Recap / Animorphs: The Ellimist Chronicles

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Narrator: The Ellimist

Between events in Animorphs: The Beginning, the Ellimist tells a dying Animorph the story of how he came to be.

Tropes:

• Alien Arts Are Appreciated: The Ketrans, as well as the majority of the species captured by Father, have no concept of music. Father introduces Toomin to music when a Skrit Na^note Yes, the Skrit Na predate the Ellimist ship carrying an alien musician crashes on his moon, giving Toomin the means to finally beat Father.
• Alien Sea: Father's moon is almost completely ocean, with a ship graveyard on its biggest landmass. The sea itself is home to Father, life-forms such as fish that he's created for whatever purpose, and that's all, as anything that falls into the water gets snared by him and absorbed into his being.
• All Planets Are Earth-Like: Ket features giant floating crystals wafted three hundred miles above lava fields and acid oceans. For reference, the absolute farthest edge of Earth's atmosphere is about sixty miles from the ground. When Ket is invaded The Remnant flees in a newly built spacecraft to search for a new home, assuming that at least Some Planets Are Ket Like. But, as anyone familiar with the Animorphs verse knows, the truth is that All Planets Are Earth-Like, and thus inhospitable to Ketrans.
• The Alternet: Ketrans have developed a "uninet" that's connected to the crystal somehow and which they access through a "shunt". They can send "memms" to one another, do research, and play immersive games. When undocked and in free flight, they have no access to it, but this seems to be a relief sometimes as that clears all distractions. One crystal's uninet is not connected to any other's. The uninet is a new enough development that there are still some older Ketrans performing the function of making announcements to the public before the memm goes out.
• Always with You: Aguella's Ghost Memory says this to Toomin before he absorbs her into his mind.
  Toomin: I am making you a part of me, Aguella. Do you understand? I am downloading you, your thoughts, your knowledge. All that you were. Are.
  Aguella: I was always a part of you, and you a part of me.
• And You Thought It Was Real: The Capasins assume the broadcasts the Polars send of Alien Civilizations games are real and, even though in those games Ketrans are Reality Warpers who sit back and observe millions of years of evolution at a time, decide to come and kill them, and don't stop for a second on seeing that in actuality while Ketrans have some technology they're still using their own wings to move their homes around and have no defense.
• The Anti-Nihilist: The Ellimist struggles with the loss of his own species and the understanding that the genocidal Crayak is stronger than him. But his time living among the Andalites shows him how he can fight back by simply creating more life, and he makes this his mission. He then refuses to see his "pawns" throughout the universe as lesser beings — he is genuinely sentimental for them and assures the dying Animorph in the Framing Device that they really did matter.
• Apocalypse How:
  • The Capasins cause a Class 3a in the Ketrans, destroying all the floating crystals on their planet and leaving it uninhabitable for the handful that survive.
  • Crayak gleefully causes multiple Class 2s to Class Xs during his many games with Toomin.
• Arc Words: "Let's play a game". Toomin starts out as a gamer playing a video game where alien races are pitted against each other, and ends as a god-like being pitting actual alien races against those favored by another god-like being.
• Artistic License – Space: Ket is a rather strange and singular planet that in some ways seems like a gas giant. The drifting crystalline structures Ketrans call home can grow to a certain size on their own, but grow much larger when buoyed up millions of beating Ketran wings, three hundred miles above the surface (for reference, the farthest edges of Earth's atmosphere is around sixty miles from the surface). When the surviving Ketrans set out searching for a new home they quickly learn that worlds with a great deal of water aren't suited to supporting crystals, they need specific atmospheric pressures and updrafts. That sounds like it could be a gas giant (the "surface" could be the crush point, and the "seas" the Ketrans' ancestors come from could be a viscous layer above that point), but there's also talk of lava fields and strangling plants on the surface, and of mining there being a Fate Worse than Death, and instead of looking at gas giants the roaming Ketrans always investigate smaller, Earth-like planets.
• Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence: Toomin's spaceship fleet body jumps out of Z-space and gets lured into a black hole by Crayak, causing him to end up in three different planes of existence at once; the physical plane, Z-space, and whatever's in a black hole. His consciousness survives Crayak destroying his physical body, and he becomes one with space and time. Crayak follows suit when he realizes what happened.
• The Assimilator: Father lets ships pausing in orbit glimpse something intricate and strange, causing them to enter the atmosphere to investigate. He then causes them to crash, recovers their corpses, and links to their dead brains to gain more knowledge of the universe, especially their games.
• Asteroid Thicket: Toomin ponders how to keep two planets in the same system from warring every time their orbits carried them near each other. His solution was to shift asteroids around, breaking up some larger ones into smaller chunks, to act as a screen, at which point he decided that they wouldn't be able to fight anymore unless they'd made some major improvements in their space capacity and wandered off. Returning after a thousand years, he found that one side had wound up attaching mines to the asteroid screen and propelling them at the other planet, making it barren.
• Batman Gambit: Toomin knows that Father's one weakness is his cruelty, so when he's forced to play a game (a music competition) that seems to have a seed of possibility to it, he knows that if he tells Father he can't possibly win and begs him not to make him play it again, they're going to play it a thousand times.
• Benevolent Abomination: The Ellimist tries to be this when he leaves Father, moving from system to system trying to stop wars, end plagues and famines, and provide guidance and knowledge, very confident in his beneficence. He's quite dismayed returning to his first effort and finding that when he'd stopped a war between worlds by positioning an Asteroid Thicket that their ships couldn't penetrate without getting shredded, he'd given one side the idea of putting nuclear mines on some of the asteroids and propelling them at the other planet. Crayak sarcastically calls him a great cosmic do-gooder. The Ellimist rethinks his approach and whether he has the right to interfere, coming to think of some of his previous efforts as arrogance, and takes a lighter touch, wanting the species he favors to make their own decisions and just nudging them. He understands and accepts that his pawns can become angry about having been used For the Greater Good.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: Lackofa describes Toomin as a "brilliant loser". Toomin is a gamer who loses most games, but not because of inability. In fact he's got great analytical intelligence. He loses because he plays with different, self-chosen parameters, expressing compassion and altruism rather than a drive for victory. When he compares himself to Lackofa, who's barely older but has really applied himself and was chosen to be Third Biologist on a mission to space, a jealous Toomin decides now's the time to stop gaming and get serious.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: Trapped by Father, Toomin longs for death but knows Father won't kill him. Even though Toomin loses every game, he's the best opponent Father has and gives him a sense of purpose. After Toomin's embraced a new identity as the Ellimist he comes to regard Crayak this way and is regarded like this in turn - finally, a peer. Crayak plans to save the Ellimist for last, only killing him after he's scoured the rest of the galaxy. When Toomin ascends, there's a period of time in which Crayak thinks he's died and he has a massive advantage over him - instead of killing Crayak, he interferes with one of his plans, knowing that this intervention will eventually lead to Crayak ascending in turn.
• Career-Apropos Empowering: Toomin starts off with no real career except for gaming, specializing in a Life Simulation Game involving godlike control over a virtual environment and pitting different species against each other. Over the course of the story, Toomin is transformed into a godlike being with power over reality, essentially playing his favourite game in real life.
• Cessation of Existence: Father can manipulate the brains of the people he's absorbed and use their memories, speak through them in-character, express their thoughts and opinions, but their true selves are gone. Long after absorbing Father, when the Ellimist ascends to a higher plane of existence he wonders if he's dead and in some afterlife, then says no, the dead see nothing, know nothing. When he watches an Animorph die, he sees the strand of space-time representing them go dark and coil into nothingness. If there is an afterlife in this universe, the Ellimist isn't aware of it.
• Claustrophobia: Because they normally have so much space around them, with even their home crystals being mostly open air, Ketrans are intensely claustrophobic. Toomin feels a twinge of it when looking at a mostly flat, slightly concave surface, and the MCQ3 is a ship that the crew is on the outside of, with force fields to protect them and retain atmosphere and emergency air hoses if those fail. He and Lackofa have a truly terrible time in the Capasin ship that they dub the Crate. After the Time Skip, the Ketran remnant has acclimated themselves to some degree of enclosure complete with fighter pilots tying their wings closed to fit into their craft, but Toomin still finds an alien room that has enough space for a stage and a number of aliens at tables to be uncomfortably close and airless.
• Commonality Connection: When the Framing Device returns at the end of the book, the dying Animorph says that the Ellimist had been a kid, like them, who'd gotten in way too deep and then couldn't get out. That he'd been trapped, and still was, like they had been.
• The Confidant: Lackofa becomes this to the Ketran remnant. He's liked and confided in by all the bickering factions, because they understand that he will never betray a secret.
• Corpse Land: When captured by Father, Toomin is suspended in a corpse forest that stretches on indefinitely, countless bodies floating tethered.
• Cosmic Chess Game: Toomin and Crayak's game begins with the two of them as Mechanical Abominations, Crayak more powerful and setting up Sadistic Choices for him, wagering on the deaths of entire inhabited planets. Toomin drops out for a while and comes back stronger, on a level with Crayak, and they start battling it out across the galaxy, destroying entire star systems in their wake. Finally, an accident with a black hole leads both of them to become higher beings who can blink out reality in an instant. In a darker part of his mind, the Ellimist admits to himself that he needs Crayak's game to stave off the loneliness and boredom that comes with being a higher being.
• Creating Life: The Pemalites were created by the Ellimist from fragments of DNA collected from across the galaxy. He removes any aggression and gives them the purpose of seeding life throughout the universe.
• Creative Sterility: Father's Fatal Flaw, for all his power, is that he can only copy what he finds in the minds of his victims. He can replay the same beautiful piece of music perfectly but can't improvise or make something else, while Toomin figures out how to turn the audience of the dead to his favor over the thousands of times they have a musical duel. Awakening his own creativity and emotions suddenly gives him an advantage in other games as well.
• Democracy Is Bad: Menno tells Toomin that the Polar Crystal has switched from rule by the elder Wise Ones to a voting-based system, a drastic change that makes Toomin uneasy. When they're The Remnant, most Ketrans are from Toomin's own Equatorial crystal, and the Polars and a few others they'd managed to save want to resist their dominance and insist on democracy. The most vocal Polar, Menno, becomes Number Two. As Toomin ends up The Leader, he's constantly aware of Menno agitating to get control.
• Derelict Graveyard: Father's moon has an island where he's heaped all the alien ships that crashed there. Toomin later uses it to build his new spaceship body.
• Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life: In his "third life", the post-Ketran Toomin is lost for purpose. He feels he's part of many races but also that he can't go join any of them, and returning to Ket with its now-empty skies would only cause him pain. The purpose he finds is becoming a Benevolent Abomination, though this collapses when he meets Crayak and learns that some of his attempts actually made things worse, and Crayak can just disregard the efforts that succeeded.
• Detonation Moon: Toomin destroys Father's moon after he finally manages to leave. Just as well, as without Father's intervention all the corpses preserved in the water decayed to the point where the ocean became inhospitable.
• Did Not Think This Through: In the window of time between destroying the Capasin ship threatening one of the Home Crystals and three more arriving on the spot, Toomin's unable to convince his seniors that the Alien Invasion has to consist of more than just one ship, despite being able to cite that the Capasins like to stop and observe and destroy the crystals slowly, but even though it hasn't been all that long the MCQ3 found empty skies in the places where several Home Crystals should have been. They brush him aside as fantasizing and just jockey for position as if there hasn't been a terrible paradigm shift.
• Doomed Hometown: Several chapters are spent building up Toomin's life on the Equatorial High Crystal, including the games he plays, his friends, a bit of how society works et cetera, before Ket is invaded.
• Dying Race: The remnant Ketrans have an unspoken rule not to have children until they find a new home, and in sixty years of searching they don't find anything close enough to Ket for them to set up wing-carried home crystals in the skies. They're Long-Lived enough that only one has died of age in that time and they could still reproduce. Menno is insistent that they give up the search and modify themselves genetically, fitting themselves to a new world and having children or grandchildren who are flightless surface-dwellers, but this is very unpopular.
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom: Many of these happen across the galaxy as Toomin and Crayak play their game. It only ends when the Ellimist stops Crayak from blowing up prehistoric Earth.
• Eldritch Abomination:
  • Father may "only" control a watery moon and doesn't or can't leave, making him far less powerful than the other two, but he was there before the first sentient lit the first rocket, collects the minds and memories of the dead in an underwater forest of a Corpse Land, and of course is huge.
  Unless I’m getting false readings I show a continuous nervous-electrical system extending out to the limits of the sensors. This thing extends beyond the horizon. In every direction!
  • After Toomin absorbs Father and all his captured minds, he's something more and other than a Ketran and builds a massive ship to house the burden of them all, and make proper use of them, a ship that he refines and adds to extensively over time, and he is not the pilot of the ship, he is the ship. When he sections off a bit of himself to inhabit a proto-Andalite body he creates, looking up at himself this bit sees that he's become a Mechanical Abomination. From there he becomes a fleet of such ships, before ascending.
  • Crayak is first seen as a free-flying small planet, with its bulk and twenty thousand life forms living on it all wired directly to one source. Like Toomin he's both biological and mechanical, with the single huge red eye that the Animorphs notice in their rare encounters with him.
• Eldritch Ocean Abyss: The depths of Father's ocean. The visiting Ketrans submerge and marvel at the sea life. Luminous schooling eels, fish with trailing feathery fins, an airfoil-shaped creature, and below, a forest of tentacles so long they disappear into the darkness... then something hits their ship.
• Evil Versus Oblivion: After they both ascend and Crayak and the Ellimist can no longer harm one another directly. Crayak can harm the mortal species that the Ellimist loves, but the Ellimist can undo anything he tries, even rewinding time. But if they do too much of that, they'll collapse the universe and kill both themselves and everything else.
  Crayak: It's a pointless game that has no winner.
• Exact Words: In the prologue, the Ellimist says that, once he gives his answer to who he is, the dying Animorph will ask another question, which he will answer, "and then..." trails off. Some fans think this implies more questions, others see it as admitting that the Animorph will die. When the main story is over the Animorph actually asks three questions in succession, but the Ellimist treats them as one and answers. The Animorph dies, finally having received some amount of closure.
• Face Death with Dignity: The dying Animorph rages at the Ellimist at the start, but after hearing the story, they're sober, sadder.
  The human was silent. No begging, no pleading for life. At the end, acceptance came even to this strong, turbulent spirit.
• Floating Landmass: The Ketrans live on large crystals that float three hundred miles above an inhospitable surface. This feature turns out to be unique to their homeworld, which poses a problem when they're trying to find a new planet to live on.
• Foreshadowing: The framing device reveals that one Animorph will not survive the end of the series. Considering that the dying Animorph is The Unchosen One, the revelation in Back to Before that the Ellimist chose some of the Animorphs confirms that Cassie, Marco, Ax, and Tobias are all safe. That leaves just Jake and Rachel and sure enough, Rachel dies in The Beginning
• Framing Device: The Ellimist comes to talk to an Animorph who has been mortally wounded. The Animorph demands to know who the Ellimist really is, and why he plays games with entire civilizations. And so, the Ellimist answers...
• Gamer Chick: During Aguella's introduction, Toomin notes that female gamers are rare in Ketran society.
• Goal-Oriented Evolution: Proto-Andalites, who have shaggy fur, tails with stubby blades that have them turning their backs and hopping backwards to attack, and thought-speech that only expresses imagery and emotion, so they mostly talk with sign language. In the series proper, they're a thriving advanced civilization and have shorter fur, much longer tails with curved blades, and their thought-speech is easily interpreted as a verbal language.
• God in Human Form: Toomin creates a mortal Andalite body for himself so he can experience companionship again. From the point of view of the primitive Andalites, a stranger walks into their herd, kills an unstoppable predator with a futuristic weapon, then settles down with them and invents a telepathic language. It's no wonder modern Andalites view the Ellimist as an ancient trickster god.
• Have a Gay Old Time: The first law in Ketran society is "Lift for All", and for the ninety percent of their time that each spends docked to their home crystals and beating their wings, they're "lifting", a word that comes up regularly. Since the book was published, "lifting" by itself like that has come to mean "weightlifting" which is regularly used in exuberantly jock-type phrases. Do you even lift?
• Hold Your Hippogriffs: The book is narrated by a Ketran, and thus Toomin uses words and phrases that are analogous to a human equivalent.
• Honor Before Reason:
  • Menno believes that for Ketrans to survive they must modify their genes and have flightless, surface-dwelling descendants, because they can't find another world with the updrafts and atmospheric pressures that can buoy crystals enough for Ketrans to dock and move them. This is unpopular, because to Aguella and others being Ketran means being of the sky, not walking or crawling. That they could use antigrav generators, like the ones that had kept the original ship floating without anyone lifting it, doesn't come up.
  • When Toomin is having a part of himself live as an Andalite and has a child, the child falls sick. Toomin knows he could very easily contact his vast ship-self in orbit and have an immediate cure - and to prevent the disease from killing other children, to ensure food and safety, to raise the Andalites up - but is so paralyzed with the thought that exercising this power before had led to worlds ending that he doesn't.
• Hope Springs Eternal: Toomin falls into a Heroic BSoD after his games with Crayak destroy many inhabited planets. He retreats to the Andalite homeworld, where he starts a family with a female Andalite named Tree. After their first child dies, Toomin asks her how she can just decide to have another, to which she admits that some children will inevitably die to disease, predators, or bad luck; the only solution is to have more children than the universe can kill. This turns out to be the answer to Toomin's game with Crayak, make more alien species than Crayak can wipe out.
• I Cannot Self-Terminate: Trapped by Father, Toomin longs for death and begs Father for it many times. When he starts to see the possibilities in the game of "music", he sets himself to learning it, despite the creative expression causing him to remember life with more emotional clarity, in the belief that if he's able to defeat Father, Father will finally kill him. It takes some time for him to start to realize that in fact, he can use this to overcome his captor and be free.
• Know When to Fold 'Em:
  • When the Capasins destroy the Polar crystal, Toomin sees that now it's three major Capasin ships, all heavily armed, versus the shielded but unarmed MCQ3 and the fast, tiny, less-armed fighter they've stolen, the "Crate". With no winning move and no one left to protect, he convinces Lackofa to retreat.
  • Much, much later, Toomin is the Ellimist being toyed with by Crayak, who presents him with many Sadistic Choices regarding the fates of many different peoples, and eventually cuts and runs when he can't stand losing anymore. In both cases, the logic of it can't soothe how terrible it feels to turn tail.
• Last of His Kind: The Capasins's attack on Ket leaves only seventy two Ketrans of the Equatorial High Crystal and Polar Orbit High Crystal, and an unspecified number they managed to save from a shattered Tropical crystal, alive and roaming as The Remnant. Crashing on Father's moon killed all of them but Toomin. And when he absorbs Father, he also becomes all that's left of many other species, tribes, families.
• Legend Fades to Myth: In his second body, Toomin becomes well-known through the galaxy as the Ellimist, a cosmic being that ends wars and creates solutions for problems that mortal species can't solve themselves.
• Long-Lived: In the sixty years between the Capasin attack and encountering Father, Toomin went from an adolescent to a leader whose youth is past, but he doesn't consider himself old and it seems like he and Aguella could still have children.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: Father induced one in Toomin after Toomin survives the spaceship crash. Toomin sees himself back on his home planet, mingling with friends and having juvies with Aguella, but whenever he questions the illusions or remembers reality, he snaps back to his true situation: Floating underwater, tangled in Father's tendrils, and surrounded by the preserved corpses of his friends and lover.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Menno is difficult, to say the least. He likes to challenge the order of things and is quite self-aggrandizing. Sixty years after he and his faction accidentally draw the Capasins to nearly wipe out the Ketran people he hasn't let any recriminations keep him from becoming second in command with a drive to depose Toomin. He wants their people to genetically modify their children into ground-bound surface dwellers, since it turns out Ket-like planets are vanishingly rare. They have to adapt or die. After Toomin absorbs Father and drags himself to the surface, he knows he's not who he was and says aloud that Menno was right.
• Mechanical Abomination: After absorbing Father and all the minds it consumed, Toomin creates a massive spaceship fleet to house his new consciousness. He tries to play a benevolent version of this trope, using his Sufficiently Advanced Technology to act as a peacemaker between warring alien races, but then meets Crayak, who at that point, is a planet-sized machine using his own Sufficiently Advanced Technology for destruction. After a series of mind games between them destroys many inhabited planets, the Ellimist flees to the Andalite homeworld and makes a mortal body for himself. When his Andalite avatar takes a look at his original body, he sees a withered, bird-like creature plugged into a massive construct of metal and crystal, and wonders if he can even recognize himself.
  Toomin's narration: It made me sad, somehow, to really see myself from the outside. In my mind’s eyes I was still a Ketran male. To any other eye, I was a terrifying device of unrivaled power.
• Million to One Chance: Toomin becoming one with space and time after being destroyed in three different planes of reality was one such chance. Unfortunately, the fact that it even happened allowed Crayak to replicate it for himself.
• Mind Hive: After Toomin absorbs all the minds in Father, he can call upon the memories and personalities of Father's other victims to aid in his objectives.
• Mutual Envy: Early in the book Toomin's Equatorial High Crystal has a Dance By with the Polar Orbit High Crystal - the two crystals drift past one another, and Ketrans from each are allowed free-flight time to meet briefly in the middle. The Equatorials are astounded that the Polar crystal is developing into an airfoil shape that will be able to generate some lift itself and give its people more free-flight time. The Polars are just as impressed that the Equatorials have constructed a space probe ready to launch with crew aboard.
• Mutually Assured Destruction: When their final game begins, the Ellimist and Crayak realize that if they fight each other all-out they'll destroy themselves and end the universe. Neither finds the idea appealing, so they agree to play an indirect game instead, using mortal aliens as their pieces. There will be a winner, but it will take millions of years.
• My Skull Runneth Over: Toomin has this problem after absorbing all the minds inside Father. It's the reason why he builds a giant spaceship to plug his new mind into.
• Noodle Incident: When Toomin leaves control of the Ketran mothership to Menno, Lackofa tells him "He’ll turn this ship around and head back to his little Utopia." Likely it involved those ideas he had to produce flightless surface-dweller offspring rather than searching for another Ket, and his efforts seem to have gone further than just stating the idea.
• "Not So Different" Remark: As the dying Animorph notes, the Ellimist is a lot like them: a kid who got in over his head, and then did the best he could.
• Pretentious Pronunciation: In the audiobook, Toomin first pronounces his neighbor's name as "La-kova" before saying that Lackofa actually pronounces it "LACK-uv-uh", because he thinks that's droll.
• Oblivious to Love: Toomin manages to be this while Aguella is openly blasting him with pheromones, much to her frustration.
• Older and Wiser: With the timeskip, Toomin's grown from an adolescent longing to be treated as an adult and who has a good head for bad situations into the leader of the Ketran remnant.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: "Ellimist" was Toomin's gamer handle. By the time the series takes place, it's the only name the universe knows him by.
• Questionable Consent: Toomin wants to ask Aguella for permission to absorb her but...
  Could I ask permission? Of a person dead for decades? It was a mockery. She would give the answer I sought. Her will was long gone, long since flown away.
• Rage Against the Heavens: In the framing device a dying Animorph, who the Ellimist pulls aside for a moment to be able to talk to, rages at him.
  "Who are you?! Who are you to play games with us? You appear, you disappear, you play with us, you use us, who are you, what are you? I deserve an answer."
• Rage Quit: Less rage than despair. After millennia of losing to Crayak, Toomin can't take it anymore runs off into Z-space to put as much distance between the two of them as possible, and hears Crayak howl in triumph behind him.
• The Remnant: The surviving Ketrans searching for a new home, in their one ship, numbering less than a hundred in total, are a Dying Race.
• Rock Beats Laser: Toomin saws off a six-foot spar of crystal and with the help of gravity spears a Capasin through the fighter it's in. Later, Father grabs the Explorer in his tentacles and bashes the ship until its hull breaks and he has access to Toomin and his dead comrades.
• Sadistic Choice: Each of Crayak's mind games with Toomin involve one that causes the extinction of at least one alien race, in no small part because Crayak is great at applying Morton's Fork to every scenario.
• Scary Dogmatic Aliens: The Capasins wipe the Ketrans out, leaving only an handful to escape their doomed planet. It turns out the Capasins saw broadcasts of Alien Civilizations and assumed the Ketrans were playing god with real species, and decided to save the rest of the universe from them.
• Schizo Tech: Ketrans have odd levels of technology. They move the crystals they live on with their own wings. Shaping the crystals into airfoils that take less effort to carry, let alone attaching antigrav, is scandalous, but they still have antigrav. In the past century they've developed a "uninet" which seems to be a form of Internet connecting across a crystal, and full-immersion virtual reality video games they can play while lifting. They have sensors in orbit that relay information using drop pods, and complex drones. Yet the only contact between crystals happens when they fly past each other, which is rare. Not having radio contact with the other crystals is justified with the high radiation in Ket's atmosphere but you'd expect small ships to cross the distance, or drones. Two different crystals are working on Z-space technology - one just communicating through it, the other taking spaceships and traveling in it. They also talk about the Generationals and the Illamans, friendly aliens who've visited Ket, as possibly being given access to the uninet and being contacted through Z-space transmissions, but never think of going to them for help or information. It's possible that the aliens are the ones who gave them a lot of this technology and their society hasn't really adapted to it.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: At one point before becoming a Sufficiently Advanced Alien Toomin travels "billions of light years" in whats implied to only be a year or so. A billion light years is quite a sizable distance even in astronomical terms (the observable universe is about 93 billion light years across). Even considering Faster-Than-Light Travel is common in the series, traveling a billion times the speed of light (if not more) is hard to swallow.
• Self-Applied Nickname: Toomin's given name is Azure Level, Seven Spar, Extension Two, Down-Messenger, Forty-one, a name that will change if he's ever assigned elsewhere. Ketrans choose their own personal names and game names, neither of which have any meaning besides sounding nice. They can apparently change their personal names, as a Wise One did - "Farsight" is clearly chosen for its meaning.
• Simulation Game:
  • The Ketrans had a video game called Alien Civilizations, in which players are assigned one alien species each and can make a single change to the species or their world, then pit them against each other in a battle over who makes the other go extinct first. Toomin was terrible at the game because he neglected the "pit them against each other" part and just wanted good and worthy ones to prosper. At the start of the book he makes the cloudy skies of his chosen species's homeworld just a bit clearer in order to inspire them and kick off social development, while his opponent takes his aggressive rodent-race and boosts their reproductive rate, heightening their aggression. The rodents already being better-suited to using technology, they saw the surface of their neighbor world, built rockets, and crossed to eat the other species.
  • All the games Toomin plays with Father are this to one degree or another. Toomin floats suspended underwater hooked up to Father's tendrils, and Father creates illusions of other places where they play. The only one shown is an alien cruise ship where the game is a music contest, and the audience responds as collective judges.
• Space Age Stasis: Father has some Skrit Na, who're already into kidnapping aliens. They're doing this in Animorphs: The Andalite Chronicles too, in spaceships that can be intercepted and disabled by Andalite ships.
• Starfish Alien: It's a bit difficult to imagine Ketrans, who are never described in close detail other than a breezy "They each had '2 plus 4 equals 4 plus 2 and no one the better,' as my pre-sire used to say: two pods, four wings, four eyes, and two arms." Rather, aspects of their bodies are revealed gradually. Pods seem to be equivalent to feet but they can barely shuffle on them. They also have docking talons that they can perch with, dorsal intakes to inhale air, and headquills. Ketran full names are basically addresses to their perches, where they fan their wings to provide lift to the whole crystalline structure.
• Sufficiently Advanced Alien: After defeating Father, Toomin has the combined knowledge and ability of countless engineers and scientists. Synthesizing their efforts he develops technology that can make what seems impossible happen. It's the reason he becomes known as a god throughout the galaxy.
• Surprisingly Normal Backstory: Despite all the terrifying eldritch horror he causes, Father turns out to be nothing more than a kind of huge, predatory sponge that can link with the nervous system of its prey. Toomin notes that when he absorbed Father, he absorbed a hollow shell.
• Transhuman Abomination: Long after he wasn't really a Ketran anymore but long before he Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence, he placed a lesser copy of his mind in a biological body and saw himself as other beings would.
  I looked at the older, fuller me, the machine-spacecraft me. I seemed vast and overwhelming and complex. The old me was a machine, there was no denying that. I could still see a wizened, aged, desiccated Ketran enmeshed in the gears, so to speak, but the soaring crystal spars and titanium machines and composite engine housings and weapons systems extended now for a mile or more.
  It made me sad, somehow, to really see myself from the outside. In my mind's eyes I was still a Ketran male. To any other eye I was a terrifying device of unrivaled power.
• The Power of Rock: The Ellimist defeats Father using music, as his ability to improvise defeats Father's Creative Sterility.
• The Unchosen One: The Ellimist reveals to the dying Animorph that he didn't choose them to fight the war against the Yeerks; they were "An unwitting contribution from the human race to its own survival" in his words. The Drode's accusations of "stacking the deck" in Back to Before listed Tobias, Ax, Marco, and Cassie, so it can be assumed that this is either Jake or Rachel.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom:
  • The remnant Ketrans would have passed by Father's moon after the barest glance from orbit, but Aguella spots strange lights in the sea that remind her of crystalline patterns. Toomin takes a crew down in a small ship to look, and after it's captured the main ship tries to save them and is slapped down by a mile-high wave Father generates.
  • As a Mechanical Abomination Toomin roams the galaxy doing good, confident in the moral justification that he's always doing the right thing, and subtly too! But when he returns after a thousand years to the system of the Inner Worlders and Jallians, he finds that the Inner Worlders had got the idea to use asteroids on their enemies from the Asteroid Thicket he put to block their war. Crayak tells him that there have been multiple such cases, though he admits that quite often things had worked and he had to intervene himself to make them worse again.
• Signed Language: The primitive Andalites communicated this way, as their thought-speech was limited to only projecting emotions at each other.
• Violence Is Disturbing: At the start of the book the Ellimist watches the dying Animorph lash out at him and knows that they've suffered greatly from the terrible effects of both using violence and having it used against them.
• Wake-Up Call: Unambitious gamer Toomin is deeply shocked when he discovers his neighbor Lackofa, who's not much older than him, has been selected for a position aboard Ket's first manned deep space expedition. Having previously been content to waste time repeatedly losing the same game, he regards himself as clinging to childhood at an age where he could be taken as an adult and takes this as a "wake-up memm", indicating that he should start applying himself. As Lackofa explains, it's not that Toomin isn't smart and insightful in his own ways.
• We ARE Struggling Together: Immediately upon escaping the destruction of the Equatorial High Crystal and managing to destroy the ship threatening the Polar Orbit High Crystal, the people on board the MCQ3 start bickering about what to do, both with one another and with the delegation of Polars who come on board and, despite the circumstances, demand the Equatorials submit to their authority. Everyone present ignores Toomin insisting that the Capasins sent more than one ship until three arrive and destroy the Polar crystal. Post Time Skip, the remnant Ketrans are in Teeth-Clenched Teamwork with a constant threat of tearing themselves apart.
• We Come in Peace — Shoot to Kill: The Ketrans' MCQ3 is gearing up to try and meet those aliens who've been shooting down their satellites, in the hopes of brokering peace. Said aliens arrive and without saying a word, slaughter every Ketran settlement they find. The Remnant escapes in the MCQ3 and over the next six decades rebuild their ship to bristle with weaponry. Toomin wonders if that sets the tone for their encounters with aliens from there on out.
• Writers Cannot Do Math: Toomin winds up on a stage in a room that he finds unpleasantly close and airless, but he immediately says that that's how it felt to him, as a Ketran. The room is large enough to hold the stage and a number of tables with audience members at them. But he says the room is a hundred feet square. A hundred foot square space is smaller than a standard parking space, and there's no mention of Unemites being so tiny that such a small room is a good venue.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: The Framing Device is the Ellimist talking to an unnamed dying Animorph. At the end, he tells them that they were good and mattered. Come the last book and we find out who that was - Rachel, who in the previous book from her POV fully believed that she was the team's Token Evil Teammate, and some of the others had come to believe it as well. With that context, telling her that she was good is this.
  "Did I … did I make a difference? My life, and my … my death … was I worth it? Did my life really matter?"
  "Yes. You were brave. You were strong. You were good. You mattered."