| #11: The Forgotten |
Detailed Plot: Jake is stuck in class doing something he hates--square dancing--when Cassie shows up and tells him and Rachel that Tobias wants to talk to them about "something big" after school. While still in class, Jake has a weird hallucination about being a monkey in a jungle, and then he snaps back to reality. He knows it wasn't just a daydream, so he's concerned, but Tobias's big trouble takes priority in their afternoon. The group flies out in bird morph to check out Tobias's find: a grocery store has been partially demolished and burned, and the Yeerks are trying to conceal the damage as quickly as possible as if they're trying to cover up something that shouldn't have happened. They decide to get inside the store in fly morphs, but not before Jake has had another episode of hallucination: he sees himself in front of a predatory cat of some kind. He doesn't mention the problem to the others. Jake has to watch a televised Pay-Per-View fight with his family because his dad planned it as a male-bonding activity with his sons, and both he and Tom want to get away but can't show it. Jake escapes by pretending he wants to take the tape of the fight to Marco's, and he has more flashes of being in a jungle during all this. He meets with his friends and they turn into flies, after which they have issues flying in the rain and have to be guided across the road by Tobias. Finally they enter the grocery store and spy on the Controllers. Turns out there is a Yeerk Bug fighter that crashed, and the Yeerks are trying to get the thing working before Visser Three gets there or they will be in trouble. The Animorphs try to figure out what would be the best way to steal the fighter so they can take it somewhere where it will be noticed, dealing a blow to the Yeerks' secrecy. Tobias creates a distraction while the rest of the group gets into the Bug fighter. They morph back to their natural shapes while Controllers are taking potshots at Tobias. He is nearly injured seriously, and Jake demands that he come into the fighters. They shut the door once Ax has strong enough limbs to operate the controls, and though the Controllers see that their ship has been hijacked, they're powerless to stop it. Ax figures out the controls well enough to fly the ship, and off they go with intent to park in Washington, D.C. They are picked up on radar by some military planes, but as they're escaping they end up rocketing into space. There they encounter Visser Three's Blade ship as it's coming into the neighborhood. They decide that given the choice of running away or firing at the ship, they would rather fight. Jake takes the shot, but the Visser's ship fires back. Light explodes through the ship but everyone is okay except for being half blind. They begin to plummet into the atmosphere of Earth, but they notice that the Blade ship is also falling. Ax manages to slow the descent just a little, but he feels it will not be enough. Cassie is confused because they are falling into the Western hemisphere but it appears to be daylight even though it was night when they left. After one more hallucination to a moment when Jake is square-dancing from the beginning of the book, they make contact. Violently. Jake is found after waking up in the jungle by Tobias. He has managed to locate all the other folks and brings Jake to them. They are in a jungle very much like Jake's visions, and they realize based on their surroundings that they appear to be in the Amazon rainforest. But it shouldn't be daytime if they're in the Western hemisphere. Ax determines that when the Blade ship and the Bug fighter fired weapons at the same time, it must have opened a small hole in space-time that he refers to as a Sario Rip. They are stuck in either the past or the future, and Visser Three and his Controllers are somewhere in the forest. Tobias sees the group of enemies coming their way, so Jake asks Ax to stay behind and disable the Bug fighter so the Yeerks can't use it, while the rest of them move forward in the forest to get away. He has a hard time putting Ax in danger like that, but figures Ax is also likely to be able to fight or flee if the Hork-Bajir find him. When Tobias reports that the Hork-Bajir have spotted Ax, Jake and Rachel decide to morph fighting animals and go save him while Cassie and Marco stay as backup. But though they manage to hold their own, they're injured, and Jake takes a bite from a snake. He has to morph out to save himself, while Rachel, in bear morph, ends up unconscious and starts getting eaten by ants before she's even cold. Jake delays the inevitable by leading a different colony of ants to the ants on Rachel, and they begin to fight each other instead of eat her. When she wakes up, she morphs out and then runs for water to get the ants off her. Jake has the same problem and they both go for the water. But it's infested with piranha, so they have to get out quickly. Jake is feeling terrible about his decisions almost getting various friends killed, and Ax shows up in the morph of a spider monkey. They decide they need to get "local" morphs so they won't look suspicious to any human-Controllers who cross their paths. Morphing spider monkeys, the group motors through the trees and happens to notice Hork-Bajir and human-Controllers, who are shooting any animal that seems suspicious because it might be an Andalite. They end up encountering Visser Three in snake morph. He tells the group that they shouldn't have been firing their Dracon beams because they could have hit him or the Bug fighter, which they need to get home. Visser Three has given the group an important piece of information: they need the Bug fighter to get back to their own time, and since Jake has had Ax disable its computer, he seems to have made their rescue impossible. The group gets interrupted by cautiously aggressive rainforest-dwelling humans, and though they don't speak English, the dialect they use is close enough to Spanish that Marco can understand some of it and they figure out these guys think they're monkey spirits because they saw them morph from monkeys. Unfortunately they also think Ax is a devil because he looks like Visser Three, who was with the group who was destroying their forest. One of the men draws a picture of a Hork-Bajir and says something that amounts to an oath to kill these monsters, and he seals the promise by shaking Jake's hand. Then it starts raining and they have to take a break. Cassie tries to comfort Jake because he feels so overwhelmed by his leader duties, and they nap in the rain. When Jake wakes up he's got a curious jaguar right in his face. He acquires the jaguar's DNA to keep it calm, and the plan for escaping it is for the rest of the group to acquire it to keep it in a trance (Ax doing so last because he can outrun it). Since they all have a jaguar morph now they decide to use it for safety and for camouflage, which helps them navigate the rainforest. When they see lights ahead, they know it's the Yeerks, and they have the Blade ship and the Bug fighter together in one place. Jake doesn't understand the meaning of this but feels he should. But then Visser Three turns out to have been hiding in the forest morphed as a vine-collective-like animal and it traps and eats everyone but Jake. The Amazon human warriors manage to attack some of the Hork-Bajir and the Visser himself, which buys Jake some time to morph back to human and into the monkey. He uses the monkey's agility to swing all around the vines of the Visser's body, and when one of the Amazon warriors throws Jake his spear, Jake stabs Visser Three's head with it. But then he gets grabbed himself and wakes up back in the original timeline just before going into the grocery store. No one but him remembers their Amazon adventure, and when he explains it to Ax, he says Jake must have died. The only reason he's the one who remembers it all is that his decision to abort the mission caused the rest of the action not to happen. Narrator: Jake New known controllers:
New morphs acquired (but these disappear at the end of the book):
Cassie: Monkey (spider), jaguar Marco: Monkey (spider), jaguar Rachel:Monkey (spider), jaguar Ax: Monkey (spider), jaguar Notable: It's clear when the first chapter opens with timestamps that something important is going to come up regarding the time of day; this is the first book that has done this so it gets your attention. After flying out to the mission at the beginning of the book, the kids demorph and discuss their next course of action. But somehow at this point Jake is wearing a watch, which he checks for reference. (Cartoon physics: people wear watches in cartoons only if someone's going to need to know what time it is at some point. Then the watches disappear.) As they make such a point all the time of only being able to morph their skin-tight morphing outfits, having on a watch might be impossible, though watches are pretty small and pretty tightly attached to a wrist when they're worn, so it's possible that morphing a watch wouldn't be hard. However, this was never clarified, and having the ability to take a watch would have come in handy on a few missions. And speaking of which, Cassie uses strips from a tee shirt as bandages shortly after a morph as well, which makes no sense since she shouldn't be wearing a shirt that could be torn into strips if she's standing around in her morphing outfit which is NOT a tee shirt. The book mentions having to depend on Marco for some translation because the Spanish words he knows are close to the words the native population they meet is using. But Andalites are supposed to have a translation chip if they're in the military, which is how Ax is able to speak/understand English (supposedly). After hearing enough of the language, Ax's chip should have helped him be a flawless translator. Not that it really mattered since they understood everything they needed to. For the first (but not the last) time, the Animorphs meet natives in an extreme location who immediately and naïvely believe them to be animal spirits in accordance with local tribal beliefs. The tendency for this to happen with stereotypical "natives" has not gone unnoticed, and is taken as offensive by some. It's at least odd that nobody would consider these folks a security risk just because they were Amazon Indians. Another creature from another world--something called a Lerdethak--is identified by Ax when Visser Three morphs into it. It's a creature from the Hork-Bajir home world. This is the first time any morphs the group acquires are "undone"; because of the Sario Rip, the monkey and jaguar morphs "didn't really happen," so they don't have the DNA they acquired during that experience. Best lines:
Jake: "Everyone okay?" Ax: "I can take you to the monkeys. I believe they are close relatives of yours."
|