Tobias, this time.

He’s such a fascinating character. In the very first book he broke the number one rule of morphing–if you stay in morph for more than two hours, you’re stuck like that. Forever.

So now Tobias is a red-tailed hawk, with the mind of a boy (and also somewhat a hawk, because that’s how morphing works).

Which is just such a fascinating way to do it. And leads to some really interesting digging into what it actually even means to be human… and what it might mean to lose that little bit of yourself…

It worried me a little. It made me wonder. Was he right about other things as well?

How many risks could we take before we lost? How long till the five of us were four? Or two?

Or none?

And now we have more than 50 books to find out!

Random thoughts

(minor spoilers)

There’s actually a bit of a mistake in this one:

Marco and Rachel had both previously morphed bald eagles. Bald eagles are huge birds, much bigger than red-tailed hawks.

Marco’s bird morph is actually an osprey, both in [[The Visitor]] and (if I remember correctly) in every book after this one.

Unrelated to that, Marco gets some of the best dialog…

<Excuse me,> Marco said. <But does anyone else ever stop to realize that some of the things we talk about doing are totally INSANE?>

<What? Turning into fish, so we can be carried by a hawk and let ourselves be sucked up the pipe of an alien spaceship, so that we can then turn into tigers and gorillas and whatever, and overpower the creepy aliens?> Rachel said. <Is that what you mean by insane?>

<That’s it exactly.>

<Yep,> Rachel said.

<Well, okay,> Marco said. <As long as we all know we’re nuts. Let’s do it!>

And then finally, we have this (mildly terrifying, especially from Tobias’ point of view) scene:

<What time is it?> Jake demanded.

<You have about two minutes,> I said. It was a lie. According to the clock, they were already seven minutes too late.

Too late.

And yet Cassie was continuing to emerge from her wolf body. Skin was replacing fur. Her leotard covered her legs.

But the others were not so lucky.

It’s interesting that it’s not a hard limit (weird initially that it was ’two hours’ from some completely alien definition of ‘hours’). I wonder what the real rules are. Or how much of it is completely up to what the plot requires.