The Underground

The Underground
Rachel morphing into a bat.
Author	K. A. Applegate
Cover artist	David B. Mattingly
Country	United States
Language	English
Series	Animorphs #17
Genre(s)	Science Fiction
Publisher	Scholastic
Publication date	April 1998
Media type	Print (Paperback)
Pages	167
ISBN	0-590-49436-8
OCLC Number	38740151
LC Classification	CPB Box no. 1776 vol. 8
Preceded by	The Warning
Followed by	The Decision

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The Underground is the seventeenth book in the Animorphs series, written by K.A. Applegate. It is narrated by Rachel.

Plot summary

The Animorphs see a man jumping out of an office building, and save him. Rachel finds out he has been talking about Yeerks, so the Animorphs go to talk to him. He tells them that he is a Controller, and the Yeerk inside him doesn't need Kandrona Rays because he ate Maple and Ginger Instant Oatmeal, which seems to give Yeerks to ability to survive without Kandrona Rays. However, there is a downside. The oatmeal is extremely addictive and makes the Yeerks who eat it go crazy and only able to control their host some of the time. To sum it up, the yeerk will never need to leave the host body even though the host stop eating the oatmeal, besides, it won't always have the control over the body. The Animorphs decide to dump a bunch of oatmeal into the Yeerk pool, which would cause thousands of Yeerks to go insane.

Unable to enter the Yeerk Pool the normal way because of a new invention called the "Gleet Bio-Filter", which doesn't allow creatures besides Humans and Yeerks to enter the Yeerk Pool, they spend a week digging through the ground as moles. Upon entering the Yeerk pool, they are attacked by two hunter robots and Rachel falls into the Yeerk pool. She morphs an ant, gets out, steals a dracon beam and disguises herself as a human-Controller. She learns that Ax, Jake and Tobias have been captured and there is a large amount of Maple and Ginger Instant Oatmeal near the Yeerk pool. Marco thought-speaks to her telling her that he is ok but he doesn't know about Cassie.

Rachel finds Cassie in human form too, they hide in a small room where they keep food, where Marco/gorilla is calmy eating bananas. Visser Three arrives with more Hork-Bajirs. Rachel morphs into an elephant and runs to the area where confiscated oatmeal is stored.

When Visser Three comes close to them, she throws an oatmeal barrel into the pool and gives the dracon beam to Marco (who, being in gorilla morph, has hands) and he pointed it to the barrel. Visser Three decides to sacrifice the Yeerks in the pool in order to catch them, so Rachel throws him in too. While he is there swimming, and every underlings freezed under Visser orders, Rachel rescues the other and they start leaving. However Visser Three starts to morph giving them no chance to escape, so Marco shoots open the barrels of oatmeal. Once in the tunnel, they are surrounded by the enemies. So Rachel uses the dracon beam to collapse the tunnel burying themselves alive. The Animorphs escape as moles by digging another tunnel out.

Morphs

Trivia

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• This book has one of the longest titles out of all of the books in the series.
• This is the fifth book to feature a cover morph that was not acquired in the book. The Animorphs (except Tobias) acquired bat morphs in the tenth book, The Android.
• The front cover quote is, "There's nothing to fear but the Yeerks themselves....", a reference to U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt's famous quote "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
• The inside front cover quote is, "There's nothing to fear. Batgirl is here...."