Eva’s right about Marco: he’s a sweet kid, even to the point of delicacy, and he has no understanding of the vileness of the world. He’s never tasted death, never watched one parent disappear while the other decayed. The world has not yet made him hard, has not honed the sharp edges of his mind into razors and armored spikes.
This time around, when they’re all standing around arguing in Cassie’s barn, Marco becomes first the one to agree with Tobias. “Think about it, man,” Marco says, grinning at Jake. “Turning into animals? Saving the planet? It’s like something out of a comic book.”
“Our parents would kill us if they knew,” Jake says slowly.
“That’s why they’re never gonna know,” Marco says, laughing. “How about it, huh? We rescue Tom, we kick butts, and depending on how that goes we’ll talk more later.”
After the mission goes more wrong than they ever could have imagined, after they learn what hell looks like and lose a fight against the being who rules that hell, Marco misses nearly a week of school. His parents are worried, of course, but neither of them can get a straight answer out of him. Marco keeps his trap shut, because he knows this much: if Tom could be a controller, then anyone could be.
Still, Marco loves his friends, and he can’t let them face danger alone. He helps them infiltrate Chapman’s house, and the construction site afterward. He goes with them to take down the yeerks’ supply ship, grumbling the whole time about how they’re all gonna die. He rescues Ax, and does his best to stifle the nightmares that follow their encounter with the sharks. Each time he gets home, he’s met at the door of his house by Eva, who is growing steadily more concerned and doesn’t know what to think of his increasingly-flimsy lies.
He says to Jake, “This is going to be my last mission,” and this time he means it. They barely make it out of that mission alive, and even then only because of the grace of Visser One (whose human host is a young engineer named Allison Kim) and her ongoing conflict with Visser Three.
Marco quits; Jake doesn’t try to stop him. Marco agrees to stop morphing entirely, and so he walks home—and straight into an intervention.
Eva and Peter don’t know whether Marco has joined a gang, started taking drugs, fallen in with the wrong crowd, or what. All they know is that the withdrawn silences, the nightmares, and the free-falling GPA are all recent developments. They have questions, and they’re not letting him get away without answers. They tell him that they’re here for him, but also that they are going to leave town to go spend some time in Eva’s sister’s cabin in the woods for the next five days, and he doesn’t have a choice in the matter.
“Actually,” Marco says, “five days in the middle of nowhere sounds like the best idea I’ve heard all year.”
Even this kinder, gentler version of Marco is still Marco: he watches both his parents carefully for the next seventy-two hours, and can hardly believe the relief he feels when they go that entire time without leaving their tiny corner of nowheresville long enough to access a yeerk pool.
When those seventy-two hours are up, Marco sends a mental apology to Jake (who, although Marco doesn’t know it, is starving out a yeerk of his own at that very time) and then starts answering his parents’ questions. He tells them where he’s been going lately. Why he and Jake have missed so much school in the past two months. What the nightmares are about.
Eva and Peter think he’s crazy at first, because they’re God-fearing suburban Americans who have never once considered the possibility of aliens outside of sci-fi. They start to listen a lot more closely, however, once he morphs a wolf in front of their eyes and then changes back.
When the entire family gets home and Marco discovers that his best friend spent three days as a controller in his absence, he immediately rejoins the team. Peter disapproves sharply of Marco continuing to fight. Eva asks Peter, tears in her eyes, what choice they have in the matter. It’s not like the human authorities are doing anything to combat the yeerks. It’s not like they can fight back themselves. And so they get in the habit of sending Marco out the door (or a window) any time Jake or Cassie calls, always begging him to let them know he’s safe the instant he can.
Funny enough, though, they do find ways to fight back.
Eva listens to their description of the Veleek in careful detail, then she loads Jake and Cassie and Marco into the back seat of her sedan and instructs them to take turns morphing. For nearly six hours she barrels up and down Highway 1 at speeds which leave Marco shrieking in terror at the turns, playing keep-away with the tornado monster until at last Visser Three calls it home in exasperation.
Peter simply hands over his laptop to Ax and asks for help in “fixing” his code for the long-distance communications array. Ax does one better and helps him design a program which gets them a permanent connection between the andalite home world and Marco’s own living room. He stops by to call his parents twice a week, and once a month gives carefully-edited reports on the resistance to the andalite high command.
At first, Eva nudges Ax into staying for dinner after his twice-weekly calls home, on the grounds that she’s never in her life seen someone eat her cooking with that much enthusiasm. However, it’s not long before she convinces him to bring Tobias by as often as he can. It does them a lot of good, even though neither one of them will admit it outright, to have a safe place to get inside when they need it.
Eva doesn’t love it, but she starts doing a lot of the kids’ homework as well. She always does her best to quiz them on Algebra concepts or history dates when there’s time, but she also understands that sometimes the war has to take priority.
Peter installs an air mattress on Marco’s floor on a semi-permanent basis, and gets in the habit of lying to Jean. Because Jake’s just a kid, at the end of the day, and there are a lot of times at the end of the day when he’s too wrecked or exhausted from yet another mission gone bad to face the thought of lying to his family.
Eva dislikes David right from the moment Marco first brings him home, but she keeps that opinion to herself. She sits patiently through the entitled little brat asking her where she’s from (implying, of course, that “San Diego” cannot possibly be the full truth) but also tells him that if he even thinks of borrowing their phone without permission she will make him regret it for the rest of his life. With effort she ignores his repeated attempts to undermine her authority (she’s not his real mom, as he feels the need to remind her constantly) but when she catches him stealing money from Peter’s wallet, she snaps and grounds him on the spot.
David immediately morphs into a lion, unsheathing hooked claws as a growl builds inside his throat. It takes a force of will Eva didn’t even know she had, but she stares him down without flinching. Cold sweat is running down her back, but there’s not even a trace of a tremor in her words when she orders him to demorph now, young man, in her best Mom Voice.
Miraculously, he listens. He sulks about it all afternoon, whining to Peter and to Marco (neither of whom is remotely sympathetic), but the fact is that he can’t bring himself to kill a human. Not yet, anyway.
When David disappears two days later, Eva asks Marco only once what happened. He tells her in two or three halting sentences, and afterwards she hugs him until he finally stops shaking. She explains what happened to Peter, and neither one of them ever brings it up again.
Marco’s house becomes the natural convergence point for all their meetings. It’s only three doors down from Jake’s house, a five-block walk from Rachel’s, and close enough to Cassie’s usual bus route that she has little trouble getting there. They don’t really converge there for the location, though. They come for Peter’s willingness to cobble together a fake Bug fighter distress signal on the fly, for Eva’s no-nonsense questions about whether they’re sure it’s a good idea to attack Joe Bob Fenestre’s house before they know what they’re getting into. They come for the cinnamon cookies that Ax eats by the trayful and the links to forum discussions about the latest yeerk activity.
It might be a cliche, but the truth is this: at Marco’s house they are safe. And in that small bubble of safety, they have freedom. The freedom to talk openly about new morphs without fear of being overheard. The freedom to come and go through the sunroom skylight that Eva leaves open at all times. The freedom to be vulnerable and scared and not sure where they’re going with this war. The freedom to be kids, and to ask an adult for help.
Eva talks to Rachel for nearly three hours about her own parents’ divorce, and what it was like to realize she’d probably never see her dad again. Peter keeps a stock of paperback novels in the living room, never minding when Tobias tends to return them with talon marks in their spines. Eva teaches Ax how to cook cinnamon cookies and churros, chicken fajitas and western omelettes. Peter becomes ever more convincing when assuring Walter and Michelle on the phone that Cassie is simply a delight to have around as she and Marco help each other with homework.
Marco kills Visser One, and Allison Kim along with her, one sunny afternoon in May. Visser Three witnesses the whole thing, not lifting a finger to intervene. The kids have gotten in the habit of telling Peter and especially Eva absolutely everything, but this is the one thing Marco can never bring himself to tell.
The war ends eventually. Maybe it’s not better, or worse, than it would have been if Visser One had chosen a different host. They take longer to figure out how to defeat Visser Three without Eva’s insight to the way yeerk leadership works, but they get there in the end. Tom dies. Rachel dies. James and Kelly and several thousand humans and hork-bajir and taxxons die. Seventeen thousand yeerks meet a terrible icy death in the vacuum of space; Eva finds out about it later and can’t bring herself to disapprove.
One week after Rachel’s funeral, Eva is watching Marco’s latest NBC segment when she hears a knock on the door. Muting the TV, she goes to answer it and finds Jake on her doorstep once again. This time he’s got a backpack over one shoulder and a worn duffle bag with the name of a basketball team that rejected him tucked under the opposite arm.
“Hi,” he says softly, voice hoarse as if from tears. “Things with my parents are kind of a mess right now, and I was just wondering…”
Eva pulls the door open all the way. “Of course, honey. Stay as long as you’d like.”
Ax is safe from controllers for the moment, which is why Marco lumbers over to where Visser Three’s host is lying on the ground. <Come on,> he snaps, dragging the half-dead andalite upright. <Either morph and help us fight, or wait around like a useless lump for the yeerks to start using you again. Dying heroically doesn’t solve anything.>
As he speaks, Rachel swipes a grizzly paw into the river. Almost casually, she flattens the small grey-green body onto the ground until it pops with a squelch.
The andalite host starts to protest Marco’s attempts to yank him away, but by then Rachel and Ax have both come over to drag him to safety as well, and he gives in. He morphs, some kind of bird with way too many wings and a razor-sharp beak, and follows them.
Unbeknownst to the newly freed War-Prince Alloran-Semitur-Corrass, an intense debate rages throughout the entire forty-minute flight back to Ax’s scoop. Marco doesn’t think they should trust him with anything until they have more information. Rachel cannot wait to get him on board, given how much fighting experience he must have. Cassie thinks that they should wait and see what Alloran wants, whereas Tobias insists that if Ax worked out this well then Alloran will too. Jake and Ax, as always, stay out of the debate.
Until the moment of decision comes, that is. And then Jake, as they’re landing on the ground, says <We can’t keep it from him forever. Might as well see how he reacts right now,> and the issue is decided. As one, they begin to demorph.
As it turns out, how he reacts is with about two and a half minutes of incredulous silence, staring at all six of them at once. Even the human Animorphs can tell that if he had a mouth, it would be hanging open.
And then he bursts out laughing.
Cassie flinches, because it’s still Visser Three’s laugh, but after a second she finds herself relaxing. The andalite has his face buried in one hand, shoulders shaking with that silent laughter, in a way that is distinctly unvisserish. “Yeah,” she says, spreading her arms out apologetically. “We’re human. Most of us, anyway.”
<Human children,> he says slowly. <Who destroyed the ground-based Kandrona. Who annihilated a veleek.> He continues to stare at all of them—and then both stalk eyes focus on Ax. <This is Elfangor’s doing, isn’t it?> he asks.
Ax shifts in place, one hoof kicking nervously against the ground. <He made a choice of desperation in his last moments of life.>
<Of course he gave away our most precious technology to a group of humans.> The andalite prince seems almost fond, underneath the exasperation. <Of course he did.>
<You knew Prince Elfangor?> Tobias asks.
<Yes, and I know he wouldn’t have left you without a prince if he’d had a choice in the matter.> The andalite straightens, shaking out his tail. <But no matter. I can take on that responsibility now. My name is War-Prince Alloran-Semitur-Corrass, and I am here to help you. Dismissed, arisths. Return to this place at the seventh hour of the Earthly time system tomorrow. In the meantime, I have many questions for Aristh Aximili.>
They all go, mostly because it doesn’t seem worth fighting him about, although Marco grumbles about it the whole way home. Jake broods on the issue for the rest of the afternoon, wondering if it would be for the best for him simply to hand over leadership. He barely even notices when Tom’s gone for almost the entire day—some emergency at the Sharing, allegedly—and he doesn’t arrive at an easy answer.
Things don’t come to a head until a couple weeks later, when Alloran flatly refuses to listen to Cassie’s concerns about the potential for logging in the woods where the andalites and Tobias live. <It’s a pity about the trees, yes, but it is not our concern right now,> Alloran says impatiently. <We need to focus on taking out the empire’s top vissers while the power vacuum from Esplin’s death remains unfilled. This silly worry about the local land is just one more distraction—>
“I don’t think it’s silly.” Jake speaks quietly, but his voice is firm.
<Be that as it may.> Alloran flicks his tail dismissively. <I know the yeerks, and as the ranking officer—>
“Let’s get something straight, bub.” Marco steps up to stand at Jake’s left shoulder, looking halfway shocked at his own daring. “I’ve only got one prince, and it’s this loser right here.” He nudges Jake with his elbow.
<Excuse me?> Alloran’s whole body has gone stiff. Marco looks very small where he stands staring Alloran down.
“Look,” Rachel says, “Jake hasn’t led us wrong yet. No offense, but we don’t know you. We don’t trust you. Jake’s one of us, and if you two don’t agree… We’re gonna go with Jake.” She crosses her arms, stepping forward to stand behind Marco.
<It’s not that we think you’re wrong,> Tobias offers, more gently. <It’s just…> He flares, landing gently on Rachel’s shoulder. <Well, Jake’s got a point that Cassie’s got a point.>
Ax doesn’t say a word. He just takes three steps, until he is standing directly behind Jake’s right shoulder.
The silence while they wait for Alloran’s response seems to last for years. The only one who looks more surprised by all this than Alloran is Jake himself.
<Very well,> Alloran says at last. <Prince Jake,> —and if there’s a hint of mockery to the title, they choose not to notice— <it seems you have won the unflinching loyalty of every one of your warriors. That is commendation enough for me. What is it you suggest we do?>
They work out an arrangement of sorts, wherein Jake is their field commander but Alloran gives them a lot of advice in their down time. Marco might grumble about “school all day, then homework, then what do we do with our tiny amounts of spare time? Oh goody, more homework!” but the truth is that most of what Alloran teaches them is useful. He drills them on morphing fast, morphing smoothly, morphing without losing control, and they all improve to the point where the others can almost—almost—match Cassie in skill.
Under his tutelage they all learn the frolis maneuver to combine sets of DNA from the same species, which means that, through mixing Alloran’s DNA with Ax’s, they can each develop a unique andalite morph. Their subsequent set of andalites might look like very closely-related siblings, but at least the morphs enable them to maintain the illusion that they are all andalite bandits.
Tobias becomes the last one to get an andalite shape, during the frantic period of catch-up after he regains the ability to morph. He uses more of Ax’s DNA than Alloran’s, and the subsequent form ends up (whether by accident or deliberately) looking startlingly like Elfangor.
Alloran is not a particularly patient or kind teacher, but he does get results from all of them as he snaps at them time after time that their best attempts are not good enough and won’t be until every one of them can master rodent shapes without losing control. He and Marco butt heads on a fairly regular basis, and Rachel has been known to stomp away from his biting criticism in a fit of rage, but they always learn to get along in the end. And they learn not just morphing tricks, but how to fight with tail blades and guns and knives and stolen dracon beams. They study past battles, and learn ways to do better. Alloran gives them no rest, but he also keeps them alive.
It’s odd, Ax thinks, and Alloran would probably deny it if asked, but he seems to be more patient with Tobias. It might just be his awareness that Tobias came to the game later than any of the others, or even some degree of sympathy for all nothlits, but Alloran is far less inclined to snap at Tobias’s small mistakes. He shows almost as much concern for Tobias’s well-being as Jake or Cassie might, which is strange when Alloran himself is also “roughing it” (as Marco would say) out in the woods.
Under Visser One’s influence, the invasion of Earth grows terrifying new tendrils. Politicians in state capitols and even the White House start scheduling mysterious appointments once every three days. The Sharing gains official nonprofit status, and opens chapters in every state in the country. Voluntary hosts get offered power and wealth and fame in the New Yeerk Order if they will just agree to give up their bodies for a few years while the revolution occurs. Alloran insists that Edriss is five times the strategist Esplin ever was, and pretty soon they all agree with him.
Jake isn’t the only one to notice that Alloran returns to the construction site where Elfangor died, but he is the only one brave enough to ask about it. It just happens one time that Jake’s walking home and sees a very familiar young man (comprised of DNA that has bits of Mr. Tidwell and Visser Three’s human shape and the Animorphs themselves) leaning against the chain link fence to look at the abandoned earthmovers.
Alloran hesitates for a long time after Jake voices the question, but at last he explains. “Elfangor was flying a damaged fighter, injured, in trouble… Any sensible prince would have returned to his Dome ship, or at least sought his companions’ assistance. Instead, he came—” He gestures toward the fence. “Here.”
Jake looks over at him. “You think Elfangor was trying to do something. Other than give us the power to morph, that is.”
“I think he was looking for something,” Alloran says. “Or someone. The only person he’d be likely to seek out on Earth would be little use in a fight, so it’d be an odd burst of sentiment indeed if she was what he sought, whereas…” Again, he pauses, looking Jake over. Whatever he sees causes him to continue. “Whereas if he was looking for an object… The last time I saw him before his death, Elfangor was headed for Earth with the with the most powerful weapon in the known universe in his possession.”
Jake feels a chill. Automatically his body turns, eyes scanning the cracked concrete and half-constructed walls. He’s not sure he trusts Alloran with a weapon that powerful. “What’s it look like, this thing Elfangor had?”
“Spherical. An opalescent sort of white color. Approximately forty inches in diameter.” Alloran sighs heavily enough that his shoulders lower. “The problem is, this is all speculation. For all I know, Elfangor destroyed the damn thing out of some misguided sense of idealism. For all I know he was just looking for Loren and the Time Matrix is nowhere near here. For all I know his knowledge of its location was approximate, or his calculations were off, or his ship was too badly damaged to reach its location, and it’s hundreds of miles from here.”
“And for all you know, we’re standing within spitting distance of a weapon that could end the war tomorrow,” Jake finishes.
They stand there for a long time, looking out at the scattered cinderblocks and jagged edges of rebar. And then they move on.
When Alloran arrives back at the scoop he set up not far from Ax’s, Tobias is standing there. Human. Tears painting his face. Shoulders shaking, hands balled into fists.
“You knew,” he says. “This entire time, you knew. And you never said a word.”
Alloran finds himself looking away entirely, main eyes pointed at the ground and stalk eyes scanning behind him in a blatant ploy to avoid eye contact. <There was speculation, inside the Yeerk Empire, after Iniss 226 stumbled on your school records. That, and—> He shifts his weight onto his back hooves. <Your resemblance to your mother is… striking.>
Tobias swipes tears away with an angry jerk of the back of his hand, almost like he’s hitting himself in the face. “And you never once thought that maybe I should know?“
<Would you believe,> Alloran says slowly, <that I did not tell you out of a desire to protect young Aximili? We are taught never to speak ill of the dead, and Elfangor was one of the few I would have counted as friend even after I was taken by the yeerks. To speak for him to his brother, to reveal secrets that he chose to keep, after such time as he could no longer speak for himself, would have been to dishonor his memory to Aximili.>
“Sure. When he gets back, you can ask Ax about that one for yourself.” Tobias turns away, demorphing.
<Tobias—> Alloran waits until the boy pauses. <You would have made him proud, a thousand times over.>
<Guess we’ll never know now, will we?> Tobias takes off at top speed and wheels away. He turns in the direction of the hork-bajir valley, just before he soars out of sight.
Alloran thinks that they would have all made Elfangor proud, in the end. He’s a poor substitute for the commander they need, but he can guide them the best he can all the same. He’s there, in bievilerd morph and killing taxxon-controllers at top speed, when they rescue Tobias from Sub-Visser Fifty-One’s failed interrogation, and he tears Taylor’s head off her shoulders without a hint of remorse. He’s there, a nameless monster from the hork-bajir’s Father Deep, when Jake stays their hand in the face of a whirlpool filled with helpless yeerks. He’s there to witness as Edriss’s host tumbles off the face of a cliff and Marco speaks with detached calm of revenge. He’s there as Ax guides his human friends through the ritual of mourning following the destruction of the yeerk pool, and as Cassie proves to him with shocking finality that not every yeerk alive is worth destroying.
And then, on the eve of the final battle, Jake pulls him aside for a private conversation. He speaks not as a commander to a subordinate, or even as one war-prince to another, but as a friend asking a difficult and terrible favor of a friend. That, Alloran thinks, is the truest mark of all that this boy was born to lead.
<I am the servant of my people,> Alloran says, once Jake is done speaking. <And of my prince. I have no honor left to give, but my life is not my own, and freely given for a worthy cause.>
Jake swallows. “Then you think… you think I’m making the right call?”
<I am not the person to ask about questions of morality. However…> Alloran chooses his next words carefully. <My brother, Arbat, tried to kill me not long after I was taken by the yeerks,> he says. <I felt gratitude, and relief, and the wish that he would succeed. Not just for his own sake, or for the sake of our ancestors. For the sake of my Jahar, and the daughter I never knew except as a wish-flower. And for my own sake as well. It was a gesture of mercy, driven by love, and I recognized it as such.>
“Okay, then,” Jake whispers, after swallowing a few more times. His eyes are unfocused, watching a point somewhere in middle distance. “Okay.”
Jake tells Toby and Eva and James—all his lieutenants—what they have planned. Toby, who dislikes Alloran even more openly than all the other hork-bajir in the valley, becomes the first to respond. “Funny,” she says, “that you are willing to die protecting so many lesser creatures.”
<I know that there is no balance, no forgiveness, no recompense, for what I have done,> Alloran tells her. <I only seek to make right what little is within my power to make right. To learn what I can, and to use what I have already learned. Which is why I ask your permission to die for this cause, when we both understand how that death will be remembered.>
“Maybe you have learned a thing or two along the way,” Eva murmurs.
Toby nods solemnly. “Go in peace, and may you…” She pauses to find honest words rather than kind ones. “May you be remembered for the entirety of your life, up to and including its final moments.”
Alloran bows his head, and then drops to his knees before her. It’s only when she rests a gentle claw on the back of his neck in benediction that he rises, and morphs, and flies away.
I have a lot of Hork-Bajir feels about that last part.
The corners of Jake’s mouth are still pulled back into that dangerous smile. Their little andalite fighter is rushing toward the Blade ship, full steam ahead, already gathering too much momentum to pull back now. Marco’s gripping the console in front of him so hard his knuckles ache. The modified Blade ship rushes at them with shocking speed, closing, closing—
And then…
Lights. Noise! Too much to make sense of. They’re surrounded on all sides by cacophony. Flashing, screaming. Mayhem. Marco’s halfway through trying to morph in panic when he realizes he can’t. And then Jake grabs his arm. Jake, who is about a foot shorter than Marco remembers him being. Jake, who is baby-faced and wild-eyed. Before Marco can say anything someone bumps him from behind. He whips around, but Tobias is already shoving past him, heading deeper into the room. The arcade. The arcade at the mall that was destroyed over five years ago in the last days of the war. And Jake and Tobias both look about thirteen. Which means…
Jake calls out a warning, but Tobias ignores them, shoving through the crowd like he’s running for his life. He’s headed for the far door where two familiar figures have just emerged: one small and short-haired, the other tall and blonde.
Rachel runs forward two steps. She and Tobias slam into each other, babbling over one another with questions and exclamations and words on top of words. Their first pause for breath and they’re kissing, desperately breathing each other’s air, grasping at each other as if they are drowning—or eating each other alive. His hands drag themselves through her hair as if he wants to pull her even closer but cannot physically manage. She crosses her arms over his back, devouring his mouth until they are one being.
“What the hell?” Marco says loudly, looking from mini-Jake to mini-Cassie to the four-armed Rachelntobias creature. “Seriously. What the hell.”
“So we rammed the Blade ship.” Jake’s face is screwed up in thought. It looks painful. “And… and it created some kind of sario rip, and now…”
“Sario rips can’t bring people back from the dead,” Cassie says quietly.
Tobias extracts himself from Rachel and looks around as if only just remembering that there are other people present. “She’s right. And this has the Ellimist’s fingerprints all over it.”
Jake drags them all outside before they can say anything else weird within earshot of potential controllers (“hell of a battle, yeah?” Rachel’s saying. “We won, right?”) and they emerge into the quiet of the warm California evening.
“Whatever this is, we’ll figure it out,” Jake says. “We will. Let’s… let’s plant to meet at the Gardens tomorrow afternoon. Get some morphs, figure out what to do next.”
“What to do next is to go rescue Ax,” Rachel says. “Now. If we’re all here, that means he’s stuck twenty thousand leagues under. So let’s hit the Gardens now that it’s closed, get us some dolphin morphs, and have him back on land before midnight.”
“I think you’re forgetting.” Tobias turns toward the construction site, expression grim. “There’s something else we have to do first.”
When Elfangor’s ship lands, Cassie slips her hand into Jake’s. He glances over at her, startled, and she starts to pull away until he gently squeezes her fingers and she stops.
“We know why you’re here,” Marco calls. “We’re in, man. The morphing, the killing, the nightmares, all of it. God help us, we’re in.”
Elfangor stumbles—and Tobias catches him before he can fall. He looks around at them all. <How…?>
“Current working theory is that the Ellimist’s messing with us.” Tobias, with Rachel’s help, lowers him to the ground. “But you and Mom have used the Time Matrix before, yeah? So maybe we should just tell you that we’ve had this conversation before and hopefully you won’t think we’re nuts.”
Jake goes and finds the morphing cube as they continue talking. One by one they press their hands against its sides.
“Come with us,” Tobias blurts out, staring desperately into Elfangor’s main eyes. “Morph, escape. We can hide you, keep you safe. We did it with Ax—Aximili—for years—”
<Aximili survived the Dome ship crash?> Elfangor asks sharply. <He’s all right?>
“By any given definition of ‘all right,’ given this is Ax we’re talking about,” Marco says. “Retrieving his sorry butt from the bottom of the Pacific is our sad excuse for weekend plans.”
“I mean it,” Tobias says, as if neither of them spoke. “Morph. Come with us. You don’t have to die here.”
Elfangor smiles sadly, the expression never reaching his stalk eyes. <I can’t, Tobias. If Visser Three thinks I’m still alive and fighting somewhere on Earth, he’ll annihilate this entire continent before the Council of Thirteen even has time to disapprove. If he thinks that he’s eliminated the resistance, however, or that there are only a few unknown andalite warriors left on the planet… You’ll have time. He’ll underestimate you, and you can use that.>
“But…” Tobias gasps for air, tears thickening his voice. “But you can’t just…”
Elfangor presses the flat of his his tail blade against Tobias’s forehead. <I am so proud of you, and how I wish I could witness the warrior you will become. But you must go. Go, and don’t watch. The Blade ship is already approaching.>
He’s right. There’s no more time for words. Jake grabs Tobias’s left arm; Rachel grabs his right. They run. The five of them sprint (Tobias hesitating at first, but soon moving willingly) toward the far exit of the construction site.
They burst out the far side just as the Blade ship is descending upon the andalite fighter behind them. For a moment they all stare at each other in shock. Then they hug, and wipe tears off their faces, and go home.
When Tom opens the front door of their house, Jake has already grabbed him in a hug before he thinks through what he’s doing. Stupid, stupid, he tells himself as he feels Temrash 114 jerk back in surprise. It’s just… it’s been five years. No, it’s been eight. Jake pulls himself away with a force of will. “I, uh, I got cut from the basketball team,” he mumbles, by way of explanation.
Marco walks past his dad, not bothering to say a word, and goes for the computer sitting on the desk by the door. He forgot how much technology advanced since the war, he thinks, staring at the boot-up screen and drumming his fingers on the mousepad. Eventually when he manages to log on, he starts entering the code that will allow the crappy internet signal to intercept yeerk messages. It takes all night for him to hack the Sharing’s internal servers, but it’s not like he was going to sleep anyway.
Tobias goes home with Rachel, although he’s forced to scramble awkwardly up the tree outside her house in order to slide through her window. Once he’s inside she pulls him into her arms, and pulls them both onto the bed. They whisper to each other about the things she missed during five years apart, all through the night.
“Cassie?” her dad says over dinner. “What were you thinking just now?” She smiles, and comes out with a lie. Because there’s no telling them that she was watching her parents in awe, wondering if they were ever really this young.
The next day they assemble outside the Gardens. The dolphin exhibit isn’t open for visitors for another two hours, so they wander: Marco to where Big Jim is kept, Rachel to the elephant exhibit, Cassie to the horse stalls, Tobias to the aviary. Jake’s not actually stupid enough to wander into the tiger enclosure a second time, instead waiting until Cassie can create a diversion long enough for Rachel to morph and pick up the world’s angriest kitty in her trunk in order to carry it over for Jake to acquire. When all’s said and done they still have time to kill, which is why Jake takes them all to the reptile house, Rachel leads the way to the polar bears, Tobias reluctantly points out the duck pond, and Cassie lets them into the owlery. They never know what they might need—except that they kind of do know.
When they finally get the chance to acquire dolphin DNA (Jake asks about orcas, and wilts a little when Cassie points out that exhibit won’t be by for several more months), they all morph ducks and fly out to the shore right away. It’s a Saturday, and they don’t have much time to waste.
“Anyone actually remember where the Dome ship was located, last time we found it?” Marco asks, as they pull off their outer clothes.
“I mean, I know the general direction we should be headed.” Tobias shrugs. “Let’s keep going that way for as long as we can, and hopefully—”
“We’ll run into another helpful whale, I’ll almost get eaten by sharks, Ax-man will blare out a distress signal that summons Visser Three, and it’ll take me two hours to get the taxxon guts out of my hair tonight?” Marco suggests cheerfully.
“Great plan,” Rachel says. “Let’s do it.”
They’re all so much more adult now, Jake thinks with a touch of sadness, and it shows. None of them allow themselves to get distracted by the dolphins’ playful euphoria, instead forming quickly into a tight pod as they head directly out to sea. He catches at least two of the others—Cassie and Tobias, if he had to guess—watching the dolphin he knows to be Rachel as if expecting her to disappear at any time. Rachel and Marco aren’t teasing each other the way they were last time, instead discussing whether to search in a grid or to start yelling for Ax once they get close.
Demorphing and then re-morphing in the water is surprisingly efficient. It turns out that Marco remembers how to swim, even if his body is smaller and clumsier than he remembers, and of course Tobias being able to tread water as a human in between morphs makes the whole process much easier.
Further proof that they’ve grown up: they’re approaching what Cassie thinks she remembers might be the right area (although she’s already offered eight or nine apologetic explanations that her memory’s not perfect) when they all “see” a sharp-edged shape approaching in their echolocation. Jake doesn’t even have time to think a command before they’ve all already snapped into battle formation, fanning out behind Rachel at the head of their phalanx. And then—
<Prince Jake?> the shark says.
<Prince Ax?> Jake calls back. When there’s a collective burst of silent laughter, he says, <Only one of us actually earned that title, dudes. And it wasn’t me.>
Their little group slides together with shocking speed, complete now in a way it hasn’t been in five years. They continue teasing each other the whole way back to shore:
<However it may have happened, in this timeline I am only an aristh. So you really shouldn’t call me ‘prince,’ you know.>
<I know, Prince Ax.>
This time around the near-giddiness that infects the whole group, causing Rachel to try and knock Marco off course while Tobias dryly lists off all the things he’s not going to miss about being a bird and Cassie points out distant fish species with childlike awe, can’t be chalked up entirely to the dolphin morphs. Still, Jake thinks, if anyone asked, that would be the excuse they’d give.
Nonetheless, when they all meet up in Cassie’s barn the following afternoon, they’re all business. On the chalkboard where Cassie’s dad normally keeps track of his patients and their meds, the six of them start the most exhaustive list they can recall of everything they did in the war and whether or not it actually worked. One whole side of the board is devoted to a list of people they want to bring into the war as soon as possible—James is at the top of the list, but Jara and Ket are directly below, whereas Arbron and Erek both have question marks next to their names. There’s another section for people they want to keep out if at all possible, including their families but also celebrities like William Roger Tennant and Jeremy Jason McCole.
There’s one name none of them have mentioned so far, Rachel thinks. One person whose presence, or absence, has been a festering sore at the center of this team since he first crawled into their lives. She doesn’t have a solution for David. Not yet. But she will come up with one, she resolves. Because that’s what she does for this team: she takes out the trash.
They spend almost an entire afternoon arguing (at one point Cassie’s mom comes out to offer them lemonade, terrifying them all before they remember that Ax is currently human and Tobias doesn’t exactly look suspicious) but at the end of it they have something approaching a plan.
“We’re going to do it right this time,” Jake says, grimly looking over the rough battle plan doodled across the far wall. “No mistakes, no needless deaths—”
“Good luck with that,” Marco drawls. “The rest of us, who are only human, are going to screw up plenty. But hey, if we muck it up too badly, the Ellimist will probably just let us start over again, and again, and again…”
“We get the point,” Rachel says. She watches Marco startle for the fourth or fifth time as he remembers that yeah, she’s alive. (None of them have asked her what it was like being dead. Which is good, because she doesn’t remember anything. Maybe there’s nothing to remember.)
The following afternoon, Marco and Tobias and Ax work together to go through every inch of the construction site in a grid pattern, but they find no trace of the morphing cube. They suspected that might happen. David didn’t find that thing by accident. And it didn’t survive the destruction of Elfangor’s fighter by chance, no matter what the Ellimist might claim.
They have a busy week. Cassie and Tobias pull Mr. Tidwell aside, tell him outright that they know about Illim and the Yeerk Peace Movement, and set up a cautious line of communication. Marco takes Ax with him to talk to Erek and the rest of the chee, dodging any questions about the pemalite crystal as they stoke his need to fight back. Jake gives Rachel backup as she marches up to Mertil and Gafinilan’s front door, rings the bell, and (when Gafinilan answers) announces that she’s recruiting them both to fight and doesn’t care about any vecol nonsense when it’s all hands on deck on this planet.
Arbron is trickier. They all admit to one another, when pressed, that they probably couldn’t pick out one taxxon from another in a lineup. They’re also not sure how to get ahold of the rebellious taxxons without accidentally alerting the voluntary taxxon-controllers to their presence. Jake tells them to keep thinking about it, but to worry about other problems in the interim.
Jara Hamee and Ket Halpak are also out of reach for the moment. The problem there isn’t that the Animorphs don’t know how to find them; it’s that even all six of them aren’t necessarily enough to sit on two hork-bajir-controllers for three whole days as they wait for the yeerks to starve. Waiting around for the Ellimist to help seems like a bad idea, since they’ve never been able to count on him to do anything.
On top of that, if they try and recruit James and Erica and the others without being able to offer them the power to morph… “They’ll laugh at us,” Marco says flatly. “And then James will do that thing where he grabs you and throws you on the floor with, like, his pinky muscles, and then they’ll all laugh at us some more. And then Collette will call security.”
Lacking other options, they decide to wait. Wait for the Ellimist to make his move. Wait for Crayak to make his. Hope that, this time around, they get the chance to do it right. In the meantime, there’s plenty of work to keep them busy.
The day before the governor of California is due to arrive at the local hospital for an unspecified treatment, a small-scale bomb at just the right power station shuts down the entire grid for that section of the city. Rumors—which have no traceable origin, but seem to be all over—suggest that there’s going to be another attack, even bigger, on the governor when he arrives. He cancels the visit.
“Hey Mom, you think we’d be able to visit Grandpa G this weekend? We just haven’t seen him in a while, is all. Could we do that, just for a day or two?”
Jeremy Jason McCole shuts the door of his dressing room, and gets about half a second into a scream of terror before a thing grabs him from behind and puts a part-human paw over his mouth. “You will not join the Sharing,” the creature sitting at his dressing table (it looks like a horribly mutated grizzly bear, one with blond hair) growls at him. “You will cease all communication with them. If you don’t, we’ll know. And we will come for you.” Jeremy Jason McCole bobs his head in frantic agreement, and the werewolf (oh Jesus, that’s a werewolf, he’s never seen one before but he knows what one would look like) releases him. He collapses to the ground, gasping for air, and by the time he finally looks up both monsters are gone.
“Aunt Ellen?… Yeah, it’s Rachel. Look, I had a weird experience earlier… And anyway, I wanted to make sure… Could you make sure Saddler’s always wearing a helmet, like, every time he bikes anywhere? … Yeah, Brooke and Justin should probably do the same. I just don’t want… You’ll do that for me? You’ll make sure? … Oh, no reason… Thanks, you too.”
None of the other Animorphs ever find out about it, but Taylor’s parents receive an anonymous phone call telling them to check the wiring in their house. The voice on the other end claims that there have been over a dozen house fires in properties made by the same developer, and that he can’t give out any more information for fear his employers will find out he leaked this information. Tobias doesn’t know whether or not it works; he never bothers to find out.
“Ms. Robbinette, hi! Mind if I call you Nora?”
“Yes, Marco. Yes I do.”
“Sure thing. Mrs. Robbinette, then. That was a great class today, with those, uh, binomial quadratic functions and all.”
“I must say I had no idea you were paying so much attention. Judging by the expression on your face, you spent the entire class either daydreaming or dozing off.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve heard it all before.”
“What?”
“I just mean, uh, from my dad! Because he’s taught me a lot about the FOIL stuff. See, my dad’s a great guy. Really. All that stuff about him stealing prescription meds and getting high off pain pills he doesn’t need, it’s… Okay, fine, that’s all true, but he’s really a nice person. When he’s sober. Which isn’t that often.”
“Marco, honey, is there a reason you’re telling me all of this? If you’re having problems at home, then Mr. Chapman—”
“He’s thinking of asking you out! My dad, that is. Not sure why, since he’s already got two or three girlfriends he’s seeing. Well, not sure if they’re girlfriends, but a lot of them come by and spend the night. I don’t mind, not really, and I guess if you don’t mind him cheating on you all the time…”
“I’m not dating your father, Marco. And I have no intention of doing so.”
“And that’s awesome. Anyway, have a nice day!”
“But—”
“See you tomorrow. Can’t wait to get started on factoring those second-order polynomials!”
Joe Bob Fenestre’s house, after the grounds are soaked in accelerant by several birds of prey that are illogically each carrying their own gas can, catches on fire. It burns to the ground in less than an hour, although the fire is controlled enough that the entire household staff and even the guard dogs escape unharmed. Web Access America goes offline for three hours in the ensuing chaos, leading Marco to compose a fifteen-line lament about how they’re going back to the dark ages.
They’re all so much less careful this time around, Jake thinks with weary concern. It all just matters so little, even less than it did when they were first fighting. He’s twenty-two years old, not thirteen; it’s annoying rather than panic-inducing to realize that he’s already been out over an hour past his parents’ curfew. His mom’s attempts to ground him are somewhere between exasperating (because they’ll inconvenience him for an hour or two before he can sneak out again) and endearing (she’s just doing her best to be a responsible parent, he can see that now), but either way they don’t slow him down for long. Still, at this rate—none of them doing any homework, most of them lying only halfheartedly to their families—something’s going to crack. Much sooner than it did the first time.
Marco and Tobias are the ones who manage to get footage of William Roger Tennant grabbing one of his own cockatiels out of the air and throwing it at a wall, mostly by lurking in his bushes for several hours at a time with a long-range zoom camera that Ax helped them assemble from Radio Shack parts. However, Rachel’s the one who walks them through the process of mailing the tape off to her dad, and of ensuring it will make the six o’clock news. Contact Point gets cancelled (and good riddance, Marco insists) before the Sharing ever comes up in conversation.
“My parents would kill me if they knew about this,” Rachel mutters. Somehow the gun—yes, that’s a freaking gun in the brown paper bag she’s holding gingerly—seems so much more awful than the dracon beams or even claws and teeth she’s used before.
“My parents would probably be fine with it, especially given what’s at stake.” Marco lets out a high-pitched little laugh. He’s rubbing at his arms as if he’s cold, even though it’s a perfectly mild night.
“Fine, then.” Tobias smiles, although there’s no humor behind it. “You want to be the one to…?”
Marco holds up both hands, taking a step back from the bag in Rachel’s hands. “You know,” he says slyly, “If your parents knew about this, they’d probably give you a freaking medal.”
“Nuh-uh.” Tobias crosses his arms. “I went through all this trouble to steal some perfectly good ski masks. I’ve done my part.”
“December sixth, right?” Rachel cuts the boys off before they can bicker any more. She’ll be the one to use the gun. She’s done worse things before, and lived with herself afterwards. Tom’s alive, and so is David. An old man who would have had a heart attack in a TV studio is going to live another few boring years. All things considered, she’s fine.
“I’m sure.” Marco is now jumping up and down in place, jitters infecting his whole body. “He brought it to school on a Monday, said he found it the night before. I know it was the first Monday of December because we went on winter break just after…” He coughs, clears his throat. “It was December sixth. I’m sure.”
“Let’s do it.” Rachel pulls the mask over her own face, tosses the other one to Marco. Crumpling the paper bag in her pocket, she adjusts her grip on the pistol.
David is walking home alone, having unwisely cut through the construction site to get from the mall to the suburbs exactly the way they used to do. He freezes, putting up both hands, when Rachel steps out of the alleyway in front of him and points the gun at his head.
“Give us the backpack, asshole,” Marco growls, stepping up behind her. “Or we’ll blow your head off.”
David’s face is dead-white, but even Rachel can grudgingly admit that he shows an impressive amount of bravado when he says, “I’m a kid. I have a couple textbooks and maybe three dollars—”
“Don’t care.” Marco steps forward, arms crossed and stance squared in what is clearly an attempt to look bigger than he is. “Give it up.”
Rachel thumbs the safety off the gun. It’s not loaded, but she’s pretty sure even David isn’t stupid enough to test whether it is.
“Fine, fine.” He swings it off his shoulder and tosses it at their feet.
“You got any more money in your pockets?” Rachel wants nothing more than to grab the bag and run for it, but she also knows they have to make this look like a real mugging.
Rolling his eyes, David shrugs out of his light jacket and tosses that at them too. “Happy?”
“Get out of here,” Marco snaps.
Rachel’s heart is pounding so hard she feels the rush of blood throughout her entire body. It’s not until they retreat back into the alleyway and pull the morphing cube out of the bottom of David’s bag that she finally feels her heartbeat start to slow. “Yeah,” she breathes, “Jake’s not exactly going to be annoyed with us for long.”
That same week, the G7 summit scheduled for the conference center downtown gets cancelled after a bomb goes off in one of the hotel’s satellite buildings. At least, everyone assumes it must be a bomb, because even the Secret Service agents don’t know of anything else that could cause that much destruction in that little time while leaving the surrounding areas untouched. If they’d been from Sudan or the Central African Republic instead of California, they might have recognized the aftermath of a rhinoceros rampage when they saw one.
Two days later, a group of kids wanders into the long-term pediatric care ward of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. James takes almost as much convincing this time around as he did the first time—none of them have exactly become master persuaders in their old age—but once again he agrees after he sees what the morphing power can do. Jake gives him the morphing cube for safekeeping, with instructions to use it as he sees fit. Cassie, at least, suspects that James is going to have a couple hundred new Animorphs ready to go by the time they need his help again.
The EGS tower gets infiltrated by a large collection of cockroaches, and half an hour later the ground-based kandrona generator gets shut off. Erek King talks them through the process of hammering a hole in the side and then pouring salt water into the crack. The damage will look accidental, a product of wear and tear and improper maintenance, but it will also result in the core ceasing to put out its life-giving rays. This time around the secrecy is a must, because this time around the Yeerk Empire doesn’t even know there are morph-capable agents on Earth at all. At least, not yet. It’s only a matter of time, Jake knows. It’s only a matter of time. And they have to use their advantage while they have it.
“This is cruel,” Cassie says. “It’s cruel and it’s wrong and it’s inexcusable.”
“Do you have another way?” Marco demands. “Another way that won’t result in even more people dying?”
She hunches her shoulders, crossing her arms over her chest where she leans against a post of one of the horse stalls.
“Seriously, though.” Jake looks up at Cassie from where he’s sitting on a bale of hay on the floor. “Do you? Because I don’t know how to do this without killing so many of them that the rest don’t have the will to fight.”
It’s just the six of them, sitting around in a circle in Cassie’s barn. Almost like old times, except for all of the ways it’s not.
For instance, Rachel thinks, it never occurred to them last time. Because they never knew. But they know now: yeerks are like slugs in most of the important ways. Most importantly of all, if they dump salt in the yeerk pool…
Saddler did it one time when they were kids, mostly just because he thought it would gross her out since she was a girl. He’d waited until the little brown slug had slithered up onto the front porch, and then he’d taken his mom’s salt shaker and…
And the result was more horrible than Rachel could have imagined. She didn’t know in advance that it would stiffen like that, that the tiny body would convulse and shake. That despite not making a sound the slug could put out such a visible scream of pain and bewilderment as its very skin peeled back from the pale muscle underneath. That it would blister and deform as if it cooked alive from the inside. She never found out how it ended; she’d stomped down as hard as she could, ground the body into the wood of the porch, and then she’d punched Saddler in the face so hard she’d blackened his eye.
There are three 25-pound bags of road salt leaning against the door frame of the barn. Marco has already made four and a half jokes about how salt allegedly kills evil things in the old urban legends.
“We’ll warn the Yeerk Peace Movement in advance,” Jake says. As if that will make it okay.
“Let’s do it.” Rachel doesn’t know what else to say, if there even is anything else.
In the end it works. God help them, it works. They hit the yeerk pool during its peak hours—midafternoon on a Tuesday, when there are always Sharing full members’ meetings—and simply break down the door of the entrance in the closet of their school. There are no Gleet Biofilters, since Visser Three doesn’t know there are “andalites” on this planet, so it’s no problem at all for the six of them, along with the twenty-three members of James’s team, to burst through the door. They are mostly elephants or gorillas, creatures that can drag the huge bags of road salt with them, and they are in and out with vicious speed.
Over one hundred thirty-nine thousand yeerks die in the most horrible way imaginable in the span of about ten minutes. Cassie thinks, sick to her stomach, that even flushing them into space would have been kinder.
The seventeen thousand-odd yeerks on the Pool ship are lucky, though they don’t know it. They are the ones, along with the few surviving yeerks in the pool and the handful at known yeerk-owned locations like the community center, who see Jake’s message when it plays. Jake is the one speaking into the camera, but Cassie and Marco were the ones who wrote most of the message.
Jake offers the remainder of the empire peace. He holds up the morphing cube where the camcorder will pick it up, and explains that he is willing to offer its use to any yeerk who surrenders. He tells them that he is as weary of fighting as he is sure many of them are, and that if they do not comply then he will slaughter every single one of them. He lists names: hosts they know are infested, sub-vissers they can find and kill in an instant, plans from within the highest levels of the empire that prove he has insider knowledge.
The recording isn’t live. Jake’s not there to see it play. He, and the other Animorphs, are crowded into the Kings’ basement along with their terrified and confused families.
Well, not all the Animorphs, and not all their families. Because Visser One was overseeing the construction of the underwater base that would prepare their troops for Leeran, as they expected she would be. She also summoned the nearest Bug fighter and took off for command central the instant she got the news, as expected.
What Visser One couldn’t have expected is the second Bug fighter that rams into hers at top speed. She doesn’t have time to expect the explosion that comes, or the crash that follows. She certainly isn’t expecting the gorilla that comes wading through the wreckage toward her, or the young andalite who grabs the dracon beam off her belt before she can even think to reach for it.
Most surprising of all is the voice that says <Hang in there, Mom. Not much longer now,> as enormous arms lift her and toss her over one black-furred shoulder.
He’s right, as it turns out. Eva lives to see the end of the war a scant month after Visser One dies. She sees things she never could have imagined: her own son planning battles before he’s old enough for his voice to change. His best friend, no older, commanding armies hybridized from their own bandit force and the U.S. Military. Humans and rebellious yeerks and even a handful of taxxons and hork-bajir working together to turn back the andalite force when it finally arrives to “help” with the after-battle cleanup. Reconstruction. Something almost like peace.
<You think someday it’ll end?> Marco asks. He and Tobias and Ax are floating half a mile up from the area out in back of Cassie’s barn, blatantly spying as they watch her try and work up the gumption to ask Jake out. So far her first two attempts have petered off into awkward stammering while Jake remains as clueless as ever; any minute now Rachel’s going to get exasperated enough to drag them together by force if she has to. In the meantime, it’s better than daytime TV.
<You mean, are we going to wake up one of these days and be, what, back on board the Rachel?> Tobias asks. <About to die, with none of this ever having happened?>
<There are no records of a sario rip lasting more than one of your weeks without becoming permanent,> Ax says, but he doesn’t sound that certain.
<Yeah, well, maybe this is all a weirdly elaborate dream and any minute from now I’m going to wake up.> Marco tilts around to look at him. <You ever think of that?>
<And there she goes,> Tobias says. Rachel is now standing between Jake and Cassie, gesticulating wildly. <Marco, if you jinx us, then so help me…>
<Andalites simply exchange will flowers with one another,> Ax says. <Have you humans ever considered the merits of such a policy?> He doesn’t seem particularly interested in the drama below; Marco suspects he’s just looking for every excuse to spend as much time as he can with the others. The shuttle that will take Ax home to see his parents at long last will be leaving one week from now. He’s been trying to talk Tobias into coming along to meet his grandparents, and Tobias has already shown signs of wavering.
<Marco,> Tobias says, <You think too much. Ax, I’ll come with you, but only if we can be back within a month or two. It’s a brand new reality, and I’ve got plans.>
<Plans? When do you ever have plans?> Marco regrets the words as soon as he says them. <Does this mean you’re in on my idea about the World Series?> he adds quickly, trying to cover. <Yankees beat the Braves, four games to nothing, six whole months from now. If we put down just one or two liiiiittle bets…>
<You’ve decided, then, that we are still going to be here six months in the future?> Ax is doing that thing where he’s being a little bit sardonic and a lot bit literal.
So both Hunk and Lance are “supports”- they’re people who are driven by caring about the team. Both are literally and figuratively, stabilizers and there’s some overlap in what they’ll do as compassionate people who care about their friends.
Part of this is that Lance and Hunk have a fantastic synergy between them. They’ve been friends for a long time and this frankly shows, obviously, in how their thinking and attitudes can near-effortlessly slot into each other. They’re something our other team of heroes, the arm pilots (Keith and Pidge) can frankly stand to learn a lot from.
The Yellow and Blue Lion both care, but they care in very
different ways. Where Blue is arms spread wide open for a warm
hug- “it’s gonna be okay! I’m here and I love you!” Yellow cares in the
way of someone who steps in front of the people they care about, stares
hazards down and goes “Not on my watch.” One is a warm blanket to keep
out the cold- soft and reassuring- and one is a wall to stave off wind
and fire, comforting in its own way for its unyielding, unbreakable
strength.
GodDAMN what a great summation of these two’s personalities and roles on the team.
Honestly, though, I think the Blue Paladin being a looked-down-upon position and the impetus to try and cast Lance as another- mainly Black, but some people are eager to see him stay with Red or interpret him as a sort of secondary Right Hand figure rather than a Heart figure– boils down to a couple of things:
Heroism that puts supporting others above personal glory is seen as unheroic. Dull, uninteresting, this isn’t the sort of thing we tell stories about- we want to see heroes who take the front lines and take charge and have specific victories that were all them. An example of this is s4e6, where Lance personally inspired and empowered Allura in a very big dramatic manner, impossible to miss- and people don’t consider that a heroic moment for Lance. Only Allura- because Allura’s making the magic happen.
If you’re a character that supports others, there’s a common assumption that only the characters you’re supporting are important here- that you are accepting a subordinate or less important position because of prioritizing your connection over personal glory.
Because oh, sure, nobody actually wants to be without the Heart,
but nobody wants to give them the time of day or actually admit that any
of their rough tough cool guy heroes need something as wimpy as, y’know, emotional labor or anything.
In addition to loving their battle morphs, I really love what K.A. Applegate does with each of the kids’ first morphs. As with the tiger and the gorilla and the wolf, what’s important is not the generally agreed-upon symbolism of the animals themselves, it’s the details she chooses to convey or focus upon.
Tobias becomes the first one to morph, and he does it alone. Because that’s who Tobias is, at that point in the series: eager for adventure almost to the point of recklessness, hungry to prove himself without fully grasping what an adventure will entail. He’s a house cat bouncing from bed to dresser to windowsill, not exactly looking where he leaps. Rachel morphs a house cat one book later, and the description of that house cat is all about Rachel’s character. Fluffer McKitty is a gorgeous fluffy murder machine who can fight a human five times his size to a standstill, with enough reckless courage to impress Visser Three, all in a package that is deceptively pretty-looking. By contrast, Tobias in cat morph is cheerfully impulsive, eager to impress Jake and not particularly grounded—Tobias hasn’t yet learned the hard way to embrace his inner hunter.
It’s not totally clear whether Cassie beats Jake to the punch, but Jake is the next person we actually see morph. Again, it’s all about the way that Applegate chooses to describe the golden retriever. Marco in dog morph delights in being an agent of chaos (#10, #35), but Jake in dog morph is bouncy, cheerful, over-eager, and quick to defend his own—even though he is of course defending Homer’s house from Homer himself (#1). At the Sharing meeting he takes advantage of the fact that everyone overlooks a dog on the beach because even dogs without humans are so very ordinary. And that’s Jake himself in the first book: quick to respond to unexpected events, fiercely protective of his family and friends… and also a thoroughly mediocre person. He’s a dumb jock who can’t make his school’s basketball team, a gamer geek who routinely loses to Marco at the arcade, an average kid trying to escape the long shadow cast by his more-competent older brother. The empire-toppling siberian tiger is yet to come.
Whether Cassie is the second person or the third one to morph, my headcanon will forever be that she chose the horse morph because of the whole “I hadn’t played that game where I pretended I was a horse since I was about five. Okay maybe six” bit, where we know that was definitely a childhood dream (#29). Anyway, that aside, the horse morph has the same implication the wolf morph does: it’s all about endurance. It’s about Cassie being able to go and keep going toward her ideals, her goals, and who she wants to be. Cassie has the horselike ability to run through any amount of fatigue for days on end until her body won’t carry her anymore. She’s also in many ways the one most concerned with protecting this planet and living up to Elfangor’s legacy, which is why she controls the morph to be andalite-like just for a second on her way out.
Then Rachel becomes an elephant, a freaking juggernaut of destruction who can nevertheless display a surprising amount of delicacy and finesse with that long, clever trunk. Marco gets the only battle morph who can unlock doors and also pull iron bars apart with brute strength, the most human-like battle morph when he is the most reluctant and least skilled morpher. Neither one of those needs any additional commentary.
Ax’s first morph is the tiger shark, the “blue blade”—note the name—who is not only an ancient killing machine, but also definitely not a dolphin (MM4). Ax, quite accidentally, starts out with a morph that is the “natural enemy” of the dolphin that the four humans have morphed (#4). He’s an outsider, an alien, a “living weapon” who has been trained into the idea of being a warrior since early childhood (MM4). He’s also mysterious, inscrutable, someone the Animorphs aren’t sure they can trust until four books later, and with good reason. He himself withdraws from them, makes pains to separate himself from humanity, and doesn’t share important information with them for fear of compounding Elfangor’s violation of Seerow’s Kindness (#8). Although Ax eventually gets a dolphin morph, and by the end of the war he’s more Animorph than aristh, as of his first appearance he’s a weaponized, somewhat fear-inducing outsider (#46).
It’s pretty obvious (and incredibly awesome) that all of the kids’ morphs reflect strongly on their personalities. The bald eagle and the elephant are both big, loud, rough, and able to do a lot of damage but without much room for finesse. The gorilla contains both the sweet gentle kid who Eva thinks will never make it in the world and the ruthless force of destruction capable of murdering his own mother to get what he wants. The red-tailed hawk reflects not only Tobias’s desire for freedom so extreme it gets in the way of his responsibilities but also the beautiful dangerous far-sight he inherited from Elfangor. The wolf and the horse are both about endurance, about sticking by one’s guns and refusing to tire no matter how long the bitter march goes on. Ax rarely morphs both because his conservatism is simultaneously his greatest strength and his greatest weakness, and because he is simultaneously delicate and dangerous, simultaneously beautiful and inhuman.
It’s not just the use of the animals themselves that makes this motif of analogies so clever; it’s the very specific way that the animals are described. The characters make the meanings of the animal shapes; it’s not a one-to-one comparison. One could easily imagine that if it was Marco who used the wolf as a battle morph the narration would focus on a wolf’s fierce loyalty and unwillingness to fight alone instead of its untiring endurance. If Jake used the gorilla morph the series would probably mention the silverback’s concern with protecting his own rather than emphasizing the gorilla’s slow-burning fuse connected to a nuclear bomb. David morphing a lion is a sign of his tendency to be more concerned with style than substance; James morphing a lion is a sign of his instinctive comprehension of patient leadership.
This massive metaphor/framing device/commentary/character motif not only forms a huge part of the backbone of the series, it also continues to evolve as the characters themselves evolve. Jake first uses the blindly destructive rhino the first time he uses the total war tactics (“getting out of checkmate by throwing the whole chessboard across the room,” as Rachel describes it in #22) that will later get him branded “Napoleon junior” and “Yeerk-Killer” (#53). Marco starts using David’s cobra as a battle morph as the sweet kid falls away and the cold-blooded tactical mind comes to the fore. Rachel’s grizzly morph harkens back to the original meaning of the word “berserker” to refer to a warrior who fights with blind ferocity while wearing the skin of the bear. Tobias uses hork-bajir shape more than any of the others and also becomes the only one who morphs a taxxon, an andalite, or a Nartec, paralleling the story of how he (as he puts it) gets in touch with his alien heritage—and, in the process, becomes ever more cut off from ordinary life on earth.
This principle even applies to the series’s villains. Visser Three always, always chooses the loudest flashiest alien shape he can find because he genuinely doesn’t understand how to use morphing as a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer. Tom’s yeerk morphs a king cobra because they are the only snakes that kill and eat other snakes—just as the yeerk sells out his entire species for a shot at revenge and power. Efflit 1318 (the controller who kills Rachel) morphs a polar bear as a ghostly shadow-self of Rachel’s own grizzly bear, emphasized in the way those hairs Ax finds are described as “colorless” and “hollow” (#54).
But all that goes even one step further with Jake.
Jake’s favorite morphs—the tiger and the peregrine falcon—aren’t just character commentary; they’re foreshadowing. The connection between a small, fast bird and everyone’s favorite “dumb jock playing General Patton” isn’t immediately obvious the way it is with Rachel’s wildly destructive nature being embodied in the grizzly bear (#35). It only becomes evident any time Jake has been flying around in falcon morph for a while… and starts to wear out. He moves the fastest of any of the Animorphs in bird morph—and has the least ability to maintain that speed. When traveling over short distances he kicks the butts of the rest of the team at 200+ miles an hour, and when he needs to get clear across town as fast as possible Marco rapidly outstrips him and he’s left flapping himself half to death when he runs out of steam (#31).
The tiger is the same way; the narration emphasizes again and again that it is lightning-fast but a sprinter, not a marathon runner. Jake almost gets killed by the veleek because he can only keep dodging it at crazy speeds for a few minutes before he tires (MM1). He doesn’t succeed in stopping Tom’s yeerk from taking the morphing cube before Cassie gets there because, after fighting Visser Three for just a few minutes, he barely has enough energy left to keep up with a human moving on foot (#50). Like Jake, the tiger is big and loud and flashy—the others use all that orange fur as a beacon when stuck in the Arctic, and the “pants-wetting” roar as their battle cry (#25). And, like Jake, the tiger responds to threats quickly but wears out just as fast.
Jake’s entire character arc, from his first battle to his final collapse, is spelled out right from the first and second books with the peregrine falcon and the tiger. He figures out within minutes of meeting his first alien how he needs to protect his friends (drawing the hork-bajir-controllers toward him and Rachel because they’re the fastest runners, creating a diversion to let the others get away, making snap judgments about whether he can trust Tobias as the only unknown element in the group), and his ability to make rapid decisive moves continues to be his greatest strength throughout the series. No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy, which is why the team needs Jake there to change and discard and reinvent plans with nanosecond timing. He’s there to notice everything, run through rapid-fire possibilities, and make the snap judgments that will get them all home alive. And Jake does it.
For a while, that is.
Jake burns his candle at both ends, even more so than Tobias or Rachel. He stops doing his homework. Stops socializing with friends. Stops sleeping regularly. Stops eating regular meals. His brain becomes a dark disturbing landscape of chewing on his guilt over the last battle even as he worries his way through the next one. He never, ever turns off the warrior the way that even Rachel sometimes does. It’s not like he has much of a choice in the matter—out of the six of them he is the only one who has the enemy living inside his home, who has to stagger home from a battle at the end of the day only to be greeted by a yeerk asking why he was out so late and whether that’s blood on his leg, who can’t even have nightmares in peace without wondering if his PTSD is going to be the thing that gives them all away (#41). Of course he burns out. Of course it’s spectacularly awful when he does.
Maybe Jake more-or-less keeps it together through the end of the final battle, at least enough that he succeeds in winning the war. But the truth is that he falls apart after they lose his parents, and he never really puts himself back together again. He’s done. Used up. Worn out. He spent the last two and a half years moving at 200 miles an hour, and he doesn’t have anything else left in him. And he never really recovers. The only thing that ever succeeds in making him happy again is the chance to go kill himself (and half his friends) in some heroic fashion so that he can finally have some peace. His epic battle plan during the last three books is ultimately effective—they do win the war—but it’s a hell of a lot messier than anything he ever came up with before, and results in literally tens of thousands of casualties. Including a lot of innocent humans caught in the crossfire. Including his own cousin and his own brother. He gets out of checkmate, but he has to smash the entire chessboard in order to do it.
The tiger form is incredibly powerful, both strong enough to take on a hork-bajir and fast enough to dodge an andalite. It’s adaptive, able to climb and swim as well as running. Its fearlessness as a predator is encoded into its brilliant orange color scheme and voice that can paralyze prey with fear. And it cannot run for a long time, cannot survive the level of damage that an elephant or a gorilla can, and it will lose any fight it does not win in the first 60 seconds. In other words: Jake Berenson in a nutshell. We just don’t know how apropos that comparison is until the final book in the series.
Give me your headcanons on how the Animorphs’ parents interacted with their children after the war.
Ax makes it as far as the edge of his family’s scoop before he stops and, in a sudden rush, wishes violently that he hadn’t come. That he had kept this place perfect in his mind the way it was for all those years he was stranded on earth. Noorlin’s fingers shake with age as she sets aside the tangle of wires she’d been working on and turns all four eyes on him. Forlay’s hooves are even duller than Ax remembers when he comes running over the hill. The grass of the home world is not as sweet as he remembered-imagined. The trees have a concept that is hard to translate, but he’s often thought the humans did fairly well at summing it up: The same person never steps in the same river twice. And Ax himself knows in his hearts that he is unrecognizable as that naïve, arrogant aristh who left home to follow his big brother to the stars. <You must come to earth,> is the only thought he shares with them. <I can’t wait to introduce you to your grandson.>
Marco doesn’t get to keep the fairy-tale ending he got when he stole Eva back from Visser One. He can see that perfect future for a few precious months after the war, ignoring any evidence that contradicts this version of events. And then one day his parents are sitting down and telling him that it’s not his fault, they both still love him, they just can’t be together anymore. And Marco knows why, is the bitch of it. They must think he’s an idiot if they honestly believe he doesn’t know about all the months that are still perfect in Peter’s mind when it wasn’t his wife he was loving all the while, about the days when Eva can hardly stand to be in the same room as Peter even though she realizes he had no way of knowing she wasn’t in control of the body he kissed and held and fucked. But Marco doesn’t say any of that out loud, because that’s not the way it’s done in this family. Never tragedy, only comedy. "Well.“ He rubs his hands together and grins maniacally at both of them. "Guess it’s a good thing I’ve already got my own place, then.”
Here’s the thing: Cassie moves to the east coast to get away from Walter and Michelle. It’s not that they’re not good to her, because they are, as much as they can be. It’s that she looks at them sometimes and she is terrified. These fragile, beautiful human beings have never killed, have never seen true war, and have emerged from the horror with their innocence intact because they trusted her to keep them safe. They terrify her. She wonders sometimes if this is the way that parents normally feel about their own children, and vows yet again never to find out. She still emails them from D.C., when she remembers, but can’t bear anything more. She never realized how they would take her radio silence… until she opens the pain-filled rambling email where Walter spends eight paragraphs telling her that he knows nothing can ever be the same after how badly they failed to protect her, but he just wants to hear her voice. She spends the rest of that day flying back to California and lands in her own yard with aching wings but a lightened heart. Walter opens the door before she’s even finished demorphing. "It’s okay, Daddy,“ she says, “I’m home.”
Tobias goes back to his uncle’s house only once after the war. He jimmies the window with a clever beak but once he’s inside his old room he morphs human to retrieve the few things he actually wants to keep. A school picture where Rachel is grinning front and center. A battered paperback copy of Jurassic Park with Professor Powers’s note tucked lovingly inside. The forty-one dollars and uncounted change he managed to hide by filling a sock and taping it to the back of his dresser drawer. A toy Deinonychus, just because. He has to exit the house the normal way while carrying his sack of loot, which is how he sees the carpet downstairs covered with beer cans, the sink overflowing with dishes. He doesn’t know why he does it, but he finds himself starting to shove all the loose trash into a garbage bag. And once he’s taken that out he might as well start washing the dishes, only first he has to clean off the counter… He’s in the middle of sweeping the kitchen floor, muttering to himself in disgust about people who are too fucked-up to take care of themselves, when he has a sudden panic about the time and demorphs all in a rush. Looking at the room through hawk’s eyes he can’t help but focus on the empty prescription bottles stacked on the end table, the stack of unpaid bills weighed down by a fifth of vodka on the TV stand. When he morphs again he doesn’t resume cleaning. But before he leaves he flips one of the pre-eviction notices over and scrawls across the back in an unsteady hand: “I think I forgive you now.”
Jean and Steve try with Jake, they really do. As much as they can while dealing with a world of hurt of their own. But the house still fills up with silences: the silence replacing the bark of a golden retriever demanding to be let in, the silence of the stereo in the room upstairs, the silence where Jake used to talk to them, the silence around all the things they can’t say aloud. Jake stays with them, a kid who has run home and curled up under his bed to try and keep the monsters at bay as if telling his mother about his nightmares still has the power to make them disappear. He doesn’t move out until the day after Jean blinks awake one morning to see him standing in the door of her room in tears and, still half-asleep, she murmurs, “Tommy, what’s wrong?”
Naomi catches Dan at the grave site one day. Though she knows he can see her he doesn’t turn. Doesn’t try to hide the tears on his face. "Some days,“ he whispers, “I still hate you,” and Naomi wonders which of them he’s really talking to.
wow what a surprise i cannot believe u have requested this
take 3 on the cooking headcanons. U ASKED FOR IT
marco: remember how when
marco was 11 his mum died and his dad fell into a major depressive episode and
marco unofficially became his own sole carer for 2 years? HA good times well
marco knows how to cook. thats how he’s alive. he never viewed the task with
much enthusiasm bc it was just like,, something that needed to be done,, (at
least some of the time. obviously 2 in 5 days it was just m&ms for dinner)
and he’s got all his skills from trial-and-error and from watching the terrible
daytime cooking shows that his dad watches, so he’s not an Artiste™ but his
practical skills are off the wall. he can make a shockingly palatable meal out
of nothing but convenience-store canned items, jake’s lunch leftovers, and
gently-expired condiments. also he is a MASTER when it comes to Secret Kitchen
Tricks (many of which were cannily passed down to him by a forward-thinking eva
before she disappeared). the only person who knows about these talents this is
cassie. one time he called her and she was like “im SORRY marco im distracted
by this bacon disaster, i just put the olive oil in and its all going wrong”
and marco’s like “well duh there’s your first problem. you dont FRY with
OLIVE OIL cassie. thats why it SMOKES. use rice bran oil like the rest of us”
and cassies like ???????? she never tells anyone bc she realises hes lowkey
embarrassed by the fact that he’s developed this as an Adaptive Survival skill,
and when hes a kid he plays it down like nbd, but later on when he gets
older he starts to milk this talent for all it’s worth. hes like hang on…. this
shit is VALUABLE. that’s when his true culinary talents can blossom
jake: u
worded this “who sets pasta on fire regularly” and my response to that is that
one (1) time jake did Not set the pasta on fire and it made marco cry real
tears of joy. listen jake tries So Hard (because, in the spirit of being the
Ultimate Straight Ally Dadfriend and an All Round Decent Fella, he’s lowkey
aware of his existence as a straight white guy and makes well-meaning attempts
to avoid hypermasculinic douchebaggery in domestic life. also he’s probably
that disgustingly wholesome Hey Mom Do You Need Some Help In The Kitchen kind
of kid) but when he tries its just. so bad. oh my god its so bad. he’s only
ever tried like 3 ultra-basic Good Ol Classic American meals and every time he
does its a crime against his culinary heritage. his brownies come out lopsided,, he puts
wildly incorrect ingredient volumes in,, he confuses salt for sugar,, somehow
never manages to stir the cake mix properly,, tries to do taste tests like “i think
it tastes ok??” no it doesnt jake this gravy tastes like toxic waste,, without
fail lets something catch on fire while he’s squinting at the recipe trying to
figure out which step he was up to,,, its a mess. his family suffers through it
nevertheless because they are Heroes. “t-tastess – gre at,, llittleb uddy”
pre-yeerk tom says once, with tears of anguish streaming from his eyes
rachel: terrible
cooking is a berenson gene and if rachel had survived the war marco’s talk show
would have included a nailbiting Reality TV segment where contestants sample a
mystery berenson dish and have to race to identify the Cousin of Origin before
food poisoning sets in. this segment would have been discontinued after the 3rd
hospitalisation and a food safety inquiry. in essence rachel is as terrible as
jake but also worse because the constant failure pisses her off so much that
all of her concoctions are brewed with a terrible bitter malice. Fuck You,
Pasta. You Deserve to Burn. also i think at some point in the series it
mentions taht rachel tried being a vegetarian and i choose to believe this is
true and also that it is the point where things go from worst to worster.
eventually even she has to admit she’s never gonna manage it and resorts to
like. deep-frying entire zucchinis or something
tobias: u
know what?? im gonna say Not Terrible?? tobias is pretty creative and lbr i
doubt his neglectful ass relatives were gonna cook for him. he probably picked
up some stuff from recipe books bc he liked reading through them (listen i cant
cook for shit but even i get a kick out of lookin at food books bc goddamn??
the aesthetic?? plus tobias was a book kid in general so) also if we’re running
with the autistic tobias concept (its Canon, folks) i like the idea that as a
human tobias couldve been hypersensitive esp. to tastes, so he was pretty good
at noticing when two flavours clashed and figuring out what stuff to put
together to avoid that. (obviously he cant do this as a hawk but sometimes he
watches ax’s food choices and the twist of primal horror he experiences is a
comforting reminder that some vestiges of his humanity remain). HOWEVER by the
same token he also doesnt strike me as the sort of Organised Efficient person
who’d be a really productive cooker. i might be self-projecting here but like,,
have u ever tried to string together a series of practical tasks into an organised
sequence while in the kitchen,,, theres like 80 bowls and justt too many
utensils and timers goin off and u forgot to put the herbs in and u ran out of
bench space so u gotta try start washign up at the same time but meanwhile u
gotta Coordinate all the cooking stuff really fast so u dont poison urself or
start a fire and then u lose focus zonin out thinkin about smth else u already
messed up the order of actions sso do u start again or just eat the garbage or
??? look cooking is hard and i feel like tobias gets that. he’s ok at it in
theory but his application is shit. also hes a bird
cassie: id
say she’s not a natural culinary prodigy but with lots of patient practice
she’s become pretty decent. im not sure if its canon but for some reason im
convinced her dad is a really good cook?? meanwhile her mum is approaching
berenson-level bad and DESPISES it. hooooo boy. (she and rachel bond over
this). this means her dad enlists cassie as Head Kitchen Assistant and teaches
her the ropes, and she really quite enjoys it? preparing a meal is simple and
practical and instantly-gratifying in a way thats really calming, and she likes
being able to spend time with her dad. also not to be sappy but one time they
have rachel over for dinner and cassie and her dad are helping each other stir
the pot on the stove while her mum and rachel viciously chop vegetables and
toss carrot tops at them from across the kitchen as a protest against being
relegated to washing-up duty, and afterwards cassie tries to make brownies but burns
them atrociously and they gotta pick through the charred remains to find edible
bits and rachel says “HA who’s top of the Poisons Authority Watchlist now??…
dont answer that” and thats. a really good night. cassie holds on to that. ALSO
after the war cassie pretends she’s a way worse cook than she actually is so
she has an excuse to invite marco over to “”help her”” and get him doing
something different. he never admits that it helps but she knows from
experience it does
ax: HOOO BOY HERE COMES THE WILDCARD. i was torn between
saying “theres an intergalactic petition to establish a restraining order
between ax and Every Kitchen” and “he is a culinary TREASURE” but u know
what?? porque no los dos. ax around food is an unrestrained force of nature. this is a canonical fact. he gathers his flavours from the world around him (literally from the entire world around him, and from under him, and sometimes from the gutter to his left) AND im gonna say that despite his unconventional pantry choices hes actually,, not too bad at making flavours Work. unfortunately since he never has to occupy a human body for longer than 2 hours he has never had to work around the concept of “”food poisoning”” and his talents would have gone to tragic waste,, had marco not stepped in to save the day. with the help of marco’s PRACTICALITY and his handy snippets of earth advice like “the alfoil is a
UTENSIL not an INGREDIENT what the FUCK AX how are u even CHEWING THAT” ax’s raw talent is skilfully tamed. together they are
unstoppable. They take out several team cooking shows on network tv,
once because ax famously used the kitchen’s set props as a garnish. Ax probably
briefly invests in a popup restaurant for the fun of it and meets with roaring
critical success before it is gently shut down by the well-meaning and
highly-entertained food safety authorities, on account of his questionable
ingredient choices. Notable exchanges in the restaurant’s brief and
spectacular history include the food connoisseur who located ax personally to
implore “what is this…. subtle twist of flavour? the acidic flare that tingles
in the throat and warms the belly to its deepest crevice? please aximili, u
must reveal what mystery ingredient is responsible for this luxuriant gustatory
sensation” “its helicopter fuel”
Based on a dream I had, I designed a creature that is “the natural predator of merfolk” (I call her a Xocduct, which roughly translates to ‘seductive ancient shark’)
A massive sea witch with a humanoid ‘lure’ on the top of her prehistoric shark body. She is a rare sea monster that can enchant merfolk and pick them off one by one. Mer-people are naive and naturally trusting of other aquatic humanoids, and this paired with the Xoducts inviting nature, causes whole villages of mer-people to vanish without a single sign of struggle.
This one is a juvenile Xocduct named Ecrive. She wanders a little too close to the shore and gets trapped between some reefs and the shore.
Luckily she is able to get in contact with a Marine Biologist named Teja who wants to help this mysterious primordial creature despite the danger.
Don’t fall for a Xocducts charms, it will feed you honey lies and sing deeply haunting songs too low for Merfolk to sign in their soft upper registers. Almost everything about them is to snar prey, even the humanoid torso is just a lure they can live without.
And whatever you do don’t kiss the giant enchanting sea witch, they can transform humans into merfolk and they don’t show merfolk the same respect they show humans.
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