He lifts a folded wing and resettles it in a kind of alien bird shrug. It's getting darker, and the bird's instincts are to find somewhere to actually perch, but he can override them.

<As it happens anyone can,> he says, with a few layers of irony. Alloran's assumption for three years had been that anyone with the morphing power had to be an Andalite. <It takes being, you might say charged or seeded, with a particular device. It's a subcellular technology. We love that sort of thing. I have a linguistic analysis computer too, but it seems to have finally broken down.>