Animorphs: The Andalite's Gift - TV Tropes

Narrator: All six Animorphs

The Animorphs are scattered to the winds as a living tornado hunts them down one by one.

Takes place between Animorphs: The Visitor and Animorphs: The Alien.

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Tropes:

• Amnesia Danger: Rachel spends most of the book lost in the woods since she can't remember who she is. She starts figuring out a bit about morphing early but doesn't know to morph something that can find civilization, and doesn't know that Shapeshifting Heals Wounds, so she doesn't re-morph bear out of fear that it will still be gravely injured.
• Amnesia Episode: Rachel gets mobbed by jays when she flies too close to their nest as a bald eagle, and hits her head on a tree on the way down. She instinctively morphs to heal her concussion, but morphing doesn't fix memory loss, so she's left wandering the woods in a daze all Saturday. She regains her memory after Marco hits her with a truck that evening; luckily she's an elephant at the time.
• Amnesiac Resonance: Rachel doesn't remember how her morphing powers work, but she does spontaneously remember which animal she needs to morph into to escape sticky situations when she finds herself in danger. When Cassie meets back up with her, despite some uncertainty Rachel decides to trust her, and when Rachel twice says recklessly bold things Cassie tells her "My girl, Rachel" affectionately.

  "You may have lost your memory, but you're still Rachel."

• An Arm and a Leg: Whenever something strikes at the Veleek, it chews instantly through whichever limb was raked across it and leaves a bloody stump. Rachel finds this out as a grizzly bear and has to hobble awkwardly away on her back legs after it carries off Ax. Later, when Ax is a flea on Visser Three and demorphs enough to engage its capture drive, it takes off the arm of a Hork-Bajir trying to stop it.
• Badass in Distress: The Veleek succeeds in capturing Ax and Marco, but both of them are able to work together to escape the Blade Ship.
• Bond One-Liner: While discussing the Veleek towards the end of the book, the kids compare it to a hunting dog. At the climax, it tries to capture Cassie and she morphs whale, dragging it down into the ocean which drowns all its constituent particles.

  <Hey, Visser Three! I washed your dog for you!>

• Borrowed Catchphrase: In Rachel's absence, Jake is the one who says "Let's do it" to a crazy plan.
• Continuity Nod: This book is set directly after book 7, in which the Animorphs destroyed the ground-based Kandrona generator, and therefore not long after book 5. Chapman, meeting with a pair of Controllers placed with the police and the news, says that they're meeting in the mall because it's widely (correctly) suspected that after Visser Three captured the "Andalite bandits" Visser One had them released to embarrass him, and since she has supporters on Earth they might sabotage efforts again. He also tells them that with the Kandrona rationing, the Visser is looking for any excuse to eliminate hungry Yeerks.
• Cowardly Lion:
  • Ax is compelled by Andalite honor to kill Visser Three for murdering Elfangor. He's able to justify not trying it in previous encounters because the Animorphs were there, and attacking the Visser would have put them in danger. Visser Three gets close to him here after Ax is captured, and Ax is terrified of him and of the ten Hork-Bajir pointing Dracon beams at him and doesn't strike. He tells himself that he probably would have been killed as soon as he struck, but he feels like he's lying to himself. Still, this doesn't stop him from making a very audacious and successful attempt to escape.
  • Cassie spends much of the book fearing that she's a coward, although none of the others believe it and Tobias is baffled at the very idea. In particular she's convinced of this after she, Marco, and Rachel are all in one place and the Veleek has to choose one of them to take away. It takes Marco, which Cassie believes is her fault, although even Rachel had frozen trying not to attract its attention. In fact every Animorph feels like a coward at times, which Tobias chats freely with her about near the end of the book.
• Crazy Homeless People: Rachel encounters an escaped ex-host living in the woods. At first, the woman talks to her like an annoyed store clerk dealing with a customer trying to return an item, but then becomes hostile because she thinks Rachel is a Controller trying to recapture her.
• Deadly Dust Storm: The Veleek, a swarm of microscopic alien mites from Saturn, is described as a dusty, horizontal tornado that then resolves into a solid, amorphous flying shape covered in gnashing toothy maws, dozens of randomly-placed staring eyes, and whirling blades which rapidly chews through anything in between it and them.
• Dramatic Irony: Tobias comments to Marco and Ax about seeing a bald eagle get taken down by a flock of jays, not realizing that the eagle he saw was Rachel in morph.
• Drives Like Crazy: Marco "learned" how to drive from playing WipEout. He causes chaos across the road, terrifies all his passengers, and somehow manages to collide with Rachel in elephant morph.
• Eek, a Mouse!!: Darlene specifically dis-invites Marco to her party. Marco, convinced that actually she "like likes him", recruits Ax to morph mouse with him and attend anyway, spying on her and making her think someone nearby said "Marco". Darlene reaffirms her active dislike of Marco and says he's not funny, so he races across her foot and chases after her when she freaks out and runs.
• Extra-Strength Masquerade: Justified. The Veleek is big and obvious and doesn't know or care about the Yeerks' covert invasion, so when it senses morphing energy at a house party it manifests above the house, a huge amorphous shape of teeth and eyes and blades, and turns the house to rubble. When it senses some at a highway, it manifests at the highway and mulches a semi truck. In broad daylight, with dozens of witnesses. Local news covers the story and says that the house and highway were hit by a freak tornado, and that some of the kids described it as a monster but of course, they were frightened. Cassie, spying on a meeting between Chapman and Controllers placed in the police and media, finds out that the Yeerks are actively covering the situation up and are quite stressed in the process, wishing the Visser hadn't gone with such a difficult-to-conceal plan.
• Flea Episode: Ax finds that he has fleas, which prompts Marco into recruiting him to help him spying on a girl in exchange for flea powder. Ax later acquires and morphs into one of the fleas to escape from his prison cell in the blade ship. Whether shrinking down "cured" him and left them scattered on the floor of the cage or whether they reappeared on his demorphed body later is never said.
• Forgot About His Powers: Even though Marco (and others) fell out of a damaged ship in Animorphs: The Encounter and morphed bird on the way down, when he and Ax have dropped out of the Blade ship Marco panics, screams, and yells at Ax, and when Ax tells him to just demorph and become a bird he stops and asks "Is there time?"
• The Friend No One Likes:
  • In a general outside-of-the-Animorphs sense, Marco. Tons of kids were invited to Darlene's pool party including Cassie, who Darlene has nothing in common with. Marco was specifically disinvited (something that several other guests approve of) because he'd pulled a prank at one of her parties a few years ago that panicked everyone, and because he's the kind of self-centered immature boy who decides to take revenge on someone for considering him not cute and not funny.
  • Within the Animorphs, Ax, though this is downplayed, in that no one dislikes Ax and they're very worried when he disappears after Rachel does. But this is just before book 8, where he opens up a bit; at this point, he doesn't even consider himself an Animorph. Jake at least is more concerned about Rachel.

  Ax was a new friend, sort of. And an alien, not someone we had grown up with. But Rachel was my cousin. She was Cassie’s best friend. And we looked up to Rachel. She was fearless. She made the rest of us braver than we might have been without her.

• The Glorious War of Sisterly Rivalry: Touched upon when one of Rachel's flashbacks depicts Jordan complaining about how Rachel gets all the attention.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Ax as a flea sneaks onto Visser Three and demorphs partially to attract the Veleek, forcing Visser Three to fend off his own pet monster and reveal its weakness.
• It's All My Fault: Tobias blames himself for not seeing and understanding everything. Cassie, feeling like a coward, blames herself for Marco's capture, though he doesn't blame her and tries to tell her it's okay. Jake blames none of the other Animorphs for anything that goes wrong and himself for everything, since as the leader he feels he has to be able to make the right calls. This is early enough in the series that no one has any simmering resentment towards anyone else.
• I'm Not Doing That Again: Marco and Ax agree that escaping the Blade Ship by skydiving, demorphing from gorilla and flea, and morphing into osprey and harrier were exciting. They also agree to never do it again.
• Insane Equals Violent: Rachel is largely sympathetic to the woman ranting about Yeerks while living in a shack in the woods. After all, at the moment they're both trying to deal with their brains betraying them. When she shows a little too much interest the woman becomes convinced that Rachel is a Controller trying to get her re-infested and shoves her into a cellar, then sets the shack on fire to try to kill her.
• "Instant Death" Radius: The Veleek can shred through matter in seconds, meaning fighting it directly is suicide. Luckily, it's not out to kill the Animorphs, just capture them.
• I Want Them Alive!: The Veleek could easily kill the Animorphs, but Visser Three programmed it to capture them instead, because he'd rather have them as host bodies for his most loyal minions. He does menacingly tell Ax that if things drag on too much longer he will accept the corpses of the "bandits" instead.
• The Juggernaut: The Veleek cannot be stopped, only slowed down by obstacles or distracted
• Kill It with Water: The tiny bugs that make up the Veleek are vulnerable to water, which sticks to their tiny bodies and pulls them out of the mass. Visser Three uses water from a sprinkler system when it tries to grab him, and later the Animorphs trick it into trying to catch Cassie as she morphs into a whale over the ocean.
• Logical Weakness: The Veleek can only lift so much weight at once. While a gorilla and an Andalite are no problem for it, an elephant is heavy enough that it can only get it three feet off the ground before having to settle back down. A humpback whale is far too much for it to even think of carrying.
• More Teeth than the Osmond Family: Whenever the Veleek takes its solid form, it's a great flying amorphous mass covered in gnashing toothy maws, staring eyes, and whirling blades.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain!: When Ax tricks the Veleek into trying to capture Visser Three, the Visser screams for water and someone turns on the bridge sprinklers. The spray of water catches the Veleek particles and weighs them down, which Ax makes a note of.
• Not Even Human: Not that anyone thought the Veleek was human, and they're ready to kill things that are as smart as humans if they have to, but in the "inverse of It Can Think" way it applies. The Animorphs worry that the Veleek knows who they are, since it has seen them in their human forms and surely must be intelligent. In fact it is not and knows or understands very little. It senses the energy released during morphing, so it pursues the source, captures it, and carries it to the Blade Ship up in the atmosphere, where it's fed. It's just intelligent enough to know that water hurts it and that it can't chew through it like everything else between it and its quarry.
• Not So Above It All: As they're falling from the sky, Ax calmly talks a screaming Marco into demorphing so he can morph into a bird. When Ax demorphs from a flea, he also starts screaming as he falls.
• Not So Stoic: Ax, who is normally The Spock, snickers deviously when he tricks the Veleek into attacking Visser Three.
• Out of Focus: Tobias, being unable to morph and a diurnal bird in a book that has quite a chunk dedicated to night scenes, is a bit sidelined. While he sees the Veleek form over and destroy Darlene's house, he's not part of the scene where the non-Rachel Animorphs discuss what happened there. When the sun goes down he has to retire to a tree, and in the morning complains that he can't believe how much the others got up to while he was sleeping. Feeling extraneous has him working harder at the end of the book despite flying over water being exhausting.
• Polymorphic Plummet:
  • Jumping out of the Blade Ship, Marco and Ax have to demorph and morph birds to survive. Marco, despite having done something like this before, acts like this is his first time.
  • Invoked. The Animorphs are attacked multiple times by a swarm organism called a Veleek that Visser Three trained to be attracted to morphing energy, but realize it's vulnerable to water and can barely lift Rachel's elephant morph. This leads to a Zany Scheme where insect Cassie is carried by Tobias as high in the air as possible over the ocean while the others distract the Veleek, then rapidly demorphs in freefall and then morphs a humpback whale. The Veleek tries to grab her and carry her away but is instead dragged into the sea and drowned, while Cassie emerges no worse for wear, due to it having slowed her fall.
• Pop Culture Is Poor Training: Marco insists on driving the truck because of his experience with a driving game, but he's awful at it. He claims he's great at the game, but according to Jake he always crashes.
• Psychic Dreams for Everyone: Cassie's been having nightmares about a malevolent force making her choose who lives and who dies. When the Veleek's hovering above her, Rachel, and Marco, Cassie thinks that it's come true and she can decide who it takes. She thinks she should morph so it takes her and not her friends, but like them she's frozen in fear. It takes Marco.
• Scarily Competent Tracker: The Veleek can track the energy used in morphing, meaning the Animorphs encounter it any time they try to morph within its range. Enough of this energy clings to them in morph that it continues to follow them, though someone else morphing always draws it away.
• Soft Water: Averted, there's considerable concern about Cassie hitting the water at speed and how it will be as hard as concrete. Fortunately, while the Veleek can't lift her whale form, it slows her down enough that impact only stuns her.
• Smart Cetaceans: Quite downplayed compared to Animorphs: The Message where a whale had dialogue and helped extensively, but the humpback at the end of this book does comment to the dolphin-Animorphs that "strange clouds" are overhead. Cassie thinks the communication between dolphins and whales is too much of a Starfish Language for her to explain that she wants to acquire and morph it.
• Solar System Neighbors: The Veleek is an energy-eating animal from Saturn. Visser Three trained it to track the energy of morphing, then capture whoever was giving that off and taking them to the Blade Ship, where it's fed energy from the engines.
• Spoiled Sweet: The Animorphs' classmate Darlene is a rich girl who regularly throws parties at her large house and invites wide swaths of her peers, including Cassie, who readily admits in her own books to wearing filth-stained boots to class. The parties probably benefit Darlene by making her more popular and letting her show off her family's wealth, but they aren't excuses to mock or humiliate anyone and the Animorphs just think of them as a good time. The worst that can be said about her is that she's afraid of mice and doesn't like Marco, and he immediately proves why she doesn't like him.
• Super-Persistent Predator: The Veleek is not an intelligent being and doesn't consciously understand that it's being tasked with capturing morphers to bring back, so no matter how close it comes to capturing an Animorph it is always drawn away by someone else morphing and releasing a fresh burst of morphing energy. But when it's not being drawn away it pursues relentlessly, slowed only by the necessity of chewing through anything between it and them. Marco and Jake, fleeing as wolves, can't even outrun it through deep woods with large trees, only keep it at a steady distance. It also doesn't know to try to maintain The Masquerade, so it also readily pursues them among ordinary humans, chewing through houses in broad daylight and causing a lot of work for the Controllers trying to cover this up.
• Surprisingly Happy Ending: Animorphs books rarely end as happily as this one. There's usually some indication of lingering trauma and dread even when they manage to come out ahead. This book ends in the total defeat of the Veleek, Cassie having overcome her fear of being a coward and making a Bond One-Liner, and everyone being happy.
• Uncertain Doom: The ex-Controller Rachel meets in the woods traps Rachel in the cellar of her shack and sets the shack on fire. After that she vanishes from the narrative, with no word on if she escaped or perished herself. Marco and Jake, arriving on the scene afterwards as wolves, catch Rachel's scent, Ax's scent, and the unnamed woman's and have a Fresh Clue, but don't mention the ex-Controller's scent leaving the scene. In the TV episode adapting this book she survives and spies on the group, but she never appears again in the actual book series.
• Unexpectedly Human Perception: You wouldn't expect this from flea morph, whose eyesight Ax calls just a series of gray dots that don't even form an image. More light simply means more gray dots. But he can see and identify the hairs around him without issue when he's on something furry, and when he leaps through the Veleek he can quite clearly see that its particles are tiny alien animals, and make out details of their anatomy.
• With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Not morphing sentient beings without permission is one of the Animorphs' unwritten rules, but they bend or break it when pressed enough, as here when Cassie acquires a humpback whale. She feels guilty, but thinks that the slow Starfish Language between dolphins and whales won't allow the kind of explanation she'd have to give.
• Would Hurt a Child: For the second and final time (the first was Animorphs: The Predator) Visser Three looks at Ax and says that he's just a child. This of course does not earn any clemency from him.
• You Are Grounded!: After an eventful night running from the Veleek, culminating in it taking Marco away, Jake gets home very late and is grounded. He's too beaten-down to argue. Happily, Marco returns in the morning and the grounding is lifted once he cleans the garage, a chore his mother had been wanting his father to get around to and which he was able to foist on Jake.
• You Have Failed Me:
  • A Taxxon-Controller says it's difficult to keep a visual on the Veleek. It's right, but Visser Three cuts it open anyway and demands to know if anyone else thinks it's difficult to follow his orders.
  • The Veleek takes Marco up to the Blade Ship, leaving Rachel and Cassie behind. The Visser orders several of his people to capture them and threatens to feed them to Taxxons if they fail. We don't get back to see it happen, but the girls do escape.
  • When Ax morphs into a flea, one of the Hork-Bajir-Controllers opens his cell to look for him against Visser Three's orders. Ax leaps out of the cage and onto the Hork-Bajir, and immediately senses that it's been killed.