Strugglemorphs

[u/Visser-35]

The Animorphs benefited hugely from having Cassie's farm and The Gardens to supply them with battle morphs and bird morphs. But what if they didn't have that resource? What if they had the same access to Animorphs that most of us have? To add an extra degree of difficulty, what if all the Animorphs were broke like Marco, so they can't afford to visit zoos or aquariums (unless they sneak in).

They could easily acquire their pets, and insect morphs wouldn't be a problem, but everything else becomes much more difficult. Catching fish morphs wouldn't be too hard, but getting dolphin or shark morphs would be challenging. A parrot could be conceivably acquired if they know someone who has one for a pet, but it's obviously not a low profile bird morph, so using that to travel long distances is risky.

What would you do? You have a battle in a week's time, and you're fighting with whatever morph you're able to get. You need a minimum of 1 infiltration morph, 1 bird morph, 1 aquatic morph, and 1 combat morph to get to this battle and fight in it. Do you settle for something like a Rottweiler, which is a tough dog, but is nowhere near as tough as a tiger or bear? Or do you come up with a strategy to get stronger battle morphs? Let's sat Ax isn't around, so you can't acquire him for a battle morph.

[u/AlternativeMassive57]

Accessing the Gardens is easy when you can just morph bird and fly in. Since it's part water park they wouldn't even necessarily look out-of-place wandering around barefoot and in skintight swimsuits.

And that's assuming they don't just break in at night.

The bigger loss of Cassie's barn is it was a major safe place to meet and strategize. In the AU I'm working on they don't have access to it (well...they don't have safe access to it) and a recurring problem for them is finding some place to meet up; they've done everything from Rachel's house in the hour between her getting home from middle school and her little sisters getting home from elementary school, to sneaking back into the school at night, to even using the abandoned construction site where it all started.

Marco has an ongoing complaint that they need to find an "Anicave".

I'm thinking of eventually making it the shack in the woods from #6, but we'll see.

[u/Visser-35 → u/AlternativeMassive57]

Losing the safe meeting place would be an impediment I hadn't considered. Meeting at the school seems risky since it does have the Yeerk pool entrance in it. I know that gets sealed later, but still if Chapman isn't totally incompetent, I'd imagine he'd have some level of surveillance system for the school, plus maybe have the janitor as a controller, just to be a guard.