14 KiB
R!Animorphs: Garrett (AKA In Which There Are Bears)
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Author: u/callmebrotherg now posting as /u/callmesalticidae*
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URL: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11090259/20/r-Animorphs-The-Reckoning
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Score: 50
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Created: 2016-04-15T08:13:45
Post:
Comments:
u/PeridexisErrant [+19] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (an hour later)
That was LOVELY, in a way that CHEMICAL WARFARE usually isn't.
u/narfanator [+10] (an hour later)
Best. Morph. Ever.
u/KnickersInAKnit [+3] (6 hours later)
That was utter brilliance. Best morph pick yet.
u/None [+4] (22 hours later)
I feel like it may be violating the spirit of the rule, but I'm willing to look the other way because it was so damn cool.
u/TK17Studios [+3] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (a day later)
Some of them are over a millimeter long, which is pretty big.
u/KnickersInAKnit [+8] (6 hours later)
So Garrett's got ASD, yeah?
Hope your surgery goes well, /u/TK17Studios
Thanks for getting us the update before going under!
u/CitrusJ [+3] (8 hours later)
Wait what? Why so (the ASD)?
u/KnickersInAKnit [+12] (9 hours later)
Most recent to Ch 16, because I don't want to dig back further :P
Absolute stickler for rules. Ponders on rules-that-aren't-meant-to-be-followed and doesn't understand why this is the case. Keeps following the rules (name yourself, over) even though no one else is.
Incredibly detail fixated. Someone owes Tobias a dollar. The volume of the sphere. The temp of the explosion. Differentiates thought speak based on inflection.
Difficulty with social norms and eye contact:
“Let it go,” Garrett advised in a soft murmur. “Words don’t ever make sense.”
“The interference!” Garrett blurted out, cutting the alien off mid-sentence.
It wasn’t the first time that the others had expressed reservations about the strange little orphan kid. The subject had come up twice since Tobias left, exacerbated by the fact that—in the older boy’s absence—Garrett had spent almost all of his time with Ax. Marco and Rachel and Cassie had seen little of his competence, and a lot of his awkward, antisocial weirdness. It took energy to deal with him, especially as the days dragged on and the little valley felt smaller and smaller—energy that was in short supply, given the stress we were already under.
Pulling his shirt down, he fixed his gaze somewhere in the vicinity of my left nostril, his arms held rigidly by his sides.
- Possible stimming/self-soothing behavior:
We all turned to look at him, and he visibly blanched, dropping his eyes to the dirt and pulling up the neck of his shirt to cover his mouth.
I would deal with it later, along with Ax’s alien dogma and Tobias’s continued skepticism and Marco’s increasing irritability and Cassie’s quiet despair and Garrett’s weird tics (emphasis mine)
Garrett didn’t look up, didn’t speak—just sat there with his shirt pulled up around his mouth, staring resolutely at my shoes. But he nodded.
I nodded. “Fine. Garrett, you’re not acting like you can handle this.”
“Because I won’t look you in the eye.”
“And because you’ve got the shirt over your mouth. And because you’re curled up in a little ball. And there’s that sound you make when we’re not looking. This is pretty much the worst I’ve ever seen you, as far as—that stuff—is concerned. And Tobias isn’t here to—”
Eventually, I got my breathing back under control and was able to open my eyes. Garrett was half a dozen yards away, curled up into a ball, his shirt fully obscuring his face and ooze and slime drenching his clothes.
u/CitrusJ [+8] (19 hours later)
Ah, I'm an idiot, I thought it was referring to Atrial Septal Defect via google and was mind boggled as to why
u/ReversedGif [+4] (9 hours later)
Likely explanation for his unusual thought processes and abilities.
u/CouteauBleu [+6] We are the Empire. (5 hours later)
Okay, that was unexpected. Also, solving problems with bombs.
u/XerxesPraelor [+6] (22 hours later)
I like that each person basically represents a different rationalist virtue, so that this story seems to be rationalist in addition to being rational.
u/None [+6] (22 hours later)
What would you say each person's is?
u/Salivanth [+3] (6 hours later)
Holy crap, that was amazing. I can't wait to see what kind of carnage this has wrought.
u/Nighzmarquls [+3] (9 hours later)
So earlier I got the impression that cassie figured out how to 'construct' hybrid morphs. Or do something to the DNA of base morphs.
And they used this to get 'dinosaurs' or something every similar.
Does anyone else think Cassie needs to get a hold of some databases on what the taxonomy of various animals are/what gene flipping options there are in various ancestral genes?
u/ketura [+3] Organizer (9 hours later)
Eh, that's probably not all that feasible for anything with a hint of complexity. Google says humans have upwards of 20,000 genes, which is way too much info to process, and I imagine cassie intuits most of the process anyway.
u/Nighzmarquls [+3] (10 hours later)
Sure, but knowing that there are say, ancestral traits in chickens to make a T-rex is not the ONLY things available.
if Cassie + morphing power has enough info processing/capability to intuit a DINOSAUR out of a chicken and she is able to intuit hybridization / evolution backtracking by having samples from multiple extant species to reach into the past and resurrect extinct common ancestors.
And they can manage to acquire things like TARDIGRADES.
There is a really good case presented here that cassie with a little more mastery of her powers could probably explore the entire space of ancestral animal life.
Possibly even the entire space of ancestral LIFE ON EARTH.
It won't get us any species that have NO living descendants, but seriously. R!Cassie has access to a number of morphs that staggers the mind.
u/Zaraxia [+4] (11 hours later)
When did Cassie ever get access to dinosaurs?
u/Nighzmarquls [+2] (11 hours later)
It's really REALLY vaguely described so it might be something else but marco uses a morph that can crush a human's skull with it's talons. That runs, has a long tail and feathers.
There is also during the big montage time skip thing that suggests that cassie came up with 'something' that lets people have taloned clawed hands of some kind.
But it's not described as a hork-bajir initially and I'm pretty sure that's not what marco was morphed as because that would have been a lot bigger.
So it's not certain it's dinosaurs, but Cassie appears to have some kind of none-standard animal morph creation ability.
u/TK17Studios [+3] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (4 days later)
I dunno if this detail will ever make it into the text, so it's not super spoilery:
In my head, she started with a cassowary and made it most of the way to a Jurassic Park-style velociraptor. So not too too huge of a leap.
u/Nighzmarquls [+2] (5 days later)
considering you can recover the anatomical trait for things like teeth in a chicken and that trait has been more or less gone for 60 some million years. There is a lot that can be recovered.
However it does depend on how she goes about doing it, is she able to cross traits from morphs? or is it just 'noodling around in the same genome/epigenome/organism'?
u/TK17Studios [+2] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (5 days later)
The latter, so far. She can flip genes and cause single-point mutations (only those that result in a living body).
u/Nighzmarquls [+3] (5 days later)
That is still rather significant, does she have access to the symbiotic flora/fauna of a morph? Are these included in a given acquiring event? Prior to cassie's power reveal I presumed that the morphs were pretty consistently an atomic scan of the 'recognized living/vital' tissues of a body.
But being able to tweak a body template's genes, evaluate if it's viably alive and then letting it be created is still pretty potent. It suggests that she might actually be able to do aging/regression extrapolation at the least.
Which if you crossed that with say, turning off the growth hormone shut off genes means Cassie can probably 'gigantify' any animal she wants that won't die under its own weight.
Or tweak it so it grows smaller. Or is younger.
Of if they get a particular species of aphid have a morph that is born pregnant and or some kind of other weird biology.
Cassie is very very very potent and we haven't even gotten into the fun stuff, like making a morph of some one that has an injured or diseased organ that grows a secondary in a skin sack on the outside for easy removal.
u/TK17Studios [+2] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (5 days later)
No answers. Good questions. =P
u/TimTravel [+3] (9 days later)
I'm loving Rational Animorphs! I just caught up after being a few chapters behind. Super psyched my prediction about weaponized thought-speak was true. I liked Garrett's different thought-style. Not as exotic as Aximili's but still interestingly characterized.
A subtler mistake on an earlier chapter: ETA = estimated time of arrival (like "four-o-clock" or "tomorrow"), ETE = estimated time en route (like "five minutes" or "a day"). Possibly intentional if the character who said it (Jake I think) doesn't know this. Basically everyone gets it wrong so it's believable.
Am I correct in understanding that if you morph a controller you only get the host, not the yeerk in the host? If so, how did they get the yeerk's name? Did the human just know it?
I'd appreciate it if you refresh my memory on the morph interference copy thing. I'm still a bit confused.
If the morphing time limit is based on your natural form then if somehow you could cheat yourself into having a small animal be your "natural" form then you could stay morphed much longer. I think that's impossible though, unless natural form = brain in a life-support jar / stasis field or something, which requires tech they very much do not have. If they ever do manage to morph a yeerk in a way that transfers their memories to the morphed form then that would allow a very small natural form.
I liked pushing objects and people and even morphed allies into z-space as a strategy. Can you teleport objects through Z-space by sharing morphs?
u/TK17Studios [+2] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (10 days later)
ETA = deliberately wrong. It hurts every time I type it.
It's correct that you don't get the Yeerk. Tidwell just knew his Yeerk's name, because Yeerks often communicate directly/verbally with their hosts.
Morph interference => When you morph into a creature, its brain grows with artificial Yeerk tissue, largely generated from the creature's own genome to avoid autoimmune problems. That tissue responds to Z-space signals from the morpher.
If I acquire from Cassie-in-a-morph, then when I turn into that animal, the brain I'm controlling will also have the Cassie-flavored Yeerk tissue (because it would've been picked up in the acquiring scan). So the brain will respond to both my signals and Cassie's signals (if Cassie is also nearby and in morph). Mine will dominate, but hers will be enough to cause interference and spasms.
Re: natural form ... yes. There are other ways to make your natural form be smaller, too (some more unpleasant than others).
Can't teleport through Z-space, unfortunately. You stash your body in a pocket dimension, and it's not really accessible by anybody else. There are a lot of Z-spaces, in this sense—if you think of it as a dimension, there are a lot of different places to stash something "up high."
u/NotUnusualYet [+3] (a day later)
we were already over a minute and a half past moment when the first sodium canister
Missing a "the" between "past" and "moment"?
u/TK17Studios [+2] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (a day later)
Yes. Thanks!
u/QuicklyStarfish [+2] (3 days later)
well i wrote a few paragraphs about how much I enjoyed binging this story up until now and how great it is but bloody Reddit doesn't do the ancient obvious thing of preventing you from accidentally reloading (with a dialog), or saving your content. Fuck.
it's great. HPMOR + Egan + super-rationalization of canon that's so good it's now true to me, and good characters. yay.
Daaarn reddit.
keep up that great work.
u/callmebrotherg [+2] now posting as /u/callmesalticidae (3 days later)
The Lazarus app for chrome will help you there.