marco made a horrified face. "Oh, no. Now he's making jokes. Bad, bad jokes."

"Actually, that was my joke," Prince Jake said stiffly. "Oh, fine. I get it. You can't laugh at my jokes. Okay. Great. I don't even care."

I was an Andalite, all alone, far, far from home. Far from my own people. Except that sometimes your own people are not just the ones who look like you.

Sometimes the people who are your own can be very different from you.

"Can we eat cinnamon buns now?" I asked hopefully. "Bun-zuh?"

THE END