The Warning, published in February 1998 and written by Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant, is the sixteenth book in the Animorphs series. It is the fifth book narrated by Jake and his fourth book as sole narrator.

Synopsis

Plot

Jake is using his computer, where he types into a search engine "Yeerk". Expecting nothing, Jake is amazed to see that there was one match to the word. He later gathers the other Animorphs at Marco's house because Jake needed a computer and Marco's computer was better than his. He shows them the web page, which is entirely devoted to letting the world know about the Yeerks. Jake clicks on the "Types of Yeerks" page, which shows drawing of different aliens, one of which looks just like a Hork-Bajir. Marco, Cassie, and Rachel think that the page is either a mix of truth and lies, or just a coincidence. Jake then clicks onto a list of known Controllers and points to the name "Chapman". He wonders why whoever put the site together doesn't mention The Sharing, which means either they don't know about The Sharing or this is a Yeerk trap.

Cassie decides that they should check out the chat room, but Jake's not sure it's safe, Marco offers to hack the system, but Ax offers to encode Marco's software in a way that will make it impossible for anyone to trace them. Marco reluctantly agrees and Ax sits down and types in a code making Marco's computer hack-proof in just three minutes. In the chat room, the Animorphs watch a conversation that's going on, one person that goes by username "Chazz" talks about how serious the Yeerk threat is, while username "Gump8293" is worried because his dad maybe a Controller. The Animorphs believe this could be a Yeerk scam, but Cassie isn't so sure. She thinks there's something real about the people in the chatroom, especially Gump. Jake also has the same feeling, but Ax couldn't tell, and Marco thinks it's a little of both: the web page was created by Yeerks to help them locate any humans who knows about them, while at the same time, it got a little out of the control. Jake then asks Ax to hack in and penetrate the protected screen name files, but after a few minutes of typing furiously, he is unable to get into Web Access America's central computer. Marco then comes up with an idea: they travel to WAA's main office, sneak in and get the real names behind the screen names from the main computers.

The Animorphs gather at the airport on a Saturday morning. Because it would be too far away for them to travel to and back from WAA's main office. Their plan is to morph into houseflies and sneak on board the plane. At Web Access America, Marco and Ax hack into the WAA records and discover the identities of some of the screen names on the Yeerk website. They need a distraction, so the children morph and create a spectacle for anyone working in the offices. One of the users from the website is the founder of WAA himself, Joe Bob Fenestre – the second richest man in the country.

Back home, Jake needs to form a new plan to infiltrate Joe Bob Fenestre's multi-million dollar compound. Cassie objects, instead wanting to save a young child on the Yeerk website going by the screen name of Gump from confessing to his Controller father what he knows. Jake and the others overrule Cassie, deciding that Fenestre is the more pressing matter. Jake, without any prior intelligence or preparation, sends himself and the Animorphs to the billionaire's property. They are immediately attacked by gun-toting humans and pack hounds, and Rachel is shocked unconscious by a bug zapper. Ax is captured by the dogs. Jake and the others, shaken, need to find another way to break in. Jake travels to The Gardens zoo complex, and acquires a rhinoceros morph. He morphs and breaks through the entrance to the Fenestre mansion, impervious to human shotguns. The others follow, and morph their standard battle morphs.

They find Fenestre, along with Rachel and Ax in a suspended time state known as "biostasis". The Yeerk controlling Fenestre explains to Jake, Cassie, Marco and Tobias that he is Visser Three's twin brother – Esplin 9466 Lesser. Visser Three, unwilling to share his power with his sibling, banished him to Earth as a lowly telephone operator. Esplin, combining his Yeerk technical knowledge with his host's human knowledge, created a web service that would serve as a vast pool of information for the Yeerk invasion. The Visser was enraged, and has been plotting to kill him.

Jake asks Esplin how he survived without a Yeerk pool. Esplin unemotionally explains that he finds human-Controllers on the Yeerk forum. Every three days he has them kidnapped, splits the hosts' heads open, and feeds on the Yeerk inside. Fenestre admits that he is a cannibal serial killer. A horrified Cassie tries to attack him, but Jake stops her. He'd rather allow Esplin to kill as many Yeerks as he could – even it means sacrificing the host. Cassie is enraged. Jake threatens Esplin, and they leave with Rachel and Ax.

The next day at school, Jake looks for Cassie, but he doesn't see her and realizes that she wasn't in school and Jake knew exactly where she was. He makes his way to the school roof and flies off in his falcon morph, and searches around for the nearest elementary school, where he spots Cassie in wolf morph speaking to a young boy. The boy pets Cassie and walks back to his classmates, and Cassie jumps the fence and fades towards some nearby trees.

She explains to Jake that she pretended to be a magic, talking wolf to Gump, and told him not to go onto the chat room again, to not talk about Yeerks to his father, and to never trust his father. Cassie then cries over doing such a terrible thing, but Jake explains to her that it was the best she could and that it is difficult to fight evil without doing some along the way. She walks away and Jake doesn't stop her. A few days later, the news reports a fire at Fenestre's mansion, with Jake remarking that Fenestre's protection from the Animorphs no longer exists. The question of who committed the arson is left open to interpretation, although it is heavily implied that one or more members of the Animorphs were responsible.

Appearances

Protagonists

• Jake
• Rachel
• Tobias
• Cassie
• Marco
• Ax

Antagonists

• Esplin 9466 Lesser (First Appearance) (Final Chronological Appearance)
  • Joe Bob Fenestre (Body) (Only Appearance)
• Human Guards
• Dogs (Rottweilers)
• Tom's Yeerk
  • Tom (Body)

Other Characters

• Gump8293 (Only Appearance)
• Steve
• Jean

Locations

• California, United States
  • Berenson Residence
  • Peter's Residence
  • Taco Bell (First Appearance)
  • Web Access America Headquarters (Only Appearance)
  • Joe Bob Fenestre's Mansion (Only Appearance)
    • Fenestre's Homemade Yeerk Pool (Only Appearance)
  • The Gardens
  • Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic

Organizations

• Animorphs
• Web Access America (Only Appearance)
• Yeerk Empire (Mentioned)
  • The Sharing (Mentioned)
• Taco Bell

Items

• Dracon beam
• Kandrona (Mentioned)
  • Kandrona rays (Mentioned)
• Blade ship (Mentioned)

Other Mentions

Characters

• Alloran-Semitur-Corrass
• Edriss 562
• Esplin 9466 Prime
• Hedrick Chapman
  • Iniss 226
• Hork-Bajir and human-Controllers
• Elfangor-Sirinial-Shamtul
• Ellimist
• Gedds
• Leerans
• Peter
• Eva
• Skrit Na
• Jeremy Jason McCole

References

• Visa
• Yahoo
• Spice Girls
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind
• Cardassian
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
• Narn
• Babylon 5
• Bill Clinton (as President)
• Al Gore (as Vice President)
• Newt Gingrich (as Speaker of the House)
• Chief Justice of the Supreme Court
• John Tesh
• Snoop Dogg
• Michael Jordan
• Baywatch
• Papa John's

Major/Highlighted Events

• Visser Three's Yeerk name is revealed to be Esplin 9466 Prime.
• It is revealed that Esplin 9466 Prime has a younger twin brother known as Esplin 9466 Lesser, who used Yeerk technology to create Web Access America (WAA) and make his collaborative human host, Joe Bob Fenestre, into the second wealthiest man in the United States. When Visser Three had sentenced 9466 Lesser to starve from Kandrona starvation, Fenestre's Yeerk used the WAA chat rooms to find known Controllers, some of whom were children, and lure them into secretly meeting with him. He would then kill them and extract the Yeerk from their head, since the Yeerk would have some Kandrona in their system, and then grind the Yeerk into an edible food in order to ingest his required Kandrona intake.
• Cassie, despite her usual pacifist nature, attempts to kill Joe Bob Fenestre and his Yeerk due to them killing human hosts for food, and even goes as far as asking Jake to do it for her.
• The Animorphs discuss the morality of acquiring and morphing humans for the first time, with Marco, Rachel and Ax supporting it; Jake remains semi-neutral while Cassie is opposed to it, believing that it should not be done without a human's consent.
• Rachel and Marco's relationship is touched upon for the first time, with Jake wondering whether the two tease one another because they secretly like each other, or whether they really dislike one another. The book is filled with various insults or remarks said between the two, with Marco and Rachel both complimenting the other if they delivered a good comeback.
• In order to save Rachel and Ax, who were captured by Fenestre's Yeerk, Jake offers to spare Fenestre and his Yeerk as long as they stay inside the mansion and never leave, despite Cassie's desire for the Animorphs to kill them. A few days later, the mansion is mysteriously burned down and Jake remarks that with the mansion gone, his deal with Fenestre/9466 Lesser is now null and void. Fenestre and his Yeerk's fate are left unanswered, with Jake deciding not to reveal who was responsible for the arson. It is heavily implied that the Animorphs, or at least Jake, Cassie and possibly Rachel, burned down the house specifically as a loophole to void their deal with Fenestre's Yeerk, allowing them to kill him without breaking their promise. Fenestre and his Yeerk never make any future appearances in the series.

Morphs

Trivia

• The cover quote is, "Now it'll take more than the truth to set you free...."
• The inside cover quote is, "Sometime you have to blow your horn...."
• This marks the first time that Jake communicates via thought-speak with a Yeerk/Controller, in this instance being Esplin 9466 Lesser. He is the fifth Animorph to do so, after Ax, Marco, Cassie, and Rachel.
• This book also marks the third instance where the Animorphs are on a mission on Earth outside of their hometown, following their rescue of Ax in The Message and their Sario Rip adventure in the Amazon Rainforest in The Forgotten.
• When Ax is asked to identify the green aliens that are often described in alien conspiracies and abductions, he refers to the Skrit Na, and an adventure that Elfangor once had with them. Elfangor's adventure with the Skrit Na is a reference to the events of The Andalite Chronicles.
• ANIBASE: "Cassie is the only dissenting voice amongst the Animorphs regarding the Internet in this book – and it turns out that she feels the same way Katherine Applegate does! Here's what K.A. had to say about the Internet:
  • "I'm afraid I have a fairly one-sided view of the Internet. I realize I'm using it right now, but aside from this sort of experience, I find the Web a huge disappointment. If I want research, I can get what I need ten times faster in any Barnes & Noble. As for chat rooms, they tend to sink rather quickly to the level of the lowest common denominator, which, given the anonymity of the Web, is pretty low. Then again, maybe I'm just old.""

Goofs/Inconsistencies

• Despite the series releasing one book a month, the ad for this book featured in the previous book, which was released in January 1998, states "releasing in March".
• The inside cover features Jake in rhino morph at The Gardens and an osprey soaring in the air above; Jake did not morph into the rhinoceros until he was outside Joe Bob Fenestre's mansion, and the only one in raptor with him was Tobias, who was in his red-tailed hawk form and does not possess an osprey morph.
• Jake types the word "Yeerk" into an online search engine, despite the fact that it is a Yeerk language word and that he would not know the English spelling for it.
• Marco's attitude changes from the previous book. In The Escape, he wants Jake to admit that they would all stay the same after the war as they were before. In this book, he mocks Jake for thinking that he could go back to his old way of life after the war.
• Rachel in grizzly morph handles a mop, which requires a dexterity that bears don't have as they lack opposable thumbs.
• When Jake, Rachel and Cassie morph in the WAA headquarters' janitor's closet (with Tobias demorphing to his red-tailed hawk form), Jake mentions that everyone has their shoes tied around their necks except for Tobias, stating that they would leave Tobias' shoes behind in the closet and would retrieve it later. However, after providing a distraction, the four head into an elevator where they demorph (with Tobias assuming his human morph). Despite not having returned to the closet, Tobias has shoes on his feet again.
• When Jake splits the chat room members into two groups – those who live outside of their town that they can't help and those who are close enough for them to help – he places Chazz in both categories.
• Jake is able to acquire the rhino while he is still partially in falcon morph, despite having not yet demorphed entirely.
• Esplin 9466 Lesser kills a Controller every three days in order to get his required Kandrona intake, as Yeerks cannot go more than three days without Kandrona rays. However, he wouldn't always have three days worth of Kandrona to consume, because the Yeerk he feeds on would not always have three days worth of Kandrona in their body at the time of their consumption; their last trip to the Yeerk pool could have been two or three days prior to their death. 9466 Lesser would only get three days worth of Kandrona with his rigid "kill every three days" schedule if every Controller he targeted had fed from the Yeerk pool on the same day he killed them.

Gallery

"Someone took a picture of me? Not cool. Do you see what I'm wearing? I'm Spandex-boy. Totally not cool." The image gallery for The Warning may be viewed here

Notes