Just Follow Your Nose (Jullian)

[Richard]

Richard had received a note from Jullian about testing his morphing prowess by playing a game, which was a test. He was told to meet at the morphing classroom to get an explanation on what he would really be doing for his class today. This was probably going to be one of those things that he was going to have to do well in in order to graduate. Those things were meant to give him the skills he needed in order to survive in the real world.

"So it is going to be a game, but a test at the same time. I should just stop thinking about it or else I might get a headache or something." Richard just needed to focus on whatever assignment he was going to be given as it would be all that really mattered in the end. The scenario that was set up for him would only be as hard as he made it seem.

Richard approached the morphing class room with a feeling of excitement and nervousness as he thought about what he would be doing to day. He opened the door and poked his head in to see who was in there. "Ollie Ollie Oxen Free." It was the only thing he could think of to say that was not a normal greeting. He figured that it could be like his new catch-phrase or something.

[Jullian]

((Since you're playing with me gonna modify this game a bit.))

When Richard entered the room there was no one there. Instead, a small hologram was hovering in the air next to the terminal that was set into one of the walls. It was a hologram of a small red sphere and it was blinking. By now, most of the recruits knew this was the terminal's way of letting you know you had a waiting message, at least, that was what Jullian had counted on since he'd left a message waiting for Richard.

The hologram glowed a slow, pulsing red as it blinked into and out of existence almost like a button waiting to be pushed.

[Richard]

Richard walked into the room to find that Jullian wasn't here. "I hope that this wasn't a pratical joke or something." He really didn't like being the someone's target for stuff like pranks or punch lines, and the fact that he had begun to look forward to class didn't help his mood any. He started to turn to leave when he noticed a hologram floating by the terminal. "So that is how it is going to be huh?"

He walked over to the terminal and pushed the button on the terminal to play whatever message had been left for him. "I hope this is a scavenger hunt. Those things are seriously annoying to do even if it involves morphing." Richard did not know if anyone was hidden in the room at the moment. Jullian had done that test on his first day where he morphed a bug and waited to see how long it took Richard to figure out what was going on.

[Jullian]

An image of Jullian popped into existence in front of the hologram projector. He looked confused and distracted for a moment and then his usual smile appeared and he looked straight forward so that his eyes would seem to meet those of anyone standing directly in front of the hologram.

"I got it to work. You have no idea how proud of myself I am right now. I've been messing with this thing for hours. Anyway, hello. If you're seeing this you are seeing the very first Jullian virtual lesson," the Jullian hologram said with excitement. "I hope to use these to reach animorphs all over but right now this message is directed at you Richard." Holo-Jullian waved a bit as he said it.

"As you may have noticed, I'm not here. And, no, I'm not hiding in some odd morph but I am hidden somewhere on this ship. This is a test of your ability to utilize the senses of your morph that may not be familiar to you. So your task today is to track me through the ship. Use your dog morph and try to pick up my scent. I left from this room about half an hour before you arrived so the trail should still be fresh. I warn you, I'll be morphing along the way just to make it harder. Lesson ends when you find me. Good luck."

Holo Jullian waved again before his hand went off screen. He turned away and for a moment the feed continued until Holo-Jullian turned back with a frustrated look on his face. His hand disappeared out of the pick up range again and after a few motions the hologram successfully ended.

[Richard]

Richard watched the hologram message that still creeped him out on some level. He never did understand why they used these things if they were so complicated for everyone. Jullian's message told Richard that he was going to have to sniff Jullian out using his dog morph. It seemed easy enough to Richard, so he focused on his dog morph and the fur began to appear.

A few minutes later and Richard was a happy dog on a mission from his instructor. Pine trees and suntan lotion. Richard needed to follow that smell around the ship in order to find Jullian, so he walked out the door and began his search. His nose was up in the air as he ran, so he didn't really pay attention to where he was going. Richard pretty much let the dog's natural instincts take over as the smell began to dwindle down.

The dog's brain signaled for him to wake up and pay attention to the fact that Jullian's sent was just suddenly gone and now multiple other ones were go in three different directions. <<Well this is just great. He morphed something and kept going. How am I supposed to figure out what he would morph?>> Richard picked out the top three scents and decided to eliminate each one. There was an oil-like one, something that smelt like wet fur, and a variant of bad aftershave. This was going to be more difficult then he thought.

[Jullian]

Jullian zipped through the hall in a hummingbird morph. The hummingbird was a cheat, at least as far as Jullian was concerned. The small bird didn't leave a scent trace anywhere because it could fly through the halls without ever needing to settled down anywhere. The only reason Jullian had used it was because this game was about more than skill, it was about thought.

He'd left his third scent puzzle back in the hangar bay. He'd run around as three different morphs all around the large room plus himself before going to the center of the room and morphing the hummingbird. But there were also only three ways into and out of the hangar bay. If Richard was able to find the trail into the hangar bay then he should be able to eliminate at least one door that Jullian had not taken. Then he'd have to figure out which of the other two Jullian had taken.

Jullian settled down on the ground and demorphed once he figured he was a decent distance from the door to the hangar bay. He morphed into his dingo and kept running. He checked a wall clock on his way past, an automatic habit of a morpher, and figured Richard was probably somewhere around the first scent maze he'd left. He still had a good lead.

[Richard]

Richard was busy following the aftershave smell as it led him to the kitchen, where the other two had both led him back to the morphing room, which he should have figured out when he picked up the first smell again. When he reached the kitchen, Richard demorphed and decided to see if there were any obvious signs to where Jullian had gone. Seeing nothing, he remorphed the dog and started to follow the smell of bird poop down the hallway.

Ten minutes later, Richard had found that the bird poop smell had led him to the toilet where the smell was unbearable, so he went back. This time he was following the smell of flowers toward the hangar where the mother of all conundrums started. There were four different scents in the room and three exits, so any door that had a single scent at was probably a decoy. It took him about twenty minutes to eliminate one door, so that at least cut down his options by a third. Richard did the one thing he ever did when trying to sort out a puzzle. He began to talk to himself.

<<Wait. Stop and think about what Jullian would do if this is a test.>> Richard moved to the center of the room and looked at both of the doors while sniffing the air. While running through the room, he had not noticed the fact that one smell had and odd number of origin/ending points then the other. He was sitting on the odd ball end, so that meant that Jullian had picked a morph that left no scent at all or a small one. There were two doors that he could choose from, which meant that he had a fifty percent chance of picking the right one.

He spun around in a circle and stopped facing one of the two exits. With a little luck, Richard would probably pick up the right scent. His nose smelled a scent that he had remembered from his first class with Jullian, so he started to follow it. He noticed a clock on the wall nearby and saw that he had been in morph for about forty-five minutes, which didn't give him much time to make it to wherever Jullian left his next gallery of scents.

[Jullian]

Jullian entered the library on his own human feet. He probably wouldn't have gotten in trouble with Minerva, the librarian, if he'd come in in morph. This was a morphing school and he was the morphing instructor so he had some pull in these situations. But that didn't seem to matter where Minerva was concerned.

He smiled at her as she glared at him over her glasses. He quickly walked to the back of the library and hoped Richard would forgive him for putting him in this situation. Richard would have to come in here in morph to figure out where Jullian had gone and then he'd run into Minerva.

Once he was out of Minerva's sight he morphed a few times, leaving scent trails all over the stacks and back alleys of the library, before morphing his squirrel monkey and hopping form stack to stack without touching the ground and leaving a scent trail. He exited the library through a vent and wondered if Richard would be able to follow this one.

[Richard]

Richard let the dog's mind take over for a bit as it followed the smell of the dingo for a ways. The scent disappeared and became the pine tree/suntan lotion smell again. Then it switched again to the point where the dog's mind became sort of confused, so Richard took back over and started following the new smell. His dog eyes led him around the corner and then into a room where he found a weird lady giving him a look that could stop a charging water buffalo. Richard decided that it was probably a good idea to make this quick. He followed Jullian's human scent to the back of the room where he noticed that a lot more scents started to cross over it.

Richard started to follow each scent and began to notice one key fact. None of the scents went towards the front of the room, so where had Jullian gone. He demorphed so that he could get a better look of the room. "Where could he have escaped this room from?" There weren't any real windows, so that left him going out the door. He walked up to the front and decided to ask the nice lady. "Do you know if Jullian is in here?" The lady slightly shook her head no while giving him a death glare.

This meant that there was another way out of the room that Richard was not seeing because Jullian wouldn't have left in a morph that didn't leave a trail again, because that trick was getting old so he had to have changed it up somehow. Richard decided to go bird as it was his only real option at this point. A few minutes passed, and a Magpie was fluttering around the library. His bird eyes noticed an open vent, so he flew into it.

A magpie's olfactory senses were not as keen as dogs', but they got the job done. The bird could smell something in the vent, which could only be what Jullian morphed since Richard figured that no one wanted to crawl around in the vents all day in a morph and possibly get stuck. <<This is getting interesting.>> He wondered if it was considered cheating to use a bird morph to track in this particular instance.

[Jullian]

Jullian walked around in the mess hall as himself. He greeted people as they greeted him and picked up some food from the line. He ate as he walked and he walked everywhere. He wanted to make sure his scent was all over this room along with a dozen other people's who were currently in the mess hall.

This was an interesting exercise, he reflected as he passed by a table. He had never run one of these before but he was already having fun. Of course, whether he did it again would depend on what Richard did or did not get out of it. But this wasn't such a bad way to spend a day. It put him in the mindset of an escaped slave fleeing north, except he couldn't think of any rivers to wade through to break his scent trail. This would have to do.

"Bye," he said as he exited the mess hall and continued on his way, morphing after a while to keep hiding.

[Richard]

The whole ventilation thing had landed him in a pretty tight situation as he was in a closet full of stored stuff. Richard was pretty sure that Jullian had passed this way as some of the boxes were sort of squashed by something smaller than a human, but that could have been a coincidence in itself. He landed on the lowest box and began to demorph because he had lost track of time because of being in an enclosed space for so long. A few minutes later, a perfectly normal looking guy exited the storage room.

Richard morphed his dog again and began to look for clues as to where Jullian had went from there. He smelt Jullian, the monkey, and a dingo in the immediate area. The dingo's trail seemed to be the most promising one, but he figured that it was a trap so he followed Jullian's scent. It would just be like Jullian to try and trick him by walking around as himself. The dog followed the smell that reminded Richard of his home, so it was lucky that he was a dog so that he wouldn't seem that emotional.

Jullian's trail led to the mess hall, which Richard entered without thinking and began following the trail once again. It didn't occur to him that he could have demorphed and asked someone if Jullian had been here until flying food hit him on the head. "Get out of here. We don't want dog hair in our food." Richard was going to apologize but they kept throwing food at him, so he just decided to ask his question. <<Which way did Jullian go?>> Someone had apparently heard him because he distinctly heard the words 'out' and 'door'.

Richard bolted for the door and figured that Jullian was trying to get him killed during this exercise. The dog mind didn't seem to mind the fact that it smelled like food. Richard continued down the hallway following Jullian's scent, which is probably what he should have done but his mind was becoming overwhelmed with the thought of following the trail. It switched to something else halfway down the hall, which Richard figured was Jullian's next morph. <<Even though this is not as fun as I hoped, I will not quit until I find that Pine Tree scented guy.>> He was talking in open thoughtspeak just in case Jullian was listening in on him.

[Jullian]

Jullian had reentered the vents. Not necessarily because they were that useful for hiding his trail, but because they were interesting. His margay fit inside most of the vents easily enough and the cat's curiosity combined with his own was enough to keep him from getting bored with the twisting passages. There was an entire world in here and he wondered how he could use it to his advantage in the future. Maybe have animorphs with small animals try to navigate this place. Hide things in here. It would be like a dungeon full of treasure.

He wondered how that would affect the health of the ship if at all. He'd have to talk to someone in Life Support. He knew at least one girl but he hadn't run into her lately. She was a little manic but she knew her stuff. She'd be able to tell him how animal hair and anything else would affect the ship if he sent recruits in here to train.

He eventually exited the vent system and demorphed. He was somewhere inside engineering but there was no one around. Which was a bit odd, normally there were always engineers fixing up some part of the ship or another. But maybe it was their day off or this part of the ship was just as fixed as it would get.

He sat down to rest. All of the morphing was getting to him and he wondered how it must be affecting Richard. Granted, he was morphing more than Richard should be since this was an exercise primarily for his dog but it was still tiring. They'd been at it for over three hours so Richard would have had to demorph and remorph at least once, not counting the times he would have had to follow through the vents. Jullian looked back up the way he'd come and wondered if he should call it quits for the day.

He decided to wait for Richard where he was.

[Richard]

Richard had followed Jullian's last trail through Seiya's class that probably hadn't been occupied at the time of Jullian passing through it, but it most certainly was when Richard had ran in there as a dog and ran across people's laps. Needless to say, he had been given a stern look from the instructor and dashed out of the room still following the trail. The next destination was a lot less tense than the previous one as it was Nineteen's combat classroom.

It was completely empty because most of the recruits were either in Seiya's class or had a free period. The scent switched to something else that led back out the door and toward a familiar area. Richard was running at medium speed between people that were coming out of doorways. He knocked someone over who had a lot of papers in his or her hand, but Richard didn't notice as he figured that he was coming to the end of the game.

The trail led back to the same storage room from earlier that Richard had to use his bird morph to get through. Fortunately, he could just climb up the boxes like stairs and follow the scent without any uncertainty. The dog's leg made quick work of climbing up the boxes. He was in the vent before he knew it, but now came the process of picking out the correct smell to follow as the vents had acquired a huge number of scents from throughout the ship, but one stuck out to Richard's dog nose.

He let the dog follow it as it would know how to correctly navigate the vents without getting hurt. The dog picked out the scent that Richard wanted and began making the trek through the vents until he came to another open one a long way away from the other one. Richard jumped down after checking to make sure that he wasn't going to hurt himself in some way or another. Richard demorphed and looked around the room to find Jullian in the room.

This meant that the game was over, or was about to change. Richard wasn't really sure which, but he did know that he was going to need a break because he had demorphed and remorphed several times at certain stages of the hunt because he found it easier to think that way. "So how did I do?"

[Jullian]

"Well you found me," Jullian said from his position against the wall where he'd watched Richard come out of the vents and demorph. He didn't look too tired which was a good sign but he probably needed a break as much as Jullian did.

Jullian pushed himself off from the wall and began walking towards a door that would lead them out of this section of the ship. He didn't really like engineering. It was full of multileveled, criss crossing catwalks and always reminded Jullian of a hive for some reason. That wouldn't stop him from making use of it if any of the recruits every got a monkey morph but he'd rather be in a more normal part of the ship.

"So how was it for you?" Jullian asked as they walked. "This was my first time running an exercise exactly like this so any and all feedback is appreciated."

[Richard]

Richard hadn't realized that this might have been new for the both of them, since Jullian was an instructor he figured that he had done this sort of test a lot. It was unusual for him to be the guinea pig for anything, so he didn't know how to respond to Jullian's question at first.

He started to follow Jullian towards the door while trying to think about the whole process of this exercise. "In my opinion, it was very challenging to try and pick out the right scent to follow. I guess that was the whole put of this, but I can honestly say that it was helpful in two ways to me. I feel that if I ever do need to trail someone that I can do it successfully, and that I will have no real trouble controlling my dog morph from now on."

Richard had added in that last part about controlling his morph because when he started out it was very difficult to not let the dog's instincts take over. A natural happy feeling was just a paradise in itself, but three hours of practice was enough to at least feel confident in his ability to gain control of the dog.