22 KiB
[RT][WIP][FF] r!Animorphs: the Reckoning, Ch. 42 (Jake)
-
Author: u/TK17Studios Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning*
-
URL: http://archiveofourown.org/works/5627803/chapters/29080947
-
Score: 59
-
Created: 2017-11-17T10:03:39
Post:
Comments:
u/FTL_wishes [+19] superluminal (an hour later)
Somehow this is the exact sort of scenario that pays homage to the plots/plans from the original Animorph books while still being rational. I'm very very impressed that you managed to reconcile and still keep the original animorphs "flavor". Kudos to you, this is extremely good writing and if you ever publish anything I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
Keep up the good work, you're awesome and this story is awesome.
Quick question, is this story going to be reaching a final showdown sooner rather than later, or are we going to see more of this universe before the finale?
u/TK17Studios [+12] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (8 hours later)
The end is nigh (though not very). I'd estimate something like fifteen more chapters.
u/360Saturn [+2] (5 days later)
I'm happy but also sad hearing that
u/LieGroupE8 [+16] ** (6 hours later)
I woke up this morning to a surprise r!Animorphs chapter. Today will be a good day.
This chapter was superbly written and riveting as usual.
According to K.A. Applegate, author of the original series, Animorphs was always fundamentally a war story. Now that aspect is really starting to show through. Jake is starting to get war-weary. As he becomes emotionally exhausted, his empathy is diminishing and his attitude towards violence more callous. This plays out clearly in the scene between him and Cassie. In the original series, as I recall, Jake did some pretty brutal things in the end, like sending tons of reserve animorphs on a suicide mission, and ejecting a defenseless Yeerk pool into space. Or, you know, major original series spoilers. Jake and Cassie have a falling out at the end of Applegate's series, but in The Reckoning, the Jake/Cassie dynamic is taking a significantly more disturbing turn. I'm wondering if Jake, unable to live with himself in the end, will sacrifice himself to resurrect Cassie.
It rubs me the wrong way that the Animorphs decided to betray everyone during the Telor deal, as opposed to waiting and seeing what happens and having a backup plan in case things go wrong. From their perspective, I think they should have calculated that teaming up with Telor was the best way to kill Visser 3, not stealing a bug fighter and trying to do it themselves. That should have been their backup plan after the betrayal, not plan A. Unless "plan A" was their backup plan, and otherwise they would have waited to see how the deal played out. I guess they didn't have many options, and bringing in a Chee was the best way they could think of to ensure success in a wide variety of possible outcomes.
Anyway, I'm super excited for the insanity that's going to happen pretty soon in the story. Hey TK, whenever you're thinking to yourself "I should be out doing important stuff in the real world rather than writing this story," keep in mind that getting people excited about the rationalist community via good fiction is part of saving the world. As others have said before, this story is not even slightly embarrassing to recommend to people.
u/TK17Studios [+16] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (7 hours later)
So, this may not have been super clear, but they hadn't actually committed to betraying Telor. They sent Jake and Kodep, but if the deal had gone through, they would've popped out and just been like, "Surprise? Okay, so here's where you need to go to pick up the ACTUAL Essak."
u/LieGroupE8 [+3] ** (8 hours later)
Oh, gotcha. Smart move. I am no longer rubbed the wrong way.
u/CouteauBleu [+3] We are the Empire. (16 hours later)
According to K.A. Applegate, author of the original series, Animorphs was always fundamentally a war story
Well, it was always fundamentally a cash-grab. The war story part happened organically, mostly at the end of the series.
u/TK17Studios [+6] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (16 hours later)
I think it was only a cash grab in the middle. The "ghost era," if you will.
Or, like, Scholastic was cash grabbing, but the Applegates actually cared.
u/CouteauBleu [+8] We are the Empire. (16 hours later)
Having read a lot of Applegate and Michael Grant interviews and AMAs: nope, definitely mostly a cash-grab. They said on several occasions that they were doing it in large part for the money, and that the ghostwritten era being terrible was mostly their fault.
Maybe cash-grab is the wrong term. What I mean is, it was way more high concept and improvised than thematic. To paraphrase what they said about their thought process: "We need to sell lots of book to pays the bills! What's something we'd like to write about? Sci-fi! Also, animals! Okay, now we need villains. Those mind-control slugs from Star Trek! Now let's keep stealing stuff from Star Trek and see what works!" The graphic violence, real-world parallels and PTSD stuff happened organically, because that's how these two write stories.
And for the record, cash-grabs can be fun too, and lead to engaging storyverses! Just look at Stargate. (or, arguably, Star Wars)
u/TK17Studios [+3] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (16 hours later)
TIL
u/CouteauBleu [+8] We are the Empire. (16 hours later)
Aaaaand I just destroyed the childhood of the guy writing my favorite fic. Shit.
u/TK17Studios [+21] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (16 hours later)
It's okay. I'll cope by making r!Animorphs dark now, instead of the light and happy it has been.
u/CouteauBleu [+11] We are the Empire. (17 hours later)
Shit.
u/callmesalticidae [+5] writes worldbuilding books (a day later)
If everyone dies, it's your fault now.
u/PM_me_couchsurfing [+4] (2 days later)
Oh man, we are in for a wild ride... Funnily enough, I introduce this fic to my friends by saying "it's super dark and so completely realistic, and so is probably the only story where I really don't know if the author is going to give us a happy ending, or just the most realistic one..."
^(please don't change your planned ending based on this comment...)
u/CouteauBleu [+15] We are the Empire. (3 hours later)
Yay! I am whole again! Let feedback rain like a shower of happy thoughts!
Wow, Jack is not doing okay. It sounds like he's been hit way harder than anyone else. He really really needs emergency vacations. (or to reset himself into a less-stressed version of himself a few weeks ago, with all the obvious problems)
Apparently now everyone has a mini-Marco in their head who keeps calling them idiots. Wonder how he feels / would feel about that.
I hope that at some point someone takes the time to address the "Jake is getting addicted to mind-raping Cassie" problem. Like, the fact that I even had to write this sentence shows how ridiculously downhill this particular thread is going.
Jake is being unfair to Cassie, which I guess is the point. He could have gotten better advice / moral commentary if he'd given her more specific information on what they're trying to do.
Maybe the Animorphs should all have a specific "If I'm waking up in this situation / at this date, it means I'm dead and I shouldn't was time asking redundant questions" morph-form. It's starting to get necessary.
I love the whole negotiation scene between Tyagi, Dragar and Elaine Gallagher. The way she freaks out when freed and the government agents just roll with it is chilling. (I wonder how she reacted to the Yeerks stunning everyone)
I wonder how they found the guy who ends up as a potentially permanent Controller. Recruitment process must have been interesting.
Jake makes a callback to the scene where he left Tom under a forcefield to deal with the Ax crisis. And... yeah, I'm glad he does. It was kind of a monumental dick move to do that.
Stealing the Bug Fighter is a pretty clever plan! It didn't even occur to me they could do that. It's mostly reversible (the crew will know about the Chee unless they kill them) since they can always give the ship back, they're acting against orders, which means they're probably not endangering relationships too hard like they would if Tyagi had ordered it, and it kiiiiiind of neutralizes the Andalite threat (unless the Andalites have planetary shields, which I suspect they have). Honestly, I was expecting something way more evil.
Bonus: they can keep the stolen ship, and give Telor the ship Visser 3 gave them, and they basically have no way to complain about it.
Wow, Yeerk history sounds metal. Also, surprisingly poetic in an translated language :p
Heir to the Empire reference spotted :D (it pinged for me mostly because Rukh appeared in Star Wars Rebels recently)
As soon as it was mentioned that Tyagi showed up in person, I thought she might be a fake. Way too many reasons to not send the real one.
Now there are three Tyagis around! Sort of. The "copying the President" thing is getting to be a security nightmare.
Not sure why Tyagi asks for what time is it? She already knows about the morph armor, she'd have to know about it for the negotiations. Unless Tyagi set up morph!Tyagi in some way, which would be pretty metal but implausible.
One thing they could do is give morph!Tyagi the morphing power, and have her morph-lock into Foster, assuming they kept a "back-up" of him around. This is a great plan with absolutely no vaguely horrifying parts in it. But yeah, it's not so bad after all, Jake!
Keeping track of every "I know you know I know" element is getting complicated, and I think Jake is starting to slip up on that front. More on that later.
Wait, is Jake planning to use the bug Fighter they just risked everything to acquire to just jump at Visser 3? Not sure I like where this is going.
Honestly, I think by that point Visser 3 might be beyond the Animorphs' power to handle. There are way to many deadman switches he could have, pandemics he's delaying, armies of clones / horcruxes he's keeping, etc. At that point it's more logistics than tactics. This is getting more of a job for the US military + Telor.
So, the biggest question now is, who knows what?
First off, what does Visser 3 know? I'm going to guess: not much. He probably has his own plans right now, but I think he's probably too focused on his own projects, the North-Korean invasion, Kandrona, Silat, etc, to be paying the extensive attention he'd need to be aware of Telor's move. Unleeeess he has a way of spying on them that they can't detect (but I don't think so; when he used the Leeran on the yeerk Telor gave him, all he had was generic "newborn" data, not data from the central Telor intelligence).
What does Telor know? Well, first off, they had a plan in place to capture everyone at the rendez-vous. They triggered it when fake-Essak reach the Bug fighter, either because they wanted to be able to extract him, or because Tyagi mentioned the Andalite threat and they panicked. Did they know this Tyagi was a fake? They know about morphing humans, they just don't know about morph-controlling. For all they knew, maybe Tyagi was just a really convincing actor morphed into Tyagi.
Regardless, everyone on the ground has been captured, and no signal was sent. All Telor knows is that Dragar asked for an orbital strike, then their Bug Fighter made a few detours, then went silent. They're probably busy freaking out and/or having really awkward negotiations with the real Tyagi.
What does the military know? Probably everything. For some reason the Animorphs don't seem to be worried about the implications of being tracked by the US. They have no realistic way to run or hide if the US get serious about chasing them. I'm guessing that the US detected that Essak was actually someone in morph, and decided to suspend their contingency plan and let the Animorphs play their plan out once Telor double-crossed them. They're probably trying to intercept the Animorphs without being detected or triggering an international crisis.
Well, that's my thought so far. Great chapter as always!
u/TK17Studios [+10] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (8 hours later)
Yeah, Jake's been hardest hit. In particular, Jake and Rachel are the only two left who lost significant chunks of their family (Marco has his dad, Tobias and Garrett have each other), and Jake doesn't quite have the steely set-it-aside that Rachel does. Plus, people keep looking to him for direction, and he keeps blaming himself for every failure ...
I think if Marco knew about Jake and Rachel's shoulder-Marco, his main reaction would be "about damn time."
It's very subtle, but the intended interpretation was that Jake was going to do something about his "addiction" ... that that goodbye was at least him trying to say goodbye-for-good.
Your thinking matches mine re: what V3 knows, what Telor knows. I'm imagining this probably isn't actually a death-knell for peace talks and negotiations, but that other events might outpace those as a result.
For some reason the Animorphs don't seem to be worried about the implications of being tracked by the US
I don't think that's going to last.
u/None [+9] (4 hours later)
This chapter is awesome. I cannot wait for the next one, which I'm sure is going to be just as awesome. The writing style is engaging. The characterisation is so good that each character, and perhaps more importantly each character's opinion on each other (How Jake sees Marco Vs. How Rachel sees Marco) is unique.
I especially like how Marco and Cassie have, essentially, become opposites as far as their perceived position in the group is. Rachel morph clones Marco when she wants a rational, cold, perhaps a little cruel assessment of her own behaviour/situations. Meanwhile, Jake morph clones Cassie when he wants an ethical evaluation of future plans. Brilliant!
And even better the readers gets these two scenes as perfect juxtapositions of Marco and Cassie. Marco, always thinking, to the point where he most easily rationalises brutal/cruel/coldly rational decisions, and can sometimes even miss a nicer alternative (similarly to how Professor Quirrel also fails to see solutions that involve being nice to people), while Cassie, with her ability to ignore the current situation to unfailingly fallback on her moral code, may have gotten herself killed, but also manages to never transgress past the ethical boundaries she'd set for herself.
All in all, I'm loving it! And I can't wait to see how Jake and Rachel would react to finding out they were morph clones being used by someone else in need of a new perspective :)
u/PM_me_couchsurfing [+3] (2 days later)
Even if all the aliens and tech were to disappear, the human-to-human empathizing part of morphing alone would change the world. Yes, both bad things and good things, but I'd hope for the net good.* I just find the idea of Yeerk Sharing absolutely fascinating, and wonder about the consequences of a species or society where thoughts are brought and processed together, and the lines between the self and the group are blurred
- I suppose one could argue it's more likely to be bad, due to the near infinite suffering a few people might cause to the new intelligences in their brains?
u/CoolGuy54 [+1] (21 days later)
There was a bit of a conversation about this in one of the previous threads, it'd be amazing eh.
u/None [+7] (13 hours later)
I am imagining the chatter in Erek's chat program bursting in activity during that "uh" when he asks about hypothetical questions. Somehow I suspect that the Chee are not totally on the Visser's side yet, if they were leaning in that direction. Best to go with some faction, yeerk, human or otherwise, which doesn't plan on meteor impacts.
Typo: "...Google Maps had snown nothing but..."
u/TK17Studios [+7] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (44 seconds later)
u/malik753 [+8] (3 hours later)
I just wanted to say thank you very much for writing this story and for doing such a good job. As much as I think Animorphs is fertile ground for a rational fanfic, I also don't think many people would do as good a job as you are doing. Please keep it up :)
u/TK17Studios [+5] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (22 hours later)
Wanted to copy this one over from the fanfiction.net reviews, because I was waiting to hear someone say it:
At least they have a clear goal now, though I hope Jake isn't making the same mistake as Cassie (latching onto something actionable to avoid thinking about what the next step really needs to be).
u/CouteauBleu [+5] We are the Empire. (23 hours later)
My reaction to the end of the chapter was "Good lord, is Rachel going to have to talk them out of this again?"
u/kleind305 [+5] (2 days later)
I guess my biggest issue is that it's a complicated story, and the gaps between updates are too big for me to retain all the details. I look forward to the day when this is no longer an issue (because the story is done and can be read all at once).
u/TK17Studios [+3] Author of r!Animorphs: The Reckoning (2 days later)
Yeah. I'm also going to try to accelerate updates when things are really In The Middle Of Things. I acknowledge I've been bad about that.
u/nipplelightpride [+3] (14 days later)
I just binge read this over the past week, two weeks, it’s amazing! Animorphs was a huge part of my childhood and I love seeing it translated into something I can also enjoy now.
u/entropizer [+3] (5 hours later)
Excellent as ever. Jake is nuts and I love it.
u/DaystarEld [+3] Pokémon Professor (9 hours later)
I enjoyed it a lot, particularly how it addressed a number of questions and observations I'd made in earlier chapters: despite feeling short, it feels like a lot happened, which is in line with the amazing pacing of the story that you've been writing so far.
u/CCC_037 [+3] (23 hours later)
If your detector station provides not just a directional measurement, but an indication of distance as well, then you can locate something with a single detector station - "that way, three point one four one kilometres" is a precise location.
Now, the precision and range with which this particular detector can pick up z-space Events - not to mention how it figures out the distance at all - are all pretty incredibly impressive...
u/CouteauBleu [+6] We are the Empire. (23 hours later)
It doesn't detect the direction or the distance of the signal, only that there is a signal.
The way it works is: there is a huge Z-space anomaly somewhere around the Earth. When something emits a Z-space pulse, the pulse hits the anomaly and bounces back to Earth. The detector uses the delay between the echoes to trilaterate the signal's origin.
u/CCC_037 [+3] (a day later)
Okay, that gives the distance, but how does that give you the direction?
Unless... unless the pulses themselves are directional! The only downside of that is the possibility of something really quick happening between pulses...
u/CouteauBleu [+3] We are the Empire. (a day later)
Yeah, I'm not sure how that's supposed to work. Or how Than deduced the trilateration method from a position and random-looking data. Or why the different Z-space signals don't produce interference that would make reading them from a single surface impossible.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (a day later)
Well, it seems that somehow their single point detector is giving direction and distance. How this is happening is a bit mysterious, but it seems reliable...
u/None [+1] (14 days later)
If the anomaly is centered on the sun, and you get a primary signal and then the huge blur of secondary signals, couldn't that help?
u/CCC_037 [+1] (14 days later)
I'm... not following your reasoning?
u/None [+2] (15 days later)
You know the position of the earth and the sun. You then get a ping from the primary signal, and then a long blurred out secondary signal that could be deconvolved using the delay after the primary signal and the assumption of spherical symmetry and the Earth's offset to give a distance to the sun and an angle to the Earth/Sun line. Might still only confine you to a circle of a given radius centered on a point on the Earth/Sun line, but if that circle overlaps with the planet Mars, or a point on Earth's surface...
u/CCC_037 [+1] (15 days later)
Oh, so you're taking the echo off the Sun and other bodies! I get it. I think you'd need a primary and at least three echo to pinpoint it, but there's no shortage of things to echo off so that would be plausible if you could tell the source of the echo from the echo.
u/None [+3] (16 days later)
The three points I speak of are the original signal generator, the point on the anomaly at which a bounce is shortest, and the Earth. All this assumes the anomaly is centered on the Sun rather than Earth, and you will need to mathematically deconvolve the long secondary echo.
u/xamueljones [+2] My arch-enemy is entropy (9 hours later)
Minor nitpick, you have used italics both for thoughts and for the excerpt that Jake is mentally remembering. I recommend that you put the excerpt in bold instead of italics to distinguish it more from the rest of the story. It feels like it would be defined better if readers see it as a piece of history rather than Jake having morbid thoughts.
Also, cheers on doing something this incredible!
u/PM_me_couchsurfing [+2] (2 days later)
Much love!! <3 <3 <3