| #16: The Warning |
Detailed Plot: Jake is screwing around on the internet one day and then decides to do a search for "Yeerk" online. He is surprised to find that there is a website--just one--and he gets his friends together to check it out. There's a strange mix of accurate and misleading information on the page. After Ax encrypts Marco's computer, they go into a Yeerk-related chat room to see what other people know. Some people in the chat room pretend to be against the Yeerks but then keep giving terrible advice (like telling a kid who thinks his dad is infested to talk to his dad about it), and then others do things like claiming to have been infested before or pointing out that The Sharing is a Yeerk front organization. The Animorphs decide it's a good idea to bust into the records of the ISP to find out who these accounts belong to, to see if they can help. The headquarters of Web Access America aren't in their town, so they have to morph houseflies to stow away on board an airplane. The flight is short--only an hour and a half--so they should have plenty of time. Morphing the flies is a bit more of an adventure than they expect, though. It's Tobias's first time so he ends up getting stuck in a toilet while he's not quite himself yet (and someone sits down and traps him in there), but he escapes and they manage to find the right gate because Jake planted a baby-poop-filled diaper in the gate's trash can so they could track it as flies. They manage to get on the plane. Unfortunately, Marco draws attention by landing on airplane mealtime leftovers, and the flight attendants are alerted that there are a lot of flies on the plane. During their attempt to get out of first class and into a safer place, Jake gets swatted. The other Animorphs, as flies, have to scrape him off the ceiling and get him to the bathroom so he can demorph. He almost dies, but manages to make it back to human. He's very shaken up by it, though, and he and Cassie spend some time hugging once they're both human again. Then they all buy some outer clothing to go over their morphing suits, and go to Taco Bell and get kicked out by the manager because Ax acts crazy over the hot sauce. The Animorphs group manages to find the Web Access America headquarters and joins a tour to get inside, and soon enough they find the command center. They don't really know what kind of animal they could possibly be while hacking into the computers without getting noticed, so Jake, Cassie, Rachel, and Tobias cause a distraction that makes the employees abandon their posts (to gawk at the spectacle of a bear mopping a floor, for instance), which clears Marco and Ax (in human morph) to use one of the abandoned consoles. They get the information on the screennames they wanted, and after a tight escape, they are armed with information. Oddly enough, one of the screennames belonging to an informative, sane-sounding chatter actually belongs to the owner of Web Access America itself, Joe Bob Fenestre. (Marco also finds out that the girl he's been flirting with online is actually an old retired postal worker.) So after their successful mission, the group is supposed to morph flies and get on a plane again, but Jake is shaking in his boots at the thought of becoming a fly again. He tries to swallow his fear because he wants to put on a strong face as the leader, but Cassie picks up on his fears and tries to talk the others into using a different morph. Rachel calls them both out on that and says they can't do something impractical just because Jake had some trouble. Cassie drags Jake aside and tells him it's okay to be scared, and Jake counters that as the leader he's not allowed to set an example of giving in to fear. Jake makes it home in fly morph okay but he's exhausted. He has some food with his family and they have some togetherness time, the four of them (even though his older brother is really a Controller). Jake thinks a lot about the point of war and makes a comment to everyone about how he hopes the family can always be together, and Tom replies that the liqueur in the tiramisu must be making Jake mushy. Jake focuses on his belief that one day he will destroy the Yeerk that's controlling his brother for what it's done to his family. With the info they have, the group decides it would be a good idea to sneak into Joe Bob Fenestre's house and see if they can unearth any information about what he has to do with the anti-Yeerk chat and whether he's legitimately fighting the Yeerks. Cassie also suggests they help a kid from the chat room whose dad might be infested, but Jake decides investigating Fenestre is more important and they can help the kid after school the next day. They morph birds and decide they'll enter through an open window (despite all the security around designed to keep humans out). Once inside they plan to have half of them morph to cockroach and half to fly, leaving Tobias outside as a lookout. But before they can go through with this plan, Rachel--first in, as usual--experiences some kind of shock as she goes through the window and the others can see her lying inert on the floor inside the house. As the others are rushing to escape for the time being, guards who have been told to shoot even at birds begin to open fire, and Ax is hit. Cassie and Tobias try to save him but they can't hold him and he ends up dropped into an area guarded by dogs. A human guard orders the dog to just hold onto Ax (instead of chomping him), and even though Jake and then Marco try to liberate him, they fail. Two team members are captured and Jake feels it's his fault. Tobias and Jake fly to The Gardens, and Jake gets a rhino morph. He takes some risks doing what he does (while Tobias creates a distraction by stealing cotton candy from a kid), but then they fly back and Cassie and Marco on guard duty say nothing's really happened. There's poison around the perimeter which would have stopped them from using bug morphs, and the injury Rachel sustained was a bug zapper in the window. Jake believes the WAA CEO can't be a Controller because he would have had Hork-Bajir and not dogs or guards, so he thinks they can handle whatever's thrown at them. Jake morphs to rhino and rampages right through all the house's defenses, and though guards try to hurt him with guns and whatnot most of what they throw at him doesn't faze him. Tobias is leading some guards on while they take potshots at him, and Marco and Cassie follow Jake in bird morph. They look for Ax and Rachel, and at one point Jake manages to reach Ax with thought-speak and orders him to demorph. He claims that humans are watching him but obeys Jake. They still can't find Rachel, and Jake goes back to human to deal with some stairs and then takes on his tiger morph. Marco becomes a gorilla and Cassie a wolf, and they ready themselves for fighting. Jake thought-speaks to some guards and talks them out of shooting him, which was risky but ends up working out. They go through what they had determined to be the most guarded door and inside is Fenestre himself. Holding a Dracon beam. Clearly, he's got to be a Controller, and the room is very odd with a Yeerk pool and what appears to be a green sky above. Ax and Rachel are in cages in the room with him, both with no life signs; Ax is part-way through a morph but frozen that way, while Rachel is still an eagle. Fenestre behaves as if desperate and cornered, and ends up revealing some information to Jake: Yes, he's a Controller, but he has a good relationship with is host as it was his ideas and technological prowess that made the human rich. They were like two of a kind, host and parasite, because both had been looked down upon by their betters. This Yeerk turns out to have been a twin--and in Yeerk society one is always the "lesser"--and his "prime" was Visser Three, of course. He's got Ax and Rachel in bio-stasis, and though he feels like he owes no allegiance to the Yeerks because his own society kept him down, he still feels that the Andalites would kill him. So the truth comes out: Fenestre has these defenses against even birds because he believes any one of them could be Visser Three in morph, and his brother wants information from him. This information is how Yeerks can survive without a Kandrona. Turns out he's been using his chat room to figure out who might be a Controller, and then . . . he has his human host eat a substance made from a Yeerk. He's a cannibal, and that gives him the nutrition he needs without having to go to a Yeerk pool. But Cassie figures out that of course the human hosts of the eaten Yeerks become casualities. She tries to attack Fenestre but Jake has to stop her. They agree to let him live and stay protected if he stays in the house, but that they don't promise to let him live if they catch him outside. Cassie is unsatisfied by this because Jake's agreement is letting a murderer go free. But Jake's negotiations get Fenestre to release Rachel and Ax from bio-stasis, and Marco in gorilla morph carries Rachel out while Ax manages to leave on his own after he morphs back to Andalite. As they leave, Rachel is asking for details on the fight (since she was out of it), and Jake admits that he doesn't really know who the bad guy is now. Jake ponders all his problems while sitting alone in his backyard at night, and his mom comes out and tells him that experience is a great teacher, and that he'll survive his teen years to look back and thank his lucky stars that he's not a teenager still. When Jake notices that Cassie isn't in school the next day, he realizes she probably skipped to go help the little kid they'd considered helping before their big mission with Fenestre. He gets to an elementary school in time to find Cassie in wolf morph talking to a little boy who is presumably the kid they tracked down from the chat room. Cassie feels terrible about telling the kid not to trust his father and not to talk to him about Yeerks. Jake reminds her that sometimes we have to do bad things for the greater good. And then the narration of the book says that Fenestre's mansion burned down, which erases his protection from Animorph attack should they ever find him; Jake won't say who set the fire. His relationship with Cassie is still somewhat strained at the end, but the whole group is working its way back to who they normally are. Narrator: Jake New known controllers:
New morphs acquired:
Cassie: None Marco: None Rachel: None Ax: None Tobias: Fly Notable: From this book's description of Jake signing onto the Internet (especially the "you've got mail!" notification sound), it sounds like he has America Online with a screenname of Bball24. They're calling it "Web Access America" instead. The modem "dialing" helps date the book. Especially since it even includes his modem speed: 38,400 bps, which he suggests is not all that fast but at least it's better than his 14,400 bps one from before. Marco's modem, the "fastest one around," is 56,000 bps. Jake mentions searching the Internet for the term "Yeerk." One wonders how exactly they decided it'd be spelled that way. . . . The Skrit Na (first mentioned in a previous book) are mentioned amongst the Animorphs for the first time, confirming that the Na form looks like our popular portayal of the Greys. Jake points out (not for the first time) that his ability to understand other people's motivations is not the best, and that he relies on Cassie's instincts to guide him on that sort of thing. In this book, he notes that he doesn't know whether Rachel and Marco can't stand each other or whether they razz each other because they respect each other. While the group is trying to figure out who they can visit or help from the chat room, they point out who lives in town and who lives far away. One of the chatters, named Chazz, is pointed out as both living nearby and living out of town. There's a proofreading error in the sentence "The crowds may not able to see them all that well." Best lines: Jake (in an e-mail): Cassie, you know I like you, too. But I have vowed not to get involved with any girl until my best friend, Marco, gets at least one girl to like him. And since we know that's never going to happen, I guess we'll never get together. Signed, Jake.
Ax: "Not millions, at least? Mill-yuns. Millie-yuns. I like that word. It makes nice sounds in my human mouth." Rachel: "A 'mix of truth and lies' is like the definition of the Internet. Equal parts reality and delusion."
Marco: "You really think someday we can all go back to being regular kids? You think after being the leader of the Animorphs you can go back to being Joe Average Student?"
Tobias: "Okay, this is cool. Once you get past the fact that your own body makes you want to throw up." Rachel: "Be sure and leave your brain to science when you die, Marco. After all, they're the ones with the microscopes it'd take to find it."
Cassie: "You're scared. And you have good reason to be scared. So what's the big deal?" Jake: You never really get past the fear. Fear eats a little hole in you, like rust in the fender of a car. You fill the hole up with putty and sand it smooth and paint it over so no one else can see it. But it's never really as good as new.
Rachel: "Was the guy a Controller or not? Was he a good guy or a bad guy?"
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