Back to the Present!

"What are we doing out here?"  Victoria demanded.  "There are no shops here!"
Melanie climbed a lamppost, and scanned the area.
"I think we took a wrong turn at the Gap shop,"  she called down.  "The entrance to the mall is back that way."
"Will you stop fiddling with that thing!"  Mel snapped at Emma.  "It keeps shining in my eyes!"
She slapped the disk from Emma's hands.
"Hey!"  Emma protested.  "I was playing with that!"  She picked it up off the floor.
Mel leaned close to her, and whispered conspiratorially in her ear.
"Tell you what,"  she said,  "if you get rid of it, I'll talk Victoria into buying you some Black Forest gateau!"
"Oooooo!"  Emma's eyes widened with delight.  She tossed the disk into a dumpster without a second thought.
High above them, eyes like a hawk's watched their actions.  That they were eyes like a hawk's was singularly appropriate, given that they were positioned either side of a hawk's beak.
The beak was attached to an entire hawk, which once was a teenybopper who called himself Tobias.
Having made note of the dumpster into which the disk had been dumped, he scanned the skies for Rachel, who had also morphed into a hawk, to help with the search.
There was no sign of her.
Oboy!  thought Tobias.  I hope she hasn't lost control of her flight, fallen from the sky, banged her head, and forgotten who she is!  That would be way too trite – even for a crap show like this!
He dived down to inform Jake and Marco where the disk was.

"He said it's in that dumpster over there,"  said Marco.  "We'll have to jump in and look for it."
"Shit, man!"  replied Jake (an avid Fiveive fan)  "You can fucken get in there if you like!  I'm going for a burger."
"But we have to save the world!"
"Screw saving the world!  I want the latest Beanie-Baby they're giving away with happy meals!"  He walked off in the direction of the entrance to the mall.
"Yeah, well screw you, too!"  Marco yelled at his back.

Rachel woke up in the woods just outside town, with a headache.
The obligatory crazy old hermit-woman was hovering over her (every town on the planet has woods just outside them where crazy old hermits live – don't say you didn't know that!).
"Ow!"  said Rachel.  "My head hurts!  I must have lost control of my flight, fallen from the sky, and banged it – and now I can't remember who I am!"
"You poor dear,"  said the crazy old hermit-woman.  "Like I give a shit!  Now fuck off offa my land!"

Jake returned from the mall, talking to his Beanie-Baby.
"Look!"  he told it.  "This is the outside world; those are trees; that's dog-turd; and that's the dumpster where the stupid spic's looking for the disk."
He banged on the side of the dumpster.
"Hey, Marco!"  he shouted.  "You got it, yet?" 
No reply came from inside the dumpster.  Jake climbed up and looked inside...
...It was Empty!
Jake finally noticed the huge dumpster-emptying truck – it was only was fifty yards down the street, and was drowning out all other sounds in the area – but too late!
The dumpster-emptying truck rounded the corner and sped away at five miles an hour – far too fast for Jake to bother putting the effort into following it.
To hell with that!  he thought.  What's one wetback, more or less?

-oOo-

My name is Marco.  I wish that I could get back to the way things were.  Just a few hours ago, I was mrgph mumph muppher...
{You were warned!  Try to start a flashback again, and your mouth will be 'mysteriously' sewn up forever! – Sticks}
Ok, Ok!  Jeeze, what a grouch!
Anyway, my name is Marco, and... Shit, I forgot what I was going to say!
{The 'Sharing', and the pool.  Get on with it!  I don't want this story to run over to another eight-page debacle!}
Oh, right.  So it turned out that Jake's brother had been possessed by the Yerks, so we followed him, and a couple of hundred other kids from a youth club called the 'Sharing', to this party thing at a slimy underground pool, where the Yerk influence is reinforced.  Y'see, every couple of days, the Yerks need to subject their possessees to the same thing that they used to possess them in the first place – otherwise they shake it off, and go back to normal.
Rachel had got her memory back, by this time (you didn't honestly think it would last more than one episode, did you?), and I had escaped from the dumpster with the disk.  We had tried the disk out on Jake's stereo at home, but it had blown it up.  Boy, was his mom pissed!
Of course, I haven't got a mom, *sniff* ever since...
{Stop trying to sneak in mini flashbacks, and get back to the thread!}
Awww, for crying out loud!  The story was written for teenyboppers!  They know fuck all about good writing style and intelligent storytelling methods, so what difference will a few flashbacks make?
{They will make the difference between Marco with his mouth sewn up, and Marco with his mouth not sewn up.}
Well, like I always say: good writing style and intelligent storytelling methods are really important!
The indoctrination began almost as soon as we got inside.  It was the worst, most evil, disgusting thing you could ever have seen.  Y'see, the Yerks do their possession thing by forcing hideous, awful, horrible things (which were not in any way ripped off from the Hitch-hikers' Guide to the Galaxy) into people's ears; and these things, once inside a person's brain, turn their hosts totally demented, leaving them no control of themselves.  I never dreamed that anything could be so dreadful, so hideous; but the things they used were...
..I can hardly bring myself to say it...
...The things they used were...
...They were...
...Spice Girl songs!!!

-oOo-

"Bugger this for a game of soldiers!"  Mel complained.  "We only did this crappy venue a couple of days ago!  I don't like doing more than one gig a week, no matter how much they're paying us!"
"You lying cow!"  Victoria snorted.  "If you don't care about the money, how come you got your agent to re-negotiate your contract?"
"Shut it, you!  I deserve a bigger cut, because my tits are better than yours, and that's the only reason kids buy our records!"
"That's not what my mates down at the gay and lesbian club said!"  snorted Melanie.
"Gay and lesbian club?"  Emma looked at her.  "I didn't know you were a member of that."
"Um... er... I'm not!  I... er... I found a free ticket on the street, and didn't know what it was until I got there!"
"Picking up gays and lesbians on the street, eh?"  sneered Victoria.  "Can't you keep it in the closet, where it belongs?"
"She is!"  Melanie protested.  "I mean... Um... Clothes!  I've got lots of clothes in my closet, in case I need a quick... erm... a quick costume change!"
"Oh, shurrup, ya flat-chested dyke, and get yer arse on stage!"  Mel shoved her up the backstage steps.

The Girls walked out on stage to the screams of the assembled kids.
They were screaming: 'Please, not again!', and: 'No more... No more!, but the Girls were used to that kind of thing.
They started to sing, their criminally awful voices entering the ears of the kids, unbalancing their minds so that the Yerks' influence would strengthen.
The Animorphs looked on from their hiding place in the vaults of the venue – It's easy to hide in the vaults of such places, because security never ever thinks to look there.
"We have to do something!"  An edge of panic crept into Rachel's voice.
"Well, if you turn into a dog, we can..."  Jake's idea was cut off as Rachel read his mind and slapped his face.
"I mean we have to do something to stop them!"  Rachel screamed at him.  "Keep your filthy ideas to yourself!"
"But what can we do?"  demanded Marco.  "We're only kids!"
They eyed each other in slow motion.
 

Can a handful of young kids stop the re-indoctrination of hundreds of other kids, despite there being dozens of armed guards and alien monsters? Will they be caught, and themselves possessed?

It was Jake who eventually saved the day.
Being chased by an alien monster, he morphed into a dog and tried to hide in what looked like a small section of sewer pipe.
It turned out not to be sewer pipe, but part of the alien playback machine.
Cowering in terror, he pissed himself, shorting out the playback machine, and the "music" stopped!
Shocked by the sudden silence, the Spice Girls tried to keep the show going by singing for real –Without the dozens of filters needed to anthropomorphosise their voices!!!
The roof of the venue bucked and screamed under the violent vocal assault, and caved in on them, crushing Emma into a baby puddle, but – by an incredible stroke of triteness luck – opened the way for almost half of the kids to escape!

The escaping kids all ran home and explained what had happened to their parents – but all involved obviously decided to stay home and watch Wheel of Fortune, rather than contact the authorities or do anything about the abuse their children had been subjected to; because the streets were empty, when the Animorphs regrouped, ten minutes after the collapse of the venue.
"Wow, Jake!"  said Cassie.  "That was really brave of you, breaking the machine, like that!"  She took his arm.
"Mammmaaahhh!!!"  Screamed Jake, as he ran off into the distance.  "I don't want to die of AIDS!!!"
"Cheezit, what a freak!"  said Rachel.

So, the Animorphs have had their first victory!
Will their luck hold out, or will the Yerks win, and convert the world to Spicegirlism?
Only time, several hundred flashbacks, and repeated overuse of every other trite, hackneyed storytelling method will tell!