For the Ellimist from the TV series, see Ellimist

The Ellimist (ELL-im-mist), also known as Toomin, or more formally Azure Level, Seven Spar, Extension Two, Down-Messenger, Forty-one, was a Ketran male who, through a series of extraordinary circumstances, became an almost omnipotent, god-like being. He played a game throughout the universe with a similarly-powerful being known as Crayak, with Crayak trying to destroy worlds and the Ellimist trying to save them. He frequently interfered in the Animorphs' lives, sending them to possible futures and distant planets, so as to help defeat Crayak. The Ellimist also used the Animorphs' Chee friend, Erek King, in his endeavors. When he appeared to the Animorphs, he tended to take the form of an elderly male humanoid with glowing blue skin, similar to the typical wizard or wiseman archetype.

History

Origins

Before achieving through abnormal circumstance a godlike omnipotence and omnipresence, the Ellimist was originally a Ketran named Toomin. He lived on the Equatorial High Crystal with his friends Inidar, Aguella and Wormer. Toomin could be best described as a "gamer"; he frequently played a life simulation game called Alien Civilizations, very popular among his people, which gave each player an alien species and tasked them with slightly modifying their environmental or evolutionary aspects, so as to cause change over time. The aim of the game was to keep the species alive for as long as possible; if the species became extinct, the player lost. Toomin's game name was Ellimist. He chose the name because he "thought it sounded breezy", not knowing how important the name would become.

Another society of Ketrans on his planet made the mistake of broadcasting transmissions of the game into deep space, as part of an experiment with radio transmission. Unfortunately they did not bother to include an explanation that the transmissions were only games, and a race called the Capasins annihilated the Ketrans, believing that the Ketrans meddled with the development of other species.

Toomin escaped on an experimental spacecraft with the last of his species. These last of the Ketrans roamed throughout the galaxy, searching for a new homeworld. Toomin eventually became the de facto leader of the ship's crew, and he and Aguella became a couple, though they refused to have children until a new homeworld could be found. Ketrans are approximately the size of humans, but are adapted for flight in a thick atmosphere and low gravity, and this made their search for a suitable home very difficult. Some of the last Ketrans favored a plan of re-engineering themselves, so that their children would be born adapted for life on the surface of a higher-gravity planet, and this created some controversy among them.

The Ketrans eventually came to a moon covered entirely with water. As they came close to the surface of the water, their craft was seized by the tentacle of a creature whose body covered the entire surface of the moon. It pulled the ship into the water, and there were no survivors save for Toomin.

The tentacled creature called itself Father, and was at its core merely a huge parasitic sponge. However, it had the ability to access the brains of dead creatures, and use them itself. It therefore had the combined knowledge and intelligence of every creature that had ever crashed onto the moon; the other members of the crew, although dead, still existed in the form of the data left on their brains. Toomin would interact with them metaphysically, knowing full well that they were only shadows, and his friends were actually dead.

However, since it only had dead brains, akin to biological computers, it had no creativity or imagination, and had grown terribly lonely. Father therefore kept Toomin alive, and interfaced with his brain to converse and play games with him. At first, Toomin lost every game he played with Father, as Father had perhaps millions of creatures' knowledge and memories to draw upon. Eventually, however, Toomin discovered the advantage he had over Father: creativity and the capacity for love. This allowed Toomin to best Father at every game they played, and eventually, to do to Father what Father had done to so many others: "download" its knowledge and personality into himself. As Father's intelligence consisted of that of millions of sentient beings, this made Toomin a being of unparalleled intelligence and wisdom.

Toomin found the wreckage of all the crashed spacecraft on the moon where it had been kept by Father, and used his near-infinite knowledge and insight to build a spacecraft, integrate it with his body, many times more advanced than any before or since; he experimented with spreading his existence across multiple ships, becoming unbound to just any one form. Taking the name Ellimist, he vowed that the genocide of the Ketrans would never again be repeated while he was there to stop it.^[1]

Encountering Crayak

The Ellimist, as he came to be known, journeyed through the galaxy, ending wars with the vast power of his spacecraft-body, fostering peace, and essentially taking on the role of a deity for many of the planets he visited. Eventually, Toomin (now the Ellimist) met Crayak, an evil being who aimed to bring tyranny and death to the universe. When they met, the Ellimist could not comprehend what Crayak had done to all the innocent planets in the galaxy. The first thing he did when Ellimist met him was cause the destruction of Folk by sending an asteroid to wipe them out on their homeworld. They battled for centuries, using vast technological powers in their attempts to destroy each other. In the process, they annihilated hundreds of worlds, the Ellimist merely minimizing Crayak's destruction instead of stopping it.

Disgusted with what he was doing and knowing he could not defeat Crayak in open conflict, the Ellimist retreated from the war to a small, primitive world far from the conflict. Seeking companionship and a normal life, he transferred his original Toomin mind to a body cloned from the planet's native inhabitants and chose to live among them. He named them the Andalites, and eventually took a wife from them. They were to have a child together, but the Andalites were primitive and the baby died in birth due to improper care. The Ellimist's wife asked for another child, reasoning to him that while some children may die, more may live. The Ellimist ultimately had five children, three of which lived to adulthood.

The Ellimist lived his mortal life until his wife died, then returned to the stars emboldened by her words; as Crayak destroyed, the Ellimist would create. He traveled the galaxy, terraforming uninhabitable planets so they could sustain life, seeding new races on empty worlds, and evolving doomed species to the point they could survive. At this time he created the Pemalites to aid him in his work. The Ellimist's continuous creation of life began to outpace Crayak's spread of death, until eventually Crayak attacked him, seeking to end their game for good. The Ellimist had grown strong enough to fight back at this time and a galaxy-wide war between the two began, worlds and suns destroyed in their wake. When the tide began to turn in the Ellimist's favor, Crayak tricked him into piloting his ship-body near a black hole, which consumed the Ellimist.

Instead of dying, the Ellimist became one with the fabric of space and time, transforming from a technological deity into a real one. Moving a planet that Crayak was about to destroy, believed to be Earth, half a year in its rotation, he was able to save it.^[1] Then, Crayak too managed to find a way into the fabric of space and time. They agreed not to fight in person any longer, as it could cause immense damage to the fabric and likely destroy them both in the process. From then onwards, they played a deadly game with planets and the lives of their inhabitants.^[3][1]

Altering Elfangor's Life

This section requires expansion

To be added

Stacking the Deck

To be added

Encounters with the Animorphs

Destroying the Kandrona

Ellimist continued to observe the Animorphs, and watched as they decided to enter the Underground Yeerk Pool Complex in a cockroach morph in order to discern the location of the city's Kandrona. However, while they were in the pool complex, the five of them — Jake, Rachel, Cassie, Marco, and Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill, were spotted by a Taxxon, who caught them with their tongue and was about to eat them. Knowing that they would die, Ellimist paused time and forcibly demorphed them to their base state. He then located Tobias, who was flying around the city as a red-tailed hawk, and transported him into the pool complex's general area while also reverting him back to his original human state. Ellimist then allowed for the other Animorphs to exit the lunchroom they were originally in and move into the general pool area, where they spotted Tobias. Cassie wondered if time being paused was a trick generated by Visser Three, to which Aximili stated that such an ability was far too superior than anything the Yeerks or even the Andalites possessed. Ellimist then spoke to them telepathically and remarked that he was stunned to hear humility coming from an Andalite; as Rachel spun around, looking for danger, Ellimist read Rachel's mind and informed her that there was no danger. Ellimist then read Aximili's mind and announced that Aximili had correctly deduced that he was "an" Ellimist.

Opening a "door" in space, Ellimist exited his dimension and appeared before the Animorphs in a humanoid form resembling an older man with blue skin and black eyes. Ellimist told Aximili to not be afraid, adding that the Animorphs were not fearful of him; when Aximili responded that his human friends did not know what he was, Ellimist retorted that Aximili didn't know what he really was either, and that all he knew about Ellimists were the fairy tales that the Andalites told their children. Due to the rules of non-interference, Ellimist was not allowed to directly save the Animorphs from their fate, and therefore came up with a loophole; he informed them that he needed them to decide the fate of the human race, claiming that the Yeerk Empire would indeed win the war against humanity. Ellimist then transported them into the ocean, although he used his powers so that they could still breathe and would be unharmed by any factors. As they looked at the sea life, the Ellimist remarked that it was lovely before transporting them to the African savannah, where they floated in the sky and observed the various animals. Ellimist then transported them to the jungle and told them to look at the planet's beauty, stating that in all the universe, there was no greater beauty than Earth. Ellimist continued his tour, transporting them to New York City, a village by a jungle river, a rock concert in Rio de Janeiro, a political meeting in Seoul, a soccer game in Durban, and finally, an open-air market in The Philippines. Ellimist declared that humans were crude and primitive yet capable of understanding, and showed them Irises.

Returning them back to the temporally-paused Yeerk pool, Ellimist claimed that they would lose their fight against the Yeerk Empire and that humanity would be rendered extinct; in order to prevent this extinction, Ellimist made an offer to relocate the Animorphs, their close family members, and other humans of genetic diversity, onto another planet. However, Ellimist's true plan, the entire reason he had paused time and had allowed the Animorphs to leave the lunchroom they had been in, was so that they could notice the dropshaft within the Yeerk pool complex. Ellimist then told them to make their decision immediately, clarifying that if they refused, he would revert time to the way it was prior to his intervention, which would revert Tobias back to being stuck as a red-tailed hawk while the Animorphs would return to being stuck on the Taxxon's tongue as cockroaches. While Cassie wanted to accept the deal, and Aximili refused to vote, the other four refused to accept, with Marco, Jake, and Rachel successfully having noticed the dropshaft. With his plan having succeeded, Ellimist turned Tobias back to his hawk form and returned him to where he was flying while reverting the Animorphs back onto the Taxxon's tongue in cockroach morph, and told them that he would offer them the deal once again if they survived, as he secretly intended to show them where the Kandrona was. Ellimist then restored the proper flow of time, and the Animorphs successfully managed to escape from the underground Yeerk pool using the dropshaft.

The next day, Ellimist eavesdropped on the Animorphs and they discussed the offer he had given them, where Marco revealed he intended to change his vote if the Ellimist could save certain people as well. Ellimist then transported the Animorphs to an alternate future timeline sometime in the 2000s, with the intent for the Animorphs to notice that the Kandrona was kept on the upper floors of the EGS Tower. When the Animorphs got into an altercation with that timeline's Rachel Controller and an alternate Esplin 9466, Ellimist quickly returned the Animorphs back to their timeline. A few days later, Rachel deduced the Kandrona's location and the Animorphs launched an attack on the EGS Tower around 5 A.M. Following the destruction of the Kandrona, they wondered if they had changed the future, and Ellimist, speaking telepathically to them, informed them that every action changed the future. He then disclosed to them that the Yeerk Empire had already scheduled for a replacement Kandrona to arrive in three weeks. Jake inquired again as to whether the future had been changed, although Ellimist remained silent. Rachel then remarked that she did not believe that Ellimist could see the definite future, claiming that wherever Ellimist was, he had to contend with the butterfly effect as well. This caused Ellimist to laugh, and he reiterated that humans, despite being primitive, were indeed capable of learning.^[2]

Hork-Bajir Liberation

The Ellimist appeared again to Tobias and again, explained his desire to save a species from destruction---in this case, he had arranged to free a pair of Hork-Bajir-Controllers (Jara Hamee and Ket Halpak), and Tobias aids the alien pair in setting up a home that eventually becomes the Free Hork-Bajir colony. The Ellimist rewards Tobias by granting him a wish; Tobias' wish, to become human again (he had been trapped permanently as a red-tailed hawk) was fiddled with, so that Tobias – still a bird – could morph again, including into his own human body. This gave Tobias the ability to fight the Yeerks or, if he so wished, become a human permanently.

Restoring Tobias' Morphing

To be added

Contest of Champions

This section requires expansion

In The Attack, the Ellimist finally reveals the truth about Crayak to the Animorphs, and uses them to help save a race called the Iskoort from Crayak's Howlers. He makes an interesting comment in this book – that, when Crayak first saw Jake in The Capture, Crayak had seen that the Ellimist "had touched" Jake.

Back to Before

The eventual meaning of this comes out in Back to Before, where Jake - tempted by Crayak's servant, Drode - wishes that the Animorphs had never found Elfangor, thus never acquired the morphing powers. This new reality, however – which was supposed to give the Yeerks an easy victory – broke down, as Cassie was able to tell that the world was not as it should be, inspiring the would-have-been Animorphs to assemble and fight the Yeerks even without their morphing powers. Here the Drode reveals (in the form of complaining) that the Animorphs were, in fact, not a random assortment who had found Elfangor but that they had been picked out by the Ellimist: Elfangor's son Tobias, his brother Aximili, Cassie, and the son of Visser One's host – the Ellimist had "stacked the deck" with them for their specific abilities and positions. Any alternate timeline would collapse due to their specific involvement with the fight against the Yeerks.

Speaking with Rachel

The Ellimist makes his final appearance in The Beginning. There he appears to honor the dying Rachel, where he tells her the story written in "The Ellimist Chronicles". He also tells her that she was a random choice to join the team but that her life mattered greatly to the fate of the Earth.

Personality

To be added

Appearances

In chronological order:

• The Ellimist Chronicles
• The Andalite Chronicles
• The Stranger
• The Change
• The Pretender (mentioned)
• The Attack
• The Exposed (mentioned)
• Elfangor's Secret (mentioned)
• Back to Before
• The Beginning
  • The Ellimist Chronicles

Gallery

Book Series

TV Series

Trivia

• Ellimist was based on and inspired by the Star Trek character Q.

References