| #20: The Discovery |
Detailed Plot: Marco's just hitting on some girl at school when he notices another student in the hallway holding a familiar object: It's the blue morphing cube that Elfangor used to give them all their morphing abilities. He has no idea what to think, but tries to talk the guy--David--into selling it to him. David refuses and walks off with it, and Marco and the others decide they need to get that blue box away from the kid. Marco, Rachel, and Tobias get elected to go on the mission, and they try to fly in as birds to steal the cube while David is out swimming. But Marco makes a mistake and falls behind a dresser, gets attacked by a cat, and has to be rescued by Rachel. Unfortunately the noise of it all attracts David and he barges in with a B.B. gun, and they're forced to flee without the morphing cube. The next day in school, David comes to Marco and tells him someone tried to steal the cube with "trained birds," which suggested he's got something valuable. He posted an ad online to see if anyone wanted to buy it and received a message back offering to buy it. David wants Marco's help--since he's new in town and Marco is the only person he's met so far--and hopes Marco will be up for being "backup" for when the interested party shows up to purchase the cube. Marco fears that it's going to be the Yeerks, particularly Visser Three, of course. Ax and Marco go to David's house during the last two hours of school so they can stop the e-mail from going out. Marco is hoping Ax can make it look like the e-mail went out even though they're going to prevent it. But they set off the burglar alarm in the process of breaking in, and though they hurry to finish their business before it attracts any attention, David's father happens to come home and shut it off. In response to the alarm, the security company calls and David's father tells them not to come because he is a law enforcement officer and can handle it. Upstairs, Ax and Marco were unable to stop the e-mail from going out and have to hide to avoid David's father. Marco encounters David's snake, Spawn, under the bed, and Ax morphs into a spider in the closet. Marco acquires Spawn's DNA, and since the morphing technology uses DNA it isn't affected by the surgery Spawn had to remove his poison sacs, so Marco will be poisonous in that form. After David's father barges upstairs and thinks the noises he heard were only the snake and the spider, the doorbell rings and it's the rent-a-cops checking on the burglar alarm. In the meantime, Marco morphs into the snake, and is unable to control his morph and eats Ax. He's accidentally poisoned him in the process so Ax has to morph out to avoid the poison. David's father returns only to find Ax getting bigger, so Marco uses thought-speak to distract him and pretends to be an alien (but he's telling him useless information). David arrives home and witnesses the tail end of this. And that's when Visser Three and his entourage arrive, following the address in David's e-mail. In the fight, David's dad loses a finger to an Andalite blade, and the room gets wrecked as Hork-Bajir join the fight and the rest of the Animorphs show up to help. The room loses two walls as well. And Visser Three makes it clear he's not planning on paying for the Escafil Device (a.k.a. the morphing cube); he's there to take it by force. Marco attempts to help in the fight by poisoning some of the fighters. Visser Three begins to morph into a monster called a Dule Fansa, which has the ability to launch natural projectiles from its arms. The Yeerks outnumber the good guys, and Visser Three calmly demands the morphing cube, but since the Animorphs don't know where it is they can't exactly give it up. Marco tries thought-speaking to David to ask him where it is, but David just barges out and announces that it's in his backpack and that they can have it. Rachel, in grizzly bear form, jumps in to get David (and his backpack), and they charge out. The others are able to keep the Yeerks busy for long enough to let Rachel get away, with Cassie's help. David's father is taken prisoner, presumably taken away to become a Controller, and Visser Three, in his monster form, lifts up David's bed to try to find Marco. There he sees Spawn instead, and thinks it's an Andalite in morph, so he captures it. Marco lets it happen, then watches Visser Three morph into his human form and leave the premises. David is unconscious after the escape, and they have to decide what to do with him. Tobias saw David's mom get taken by a Hork-Bajir when she came home, so they know David has no parents and that Visser Three knows who he is. They discuss whether they should turn him into an Animorph with the blue box, letting him join their team and fight against those who took his parents. Making more Animorphs could be a great long-term strategy, they figure, because they will then be able to hit harder and be less exquisitely careful. But Rachel and Marco don't trust David because they don't know him and suspect that perhaps something's not right about the kid; after all, he has a pet snake of a type that's illegal to own, names his pets Spawn and Megadeth, and keeps a gun in his desk. But Tobias and Cassie are all for it, and Ax says Jake should decide. They have a big mission coming up where many world leaders are meeting nearby, and they know one of them is a Controller (from inside info from Erek), and they could use some help. Jake wants Ax to vote, though, and he votes no on the grounds that it will make their group less cohesive and cause possible indecision; he thinks their next new member should be someone they understand, not a stranger. But Rachel surprises everyone by voting to do it, since they have to start somewhere. Jake goes ahead with the idea and explains everything to David once he wakes up. David is mainly in denial until Ax demorphs and shows him his true form. He has to think about the whole thing, and so Marco takes him to his house for a "sleepover." Marco catches David trying to sneak to make a phone call, and so he figures he'll help him out and takes him to a pay phone, where he says he can call his dad and see what will happen. Of course his dad will claim everything's fine and sound like himself while he traces the call, and shortly after everything Marco says would happen happens, Yeerks show up and David gets to overhear them talking about Visser Three and confirming all his fears. The Animorphs have been monitoring the house and they come after the Controllers who are searching for David, and after they've been chased off, Jake takes David to his own house. The next day they meet with David to give him his morphing powers and give him his first bird morph. They want him to be a merlin, a smaller and faster bird, but David wants the golden eagle because it's big and he wants to "kick butt," and he challenges Jake's leadership. Marco is still irritated by his attitude but tries to be understanding because David's dealing with losing his parents. David wants to be regarded as an equal even though he knows very little and hasn't been in any battles, and he reveals that he's used to being the new kid because he moves all the time. Now he's the new kid in the Animorphs, though, because they go ahead with the Escafil Device, then let him acquire the golden eagle. David has a little trouble with his eagle morph, going after Tobias to attack him as his first action. But he gets control of it with Cassie's help and they discuss getting him a morphing suit. Marco feels strangely emotional about watching David morph because it's like an initiation to something very important, and he likens it to acquiring American citizenship. They fly as a group out to the hotel where they know the world leaders are soon going to be meeting, wanting to scope the place out a bit, and David has some fun with his first flight. But then something weird happens: David attacks a crow and kills it just because he can, and then lies and says his eagle brain took over for a minute. Marco's very concerned (and so is Jake, though Cassie seems to buy it). Then they spot the President's helicopter coming, and notice some Yeerk shielding technology disguising the Blade ship between the President's copter a second helicopter. They see the Blade ship open its hatch as if it wants to catch the President's helicopter and intercept it. The Yeerks use a hologram to make a copy of the real copter while they steal the real one and probably stun everyone on board, and while the hatch is still open, the Animorphs race to get inside, and everyone but Tobias and Rachel make it inside. They hide under the helicopter and demorph. Jake decides they should all morph into cockroaches to hide. David is freaked out by the morph and screams while it's happening, though it's not very loud because his lungs are more like bug lungs at the time. He tries to go back to human but Cassie talks him into going back to the roach if he doesn't want to die, and she taunts him a bit by asking him if he's not really as tough as Marco. Marco goes along with this and plays up the competition between himself and David, but now he's worried David will hate him and he'll have to deal with that. They discover while in roach morph that Visser Three's plan is to acquire one of the people they kidnapped--possibly the President--and erase his memory (along with his crew's). All they know about the man is that he has a slash on the bottom of his shoe, because in roach morph they can't recognize him. The roach-Animorphs end up having to try to escape when they get gassed, but then as they're figuring out what to do, they get dumped by the helicopter hatch and flip out into the outside air. And, as this is a trilogy, that's the cliffhanger ending of this volume. Narrator: Marco New known controllers:
New morphs acquired:
Cassie: None Marco: Snake (cobra named Spawn) Rachel: None Ax: None Tobias: None David: Golden eagle, cockroach, lion Notable: K.A. Applegate, despite being a female writer, does a pretty good job writing males sometimes. (Not that that should be surprising; it's just notable.) Marco has been pointed out to be sort of unintentionally sexist and sort of entitled sometimes, and his attempts to "compliment" women by saying something offensive and then being whiny about them not taking his compliments right was handled realistically. We learn that the morphing cube that gives people morphing powers is called the Escafil Device. Cassie's risky behavior in the previous book had repercussions: Marco doesn't trust her much at all and is still dealing with that. It's nice to see that the risks she took and the way she endangered everyone had a lasting effect in a realistic fashion. It's unclear why Tobias didn't steal the morphing cube when he had the chance. It seems a lot more likely that swooping in, grabbing it, and escaping would work much better than delaying--both because of possible interception and because multiple birds flying in the window is more likely to get noticed than just one. It also doesn't make sense that Tobias isn't big enough to carry the cube because when Rachel's larger bird morph is brought in, it's stated that she's too big to fit through the window. It's unclear why David thinks he's playing it smart by having a time-delay on his e-mail. Sending out his address to a person who wants to come over and see his mysterious blue object only a little before he gets home from school "so the guy can't just rip him off while he's at school" makes no sense. If people wanted to rip him off, they could wait until the next day to come over if they wanted to, so who does he think he's fooling, and why couldn't he just send the mail once he was home? Marco clicks on "the AOL icon" on a computer at one point, despite the fact that their AOL substitute in a previous book was called "Web Access America." There seems to be a contradiction here in how e-mail works. Marco repeatedly refers to yanking out the phone cord as a way to stop David's e-mail from going out, so they must be on dial-up. But from context, it seems whatever ISP they use couldn't have been signed on for the e-mail to go out; if David has AOL, it's unlikely he has some alternate way to get online during the time this was written. (The phone was also used for a phone call during the time Marco was trying to access the AOL software, but it's possible the family had two phone lines.) How did the e-mail go out if nobody was signed on? I also don't think that mail could be set on a timer through AOL, but that could be incorrect; unsent mail was usually stored in a local (on the computer only) file, not a web-based one. Marco notes at one point that he's had two, four, six, and eight legs but never no legs before becoming a snake. Technically, while morphing a trout, a dolphin, and a shark, he had no legs then either. One of Visser Three's morphs is a monster called a Dule Fansa. It has cone-like protrusions at the ends of its arms that can become projectile weapons, and it is big and purple. Marco notes that American citizenship is very important to him because his mother was born in another country. The narration seems rather deliberate about not telling the reader what battle morph David was given, though it is revealed that he got it at the zoo. The next book reveals that it was in fact a lion. This is the first cliffhanger-ending book since Animorphs started. Best lines: Marco: The Andalites are very, very advanced. I hear they even have a Web browser that actually works. Not to mention that whole faster-than-light space-travel thing.
Marco: "Look for a pool. It was sort of kidney-shaped."
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