| Megamorphs #1: The Andalite's Gift |
Detailed Plot: Despite misgivings, Rachel decides to go away to a gymnastics camp for a couple of days. During the meeting where they decide that, Cassie admits to Jake that she's been having bad dreams about making a choice which will decide who lives and who dies. When Rachel goes to catch her bus to the gymnastics camp, she decides to go see Tobias before she heads out, and morphs into a bald eagle to find him. But then, just after she spots Ax in the forest, she ends up getting mobbed by baby birds and attacked, crashing to the forest floor and going unconscious. Tobias sees it happen, but is unware that it is Rachel. Marco is upset that he was not invited to the pool party of a classmate named Darlene. Cassie and Jake have been invited, but he was not. His theory is that Darlene must have a crush on him, but Tobias reminds him that the last time Darlene invited him to her pool, he put a candy bar in the water and tricked her into thinking it was a turd. Marco is still convinced that he needs to hear what Darlene says about him at the party, so he bribes Ax (by offering him flea powder for the fleas he's picked up in the woods) into morphing into mice with him to attend the party. Marco and Ax invade the party as mice, and they don't hear Darlene saying anything interesting about Marco until he decides to jump-start that conversation. He thought-speaks his own name at Darlene so she'll think someone said it, and as a result they end up discussing how Marco isn't as funny or cute as he thinks he is. He gets annoyed and chases Darlene as a mouse just to piss her off. This causes pandemonium and threats by a guy named Hans about stomping on them, but Jake and Cassie are at the party and quickly recognize Ax and Marco's un-mouse-like behavior. They're busted, but Ax and Marco head for the basement to demorph while their chase causes people to fall over each other in a pile. But then something unexplained happens. The sky blacks out with a dust storm/tornado, the roof of the house is ripped away, and a horrible huge creature made of dust stares down at the Animorphs, seeing Marco and Ax (in his human form). But as suddenly as it arrived, it disappears into dust, seeming confused. Tobias sees this happen too, flying above the party, and he notices that after it dissipates, it is heading toward the woods. Meanwhile, Rachel wakes up in the woods after her crash and finds she is partially still an eagle and partially a human. But she has lost her memory and doesn't know who she is or why she's got unexplained bird parts. She manages to will herself to human form again, but she's only finishing when she notices the dust cloud. It's paying attention to her. Not quite finished becoming human, she has to run from the cloud which has become a beast, and she and her pursuer cause a traffic accident with an ice cream truck. But just as she's human again, the beast dissipates. Marco, Ax, Jake, and Cassie meet and watch the news reports about the "freak tornado." There they find out there was a second one, which was the one that attacked Rachel in the woods. They happen to see her on the video and are confused as to why she's not at the camp. Rachel, for her part, still doesn't remember who she is, and she meets a crazy lady in the forest who lives in a shack and gives her some shoes. When the lady starts shrieking about a Yeerk that died and knocks her into a space beneath her shack, Rachel has a dull flash of memory about what a Yeerk pool is, but doesn't know anything except that this woman is crazy. The Animorphs decide to morph into wolves in order to track Rachel down. They bring a shirt of hers so they can sniff it and "play bloodhound," but while they're in the process, Tobias warns that the dust beast is coming again! And while Rachel is trapped in the cellar below the shack, she smells smoke and hears the crazy lady taunting her about how the Yeerk won't get her again. She realizes the shack has been set aflame and somehow she instinctively harnesses the power of her bear morph to break out of the cellar. The dust beast chases the wolves through the forest, but lets up when it notices Rachel and comes after her. In bear morph, she stupidly tries to fight it and it eats her paws. Ax notices her and thought-speaks to her, but she is unable to answer whether she is Rachel because she doesn't remember her name. Ax tries to defend her and distracts the monster by morphing into a bird, which works for a moment and makes the group realize that the dust beast is attracted to morphing energy itself. The dust beast descends upon Ax and lifts him into its dust body. Marco, Jake, and Tobias don't know what's happened to Ax and decide to look for him. His tracks stop suddenly, and Rachel is also nowhere to be found except for tracks that go to a stream. Jake sends Cassie to the mall to see if she can find Rachel at the stores she'd usually go to since she's her best friend, but Cassie ends up running into Chapman there. Since Chapman is an important Controller, she decides he might know something about the problem they're having and decides to morph into a fly to spy on him. When Ax is freed from the dust beast, he finds himself on Visser Three's Blade ship. He's frightened, but excited because he has a chance to kill the one who killed his brother. This is something he feels he has to do because of Andalite honor, but he's unable to find a good way to strike at the Visser. He's surrounded by Hork-Bajir with their weapons trained on him, after all. Still, he manages to get information out of Visser Three while being taunted, and finds that the dust beast is called a Veleek. It's from Saturn, and it's been reprogrammed by the Yeerks to be attracted to morphing energy. It can't eat that energy, though, so it does the bidding of the Yeerks in order to be given its feedings of a different kind of energy. Basically, it's like a dog that has been trained to play fetch. Ax is put in a holding cell and taunted, then left alone. Cassie's fly-morph spying teaches her similar things to what Ax learned, and now she knows the name of the monster and what it's attracted to. She also learns that Kandrona rays are in short supply and the Visser is looking for reasons to punish Yeerks with starvation since there isn't enough to go around. She reports what she's learned to the other Animorphs, and they decide to try to seek out the Veleek and find a way to destroy it. Rachel, tired and barefoot, wanders as a human through the forest, looking for a place to sleep after night has fallen. She finds a vacant house and climbs in, getting a drink and eating some cookies that were lying around. She catches some sleep but keeps having terrible nightmares, and when she wakes up police are outside demanding that whoever's inside needs to come out. She doesn't want to be caught, so she morphs into an elephant. The Veleek is sighted by the other Animorphs. They see it flying across the sky and jump in Cassie's family's truck to follow it. Rachel ends up getting chased by it as an elephant, and it rips through various property trying to get to her. But when she stops fighting and it grabs a hold of her, it can't seem to lift her. That's when the others arrive in Cassie's truck. Jake, as a tiger, distracts the Veleek and has it chasing him until another morphing Animorph distracts it from Jake. Ax ends up getting to see this chase when the Visser gets a visual lock on the monster. Rachel is getting bits and pieces of memories, but still has no clear idea of who or what she is, and when Cassie encounters her, she has to figure out if she can trust Cassie. She decides she is a friend, but disturbs Cassie because her memory isn't working right. When the monster's destruction causes Cassie, Rachel, and Marco to be unable to escape, Cassie realizes that whoever morphs next will attract the Veleek and be taken. She has to make a choice about who will live and who will die, just like in the dreams she's reported to Jake. Ax watches the scene while up in the Visser's ship, horrified, and wonders which of his friends the Veleek has captured. (It's obviously not Rachel because she hasn't demorphed to something smaller, but he knows it must be Marco or Cassie.) The Visser shouts orders and has Ax's cage become opaque again, after which he realizes he can acquire the DNA of one of the fleas that's been plaguing him and morph into it. He hopes that Visser Three will not suspect that he can become something so tiny, since animals as small as a flea aren't known on his world or probably the Yeerks' world. He changes, and when the Visser brightens his cage in anticipation of gloating when he puts another "Andalite bandit" into captivity, he sees that Ax is nowhere in sight. The Yeerks panic and open the cage to look for him, but Ax takes that moment to jump onto a Controller (he has no idea which), but Visser Three is giving panicked orders to close the cage because he knows what Ax could be up to. Marco is revealed to be the one taken by the Veleek. He is deposited, in gorilla form, onto the bridge of the ship, and he is ordered by Visser Three to demorph. He refuses to do so. Ax, who has jumped from a slain Hork-Bajir onto Visser Three, thought-speaks privately to Marco and gives him his plan: first, he is going to distract the Veleek with some morphing energy (while sitting on Visser Three, putting him in the monster's line of fire), and then Marco will use the confusion to follow Ax's instructions to open a hatch for their escape. Their plan works rather well, and for some reason the Visser starts calling for water as the Veleek attacks him. Ax, as a flea, figures out why: the Veleek is actually billions of tiny insect-like creatures, and the water immobilizes them. Ax jumps onto Marco (who is fighting Hork-Bajir), and they dive out of the hatch, but . . . as a result, end up falling toward Earth from about two miles up in the sky. Rachel ends up basically getting her memory back by having a truck bash her head into the concrete, and she remembers a lot more about herself, the Animorphs, and their situation. Cassie is wailing about not saving Marco, blaming herself, while Rachel insists on focusing on the present. They decide to morph into owls, and once they've done that they end up being stalked by Hork-Bajir and try to fight them. It's rather hopeless until Jake appears in tiger morph and takes out the bad guys. And Marco and Ax save themselves from falling by first morphing to their natural forms, then into birds. They very nearly don't make it, but manage to save themselves. Jake goes home, and Cassie takes Rachel to her own home. They worry about Marco and Ax, and Jake feels beaten but sort of relieved about being beaten. That is, until Marco pops up in his room, revealing that he is not dead--and furthermore, he is ready for a counterattack. Making sure not to morph, the Animorphs gather in the barn and discuss the plan. Tobias is pissed off that he missed the action when he was sleeping, and Rachel is still gathering her memory. Cassie is beating herself up for being a coward, so she insists on volunteering herself to be the bait in their plan, and she silences the protests from her friends by reminding them that she is the best and fastest morpher so she should do this job. Tobias uses his scouting skills to find a whale for Cassie to use. First, the group members morph dolphins to get out to sea, which attracts the Veleek. They find the whale Tobias spotted. Cassie morphs back to human while her dolphin friends support her and push her along, and she acquires the whale's DNA while the Veleek hovers above them, waiting for a chance to strike but unable to come too close to the water. Then Cassie turns into a cockroach, rides Tobias's back up into the sky, and jumps off while her friends distract the Veleek with partial morphs. Cassie morphs human as she falls, which attracts the Veleek. It catches her and wraps its ropes around her, trying to capture her, but she begins to morph into the whale and ends up being too heavy for it to lift. She drags it under the surface of the water and drowns it, then celebrates by singing a whale song of hope to her friends. Narrators: Jake, Rachel, Marco, Tobias, Cassie, Ax New known controllers:
New morphs acquired:
Cassie: Whale Marco: Field mouse Rachel: None Ax: Field mouse, flea Notable: During Jake's narration, he says that Cassie has a theory that Tobias and Rachel like each other. He apparently didn't personally know that and doesn't necessarily believe it, but he believes that if it is true it is sort of sad. The group watches some accident footage after taping it on a VCR. This helps date the books, along with many pop culture references. In a previous book, the narration tells us that the Animorphs' successful destruction of the portable Kandrona was more of a blow than they knew at the time. In this book, we find out that the crazy woman living in a shack in the forest used to be a Controller, and she mutters at one point that the Yeerk in her head died. We can only assume it was one of the casualties of this victory. The fact that Marco is a bad driver comes up in this book as part of the running gag. Why do they keep letting him drive? Ax mentions during a morph that his "hearts" became something else while he turns into a flea, so at this point we know that Andalites have at least two hearts. Ax uses a lot of language that humans would use. Not just a human language, but mainly descriptions or comparisons that suggest he isn't an alien or knows human practices well enough to make analogies using them. This wouldn't be so difficult to believe in general if his narration didn't regularly use phrases like "artificial hooves" for shoes, indicating that he is not supposed to be particularly well informed about humans' ways. Toward the end of this book, Jake thinks Ax and Marco are captured and/or dead. He believes that the Veleek will stop them from ever morphing safely again, and that therefore he and the Animorphs are finished. Weirdly, the feeling of being beaten is a relief to him at this point. It's interesting to see this side of Jake. Sometimes you can tell that these books are written by an adult feeding outdated terms to her teenage characters. An example in this book would be Marco using the phrase "going steady." It's established in this book that Visser Three can get a visual lock on his Veleek while it is in business, so it seems a little risky for the Animorphs to be in close proximity to it while morphing. Since Cassie turns from cockroach to human to whale while the Veleek is targeting her, if Visser Three happened to remotely see the events then he would know who she was. It's strange that no one worried about this, and it's strange that no consequences came of it. Best lines: Marco: I'm the smart, cute one. No, seriously. Jake is the bossy one, Cassie's the nice one, Rachel is the stupidly brave one, and Tobias is a bird. Marco: It was so cool! If you overlooked the fact that it was maybe slightly stupid. Jake: "Do you hate trash cans? Is that your problem? Do you just HATE TRASH CANS?"
Ax: "That was exciting."
Jake: "How did you get here? You're alive?"
Jake: "Cassie said the Veleek carried you away." Tobias: "Come stand over here, Marco. Stand under my branch." Tobias: "There's only one way to deal with fear: Be afraid. Be afraid, and then go ahead and do what you have to do, anyway." Cassie: "Hey, Visser Three! I washed your dog for you!"
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