| #17: The Underground |
Detailed Plot: The Animorphs talk Jake into letting them attend a star-studded event at Planet Hollywood while in bird morph. Jake is generally against morphing for personal reasons but he's pretty excited about the idea of getting to see Shaq. They attend in their various raptor morphs and are having a great time when Rachel suddenly spots a guy who's apparently trying to commit suicide by jumping out of a glass window. The group flies over to the man and tries to catch him, but all they can do is slow his descent just a little and direct him to some water instead of landing on concrete. Rachel has to save him after he gets stuck in the mud in his water landing, too, but then Arnold Schwarzenegger, who happens to be nearby from the celebrity event, drags the guy out and gives him mouth-to-mouth, which is the only story the papers pick up. The Animorphs read the headlines in the newspaper and find that the man's name is George Edelman. Rachel finds out her lawyer mom has been given Mr. Edelman's case; his family has deemed him incompetant and he is in a mental health facility. Turns out he's been raving about aliens in his head, which gets Rachel's attention. After briefing her friends, the group goes out to the facility where Edelman is being held, and they get inside through a series of morphs. Rachel ends up being the one to contact Edelman directly, and she asks him about the alien that's supposedly in his head. He explains all about the Yeerk living in his brain, but says the Yeerk is insane and sometimes takes over his body to say and do insane things. It isn't just dying from Kandrona starvation, either; a discovery had been made revealing how Yeerks can survive without Kandrona rays, and it happens to be a food: specifically, instant maple and ginger oatmeal. Supposedly now that it has modified the Yeerk's brainstem, it never has to leave Edelman's head, but it is also insane, so there looks to be no hope for him. The Animorphs argue about whether it's right to feed oatmeal to a bunch of Controllers so they can ultimately drive the Yeerks insane and win the war. But since the human hosts would probably all have to live without complete control of their lives with an insane Yeerk in their heads, they aren't sure it's moral to do that. They decide to sneak down to the Yeerk pool now that Tobias has found a new entrance (which involves going to a fast food restaurant and ordering a Happy Meal "with extra happy"), but when they morph flies and try to hitchhike on a Controller woman, they're detected by something called a Gleet Bio-Filter. It warns the Controller to shut her eyes to avoid retinal damage, which signals the morphed kids to get out of there promptly. Their fly selves are blinded by the light, but they escape, and they worry about how they're going to get into the Yeerk pools now that Gleet Bio-Filters--Andalite technology--are installed. They decide to tunnel down to the Yeerk pool as moles, and the digging takes many days with each of them taking a turn in the tunnel. There's a bit of a roadblock when they hit stone, but it turns out to be a cave, and they get through and fall into a bat habitat. They decide to morph into bats (getting Tobias a bat morph in the process), and find out where the bats go to get out of the cave since there must be an exit. But what they find is a way into the Yeerk pool, and upon entering they are targeted by hunter robots which shoot Rachel's wing off and injure others. She falls into the Yeerk pool. But the Yeerks don't know she's there because they're blind, and she takes advantage of this to slide under the infestation pier and morph back to human. Then she morphs again--to an ant, because as an ant she can basically walk on the water. She does so, latches onto a newly re-infested Controller, and escapes. But she doesn't want to leave the area until she knows whether her friends are all right, so she ends up sneaking into a storeroom, finding a Dracon beam, and disabling a Hork-Bajir and a human-Controller with it, stealing the woman's clothes for a disguise before sneaking out. Unfortunately, when she emerges she sees that the Yeerks have captured Ax, and she overhears someone saying two bats suspected of being Andalites were also captured. But while she's following the trail to see where they're being held, she encounters Yeerks interrogating a little girl Controller, who's got a container of oatmeal in her lunch sack. They drop the information that they're going to take it to the contraband room where there is over two hundred pounds of the oatmeal. Rachel sees an opportunity. Marco is trying to contact Rachel with thought-speak, but she can't answer because she's in human form. The people Rachel shot and knocked out are found so alarms go off, and this has clued the Yeerks in that there are more Andalite bandits unaccounted-for. In the confusion, Rachel manages to find Cassie who is also back to her human body. Visser Three arrives and tells everyone to freeze. He wants anyone leaving to be checked before they depart, and so Rachel pretends a nearby Taxxon is a suspected Andalite and shoots him to cause a distraction. She and Cassie run into a food pantry and find Marco in gorilla morph eating a banana. They decide to make a run for the shed where the oatmeal is hiding and try to get it into the Yeerk pool to make the Yeerks go crazy. Rachel morphs to elephant after giving Marco the Dracon beam. With Cassie (as a wolf) and Marco following her, Rachel busts the oatmeal shed open and finds barrels of the stuff. Visser Three is roaring about wanting his followers to get the Andalites, but Rachel tosses a barrel into the Yeerk pool and Marco points the Dracon beam at it, threatening to shoot and put the oatmeal into the pool water. But apparently Visser Three is willing to let five hundred Yeerks go mad if it means capturing the Andalite bandits, so Rachel runs over and throws the Visser into the pool so he'll care about what happens to it. Visser Three begins to morph into something else while they try to escape, with some Hork-Bajir troops after them. But Rachel was wounded in the attack, so she has to demorph. The Visser's monstrous morph comes after them, so Rachel uses the Dracon beam to shoot the ceiling down and instructs her friends to turn into moles to dig their way out. The digging takes long enough that they have to morph to their natural shapes once during the process, but they make it back to the bat cave. They fly out with all the other bats and make it home, and Rachel, exhausted, has to be confronted by her mother wondering where exactly she's been. But she's interrupted by a phone call saying that her client, Mr. Edelman, escaped from the institution. After a psychic talking grizzly bear told him to leave and not hurt himself because the bear didn't want to save him again. (Obviously it'd been Rachel, and she did it because she wanted Edelman to be free during the times when he wasn't taken over by the crazy Yeerk.) This book ends with Rachel receiving a box of oatmeal from Marco.
Narrator: Rachel New known controllers:
New morphs acquired:
Cassie: Mole Marco: Mole Rachel: Mole Ax: Mole Tobias: Mole, bat Notable: Oatmeal (a specific flavor, instant variety) is said to "modify a Yeerk's brainstem," causing them to stop needing Kandrona rays. This may be science fiction, but that seems impossible. Kandrona is a Yeerk's food source and being deprived of it is frequently referred to as being "starved." It makes no sense that modifying an organism's brainstem would cause them to no longer need the food its body has always thrived on. It would make sense if the Yeerk needed to continue to be exposed to the agents in the oatmeal, but there shouldn't be a substance that permanently alters their physiology to not need their equivalent of food ever again, since it doesn't explain where the Yeerk's nourishment comes from after that point. Rachel seems to be dealing with some pretty serious claustrophobia here which affects her even when she's morphed as a mole. There don't seem to be any other places in the story so far where Rachel has seemed terrified of closed-in spaces, so it's hard to tell why it's coming up now. It's revealed in this book that Yeerks have mouths and are blind in their natural state. There was no follow-up on the effects of the oatmeal being released into the Yeerk pool. Surely them having to clean the oatmeal out and refill the pool, and deal with a bunch of crazy but physically healthy Yeerks, affected the Yeerks somehow, but the Animorphs never saw signs of that. Best lines:
Cassie: "Who else has the willies?"
Jake: "I guess we go toward that. Unless anyone else has any ideas?"
Jake: "Okay. So here's the plan. We watch till someone orders the Happy Meal with . . . what was it?"
Rachel: "Gotta get out of here, man. This cold is slowing me down." Rachel: There must be something kind of liberating, just being able to say "I'm scared" like it's no big deal. I can't do that. I don't know why. I just can't. Jake: "Battles that involve oatmeal are just never going to end up being historic, you know? Gettysburg? No major oatmeal involvement. The Battle of Midway? Neither side used oatmeal. Desert Storm? No oatmeal."
|