Cassie

P L A Y E R   I N F O R M A T I O N
Your Name: Cee
OOC Journal: N/A
Under 18? If yes, what is your age?: No
Email + IM: techanimus (AIM)
Characters Played at Ataraxion: None

C H A R A C T E R   I N F O R M A T I O N
Name: Cassie
Canon: Animorphs
Original or Alternate Universe: OU
Canon Point: After the rest of the Animorphs leave Earth to save Ax (book #54, "The Beginning").

Setting: Wikia entry.
History: Cassie and her family lived on a farm that had been inherited down from the civil war era. It was remodeled into a Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic where her father, Walter, worked as a wildlife and livestock veterinarian. Her mother Michelle worked with animals at a zoo/amusement park called ‘The Gardens.’ Cassie, herself, spent a good amount of time assisting her father at the Clinic, always happy to get her hands (and clothes) dirtied as she helped.

Her existence as an Animorph -- and the realization that Earth had been, for many years, under attack by an alien species -- started on one fateful night, when Cassie and Rachel ran into Jake, Marco, and Tobias at the mall. The five of them decided to take a shortcut through an abandoned construction site on the way home. On the way, they came across a dying alien whose ship had crash landed on Earth. This alien, an Andalite named Elfangor, gave them the ability to morph into any animal that they touched. He then told them about a secret alien invasion, of the Yeerks and how oblivious the human race was to their presence.

Not too soon after this, another ship landed -- a Yeerk ship. As the Animorphs hid from view, the first and only Andalite controller, Visser Three, emerged from the ship accompanied by Hork-Bajir and Taxxons. The Visser taunted his wounded enemy, then morphed into a monstrous creature and, to the complete horror of the Animorphs watching, devoured him.

And so, the task to prevent a total takeover fell squarely onto the shoulders of these five kids.

Thus began the next three years of their lives, days and hellish days of fighting, killing, hiding, terror, and constantly losing ground against the Yeerks as they waited for the Andalites to come help them. The Animorphs were never supposed to be the main resistance against the Yeerks, not against such a powerful and widespread foe, but the Andalites never put Earth at a top priority. Even during the few times the Animorphs were able to contact them, the Andalite military always assumed that the humans were attempting to place more priority on their situation than was necessary--which, later on, they realized they were horribly wrong about. When they finally did pay attention, the Yeerk presence on Earth was overwhelming.

Towards the end of the series, the battles became much more dire and the stakes much higher. The Yeerks were able to figure out that the Animorphs were, in fact, humans, as well as who they were and where they lived. This meant that Cassie and the rest of the Animorphs had to immediately evacuate their families to a safe place to hide.

Visser Three, the Andalite controller and main villain of the series, had also gotten himself promoted to Visser One by this point, and the Yeerks had begun to herd humans en masse via the subway to be infested. When the Animorphs discovered this, they immediately set in motion a plan to destroy the Yeerk Pool complex with explosives. They succeed in doing this, but also end up destroying a large chunk of their hometown in the process. With this move, the war between human and Yeerk became open and all out.

Desperate, and deprived of their only source of nourishment, the Yeerks landed their Pool Ship on Earth. The Animorphs used this opportunity to infiltrate it, take control, and outmaneuver Visser One. With the ship in hand and Visser One defeated, the Animorphs were able to force the Yeerks to surrender. They had finally won.

But the win wasn’t without some massive personal losses; Jake lost his brother Tom, and the Animorphs lost Rachel (Jake’s cousin and Cassie's best friend) in the process. The Auxiliary Animorphs -- a group of seventeen kids that the Animorphs had just recently recruited -- were also killed in the battle.

However, it was a victory nonetheless. Visser One was taken as a prisoner of war, and forced to stand trial for his war crimes. The Visser, the Yeerk who had antagonized the group since the beginning of the series, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

After that, the Animorphs became massive celebrities, regarded as brave heroes to the public.

Yet the war had definitely changed life for the Animorphs. Jake became clinically depressed and spent his days out of the public eye. Tobias disappeared completely, affected hard by the loss of Rachel and the toll the war had taken on them all. Marco reveled in his newfound celebrity status, but lived a shallow life. Cassie, herself, didn’t care for stardom. Even when she did do interviews, she always tended to talk about the moral subtext found beneath each battle or decision that had been made -- not a subject the media (or public) was particularly interested in.

But with her life returned to some faint semblance of normalcy (if, really, you could call it that), Cassie had to make peace with the last three years and move on with her life. During this time she wrote a book called ‘Insights on the Animal Mind‘, was hired by the president as the 'Special Assistant to the President for Resident Aliens', and dated a guy named Ronnie Chambers (the Californian Governor’s liaison to the Hork-Bajir). On top of work, Cassie also started to take night classes to become a veterinarian.

At the very end of the series, the Animorphs learned that Ax had been kidnapped by Yeerks and taken into territory that the Andalites themselves couldn’t enter. Cassie, when told this by Jake, decided to listen to his advice and stay on Earth while the rest of them (Jake, Marco, and Tobias) set off on a suicidal mission to rescue Ax.

The fate of the other Animorphs isn’t known to her or anyone else.

Personality: Cassie is, in a word, compassionate. Her caring, empathetic personality makes it easy for others to come to her for advice and comfort. She is quite perceptive and sensitive to the way that others feel, and her warmth tends to encourage others to open up about their problems to her. With the Animorphs, she sometimes acted as the ‘team therapist’ when it got rough, and she was usually the ‘mediator’ and peace-maker when problems arose.

In addition, animals have always been a huge part of Cassie’s life. Back before the war went public, her father ran a Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic for injured wildlife out of the family’s barn, and her mother worked as the head vet for a zoo within an amusement park called ‘The Gardens.’ This family legacy, no doubt, helped Cassie develop a deep love for nature and animals, and also led to her desire to become a vet when she was older. She was considered the tree-hugger and nature-lover of the group, and Marco sometimes jokingly referred to her as "Earth Mother" because of it. But her love of animals also meant that there was a constant struggle in her about the morality of using morphs, and of killing other sentient creatures.

At her core, Cassie is a good-hearted and peaceful person. But her ability to sense and anticipate the way that others feel and think has allowed her to sometimes manipulate -- or, at least, help others to manipulate -- someone when it’s needed. This was especially seen in the case of David, as she was the mastermind behind the plan to trap him as a rat. She not only guessed his emotions correctly, but predicted his reactions ahead of time and, based on that, came up with the plan to have him trapped. And it worked perfectly. David, as Cassie knew he would, fell for the various tricks that the Animorphs employed on him, particularly since a lot of it fed his growing ego.

There are also some times where Cassie can be seen as hypocritical -- she always tried to hold strong to her morals, but yet still participated in the killing. One example in particular was when Jake flushed nearly seventeen thousand helpless Yeerks into space to die. While it clearly caused her some internal conflict and discomfort (seen later on, when Marco tries to explain to Jake that it was necessary, and Cassie shies away from agreeing with him or offering her own opinion and even appears to be a bit uncertain about it), Cassie initially tries to justify it to Erek -- and almost says that they’d massacred so many helpless Yeerks merely as a diversion.

The Drode, the Crayak’s lackey, once described her as a ‘killer with a conscience’. Cassie is a strongly moral person, and always questioned whether war and violence was the best choice to make to counter the Yeerks’ invasion. While, as an Animorph, she naturally needed to be violent and kill others, there were times where Cassie would seek out an alternative way to deal with an issue. She was sometimes even sympathetic towards her enemies to the point that it was detrimental to herself and others. At one point, after she’d quit the Animorphs, Cassie agreed to become a nothlit caterpillar (AKA become stuck as one the rest of her life) if a Yeerk, named Aftran, would free the little girl that she controlled. By doing this, she had to trust that her worst enemy -- an alien that had participated in the last few years of enslaving the human race -- would not only keep her word and release the girl, but also not merely squish Cassie as a caterpillar. Cassie also handed the Escafil device (the cube that gave morphing powers) to their enemy and Jake’s brother Tom, solely that so Jake wouldn’t have to kill his own brother. Both of these choices didn’t go over very well with the rest of the Animorphs, but they were things Cassie felt she needed to do.

However, even as dangerous as her actions have sometimes been, there has always tended to be a positive gain in the long run. The Yeerk Aftran eventually formed the Yeerk Peace Movement, a group of Yeerks that only took voluntary controllers and searched for a way to coexist with their hosts peacefully, even if it meant the Yeerk would have no host. And letting Tom’s Yeerk have the morphing cube showed the Yeerks another way, besides controlling others, to gain all the senses that they lacked in their natural form. So while her actions can sometimes be seen as reckless, there always seems to be a certain foresight to what she does. Cassie even argues to Ax, while trying to justify her actions in letting the Yeerks have the morphing cube, that she hoped it would show the Yeerks another way to live without controlling hosts. And, as some of the other characters have pointed out throughout the series, Cassie is able to pick out the subtle connections and possibilities that most other people don’t (or refuse to) see.

After the war ended, Cassie settled into the role one would expect her to. She became an activist and spokesperson for the now free Hork-Bajir population, and became an adviser on the President’s sub-cabinet on matters that concerned the aliens that lived on Earth now. She also spent some of her time traveling around as an animal conservationist (still trying to save the world, even after the world had been saved). Out of all the Animorphs, Cassie, as well as Marco, were perhaps the only ones to move on from the war. Cassie even mentions that the two of them have ‘prospered’ while the others had a much rougher time handling life after the war.

So while Cassie may look young, she is very far from naive or inexperienced. The few years that she spent as an Animorph packed an entire lifetime of experiences in war, gore, death, slavery, and violence into her. Cassie had to grow up fast, and she -- along with the other Animorphs -- have been through a lot.

Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations: The ability to morph into any animal that she touches. She's able to turn into any animal (or alien) that she acquires the DNA of. Any injury sustained, in morph or in her human form, can be morphed away and healed completely. Cassie is also what the Andalites call an "estreen", which means she has a natural talent for morphing. She can control the process to make it less grotesque, and she can morph repeatedly within a short time without tiring as easily as others would.

There are drawbacks to this power, however. The first is that an animal's instincts come included with each morph. This means that it's sometimes a gamble to see if the Animorph will be able to control/ignore the animal's innate (sometimes incredible strong) instincts. But even more notably, anyone that stays past the two hour limit will stay trapped as that particular morph forever (this is what's known as a 'nothlit').

Inventory:
+ Morphing suit
+ Her clothes
+ McCurnin's Clinical Textbook for Veterinary Technicians

Species/Race: Human
Appearance: Kiersey Clemons as her PB. She has an average build, if not a touch on the shorter side. Her dark hair is short and cropped, and her face is kind. She likes to wear jeans and plaid or anything casual.

Age: 19

AU Clarification: N/A

S A M P L E S
Log Sample: It was early, at a time where the camp was still sleepy and quiet and the sun had just barely peeked above the horizon. Cassie had walked a ways out into the jungle, her forehead already slick with sweat from the hot, humid climate despite the young morning hour.

She took a deep breath and inhaled the muggy air, the earthy scent of leaves and dirt and bark. It caused a dull pang of nostalgia in her, made her miss home a little bit and all the memories that came with it. Cassie had moved out from her parents' house not too soon after the war had ended, and she'd been too busy with her work to come visit all that often. It was a little hard to, when one day she'd find herself in Yellowstone working with Toby and the rest of the Hork-Bajir population, then the next day she'd be whisked off via a private government jet to some rainforest somewhere.

Not that she hadn't completely loved her job. She'd had the opportunities to make a difference once again, to help animals and people and aliens all over the world. But somehow, in the back of her mind, she always wondered if that was terrible of her. If the fact that she enjoyed her life, now, after the war, somehow made her a bad person. The only other person to make it out of the war without some sort of mental breakdown was Marco -- but you could expect that from Marco. He rolled with the punches, he was resilient, adaptive. He looked for the humor in everything.

And Cassie, herself, had done her best to look on the bright side of it all and make peace with what had happened. To recognize that yes, terrible things had happened in the war. They'd lost loved ones. They'd seen horrible things. God, they'd done horrible things. But sometimes you had to acknowledge that, and you had to mourn, but then you had to move forward and lift up your head and take care of what you had now.

And now, Cassie wanted to let herself relax. So she closed her eyes and concentrated.

Coarse gray fur flowed down her body in waves until it covered her entire body, while her bones cracked, shifted, twisted. Her face pushed forward into the muzzle of a canid, and her nose turned a dark, wet black. Suddenly her senses became sharper -- the air was filled with a thousand different, subtle scents that she could pick out. Her ears could distinguish fainter sounds: the rustle of leaves, the happy slosh of water in a nearby river, the rustle of some animal in a tree far above.

And after a few more seconds, Cassie stood on all fours as a wolf.

It was her original battle morph, the same morph that she'd used so many times to rip out the throats of countless Controllers -- Taxxons, Hork-Bajirs, sometimes even humans. It had always had the potential to be destructive. Less so than everyone else's morphs had been, but still dangerous.

And even though this wasn't the wolf's native enviroment, she could feel the animal's confident curiosity and instinctive ease flood into her thoughts. Cassie let herself sink into that sureness, that predatory calm, and started out into the jungle at a quick trot.

Comms Sample: [ The feed flutters on to display a section of gnarled, twisted tree trunk and, at first glance, nothing appears to be out of the ordinary. But as the view shifts closer to inspect, a subtle flicker of movement brings a tiny gecko into focus. The reptile twitches its head, fleetingly curious at the shadow that looms over it, then stretches out its small membrane wings to quickly flutter away.

From somewhere behind the video feed a soft-spoken, friendly voice speaks out: ] Man. The animals around here are so ... different from where I'm from. It's really cool. [ Even though Cassie has traveled the stars to a handful of alien planets filled with an awesome diversity of animals, seeing new ones still never ceased to amaze her. Sorry everyone, she just can't help herself. ]

But yeah, um. [ Wooo, yeah. Fumble fumble fumble. That's the famous "Earth Mother" Cassie for you. Talking to a group of people had never been her biggest strength, even if it was just her voice. Marco may've enjoyed the limelight and his newfound celebrity status, but it'd never meshed well with her. ] Hi everyone! I'm Cassie, for those of you I haven't met yet. I just arrived here a couple days ago.

[ The feed pans out to the lush forest that unfolds in front of her, painstakingly not revealing the face behind the voice. Even three years past the end of the war, Cassie couldn't shake that basic instinct to be overly cautious. She had no idea if the Yeerks were present in this place, if they had control over the population or not. The Ellimist had whisked the Animorphs away to different planets and dimensions enough times that being cautious was a easy choice for her. ]

Anyways, I was wondering -- do you guys have a name for those little guys?