My name is Rachel. You want to know my last name? Too bad. I don't give out my last name. No offense. I'm not trying to be difficult or "too cool." I'm just being careful. Here's the situation. Earth, our little blue and green planet, the one with the fluffy white clouds and all, is under attack. It's not under attack like in some World War II documentary or something. Or like in Star Wars. It's more subtle than that. Not a lot of explosions and ray guns or whatever. In most wars, I guess what people are after is control of land or territory. Or at least they want to ram some idea down some other person's throat. In this war, our enemies don't care about land. They don't care about ideology. They don't want to take over our capital city and raise some flag or whatever. They want us. They want our physical bodies. They are called Yeerks. They are a race of parasitic slugs. Like tapeworms or something. They need to live in the bodies of other creatures. Otherwise they're just these gray slugs who slosh around helplessly in a Yeerk pool. But unlike a tapeworm or something, Yeerks don't live in your intestines. They don't infest your stomach. It's your brain they infest. They enter through your ear. They can squeeze and flatten themselves out to fit into very small spaces. They enter your ear and then your brain.