| #15: The Escape |
Detailed Plot: Marco and his friends are at the mall on a mission: Cassie feels it's wrong to have parrots from the rainforest sitting on perches squawking out trained phrases to advertise a restaurant, so the Animorphs morph into the parrots and start saying embarrassing and damaging things about the restaurant instead. Then they run into their ally Erek, who is part of a secret android race called the Chee (first encountered in a previous book). Erek tells Jake and Marco that Visser One is back on Earth. This is of grave importance because Visser One inhabits the body of Marco's mother. Erek also says that a new type of Controller called a Leeran is operating in the area. They are an aquatic species that can read minds and project thoughts. Ax says they aren't allowed on the Andalite home world because they want to keep their military secrets safe. Despite Marco's fear about his mother and their collective fear of having their identity uncovered by psychic Leerans, they determine that they need to find out what's going on on this island with the Yeerks. They determine that dolphin morphs will be needed--along with Ax's shark morph--but Tobias doesn't have the dolphin morph because he couldn't morph at the time they were all getting theirs. He seems to be skittish about morphing, though, and it turns out he's afraid of water. He decides he needs to get over it and morph a dolphin, though, so he heads to The Gardens to get the DNA. After some difficulty getting his hawk body in contact with the dolphin he wants to acquire, Tobias gets his talon stuck and almost gets drowned before Marco rescues him. The group flies out to the island where Erek said something weird was going on, and they morph dolphins (except for Ax, who's a shark) and swim down to check out what's under the water. They end up encountering an underwater building that's cloaked by a hologram, and they go inside. They're investigating (and find for sure that it's a Yeerk facility since they see Hork-Bajir inside), and then suddenly they encounter hammerhead sharks. The group of dolphins try to make their escape but these sharks act very weird for sharks and appear to be planning to trap them. Despite Jake's idea to wound one of the sharks so they'll all attack the bleeding one, they instead ignore the blood and still chase the Animorphs. Obviously not natural sharks! The group manages to escape--and Marco embarrasses himself by being the first to hightail it out of there, drawing on memories of almost being bitten in half by a shark in a previous book--but they all get away by doing a lot of jumping out of the water and making it to safety. However, they're basically saved because a siren calls the sharks off. They decide to investigate why that happened. Underneath the water, they see a glass submarine go by, and the transparent walls allow them to see a mix of species: Gedds, Hork-Bajir, Taxxons, humans, and even a weird alien creature that's yellow with green eyes and tentacles. This creature looks at them and seems to think they're significant. It speaks to a human near it that's clearly in charge. The human is Visser One, and Marco has to restrain himself from saying "Hi Mom!" Back at home, Marco thinks about whether he's a coward for running so readily from the battle, and he thinks about his homework, his mom, and his dad. He's having a really hard time because he just wants to be the funny one, not pondering serious and somber issues all the time. He decides to take his mind off it by watching a televised sports event with his dad. And the next day, while meeting with his friends, they decide they need to investigate what's going on with the hammerhead sharks. Ax says their brains aren't the type that could be controlled by Yeerks, so they must be being controlled another way. Marco is gung-ho about the idea of investigating, still trying to prove that he's not a coward (and wondering if there's a way to rescue his mom), but at the idea of trying to acquire hammerhead sharks to blend in, he's pretty skittish. The group goes to a facility called Ocean World at night, hoping to morph to dolphin, attack a hammerhead shark, and acquire its DNA while it's unconscious. But before they can launch their plan, guards catch them. Ax is spotted by a guard who has no idea what he's seeing, but then the companion guard sidles up and announces, "Oh, that's an Andalite." Obviously we have a Controller guard. Ax puts on a brave face and trades words with the Controller, and then Marco distracts him until Tobias comes in to attack the guard's face. The Animorphs group runs away and they cut their way into an off-limits area, and soon they end up under a plastic tunnel where fish are swimming above. With two Controller guards chasing them now, they are trapped until Ax slices the plastic above and causes a flood. Marco nearly drowns but ends up poking into an air conditioning duct to breathe, and just by luck a hammerhead shark chasing him is nearby. He avoids getting bitten by putting it in an acquiring trance, and that enables his friends to all acquire it after he's finished (once they're all back together again). The accident is reported in the newspaper, along with the information that the guards are missing. Marco begins having dreams about being a shark, and wonders what it will be like to be so without emotion and so efficiently cruel. He decides to try morphing the shark while in an empty swimming pool, but before he's done a couple of jerks come by the pool and start harassing him to get out and they call him names and diss his mom. Marco feels like it would be so easy to just rip them apart, even though he's reversing his morph so they won't notice anything weird. Jake shows up and tells Marco to back off and not hurt the bullies, which makes them wonder what's going on because they're not used to being treated like they don't have the power. Marco isn't happy about the situation, but he goes on the mission the next day anyway. Before morphing the sharks, Jake gives Marco a pep talk and suggests he tell the others that his mother is Visser One. Marco counters that he does not want the others' pity. He tries to make the usual jokes even though his heart isn't in it, because it wouldn't be like him not to razz the others and make jokes about how they're all going to die. They all morph to hammerhead shark, and when Marco cuts himself on a shell and drips blood into the water, he senses it once he's become a shark. He and the others all circle around looking for the wounded animal that bled until they get control of the morph, and then they head off to find the underwater Yeerk facility. They get past the guard sharks all right because they blend right in, but then Marco sees his mother again. Before they can figure out how to get inside the facility, they notice some hammerhead sharks rushing out at them, and though it turns out they're not the target, they follow the sharks to see what's going on. They end up getting taken into a strange place where they get grabbed by robot claws and injected with some kind of substance. Cassie is first to get injected, and she thinks it's an immunization of some kind, but soon they figure out--because of their reaction--that the injection was something designed to change their shark brains into something inhabitable for Yeerks. They just got the first treatment. When the group morphs back to their natural forms and begins to go into fly morph, they realize they can't get that small because they have Yeerk control devices in their heads from their visit to the shark modifying place. Birds are large enough, though, so they morph various birds and get inside the facility. The group splits up, and Marco is with Tobias and Ax. Rachel and Jake and Cassie plan to cause a distraction for the Yeerks while Marco's group has to get to the controls of the facility. They assume human forms and end up being invited into Visser One's office, and suddenly he's face to face with his mom. Visser One assumes he's a Controller, and just talks to Marco like everything is ordinary, wanting to know where some technicians she ordered are. Noticing that Marco is a bit frozen, she remarks that Marco needs to learn to control his host body better and acknowledges that he's the biological son of her host body. She says her host's mind is "weeping and wailing" over it and that she isn't letting it affect her at all, and seems to gloat over it. Marco just goes along with it and pretends to be a Controller, but wishes he could do something silly and emotional and tell his mother that he's not a slave--he's fighting. The visser goes off to investigate the commotion that Jake, Rachel, and Cassie are causing, and Marco is left confused and upset. Through that interaction, though, he finds out that the sharks are going to become host bodies for use on Leeran people. Marco has seen Visser Three approaching in a scary aquatic snake form, guarded by dive-suited Hork-Bajir. Jake, Rachel, and Cassie are making a lot of noise in the other partition destroying things, and Marco thinks they probably need help. First, Ax checks out the computer of the facility and tries to figure out a way to get rid of the implants they have in their heads. Apparently they can destroy the implants if they destroy the facility, so Ax programs a five-minute delay into the computer before it shuts down the force fields keeping the water out. Then they morph into battle morphs to go help the others, hoping to be able to morph into something that can breathe underwater before the place gets flooded. Visser One tries to get wounded Hork-Bajir to fight Marco in gorilla morph, and though they cut him a few times they aren't able to beat him. Visser One talks to Marco and addresses him as an Andalite, but in comes a Leeran-Controller who says "that is no Andalite." The Leeran tries to tell Visser One about Marco being a human, but Visser One misunderstands and thinks the Leeran doesn't know the difference between a human and a gorilla. Marco manages to punch the Leeran out before it can say any more. Visser Three arrives in his sea serpent form, and he and Visser One exchange angry words about which one of them is failing or going to fail at taking over the humans' and the Leerans' worlds. Then the alarm goes off and announces impending containment failure, so Visser One has to run off to her computer to try to stop it, being mocked by Visser Three all the way. Visser Three swoops in to try to eat Ax, so Rachel grabs the snake body around its midsection and says she'll squeeze him to death if he eats Ax. They're in a stalemate until Marco punches Visser Three in the face and knocks him back to the water. Visser One is still trying to override the force field collapse, and Rachel and Ax storm in to try to put an end to her. Marco stops them by privately telling them through thought-speak that she is his mother. She tries to shoot them with a Dracon beam, but in the fight that ensues they crack the window, and water pours in. Marco has to focus on becoming a shark or he'll die. He thinks he sees a Leeran coming in to save his mother to take her back to the submarine, but he thinks the distance would have been impossible. He has no idea if she's survived. Rachel thinks she hears the submarine motoring away, so maybe she made it and maybe not. All Marco knows is that he's going to stay in the fight so his mother can be free again. Narrator: Marco New known controllers:
New morphs acquired:
Cassie: Parrot, shark (hammerhead) Marco: Parrot, shark (hammerhead) Rachel: Parrot, shark (hammerhead) Ax: Seagull, shark (hammerhead) Tobias: Dolphin, shark (hammerhead) Notable: Despite the fact that Ax does not appear to have powers of thought-speak when he is human morph, the kids morphing parrots still have thought-speak abilities while in a body that can theoretically talk. This is more evidence that Ax should be able to thought-speak when in human morph--and really, Tobias should too. At one point when Marco is trying to think of a good unobtrusive morph for sneaking around, he suggests that turning into wolves would be a bad idea since people would notice those. Nobody objected, but the people who needed to hide were just himself, Tobias, and Ax. Tobias and Ax did not have wolf morphs because Tobias couldn't morph when Marco and the others did their wolf missions, and Ax wasn't part of the team yet. When the Animorphs break into an aquarium to get hammerhead shark morphs, they attract Controller attention when guards notice them. Ax is in his natural form when this happens, and so of course the Controllers notice him. But despite the fact that kids are with him, they only seem interested in the Andalite. Even to the point where one of them says that the kids are "irrelevant." That seems excruciatingly short-sighted of them, since this can't possibly be a coincidence and they'd have to know the human children could be Andalites in morph (or some other explanation still implicating the kids). Visser Three sure is giving host bodies to some oblivious Yeerks. These Controllers also have guns. All of the security guards at the aquarium have guns. Which is odd since not even all actual police have guns. Security guards in most places don't have weapons that can exert deadly force. Visser One refers to "shark-Controllers ready for use on Leeran" at one point, and Ax says "the Yeerks are invading Leeran," suggesting that "Leeran" is the name of the planet, but later it's made clear that the planet's name is Leera and the inhabitants are Leerans. This appears to be a mistake. When Marco and the others begin to get too small and the chips embedded in their brains threaten their lives, it becomes clear that something inside a brain does not change size with the size of the animal morphing around it. This suggests that Visser Three, as a creature physically inside the brain of a morphable creature, would be restricted by the size and shape of the skull cavity. It seems he shouldn't be able to morph into something with a head too small to house a Yeerk, since Yeerks themselves don't change with the animal unless they themselves are morphing (and they are not). It's unclear how large an animal has to be before a Yeerk can safely be inside it. Marco did not kill the Leeran that knew he was human; he only knocked it unconscious with a punch. It's never said how much the Leeran learned about him (and the other so-called Andalite bandits); it's unclear whether it knew his identity or whether it only knew he was human. But since this Yeerk was not eliminated, it's possible there is a security risk here and no one seems to realize it; it was never assured that everyone in the facility was destroyed at the end. Best lines: Marco: "We like to keep busy. It's either rescue entire races or play Nintendo." Marco: If you step back far enough from the details, everything gets funny. You say war is tragic. I say, isn't it crazy the way people will fight over nothing?
Marco: "We're still just us. Nothing that happens can really change what you are. Right?"
Rachel: "Olivia Newton-John? Have you been listening to dinosaur-rock radio again?" Marco: I'm me, Marco, not some touchy-feely, share-your-feelings-with-the-group kind of person. I don't share feelings, I make people laugh.
Ax: "Now, this is an interesting human concept. This hologram makes it almost appear that we are under the water."
Rachel: "Eenie, meenie, minie, moe?" Marco: "Hey, it's me. Please don't remove my head. I use it sometimes."
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