| #26: The Attack |
Detailed Plot: Jake is having nightmares again, flashing back to the time he was infested with a Yeerk. But that's not the worst part of his dream; it's what happened after. In his dreams, Jake repeatedly remembers that a terrifying red eye noticed him in that moment, and he felt that it was giving him an unknown promise: "Soon." In school, the Animorphs are watching a stage show of The Lion King when time stops for no apparent reason, so they suspect the Ellimist. Tobias and Ax appear, brought there through unknown power, and then the Ellimist does appear--though he's projecting himself in a body that looks like one of their classmates. He explains that he wants to tell them a story and have them tell him how it ends. Addressing Jake, the Ellimist says that an entity called Crayak has been watching him, and has been doing so since the Yeerk died in Jake's head. They have been targeted by Crayak because they play a role in the Ellimist's plans. The Ellimist explains that he himself was the product of evolution of his sentient species--one of the first in the galaxy--while Crayak came from outside the galaxy, fleeing some greater power that had expunged him. He and the Ellimist fought because Crayak wanted to kill life and create one master sentient species--which he would then rule--while the Ellimist wanted many species to live and be free. Because they fought explosively, they destroyed part of the fabric of space-time, and Crayak lost a lot of what he'd already won. So they decided to fight more civilly, as though it were a game of chess. But now there's a species that the Ellimist wants to save and Crayak wants to have killed, and neither is willing to budge. The race is called the Iskoort, and they're about to be annihilated by the Howlers. The Ellimist and Crayak have bet that their own "champions" will be the winners, and so the Animorphs are left with a choice: Will they be the Ellimist's dogs in the war and fight the Howlers to stop the Iskoort from being taken? The Ellimist lets them make the decision, and they discuss the pros and cons amongst themselves, ultimately deciding to help fight the Howlers--and since Crayak has seven Howler "champions," the six members of the Animorphs group have Erek the Chee joining their team for a little bit of revenge on behalf of the Pemalites, who were destroyed by the Howlers in ancient times. But as soon as the decision is made, the Ellimist transports them instantly to the Iskoort home world, giving them no time to prepare. No time will have passed if they win, but if they die they won't be returning. Suddenly they are spirited to a surreal landscape in which all seven of them are standing on precarious multicolored catwalks way up in the air, and they're being accosted by the Iskoort aliens, who want to "buy their memories" and do various other things. In their enthusiasm to sell or buy from the strangers, the Iskoort crowd the new arrivals and Rachel falls off the platform they're on, but Erek's quick android reflexes and strength save her. Rachel ends up helping to get rid of the salesman-like Iskoort by telling them they're just there to use the bathroom. For some reason they mostly lose interest after that. The Animorphs party is just getting their bearings, looking around at all the igloo-like Lego-bizarre houses and rooms, when another team of Iskoort show up and ask if they need a guide. They offer to provide them with one if Rachel will give them her hair. She reluctantly gives them six inches of it, and they get a guide, whose name is Guide. Guide explains that memories are often bought on the Iskoort world for display in "memory shows," and Jake tricks him into admitting they've seen the Howlers, whose memories are very valuable because they are clear and go back a long ways. (Erek says they probably have inherited memories.) Guide leads them to the marketplace and warns them about the possible presence of the Warmaker Guild, but immediately they're attacked. Without having had a chance to morph, only Ax and Erek are particularly well-suited to survival under attack, but Jake does fairly well rebuffing his attacker. Jake believes them to be Howlers, but it turns out they're just a different kind of Iskoort--the Warmaker Guild Guide warned them about, who don't like off-worlders. Rachel morphs to a grizzly bear and decides to provide backup (along with Ax) as they move into the marketplace, having rebuffed their attackers. They're attacked a few more times as well, but at this point the Warmakers are not a match for the Animorphs team's firepower. But then they actually do run into a Howler coming into the marketplace. Erek flips out a bit and has trouble keeping his hologram on, and Jake begins go give instructions on the upcoming battle. They figure if there's only one Howler, that's the best odds they'll get. Erek explains that the Howler's voice can paralyze them, so they'd better be careful. They attack, but the Howler easily fends off their attacks, able to regenerate any limbs they lop off and using his howl to cripple them while he attacks with his weapons. Erek tries to help out by giving instructions to the fighting team, telling them when they're close to the edge of the platform or when they've been injured to the point that they should demorph. Jake nearly doesn't make it through after being fatally wounded, but he demorphs in time and wakes up in a room being held by Cassie. He finds that they may have hurt the Howler slightly but he had walked away from the battle. Ax is stewing in shame because he ran away at one point, even though he came back, and the rest reveal that Jake gave them a scare by not waking up for a while. They don't know what they're going to do next, because with seven of them against one Howler they barely even survived and certainly didn't win. Erek suggests asking the Ellimist to reprogram him so he doesn't have the prohibition against violence, and that makes Marco think things are hopeless, because that's got to be a last resort. Instead, they make a deal with their Iskoort guide to purchase some Howler memories, in exchange for a promise to sell their own. (They're very far from Yeerk territory, so they don't worry too much that the Yeerks might encounter the memories.) The Howler memories are downloaded by Erek, who displays them in a holographic show for the others. Apparently there are records of seventeen successful Howler attacks on sentient races, and they've never been defeated. They kill everything in their path . . . and they were constructed, not evolved. They were created by Crayak. Cassie and Jake discuss how odd it is that any whole race could be evil. She just plain doesn't believe it and Jake doesn't have the heart to step on her idealistic belief. They try to sleep in the room Guide got for them, but it's very uneasy, and soon enough the Howlers find them and attack. Erek holds them off for a bit by simply blocking the door, giving the others time to morph. Ax, ashamed of his earlier behavior of running away, insists on standing near the door to fight them when they get through, but Jake orders him to morph to fly, as the others have already begun to do. They use their fly morphs to escape, and a combination of tricky hologram action from Erek helps them escape disguised as some Warmaker Guild Iskoort, taking Guide with them. Guide takes them to the Servant Guild quarters to hide, and says they'll be safe there while he goes off to feed. They want information about how Iskoort feed and it sounds way too much like Yeerk feeding for them to be comfortable with. They threaten Guide until he explains that his species is made of the Isk and the Yoort, and the Yoort were once parasites but they created the Isk and modified themselves so neither half can live without the other. Finally Jake and the others understand why Iskoort are so important to the Ellimist; they represent symbiosis rather than parasitism, which would be an alternate path for the Yeerks in the future if they were ever to meet. Crayak doesn't want this to happen; he wants the Iskoort destroyed. When the Howlers next attack them within the Servant Guild quarters, Erek's hologram distracts them by providing a decoy, and they escape some airborne poison by morphing to birds and escaping. A Howler hurts Cassie by burning off one of her wings, and Jake worries that she won't demorph in time to save herself but he has to leave her side while she's injured. The rest of them do their best to attack the eyes of the Howlers while in bird form, but soon Jake gets a bright idea. He leads a Howler to fall off one of the platforms. And since it is a VERY long way down, Jake has time to dive down after the Howler in his peregrine falcon morph, attach to it, morph to human, and acquire him. The Howler, despite being in a doomed fall, tries to attack Jake, but the morphing trance stops it from howling, and Jake removes all its weapons as well. He just barely has time to morph back to a bird again so he can fly away, and the Howler meets a grisly end on the planet's surface. When Jake flies back up to where he was, Tobias manages to find him and lead him back to the group. They're all okay, because Erek created an Iskoort hologram and the Howlers can't attack Iskoort--an immense relief for Jake. He finds Cassie and kisses her on the lips. They finally figure out a plan to beat the Howlers. Jake assigns Ax to be a decoy--helping him redeem himself--and Jake discusses memory recording with Guide. Jake morphs the Howler he acquired and is able to tap into the collective memory, and he makes an interesting revelation; Howlers view battle as a game, and they're carefree and happy. Furthermore, they're all children. They only live for three years and don't become adults; new ones are grown in a factory. They don't know anything about what they're doing wrong. As a Howler, Jake is able to trick and also hurt the other Howlers, but finally he is able to get the memory emitting device he arranged with Guide and projects his memories (along with the others', including Erek's), through the headset he puts on his fighting partner's head. The Howler is forced to accept memories that will flow into the collective consciousness, and these sorts of things being known will prevent them from being able to mindlessly, happily attack sentient races without understanding that they're people. Crayak, unwilling to let this happen, simply deletes the entire group of Howlers. And brings Jake to him. He's there with the others face to face with Crayak, who agrees with the Ellimist--who's also there--that the Iskoort will live because Jake and the others won. When Jake again morphs the Howler, he figures out that the memories he created aren't in the collective memory. Crayak won't let them be. He will only let Howlers have memories of successes, so if any ever get defeated, they are wiped out before their memories get into the pool. The Ellimist is able to boast that his "champions" won, so the Iskoort get to remain unconquered. But Crayak promises he will continue to haunt Jake in his dreams. Despite that, searching the Howler collective memory, he's startled to notice that a very short "clip" of his kiss with Cassie is in there somehow. He tells Crayak that love got through, and there's nothing he can do about it. The Ellimist returns them to their own place and time, and they receive the information that their intervention allowed the possible future of the Yeerks and the Iskoort meeting in three hundred years' time. He also tells them that the next race that the Howlers try to destroy will be subjected to kisses instead of weapons, which means Crayak will have lost his army. And Jake manages to escape the Crayak dreams, but he's haunted by the thought of having pushed that Howler to its death. Narrator: Jake New known controllers:
New morphs acquired:
Cassie: None Marco: None Rachel: None Ax: None Tobias: None Notable: This book opens with a prologue--not the usual fare for Animorphs--and makes reference to the events of a previous book, when Jake was infested with a Yeerk. He remembers that after the Yeerk died, he saw a vision of a creature with a red eye that could see him. Way back when that happened, readers had no context to understand who/what was looking at him, but in this book we finally get to find out what that was all about. The Iskoort race is introduced in this book. They communicate through thought-speak like the Andalites, but have a honking/wheezing ability for vocalizing, which comes from their stomachs. They are very pushy, like alien salespeople, wanting to sell or receive services without a care for whether the targeted party is interested. Not that it's impossible, of course, but it's odd that of all the people to lose balance and be knocked off a platform, it'd be Rachel, who's a gymnast and has experience balancing on various gymnastic equipment. The Howlers are introduced part-way through the book; though they've been mentioned before as the executioners of the Pemalite race, they've never been described until this book. The narration describes them as being on the large side of man-sized, formed out of a black lava-looking substance with red cracks, having blue eyes, and having a rotating mid-section and human-like hands with a set of wrist claws above them. They regenerate limbs and have a powerful howl that can paralyze victims. They also carry a lot of weapons, and--unbeknownst to most--have an extremely carefree, happy disposition, not entirely unlike the Pemalites. Making war is a game to them, and they're all children. Cassie is unusually cynical and pessimistic in this book, though she's still very caring and empathetic. Jake's narration comments on how unusual this is several times. This is also the book in which Jake and Cassie have their first kiss. Rachel's response is, "It's about time." A thought-speak tag failed to close during a conversation shortly after Jake morphed a Howler. The other races that the Howlers had destroyed up to that point besides the Pemalites were called Graffen's Children, Mashtimee, Pon, and Nostnavay. They will also be attacking the Sharf Den in the future. Best lines:
Tobias: "The Ellimist."
Marco: "Like Andalites are badder than we are? What are we, wimps? Me in gorilla morph, you as you, let's go. We'll see who kicks whose butt."
Jake: "I know this sounds crazy."
Guide: "Someone must buy what is created in the great factories and small craftworks." Jake: Marco's always saying you choose how to see the world. That you can look at what's funny and cool, or you can focus on all the things that aren't. So I tried to follow Marco's advice. I tried to turn my dreams to Cassie.
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