ANIMORPHS #35.5: VISSER

you can't be saved, honey.

hi hello and welcome back to animorphs weekly!!! no time for a fun intro today this book is 84 pages!!!!

wanna read a book!?

i mean…..look at this shit. no tagline. no subtitle. no number! just the most RIPPED andalite in existence.

it’s a VISSER book!

SUMMARY

buckle up

we open in marco’s home. his mom, our POV character, is talking to his dad. marco’s fever is down, so maybe he’s finally over the virus! she’s just gonna take a step out. get some fresh air. check on her boat down at the marina. marco-dad is like, okay sweetheart! i’m preoccupied by my football game, so i can’t tell that something’s fucked up here!

of course, it’s not his fault. marco’s mom, as we know, is actually trapped within the confines of her own body! visser peers into marco’s room.

i looked at him, one last time, as the voice in my head kept begging and begging. let me at least say good-bye, let me hold him one last time, let me kiss him, oh my god, no, no, don’t do this!

but that was only a voice. the voice of someone who no longer had a say in what i did with this body, this life.

kid’s book! page 1!

i wish i could just read this book to you. maybe one day. you just have to trust me. the way applegate writes as the visser is so distinctly different from the way she writes the kids! which is like bare minimum for any writer worth their salt, but it’s cool to see her immediately establish the tone through syntax, vocabulary, and perspective.

visser drives down to the marina. while inside eva’s body (i don’t know if we’ve ever learned marco’s mom’s canonical name!), she’s come to appreciate sailing. it’s a sick way to pass the time, and now, it will provide the perfect cover for her disappearance. visser takes the boat out onto the sea amidst the bad weather brewing and ruminates on how hard she’s worked to get here. taking eva’s body and infiltrating her family really helped visser understand humans. but! she got the call! she’s being promoted! so it’s bye-bye family dinner and heLLO intergalactic conquest!

i was to become visser one.

sick

and that’s just the prologue!

chapter one opens with an incredible exposition dump.

“honored members of the council of thirteen, i am present at this trial under protest. i do not deny your right to hold me for trial. you are entitled to know anything and everything about my loyal service to the empire. but that my inquisitor should be none other than my most relentless enemy, himself a traitor, is intolerable!”

shakespearean

the council of thirteen is gathered holographically. their ranks consist of:

• nine hork-bajir

• two taxxons

• two “whose host bodies were so concealed that i could not guess at their form”

and, of course,

SOUND THE ALARM / FINISH YOUR DRINKS

visser three is there to lead the inquisition. so spanish! a random council member assures visser one she’ll be able to make statements soon. visser three tells the council that visser one has technically been demoted. a different council member reminds visser three that this is a trial to determine if the temporary demotion will remain permanent or if visser one gets to keep her title—and her life!

garoff? was it garoff speaking for the council? i couldn’t tell. nor could i be sure whether it was good news or bad that my mentor would be taking a leading role.

juicy

a computer reads off the charges:

• treason by incompetence (punishable by death via dracon beam)

• treason by violation of established procedure (punishable by death via dracon beam)

• treason by sympathy with a subject species (punishable by death via kandrona starvation)

• treason by contact with the “foul Andalite race” (punishable by death via torture)

• treason by murder of subordinate yeerks (punishable by “exile to punishment duty”)

not looking good for gina torres! four death penalties. exile at best! she’s most afraid of starvation. in order to avoid it, she’ll have to outwit visser three. probably won’t be difficult, considering he bathed in grape juice to get rid of skunk smell and is constantly being outwitted by a group of preteens, but. best of luck to ya girlie!

visser three is, at least, off his game. they’re still on earth, and earth has not been kind to visser three. still, he finds a way to needle her, telling her in private thought-speak that he can make a kandrona starvation last weeks. visser one shows no emotion, which is easy, because “the left side of [her] head [is] burned almost beyond recognition, bled and black and raw.” y o i n k s scoob!!!

it turns out visser one has spent the last month imprisoned by visser three, and has suffered a lot of torture in addition to the injuries she sustained after her terrible fall. children’s! literature! visser three has also kept visser one on the edge of kandrona starvation. she’s weak. and because she’s weak, eva is growing stronger.

but visser one has bigger concerns than a smug host. she has to tell her entire story to the council in one feeding cycle. typically, that’s three days. but she’s so hungry, she’ll make it half a day at most. but the show MUST go on!!!! roll tape!!!!!

we jump back in time to when visser one inhabited a hork-bajir host body and was going by sub-visser four-hundred-nine. she’s on a target acquisition mission. at this moment, the yeerks are searching for a “more numerous, more agile, more adaptable host.” the gedds are clumsy, the taxxons are starving, and the hork-bajir are in short supply. visser one is currently stationed on a moon base, where her job is to indoctrinate new yeerk recruits.

she gets a fresh shipment of recruits in gedd, hork-bajir, and taxxon form. they go over the five classes of aliens:

• class one: those physically unfit for infestation

• class two: those that can be infested but suffer from drawbacks (like the gedds’ bad eyesight or the taxxons’s insatiable hunger)

• class three: those that can be infested and make good hosts, but are in short supply (hork-bajir)

• class four: those that would be fucking rad as hell to infest but are too dangerous (andalites)

• class five: “aliens who are right for infestation, exist in large numbers, and do not have the power to resist us.”

that’s their mission: locating class five aliens. maybe they’re a myth! one of the new recruits suggests as much, and visser one immediately slices his throat open with her razor arms. then, she scoops the little yeerk slug out of the dead gedd’s ear and carries him to the yeerk pool. it’s all about balance, she says. carrots and sticks.

as she’s carrying him to the yeerk pool, her assistant, methit, approaches. there’s a new species being reported on: a potential class five.

“humans, sub-visser. they are called humans. and … and the report claims that they may exist in large numbers. not millions. billions.”

[csi theme song blares]

and WHO was the yeerk that made the report?? why none other than VISSER THREE!!!! it’s all connected

in this report, visser one learns that two humans named chapman (assistant principal controller!!!) and loren (tobias’s mom!!!) were taken by the skrit na, an alien race we may or may not have encountered before. (i have a faulty memory. let me know in the comments below if we’ve seen these little weirdos.) a passing andalite ship saw the skrit na ship and boarded it. they then took the humans with them to—for reasons unknown to visser one—the taxxon planet. while there, one of the andalites and the two humans were taken captive by yeerk forces.

who was the andalite? alloran-semitur-corrass, the andalite who released the quantum virus into the hork-bajir homeworld.

could you imagine reading that sentence at the start of this series

stroke-inducing

also there that day was elfangor, ax’s older brother and tobias’s dad. alloran, as the council knows, is visser three’s host body. visser three came into contact with the “mass-murderer alloran” (kinda hypocritical there, huh), and the “criminal elfangor”, which is kind of a win for visser one. today, in front of the council, she points her non-broken arm (dark) right at him and accuses him of befriending the andalites!

visser three will NOT stand for slander! he leaps to his feet and presses his tail blade to her human throat.

i killed elfangor myself! i morphed and lifted him up and ate him!

yeah you did pal

but in admitting so, he does give some credibility to her claim. the council member garoff tells visser three to chill out. he also tells visser one to stop egging him on, in the world-weary tone of a father just trying to make it to corpus christi texas for spring break without his kids strangling each other in the backseat.

eva pipes up. she calls visser one a fool and says now they’ll just condemn both vissers to death.

and my son will live to dance on both your graves!

metal

of course, visser one isn’t going to reveal the identities of the animorphs. it would be an easy victory for visser three, and she’d rather die than give him such a gift. she might die anyway. who knows!!

back to the statement. she’s received information on a potential class five species, and now she needs to validate the data. unfortunately, she doesn’t have the skrit na ship that would show her exactly where earth is located—that ship was in visser three’s possession, and it somehow…escaped…hm…

anyway

she spends a full year trying to narrow down the location of earth. she finally narrows it down to three systems, and reports these systems to her superior, sub-visser seventeen. this sub-visser tells her she’s wasting her time and now she’s being exiled to a taxxon host body! as if!

she convinces a subordinate and fellow hork-bajir body-snatcher, essam-two-nine-three, to help her escape. they steal a ship and set off to find earth.

at trial, visser three is like she STOLE a SHIP mr. electric SEND HIM TO THE PRINCIPAL’S OFFICE

(does…anyone get that reference? i feel like sharkboy and lavagirl was pretty relevant, but i don’t know if anyone else’s childhood was as saturated with george lopez as mine was.)

garoff is like shut UP we KNOW she stole a ship we are TRYING to get the STORY!!! he then turns to visser one. she’s made a memory dump, right?

haven’t we all

basically, a memory dump is like a pensieve: the yeerks can upload their memories to a data bank for review. the council is like, cool, let us all review the memory dump tape of the mission. visser three is like hmmm pretty suspicious that she won’t give us a FULL memory dump, huh??? visser one’s like, i will if you do!!!!

a bluff, of course. neither of us could afford a total memory dump. there are more than a hundred death penalty or exile offenses. in the course of acting as a loyal yeerk visser i had probably violated a third of them. and, of course, visser three had violated still more, beginning with summary execution of subordinates. visser three had slaughtered subordinates by the poolful.

too true queen!!!

they hook everyone up to the memory transfer protocol, and everyone settles in to watch the mission as visser one experienced it.

we’re now in the memory of the mission. visser one is sizing up her companion, essam. he is a competent pilot and technician, but he recently suffered some demotions because he didn’t understand the concept of neutrality. i get it, bud. it can be tough. this makes him perfect for this mission, however, because he’s not going to challenge visser one, and he knows he’s already in hot water. we stick it through as a crew!

they blip from zero-space into our solar system. they get a pretty close-up view of the sun, and then visser one points the ship in the direction of the planets. the third planet is a brilliant blue. alexa, play blue lips by regina spektor volume 4 (for ambience)!

visser one hovers over earth and picks up some signals. she is FLABBERGASTED by how much communication is happening—and this was before smartphones! we’ve always been a chatty little species. but all that talking hasn’t given us a space defense force, so the humans are ripe for the picking. visser one confirms: they’re gonna need to land. she needs to study the humans up close. essam’s like, visser, that’s crazy!

crazy, maybe. but it just might work

B)

they land. visser one tells essam to grab two dracon weapons. no human who sees them can live. their goal is to capture one or two humans, and infest them if they can. after spraying their eyes with night vision mist (sick), they leave the ship and head down the beach, only to stumble into a L I T E R A L war zone.

visser one and essam witness a line of humans in a trench get bombed from above. essam thinks he and the visser are the targets, but no—the humans are fighting amongst themselves.

:/

they scramble back to the ship to watch from a safe distance. visser one witnesses the two sides rolling towards each other, helicopters and tanks and gunmen alike. essam asks if the weapons make the humans unconquerable.

i shook my head. “no, essam. i will find the way. i will find the way to conquer them. and i already know one thing.” …

i pointed at the victors, the swift, confident pursuers. “if we want earth, we must start with them.”

get ‘em

after a night full of repairs, visser one and essam fly low to the ground, searching for something. they come across a lone human in the desert. at first, he’s like, oh sweet, a ship! and then visser and essam emerge and he’s like, oh shit, aliens!!!!

they catch him! visser tells essam to hold him down. essam’s like, ur gonna crawl into his ear right now??? in the middle of this desert??? what about your host body????

there are a lot of dangerous factors at play: her hork-bajir host could run away, her host body could kill her while she’s in slug form, essam could kill visser when she’s in slug form. but! fortune favors the bold and she’s made it this far. into the human ear canal she goes!

she’s very excited. uncharted territory! she moves through the ear canal, rearranging little bones, until she squeezes past the final membrane and reaches the brain. slurp slurp, she slugs her way in and is shocked to discover the human brain is almost split in two, connected by a tiny bundle of nerves. so am i!

this mind could argue with itself. this mind could see the same event in different ways. it was insanity! a democratic brain, arguing within itself, with no sure, certain control, only a sort of uneasy compromise. a consensus of disputatious elements.

this brain contained its own traitor!

mental illness innit

visser is fascinated by this split. no wonder humans attack themselves, she thinks. they’re constantly at battle within their own minds!

once visser has control of the motor functions, she and essam return to the ship to track down her hork-bajir host (which did run away). it’s not hard to find him, as he leaves tracks. they snatch him back up and tie him into a corner of the ship. dark.

visser flips through the memories of her new human host. he was a painter, he’s a father, he’s got three kids and a wife back home. a lot of his identity is centered on fatherhood. he was drafted into the war and he has conflicting feelings about it. he was also on the losing side.

i’m going to be totally honest with you guys i do not know which war applegate is referring to here and at this point i’m too afraid to ask

visser one tells essam she’s finished with this host and she will return to the hork-bajir. when she goes to the council of thirteen and begs for her life, she wants to be able to show she’s conquered the strongest of the humans. according to her host body’s memories, the most powerful among his people’s enemies is the americans. so to america they shall go!

back at the trial, the council members are still reeling from the experience of infesting a human host body. visser three is like, uh, hello?? do we have to do ALL of this?? can’t we just review the footage from her BETRAYAL?????

garoff laughed. it was not a friendly laugh. “visser three, the council will look at the evidence visser one chooses to submit.” he leaned forward, and his black-red hood slipped back revealing his battle-scarred, ugly hork-bajir face. “you may appreciate the privilege when…if…you ever turn out to be a defendant yourself.”

that was putting it plainly enough for even the fool visser three to grasp: he was on trial here, as much as me.

get his ass

garoff suggests they take a break, and then pauses to see if the emperor will object. we learn that the identity of the emperor, head of all yeerks, is known only to the thirteen council members. this way, if someone was coming to assassinate the emperor, they’d have to kill all thirteen council members to be sure.

but the emperor does not object, so they take an hour lunch. the holograms disappear and the vissers are left alone, save for their ceremonial hork-bajir guards. they bicker a little. visser three asks a hork-bajir to bring some human food for visser one. it’s a head of lettuce, two raw eggs, and a glass of water. honestly i can’t tell if it’s a bit or not but this is so fucking funny two raw eggs??? only two??? where did he get the eggs??? a Head of lettuce

visser three’s like, look. you’re right. i’ve never been in a human host. i’m sure now the council will be wanting us to ship them some humans so they can experience it for themselves. but…what if…we teamed up?

visser one is like ?????

visser three’s like, look, listen, what if we combined forces, huh? imagine it. we wouldn’t even need the council. we could just take over earth on our own! visser one is like yeah RIGHT ashton kutcher i KNOW i’m being recorded rn you’re gonna have to try harder than that if you wanna trick me into saying something treasonous!

the hour is up. the hologram council returns. it’s back to the memory bank.

visser one returns to the hork-bajir body and they presumably kill the human. rip father of three, we hardly knew ye. visser one is RAPIDLY trying to comb through information about america to locate it, and she’s racing against time. their water and food supply is DWINDLING. the girls are getting hangry!!!! she filters through until she hones in on american television. they watch, no joke, a few episodes of star trek and are DISTURBED by what they find. humans can travel at warp speed??? not even the andalites can do that!

then, visser one’s like, WAIT! this is a lie! developed to…scare away intruders, or something. it will be impossible to know what data is false and what data is true, at least from orbit. what visser one does know is there are four cities in america that are frequently mentioned: “new york, washington deecee, ellay, and hollywood.” they’re going to stock up on supplies. and then? they’re headed to hollywood, baby!!!!!

the next chapter begins with visser and essam landing in a backyard in hollywood. they find a pool, and visser one’s like, there’s your precious water ya big pansy. essam goes to take a drink just as a human woman pops her head up from beneath the water. essam starts screaming about the chlorine content of the water. it burns!

the woman is unfazed. the chlorine content is always high after the pool guy comes, and he was like, just here. she assumes they’re from the studio and asks if they want her to get lonnie—sorry, mr. lowenstein. he’s making drinks!

within minutes, the unnamed woman and the hollywood producer are under visser one and essam’s control, respectively. they kill their hork-bajir hosts (cold), and visser one begins rifling through her host’s memories. it turns out her name is jenny-lynne cadwalader, but everyone calls her jenny lines. sick. there’s a little internalized misogyny happening, as visser one derides jenny lines for being an actress that’s never acted and being addicted to an unidentified substance. essam, for his own part, is learning about the ins and outs of hollywood producing. like mike wazowski before him (after him?), essam thinks the way to the human’s hearts is to make them laugh. visser one thinks laughter is for losers.

“…they are not a strong species with a few weaknesses. they are weak, with but a few strengths. let me tell you, essam: we will not have to conquer humans. they will conquer themselves. they will come to us willingly and make themselves are slaves.”

EEEEESH

she’s not wrong, though. The Sharing, like all cults, has proved adept at drawing people in who are just seeking connection. or a really good volleyball team.

this concludes the end of the memory dump. garoff points out that visser one wasn’t totally correct: earth is still not theirs. she responds: earth isn’t theirs because of “the incompetence and treason of visser three!” good point! he would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids and their morphing technology!

visser one briefly considers telling visser three that he’s being bested by a group that at least includes human children.( to be fair, human children are brutal. you ever done shakespeare for a hundreds of bored, rich high schoolers in lincoln nebraska? no? don’t. nightmare.)

but she doesn’t reveal the identity of the animorphs. as established, she’d rather die than hand visser three a victory. we learn that visser one was responsible for the establishment of The Sharing, as an attempt to prove her theory that the humans would hand themselves over to their own destruction. but, visser three points out, it’s not enough. he thinks they should be waging war on the humans. a full-on assault.

no! i couldn’t allow that! it would result in the deaths of millions, which was irrelevant to me, but it also might result in the deaths of two. two humans i would not allow to be killed!

interesting

before we can really get into that, two of hork-bajir who have been standing guard this whole time snap into action. one of them shoots at visser one and misses. the other flings the door open—and a tiger bursts in!!!!

THE ANDALITE BANDITS

a grizzly bear comes lumbering in next, slamming two hork-bajir into the wall. visser one drops to the ground, searching for a weapon. quickly she counts: four andalite bandits; two hork-bajir, the tiger, the bear. but four isn’t right. there’s six of them, and one of them is always in andalite form. something’s fishy…

she finds a dracon beam and fires it at the tiger—she misses. the tiger doesn’t seem to notice. instead, the tiger turns and attacks the grizzly bear! visser three beheads the tiger! eva screams! two hork-bajir fire their dracon beams at the bear—

(okay a brief aside: i think it’s just been so long since i’ve read the description of what exactly a dracon beam does, but: “the bear sizzled, atoms burning, burst into flame for a brief, gratifying moment, bellowed a terrified roar, and disintegrated.” my emphasis, not applegate’s. that’s! crazy! ok back to programming)

i saw it all now in a moment of sickening realization.

fake! all of it false!

DAMN

visser one realizes visser three has staged this attack. the hork-bajir controllers were just that: controllers, who he swiftly disposes of with his tail blade. the tiger and the bear were just a hungry tiger and bear. clever!

this is bad news for visser one. now that the andalite bandits have supposedly been destroyed while the council watches, visser three has a clear path to earth domination. her only hope is if the real andalite bandits show up, but it’s a slim chance.

garoff, at least, is a little suspicious of the timing. that’s good. if, by some miracle, visser one can contact marco, and if by another miracle he’s willing to help her, the true andalite bandits could arrive and prove to the council that visser three is a liar and a coward.

garoff tries to move on to the next memory dump. there’s a fourteen month gap between the two, a gap visser three finds most suspicious. he claims that’s when visser one made contact with the andalites and hatched a conspiracy to defeat the yeerks. garoff asks if visser three has any proof of this. visser three has a witness. essam-two-nine-three.

i tried not to show any reaction. “surely the visser knows that essam is dead.”

visser three looked away from the hologram. he smiled the unsettling andalite smile that is done with eyes alone. no, visser one. essam-two-nine-three is not dead. at least not entirely. guards! bring in the witness.

imagine this judge judy episode

two hork-bajir bring in a man named spacey. he’s houseless, and an alcoholic, two words that mean nothing to the council. now, yes, essam-two-nine-three is technically dead. but before he died, he spent a lot of time in spacey’s brain, and the two became close. close enough that spacey can rattle off his yeerk name and pool origin. visser three confirms: essam took spacey as a host, yes, and they became friends. visser three asks if spacey if he ever knew visser one (he uses her full yeerk name and old rank).

spacey’s face was split by a smile that revealed a row of broken and rotting teeth. “you mean allison. allison kim.”

my heart stopped beating. the blood froze in my human veins. suddenly i saw through the matted hair, the filthy beard, the lunatic eyes. i saw through the years.

“oh yes, i remember her,” the human said. “see, she was essam’s wife. he was in love with her.”

JUST WAIT JUST WAIT

visser three asks if the love was reciprocal. spacey nods. yeah, of course it was. or else he wouldn’t have gone ahead with it.

with what?

“the babies. their kids. see, they had kids. twins. a little girl and a little boy.”

T W I N S ??????

TWINS???????

PEETA MELLARK WHO

TWINS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

visser one is GOOPED. GAGGED. SHOCKED AND BEFUDDLED. she has to deny it. but she can’t. if visser three has proof, she’s toast. lying to the council makes her as good as dead. so, she tells the truth. yes, she took a host by the name of allison kim. yes, essam took spacey as a host—spacey, whose birth name is hildy gervais. (unknown if there’s any relation to ricky.)

“and did you really cause your host bodies to reproduce?” garoff demanded incredulously.

“yes.”

MY JAW IS ON THE FLOOOOOOOORRRRRRR

WHO ARE THE TWINS??? WHERE ARE THEY NOW????

visser one is REELING. she’s like, fuck, how the fuck am i gonna get out of this one???

how to explain that for more than a year i set aside my loyalty to my own people? how to explain that yes, for a year, i was a traitor?

y’all know that gif of those school kids losing their ever loving MINDS

that’s me rn

visser one tries to explain. she and essam had made hosts of lowenstein and jenny lines. they’re learning about human behavior via the entertainment industry. lots to say about that; no time to dive into it. visser one encounters allison kim at a party. allison was a technical advisor on a show lowenstein was producing about, ironically, an alien invasion. she was a scientist. in the pool at this party, visser one in jenny lines drags allison to the bottom of the pool. she slides out of jenny lines’s ear and into allison’s, keeping her connection to jenny lines til the last possible moment, when visser one tells jenny to breathe in. visser one then takes over allison, drags jenny lines’s dead body to the surface of the pool, and “tries” to perform CPR.

BONKERS

KID’S BOOK

visser one enjoys allison as a host way more. she’s a fighter, this allison. once, visser one lets her have control of her left eyeball, and allison does nothing with it until they’re driving down the highway. then she closes the eye, ruining visser one’s depth perception, and they almost die in a car accident. visser one’s like, woo!!! what a rush!!!!

visser three’s like, SEE??? SHE LIKES HUMANS! visser one’s like, we have to respect them if we’re going to overtake them. underestimating them will get us killed. they literally fight wars all the time. she’s right! we do! visser one explains to the council that having children was part of the learning process—family is a large weakness of the human race, and she wanted to understand why. visser three isn’t buying it. he demands a live memory dump. visser one is outraged. she doesn’t want visser three rooting around in her brain! it would be so violating! eva laughs. you wanna talk violating?

garoff says he will perform the live memory probe. in exchange, the council will grant visser one immunity for all secondary crimes. they only really need to know if she delayed the yeerk invasion due to incompetence or sympathy for humans. saying yes means garoff will have total access to that entire year. but she can’t say no.

they strap her in and put probes against her little yeerk body. yuck.

hey, what is that sound? eva laughed. oh, i know. it’s the jaws of a trap snapping shut.

get her ass

we step into the live memory transfer. visser one and allison are discussing string theory. we learn that visser one and allison often engage in conversation, both of them creatures driven by curiosity. and still, allison pushes back. she tells visser one the yeerks will never be successful. no matter what, the yeerks will never know all there is to know about humans.

garoff appears in the passenger seat (of a toyota camry, by the way, a fun canonical detail i couldn’t omit). he asks if allison was successful in manipulating visser one. she denies this. he jumps them ahead one month. now, visser one is standing on a balcony, waiting for essam to return home. garoff asks why, and visser one admits that she missed him. garoff accuses her of thinking essam’s host is hot. visser one is like it’s irrelevant! humans have wacky emotions!

we jump ahead another month. right in the middle of a volleyball game!

A HA

THE ORIGINS UNFOLD BEFORE OUR VERY EYES

there’s a moment where essam/hildy slams into visser one/allison and they tumble to the ground together. a CLASSIC rom-com move. they stare at each other. alexa, play i see the light from tangled!

can’t be, eva whispered. you were falling in love with him. you?

visser one protests. she was just simulating human sympathy! just doing research! which is exactly what i said when i googled “girl kissing girl” at the ripe age of 12! it’s just RESEARCH

another month jump. this time, we’re at a romantic, candlelit dinner. visser one and essam are feeding each other lobster and crab. they jump ahead six months. visser one is receiving the news that she’s going to have twins. garoff calls her bluff: this is way too far just to “understand humans.” and visser one cracks. her host affected her, deeply. she was far from home. she was lonely. and, more than anything, she was finally living a life. actually, genuinely, experiencing the wide range of human emotion. the highs and lows of high school football.

visser one claims this doesn’t make her a traitor. she’s not an andalite sympathizer! (also great bandname, andalite sympathizer, and they WILL be duking it out with the andalite bandits in the battle of the bands.) garoff’s like, maybe not. but you were a traitor. they jump ahead three months.

visser one’s in the hospital. she’s just given birth, and she’s holding her twins for the very first time. essam is there, too, the four of them some strange family. essam whispers they’re running out of time—the kandrona generators are set to expire soon. he also tells her he loves her—he, essam, loves her, edriss. and he loves their children. but they’re condemned to die. if the yeerk empire ever discovers this, they’re toast.

the children must survive, edriss, allison said inside my head. you know that. you feel that. i know you do. you’ve come so far, learned so much. you know that the children, my children, and yes, your children, edriss, they’re what it’s all about.

“they will live.”

essam and hildy both agree. the children will live.

garoff stops the memory, and visser one experiences a pang of loss. the memory of her children disappears before her very eyes. she tries to defend herself: she and essam were the first yeerks to infest humans! they couldn’t have known! gedds, taxxons, and even hork-bajirs could not have prepared them for the depth of human love. humans, visser one declares, are not sub-yeerk.

garoff ends the live memory dump. visser one begins to spiral. if she loses this trial, and visser three wins, he will wage war on earth. her children will die. her human children. everyone turns to garoff. he says they’ll continue with visser one’s statement. she’s shocked. i’m shocked! eva’s like, he’s playing the long game. you’re not supposed to be convicted, so they’re hoping you can find your way out.

you have to discredit visser three.

“marco,” i whispered voicelessly.

yes. marco. my child, to save yours.

y’all this two-hour mid-season finale is going to pop OFF

visser one asks garoff where she should pick up. she’s hazy. disoriented. garoff asks her what happened to the children. visser one considers lying, but eva stops her—visser three wants her to lie. he probably has the children! visser one tells the truth: she gave the children away and “terminated contact.” garoff asks what happened to the host body of allison kim. visser one will answer, she says, but first she needs to eat. and pee.

been there!

visser three explodes. pissing is an obstruction of justice! but garoff agrees with visser one. all beings need to eat, even hork-bajirs. the council calls for a meal break. equity would be proud. visser three orders the hork-bajir guards to take visser one to the feeding building for the human-controllers. we learn here that this has been taking place in the underground yeerk pool (of course). the hork-bajir take visser one to the caf, where she’s served a meal of broccoli, boiled potatoes, and grilled chicken. i guaranTEE there is no salt or pepper on that. yeerks do NOT season their food!!!

while she’s in the cafeteria, another human-controller takes a call on her cell phone. visser one is like, holy shit! cell service! 5G isn’t fucking around! she stands when the woman does and ““accidentally”” bumps into her. snatched! she gets the phone!

the hork-bajir take her to the bathroom. her heart is in her throat. she calls marco’s home—and here is where we pick up where marco’s book left off. he answers. she tells him his mother needs him. he’s quick to point out that she isn’t his mother. she agrees, but his mother is in danger. the animorphs need to be seen by visser three ASAP. marco quickly assesses the situation. it’s not a trap. this is about the visser v visser battle. smart kid! war has hardened him.

visser three bangs on the door. visser one tells marco they need to come to the yeerk pool. they’re delivering fresh meat for the taxxons in an hour and a half, and the dome over the yeerk pool will be open for a few minutes for the shipment. she tells him where the dome opening is these days. she asks if marco will come.

he didn’t answer. instead, he said, “mom, i know you can hear me. i don’t know if i can save you. you understand that, right? i’ll do what’s right. i’ll do what i have to do.”

it was his only show of emotion. his voice cracked when he said “mom.”

visser one assures him: his mother loves him. marco knows. he also knows visser one is to blame. he tells her there’s no deal between he and visser one. one day, he’ll kill her for what she did to his family. and then he hangs up.

they’ll submit this scene for emmy consideration

visser one flushes the cell phone down the toilet just as visser three bursts in. you know it’s the 90s because nowadays no phone would fit down a toilet. they wait for another hour—equity would be displeased—and then the hologram council returns. garoff tells visser one to explain what happened to allison kim.

the kandrona supply was running low, so visser one contacted the empire. she spoke to sub-visser ninety-two and informed him she had discovered a class five species with population numbers in the billions. after that, of course, no one wants to arrest her. she returns home to find essam/hildy caring for the kids. he isn’t as pleased to hear she’s contacted the empire—he wanted to fly back to yeerk space, get a new kandrona generator after lying about being lost, and then return to earth.

visser three has a small outburst, but visser one cuts him off. she was a spy, alone on earth with only essam for company. she couldn’t attack the white house! (long deep sigh from the audience.) garoff comes to her defense. yes, a spy would want to blend in with their surroundings. visser three shuts up.

visser one continues to explain. she had, yes, developed some sympathy for humans. but not enough to derail her from her ultimate duty. essam, on the other hand, was a lost cause. they moved from hollywood to the unnamed city they’re in now to start The Sharing. visser one had been splitting her time between allison and a new host in order to start up everyone’s favorite cult. but one day, she came home to discover that essam is leaving. he is no longer a member of the empire, and he’d rather die than continue their mission.

visser one tells the council that essam overtook her, chained her up, and starved her. he tied her second host to the kandrona pool, and while she was feeding, he took the kids and left. she crawled into her second host—an unnamed male body—and pursued him.

the truth, she reveals to eva, is that she let essam go. she followed him not to kill him, but because she loved him, and loved their children. essam had gone human. he’d fallen in love with the human experience, and so was willing to betray his people.

visser one tells the council there was no need to kill the kids (a note i hope applegate takes for herself) because they were literal babies and didn’t know anything. besides, they’d be adopted. who cares?

visser three cares!

there’s some back and forth, again, where they’re arguing about methods. visser one thinks her way is best: a slow infiltration. visser three says the yeerks are a forceful people and should conquer earth the way they conquered the gedds, the hork-bajir, and the taxxons. visser three accuses visser one of preferring the infiltration method for one reason and one reason only: to protect her human children from the horrors of war.

careful! it’s a trap!

“nonsense!” i cried. “i care nothing for the human children! nothing!”

visser three smiled an andalite smile, and i felt a sinking sensation. my host had seen it. i had not. yes, a trap.

starwarstrap.gif

visser three is over the moon. he’s like, hork-bajir! open door number one! enter darwin, visser one’s nine-year-old son. then he hands her a human pistol and tells her to prove her loyalty by killing her child

k i d ‘ s . b o o k

darwin takes the barrel of the gun and places it against his own forehead. visser one understands: he’s a controller. risky for the yeerk inside his brain, but visser three can be very persuasive when he wants to be. visser one wonders what became of madra, his twin sister. (madra is named for the tiny moon of the yeerk home world, proving that no matter where you are in the universe, the moon will always matter.) her hands are shaky. knees weak, palms spaghetti.

stall. delay. a few more seconds. a few more seconds and the flea, the tiny insect, would be done growing.

!!!!

visser one tells visser three she’ll do it. she’ll shoot her kid and hope the bullet doesn’t pass through to the hork-bajir standing behind him. one day, she promises, she’ll see him die the tortured death of a traitor.

FWAPP FWAPP

THE ANDALITE BANDITS HAVE ARRIVED

ax is there in his andalite form. two of them have morphed hork-bajir (my guess is tobias and rachel), one is a tiger (jake), one a polar bear (cassie). it’s a wild fight. ax and visser three go tail to tail. one of the hork-bajir knocks darwin out but doesn’t kill him. the holographic council once again watches, cheering and screaming from the sidelines, and visser one Knows that it’s over for visser three. not only did he lie to the council, but now he’s getting his ass kicked by the local middle school’s GSA.

then a gorilla enters. marco. he asks visser one if this is what she had in mind. she nods. and then he knocks her out.

she wakes up in pain. the animorphs are huddled around her, all still in morph except marco. they’re in a tunnel but still near to the yeerk pool—near enough that she can see hork-bajir guards running around. they’re being protected by a hologram. (“something we put together from stuff we bought at radio shack,” marco says, providing obsolete product placement.) visser three escaped. soon, the animorphs will, too, but first, marco has some questions. he asks why she called them, and she tells him the truth: she just needed them to make an appearance. he laughs. in-fighting among the yeerks is good for the planet.

visser one tries to threaten marco, but he shoots it right back. yeah, maybe the yeerks will capture him. get access to his memories. be able to see that she called them in. check and mate! visser one’s like, yeah, but it’s hard to talk if you’re dead. marco nods. he calls for ax. in an instant, ax’s tail blade is at her throat. marco lays out the ultimatum: either visser one leaves his mother and the animorphs toss her into the yeerk pool, or ax cuts her head off.

he doesn’t mean it! i told eva.

yes. he does. you have to let me talk to him. me, without you. me alone.

“ten seconds,” marco said. “ticktock. ten … nine … eight …”

eva and visser one go back and forth. visser one doesn’t trust marco. eva says she has no choice. if she can talk to her son, they will both make it out of this alive.

visser one crawls out of eva’s ear into a waiting palm.

for a long time i waited for death.

and then, i sensed again the ear canal ahead of me. eager, giddy, afraid i rushed to crawl back inside her.

when she regains control of eva, she sees that marco has been crying. he apologizes to his mom—“we have to make it look realistic”—and then jake claws her arm and ax cuts her cheek. marco turns and cassie wraps her bear arm around him.

:’) friendship

ax knocks her out. while she’s floating in this semi-conscious state, she’s able to access what happened while she was outside her host body. eva tells marco that visser one cannot turn up without a host. it’ll be too suspicious. and though she knows marco needs her—and she needs him, too—the war needs visser one to exist. she’s the only one that can rein in visser three. she’s pushing for a non-violent invasion and she has a reason. eva reveals to marco that visser one has children.

eva also tells them that visser one is currently on trial. jake points out they might want visser three in charge. he’s an idiot who is hated by his people, and that could work in their favor. besides, visser one knows who marco is. maybe one day she’ll just take him as her host, hunt down the other animorphs, and deal with him that way. marco asks jake what they should do. jake tells him its his call.

(to be clear, visser one doesn’t know any of their names. it’s just for ease of understanding. she does realize here that they’re all humans save for the one andalite, and that they’re all children, but she doesn’t know their identities.)

marco tells eva his dad remarried. she understands, of course. she probably won’t survive. but, as she tells him, they all have to fight in the war in their own way. this—being visser one’s host, talking with her—is hers. they hug. and then marco delivers a message to visser one.

“…the deal is this: if we hear that you have retaken control of yeerk forces on earth, we drop the dime on you. we contact visser three, the council directly even, and we tell them how you reached out to us. we’ve recorded this little meeting. the recording goes to your bosses, and that’ll be it for you. other than that, this whole thing never happened. that’s the deal. you don’t know us, we don’t know you, we were never here.”

…

“and, by the way?” marco added. “if you get to thinking we can’t contact the council of thirteen, guess again. not all your fellow yeerks are loyal.”

m i c. d r o p.

visser one lays there, waiting to be discovered, waiting for eva’s brain swelling to go down. while she waits, she thinks about what she did not tell the council. essam said he’d rather die than contact the empire. but visser one was not ready to die. she loved her life as a human. and, equally, she wanted to rule. they could enslave the people of earth gradually, until they were all controllers. (i KNOW stephanie meyer read these books i KNOW IT!!!! the host is animorphs fanfiction i am calling it right now!!!!!) but how?

the way any human has tried to control others: organized religion a cult

she reminisces on the building of The Sharing. if she could get proof that humans would willingly submit to the yeerks, she could live her life as a human and be the visser in charge of the class five species. best of both worlds! limo out front (oOoooOH) hottest styles every shoe every color!

and she does get it. a human man by the name of rich huntley begs to join the inner sharing. visser one shows him essam, in his yeerk state, and explains what becoming a controller entails. and rich consents. essam slithers in, they get the proof, essam slithers out, they dispose of rich. but because visser one is running the sharing as a man named lore david altman, she has no use for allison kim. this is where she and essam had to part ways, not, as she told the council, when she contacted the empire. visser one tells essam they’ll kill their old hosts and find new ones, adopt their children, move forward. but it’s too brutal.

essam does overpower her. does leave her lore david altman, does take the kids. she did go after essam, but not to kill them. to get her kids back.

she awakens on a table. a human-controller and visser three are nearby. it’s time to return to the trial chamber.

garoff asks visser one to explain what happened to the children, how essam died, and how his host survived. he also makes it clear: the trial is over. the council has determined their verdict. both their verdicts.

visser one explains: it took awhile, but eventually, the children grew ill. allison and essam took them to a hospital, and it was there visser one found them. essam was starving. hildy was suffering. in the middle of their argument, he collapses to the ground. essam tries to escape, but he had grown so attached to hildy’s brain that he rips in half, leaving behind pieces of himself that fuck with hildy’s mind. allison runs from the hospital. she returns, disguised as a doctor, to try to rescue them. but visser one recognizes her, and kills her. she leaves the children in the hospital to be adopted.

more yeerks arrive. she throws herself into the building of The Sharing. when the time came to dispose of lore david altman, she did so without regret. she took a new host, eva, and worked behind the scenes. she wanted another taste of humanity, of marriage and children, but it doesn’t affect her the same way.

i’d had my fling with humanity. i was yeerk once more. i was visser one.

they sit and wait for their verdicts. eva grows disgusted with herself for helping visser one. when the council returns, there’s only eleven. garoff tells them that they’ve both been condemned to death by kandrona starvation.

but!

both sentences are temporarily suspended. the andalites are amassing forces. their target is unknown. either it’s earth or the anati world. garoff tells visser one she will be sent to the anati world to take over whatever sentient races exist there and draw the andalites away from earth.

eva loses it. i lose it! eva SCREAMS “NO!” visser one is triumphant! her death sentence is suspended! she’s being sent to a new planet! this time she will not fail! and as for her daughter, madra, one day they will reunite. visser one will tell her everything, and madra will love her. and if she doesn’t? well, visser one will put a well-trained yeerk in her brain and they’ll all play pretend.

yes, it was all going to work out fine. it was a great, big, lovely galaxy full of opportunity.

I’M

REVIEW

i mean. i.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

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PREDICTIONS

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applegate you wily bitch you got me again. had me almost sympathizing with the enemy!!!!!! yeerks don’t give a fuck about geese!!!!!! til next time!!!!!!