(also, a bit late, but about getting angry at the actor selling his own species - have you considered he's being lied to? For all he knows, Visser 3 is the good guy)
It's mentioned later that the Yeerks think Ax is akin to a flag or mascot or something, a deliberate point of Andalite pride to keep one member of the fighting warband in Andalite form.
I saw a flash of teeth.
And then I saw a flash of gray.
A bushy tail and tiny hands and big brown eyes went rocketing past.
<Cassie!>
The gray squirrel leapt over the toilet stall door, flew through the air, landed on the crocodile's ancient dinosaur head and started scrabbling at its big slitted eyes.
The croc went nuts. It forgot about me, and began thrashing insanely in an attempt to throw off the squirrel.
And someone chose that very moment to try to get into the bathroom.
"I can't find another bathroom! I have to get in!" a woman said.
The crocodile thrashed its tail.
I lunged down at the crocodile, swiping with a paw the size of a canned ham.
And we all hit the bathroom door.
WHAM-BOOOM!
The door exploded from its hinges! Out rushed a crocodile with a squirrel on its head, and a grizzly bear.
"AHHHHHHH!" the woman screamed. I think she found another bathroom after that.
I tripped over the crocodile. I hit the floor. The croc was on me in a flash.
I tried to get up on all fours, but man, that crocodile was fast! With no time to get up, I could only power my way down the hall by clawing. I sunk six-inch claws into the walls and propelled myself, scooting along on my back, like some weird out-of-control grizzly skateboarder.
I scooted in terror, ripping the walls apart as I went. The croc scooted after me, snapping at the air just millimeters from my hind legs.
Cassie had almost been thrown. She was holding on to the croc's neck with all her strength, but she couldn't reach his eyes anymore.
And then, still scooting, I ran out of the hallway. With one last push I scooted on my back out into the backstage area, trailing a huge crocodile and a chittering, manic squirrel.
People standing around off the set began to notice us.
"Ahhhhhh!"
"Help! Help!"
"Run! Run! Ruuuuun!"
Suddenly, crocodile jaws caught my leg.
HhhhhoooRRRAAWWRRR! I bellowed in pain.
A llama broke free of a trainer's hand and rushed with insane courage at the crocodile. There was absolutely nothing Marco could do, but he tried anyway. And it didn't take a lot of time before he was thrown clear. But he scrambled right up, and came back for more.
"Get those animals out of here!" the clipboard woman screamed.
"They're not my animals! They're not my animals!" Bart Jacobs yammered as he ran to hide. "I don't know where they came from!"
The croc started thrashing, grinding the bones in my leg. It was literally trying to tear my leg off!
And it hurt.
It hurt a lot.
ROOOWWWWR!
"Oh, no! The show will be ruined!"
"Should we go to commercial?"
"Who cares? Run! Ahhhhh!"
Maybe it was the sight of the brave-but-insane charge of the llama. Or maybe it was the fact that Cassie was once more scrabbling at the crocodile's eyes. But he opened his jaws just an inch. Just enough.
I yanked my crushed leg out of the croc's mouth and tried to get far enough away that I could turn and fight head-on. Like that would work.
Unfortunately, this move ended up dragging the entire battle - grizzly bear, squirrel, llama, and crocodile - out onto the set.
Out to where Barry and Cindy Sue were gamely trying to interview Jeremy Jason McCole.
Out to where Jeremy Jason McCole was just starting to say, "Barry and Cindy Sue, I'm involved with this group that I think is really a wonderful organization. I think-"
Out to where brilliant lights illuminated our snarling, snapping, slashing, chittering, roaring ball of fur, claws, tails, scales, and teeth.
Barry leapt out of his chair and backed away at amazing speed.
Cindy Sue was cool. She just kept saying, "Can we get Bart Jacobs to come out here and remove his animals?"
Of course Bart knew better than to get involved in a fight between a crocodile and a bear. "They aren't my animals, you silly twit!" he yelled at Cindy Sue.
It was Jeremy Jason who was most surprising. He didn't run away. He didn't scream. He froze.
He froze as stiff as a statue. The only thing that moved was his eyes. They kept growing larger.
That's when I noticed an Andalite had emerged, though he kept himself beyond the range of the cameras. And he carefully stayed there. It was Ax!
<What does it take to stop this thing?> Cassie asked me desperately, as she tried to rake over the croc's eyes.
<More than any of us has,> I said grimly.
Suddenly, the crocodile jerked its entire body with incredible violence. I was in grizzly bear morph, and I never would have believed anything was that much stronger than a grizzly. But when the crocodile thrashed, we all knew it.
Cassie had been thrown. Much farther than Marco. I lost sight of her as she was flying through the air, squirrel tail flapping like the tail on a kite.
And now there was nothing between me and the crocodile.
This was an animal that fed by dragging full-grown wildebeests and impalas into the river. I was bigger than its normal meals. But this crocodile had a grudge against me. It had started to chow down and I'd gotten away. And it didn't like that.It came for me. And let me tell you something: You do not ever, ever, ever want a crocodile looking at you for dinner.
Was I scared? Oh, yes. If I stood and fought, I'd lose. Period.
<Okay, that does it,> Jake said. <We are out of here!>
Jake. He'd caught up to us. And he didn't sound happy.
Then in my head I heard Cassie's thought-speak voice. <I'm at the light switches! I think I can turn off the lights! Get ready to run!>
<What?>
<When the lights go down, everyone bail!> Cassie cried.
<I'm ready,> Marco said.
And that's when fate intervened. Marco was climbing to his llama feet. His hooves splayed suddenly on the waxed floor and he plowed into the back of Jeremy Jason's seat.
The actor - or the Yeerk in his head - was still frozen in horror. And he stayed frozen as he fell from the chair and landed directly in front of the crocodile.
quote:
A llama broke free of a trainer's hand and rushed with insane courage at the crocodile. There was absolutely nothing Marco could do, but he tried anyway.
This was an animal that fed by dragging full-grown wildebeests and impalas into the river.
Am I mistaken or didn't she say it was a saltwater crocodile before?
Are... are crocodiles really that much tougher than a bear?
Don't crocs have almost no jaw opening strength? So if they got it in a position where its mouth was stuck shut, it would almost be helpless (or as helpless as a 25 foot croc could be)? Or am I thinking of alligators?
They've been basically unchanged since the time of dinos. Yes, they are that much tougher. They're about as close as it gets to a perfect ambush predator.
Don't crocs have almost no jaw opening strength? So if they got it in a position where its mouth was stuck shut, it would almost be helpless (or as helpless as a 25 foot croc could be)?
Yeah. When this thread was going over 'what would your favorite battle morph be?,' I picked the saltwater crocodile for a reason. Twenty feet of muscle and armor, an excellent swimmer, and shockingly stealthy in its preferred environment. They've killed a non-trivial number of people in recorded human history.
This is something I heard a lot as a kid. What they didn't mention is that crocs love rolling around and around, potentially disorienting or maiming their captured prey. So good luck holding on to the jaws.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLy-Iiy_Zp4
Saltwater crocs are most commonly found in saltwater, but they can handle freshwater and can be found in rivers.
This is something I heard a lot as a kid. What they didn't mention is that crocs love rolling around and around, potentially disorienting or maiming their captured prey. So good luck holding on to the jaws.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLy-Iiy_Zp4
Few of those who have experienced the crocodile's death roll have lived to describe it. It is, essentially, an experience beyond words of total terror. The crocodile's breathing and heart metabolism are not suited to prolonged struggle, so the roll is an intense burst of power designed to overcome the victim's resistance quickly. The crocodile then holds the feebly struggling prey underwater until it drowns. The roll was a centrifuge of boiling blackness that lasted for an eternity, beyond endurance, but when I seemed all but finished, the rolling suddenly stopped. My feet touched bottom, my head broke the surface, and, coughing, I sucked at air, amazed to be alive. The crocodile still had me in its pincer grip between the legs. I had just begun to weep for the prospects of my mangled body when the crocodile pitched me suddenly into a second death roll.
When the whirling terror stopped again I surfaced again, still in the crocodile's grip next to a stout branch of a large sandpaper fig growing in the water. I grabbed the branch, vowing to let the crocodile tear me apart rather than throw me again into that spinning, suffocating hell.
This thread should watch Crocodile Hunter, because holy shit him diving on crocs and flinging his arms around them while giggling and laughing was just fucking nuts
)
The audience screamed in renewed horror.
Cindy Sue finally broke and ran.
Barry was yelling ridiculous directions in total panic. "Get a stapler! Get a stapler!"
I think that's what he was saying, anyway. I was a little distracted.
Jeremy Jason was no longer frozen. "Ahhhhh! Ahhhhh! Save me! Save me! Get it off me!"
And with my dim bear vision, I could have sworn I saw something slimy and gray come crawling out of Jeremy Jason's ear.
And that's when the lights went out.
<Okay, run for it!> Cassie cried.
Sudden darkness! Not pitch-black, but too dark for cameras or the audience to see.
Total pandemonium in the audience. It's one thing to see wild animals up on a set. It's a whole different feeling, sitting in the dark and not knowing whether those wild animals are going to come rampaging into the audience.
The entire studio was nothing but screams. Screams and animal roars. And above it all, the shrill, horrified scream of Jeremy Jason.
"Save me! Save me!"
I saw a rush of movement from offstage.
Suddenly an Andalite was leaping through the air. It landed directly on the crocodile's back. The Andalite tail flashed.
Flashed!
Flashed!
Flashed!
And suddenly the crocodile let go of Jeremy Jason.
<Ax?> I asked.
<Yes,> he said, sounding grim.
I knew Andalites are tougher than they look. I'd fought alongside Ax before. But nothing ever impressed me as much as that. That crocodile was a tank. It was unstoppable!
And now it was stopped.
<Where's the Yeerk?> I asked Ax.
<I saw the Yeerk leave this human a few seconds ago.>
So I had seen a slug crawling out of Jeremy Jason! The Yeerk had panicked. It didn't want to be swallowed up along with its host body.
It was crawling around on the dark stage like a snail without its shell.
<Everyone okay?> Jake asked.
<Yeah,> I answered.
<Alive,> Marco said. <Not happy, but alive.>
<Then let's get out of here!> Jake yelled.
<Definitely,> I agreed fervently. I looked down at the stilled crocodile head. You know, even dead, it just scared the pee out of me.
Possibly because it was still very close to a yelling, screaming, cursing, hysterical Jeremy Jason McCole.
I bailed. I ran for the far side of the stage. But as I ran, I felt one of my massive bear paws step on something.
Something warm and squishy.
Something that felt like a slug.
<I don't think the Yeerk made it too far,> I said.
We demorphed in the ladies' room. Ax did the opposite, morphing into his human form.
But we had lost Cassie.
"I'll find her," I said. "You guys get out of here. I'm supposed to be here. But we can't explain why you're here."
I headed back toward the set area. It was still dark. Whatever Cassie had done to the lights, it was taking a while to fix them.
There was an awful lot of shouting going on. A lot of unpleasant language was being used.
I turned a corner and practically plowed into the back of a man who was standing there. He didn't even turn around. He was staring intently at a person standing just in front of him.
I heard a voice say, "Yeah, can you believe my luck?"
The voice seemed strange and familiar at the same time. Like I had heard it before, but not quite this way.
Then I realized.
"I mean, I fall in a crocodile pit, my house falls down on me, and now this."
I raised up on tiptoes and looked over the man's shoulder. What I saw was me. Me.
Actually Cassie, morphed into me.
The man she was talking to was one of the show's producers.
"You're a very unlucky girl," the man said.
"That's what I keep telling people," Cassie said. "They keep saying how lucky I am to survive. I keep saying, like, not!"
He nodded. "You know, for a moment there I wondered about you ... ," he said, letting the sentence trail off. Then he shrugged. "But the crocodile has been destroyed. And yet here you are."
I flattened myself back against the wall. If he turned and saw me he'd definitely flip. And what if he was a Controller? I couldn't take that chance.
"Yeah, I'm glad it didn't get me," Cassie said. "I'm getting out of here. I have to find my dad. He's here somewhere. It would help if someone would like, you know, get things organized."
Cassie pushed past the man. I turned my face away, not wanting to surprise her.
"Andalite!" the man snapped.
My heart stopped. He was testing Cassie. Waiting to see if she would react. If she would recognize the word. If Cassie hesitated or stopped he would know.
He would know.
I shouldn't even have worried.
When he rapped out the word "Andalite!" she kept walking and without hesitation said, "Yeah, a light would be helpful, too."
The man made a snorting, dismissive sound and turned away.
I fell into step behind Cassie. "Nice job, sister," I said.
"Oh, good, you're back," she said. "It's a good thing. I'm having the worst time trying to control this morph!"
"You're having trouble being me? What could be hard about that?"
She raised an eyebrow in a way that looked as much like Cassie as it did like me. "This brain of yours. It keeps trying to get me to do really dumb things."
Paramedics came rushing past us, shoving us apart. When we were alone again I said, "Hey, I said we were going to improvise, right? And look how well it all turned out. We're all alive. Jeremy Jason probably won't be endorsing anything for a while, let alone The Sharing. Plus, I stepped on the Yeerk."
"Jake will still kill you."
I laughed. "Cassie, if I were Jake, I'd kill me, too. Say ... I don't suppose you'd want to stay in my body a while longer ..."
"Nope."
"Coward."
"Yep."
Two days later, we sat around watching TV up in my hotel room. It would be another week at least till my house was rebuilt.
In the meantime, there was room service. And cable TV.
We lounged around, eating pie. The Animorphs. Cassie, the ecology nut, animal girl; Marco, who thought everything was a joke; and our fearless yet modest leader, Jake.
There was also a disturbingly pretty boy named Ax - a boy who was actually an Andalite when he wasn't in human morph. Ax's entire face was covered with pie. Ax doesn't have a mouth in his normal body, and the sense of taste totally overwhelms him when he morphs human. The boy is
dangerous around food.
And standing on the windowsill there was a fierce red-tailed hawk.
Tobias didn't want pie.
We watched TV and picked at remnants of pie crust as familiar theme music started to play.
Marco invented his own lyrics and sang along. "Entertainment Tonight, we're so glib and so light. Entertainment Tonight, we got stars all right! We'll entertain you and drain you of all your thoughts tonight, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah!"
Jake threw a pillow and hit Marco in the back of his head.
"Shh," Cassie said. "Here it comes."
The male announcer said, "You'll all remember the story we reported yesterday of the incredible melee during the broadcasting of the Barry and Cindy Sue Show. Wild animals brought to the show by Bart Jacobs broke loose and created a terrible scene, during which Jeremy Jason McCole, the young star of the hit television series Power House, was nearly eaten by a crocodile.
"Well, today we have an update. Jeremy Jason McCole is out of the hospital. Doctors say he'll be fine. But in an amazing development, his agent says Jeremy Jason is quitting Power House and leaving the country. McCole's agent refuses to divulge the young actor's whereabouts, but sources say he has been spotted in Uzbekistan, a small central Asian nation."
<Uzbekistan?> Tobias repeated.
"I guess that was as far as he could get from the Yeerks and the media," I suggested.
"I wonder if they have crocodiles in Uzbekistan?" Marco wondered.
"I'm guessing no," I said. "I don't think Jeremy Jason McCole will ever get within a thousand miles of a crocodile again."
"Or a Yeerk. At least if he can help it," Jake said.
Cassie sighed loudly.
"What is it, Cassie?" Jake asked.
She sighed again. "It's just a pity. He really was cute."
"Mmmm," I agreed. "Those dimples."
"That hair."
"Those eyes."
"Those lips."
"Ax," Marco said. "You should have let the crocodile eat him."
I ignored Marco, as I usually do. "He was, without a doubt, the cutest guy ever."
"That does it," Jake said. "Marco? Change the channel. Put on Baywatch."
I reached over and tried to snatch the remote away from Marco, but he was too quick. He flipped through the channels and then said, "Ah, there we go."
I looked up, expecting to see red bathing suits. Instead, I saw swords and leather boots.
Xena: Warrior Princess. My kind of girl.
Marco winked at me.
"Well, okay," I said. "This we can watch."
Tomorrow, I hope you're sick of the main characters and the 90s, because we start The Andalite Chronicles.
When he rapped out the word “Andalite!” she kept walking and without hesitation said, “Yeah, a light would be helpful, too.”
That last chapter was sweet. Actually, I liked this whole book, and better than I thought it was. We don't learn a lot about the characters, and it doesn't really develop the story at all. To a large extent, really, it's just a book about Rachel and Cassie. The other Animorphs aren't really in the book. But it's fun, It goes into the idea of celebrity crushes, and the whole sort of parasocial relationship you have with somebody who you don't even know. Plus, the whole studio scene is just funny, from Rachel trying to control herself in front of the jerky hairstylist, to the woman who really has to use the bathroom, to Marco being overly proud of being on TV, to the fact that Cassie's first instinct when it comes to confronting a crocodile is to become a squirrel. So, I really enjoyed the whole thing. It was fun.
.
We lounged around, eating pie. The Animorphs. Cassie, the ecology nut, animal girl; Marco, who thought everything was a joke; and our fearless yet modest leader, Jake.
There was also a disturbingly pretty boy named Ax - a boy who was actually an Andalite when he wasn't in human morph.
When he rapped out the word "Andalite!" she kept walking and without hesitation said, "Yeah, a light would be helpful, too."
That last chapter was sweet. Actually, I liked this whole book, and better than I thought it was. We don't learn a lot about the characters, and it doesn't really develop the story at all. To a large extent, really, it's just a book about Rachel and Cassie. The other Animorphs aren't really in the book. But it's fun, It goes into the idea of celebrity crushes, and the whole sort of parasocial relationship you have with somebody who you don't even know. Plus, the whole studio scene is just funny, from Rachel trying to control herself in front of the jerky hairstylist, to the woman who really has to use the bathroom, to Marco being overly proud of being on TV, to the fact that Cassie's first instinct when it comes to confronting a crocodile is to become a squirrel. So, I really enjoyed the whole thing. It was fun.
Agreed. I feel like I've enjoyed this one more now than when I was a kid.
I just had a horrifying thought. If Cassie had tried to acquire Rachel and ended up allergic, she would have ended up popping out a genetically identical Rachel, but without any memories.
ALLORAN DID NOTHING WRONG
What did he do wrong
I also completely forgot the Andalite Chronicles were this early. I would have figured they came late in the series. Major spoilers: Tobias' moment with Elfangor in the construction yard had me wondering if Applegate had planned Tobias' relation to Elfangor from the start. I guess that means yes, she had.
