Chapter Text
Cassie becomes a controller almost by accident. She’s out in the forest one day scouting locations for the release of an injured falcon they’ve been taking care of. Cassie is thirteen and has never heard the words ‘yeerk’ or ‘hork-bajir’ in her life. So when she walks into a clearing to find herself confronting one human and three seven-foot tall monsters covered in blades, she has no clue what is going on.
The yeerk patrol (as she learns it is later) is equally stunned to wander across a random human child in the middle of the woods. They’re there on regular maintenance duty to ensure that the entrance tunnels to the Pool remain properly accessible in case of emergency. It’s a boring task, and none of the controllers are expecting any trouble or any unusual occurrences. As a result, the four yeerks are so stunned that all they can do is stare in confusion at the young girl who has stumbled into their path for a good fifteen seconds before any of them think to do anything about the security breach.
Cassie could have run. (She should have run, she’ll later think to herself curled up in the back of her own mind.) She might have been able to get far enough away that by the time the hork-bajir realized what was happening, they wouldn’t be able to follow her trail. (Of course, she probably would have been caught soon after when she told someone what she’d seen.) But as it is, Cassie is too off-guard trying to understand how on earth three dinosaurs (because that’s what they must be, the tiny part of her brain still functioning insists) have come to life in the middle of a national forest in Southern California, to think about anything sensible like running for help. So when the human finally snaps out of his astonishment to yell at the hork-bajir to “Seize the girl, you idiots!”, Cassie is still standing exactly where she entered the clearing, just waiting for them to grab her.
Cassie does struggle when three sets of clawed hands seize her arms and legs and hoist her into the air, but by then it’s pointless. She screams and yells for help, but she’s miles deep into the forest and there’s no one around to hear, and even if there were, what could they do against seven-foot tall aliens covered in knives. The controllers quickly rush her to a Pool entrance (that is, after all, what they’re out here to maintain) and get a yeerk into her before any more humans are alerted to the alien presence on Earth. Cassie’s infestation is not a planned event, so there’s no one primed and ready to infest her. She goes to the first unhosted yeerk available. And thus, Aftran 942 is given her first human host in the form of a juvenile female of unknown origin.
Cassie returns home a couple hours later with a location for the release, some scrapes and bruises on her arms that she explains away by claiming to have taken a minor fall, and a yeerk in her brain. Almost four months later, she accompanies her friends as they take a shortcut through an abandoned construction site on their way home from the mall.