I just have to say that I love that someone else independently came up with the idea that the Kelbrid were Crayak worshippers. It's too bad my muse never cooperated in making this a fic.
(Other ideas I had in relation to this were:
The Drode is a Kelbrid culture hero, being the Drode himself being to the Kelbrid what a Neanderthal/Denisovan is to an anatomically modern human.
Genocide is their divine mission. Their exception is the Orff, who were spared because they're monocular. They don't want to drive a race to extinction when they resemble their holy symbol. So the Orff were enslaved instead.
The plot of 41 was information gathering by the Orff resistance to try and find potential allies in trying to fight off the Kelbrid.
The reason the Kelbrid have a non-aggression pact with the Andalites instead of trying to fight them is because game recognizes game.)
Yessssss I love all of these ideas. I think it just fits for The One to be a kelbrid deity, and then for The One to be a local term for Crayak himself. And I love the orff connecting back to the kelbrid, which then explains what the heck was going on in #41.
Hopefully somebody writes this someday, because it so nicely ties together several of the places Animorphs is uncharacteristically inconsistent. That, or I'll just accept it as my new headcanon forever because it explains so much.
Celebrating the works by Nobuyuki Fukumoto, but with a girly twist!
the FemKMT Zine that I’ve been working on since April is finally up! It’s a sexbend fanzine hosted by me and @kelbrid! Please go check it out and give it a download as a PDF!
I’d had the idea of making a post-54 Animorphs fic, but the time and energy required to do so have proven to be outside my grasp. As such, I’m going to post a rough outline. This is vaguely based on the awesome AU posts done by @thejakeformerlyknownasprince, who recently answered an AU request of mine. Here goes...
We start with the Andalite military contacting Cassie a few years after The Rachel heads off into deep space. The Andalites say that there’s been incursions into Andalite territory from Kelbrid space, some violent but others simply fleeing. They appear to be fleeing a new force that is changing the cosmos, and it refers to itself as the Animorphs.
So, it’s up to Cassie to get a team up into space to find her old friends and figure out what’s going on and possibly prevent a new war. The team assembled includes...
Toby Hamee, who is a grandmother at this point. The Hork-Bajir have a new seer, and Toby decides to try and save her godfather.
Eva, who isn’t going to let anything stop her from saving her son.
Loren, whose memories have somehow mysteriously resurfaced and who is ready to kick ass and take names.
Hedrick Chapman, who is currently in witness protection and in hiding after Yeerk records were surrendered and released. Turns out there was documentation of him selling out humanity to the Yeerks and the name Chapman has joined the ranks of Quisling or Benedict Arnold as words synonymous for traitor.
Melissa Chapman, who has joined the air force and has experience piloting. She’s trying to live up to Rachel’s memory, as well as the problems of her father’s reputation and the fact that he sacrificed so much for her benefit.
Erek King, who was cut off from the Chee-Net and exiled after the battle on the Pool Ship. He’d been skating the line of acceptable Chee behavior and the final gambit caused his compatriots to shun him entirely. His initial hologram self is a homeless wino and it’s uncertain how much of it is an act.
Alloran, who is going stir crazy from isolation and wants one last chance to either die in a blaze of glory or repay the team that gave him his freedom after years of despair.
Esplin 9466, who’s imprisonment had been protested as cruel and unusual. The governments of Earth send him with Cassie, ostensibly to rgive him a chance for redemption that some of the others are hoping for, but she’s told point blank to toss him into a sun.
In addition to Cassie being less than thrilled with the prospect of dumping the Visser into the sun, I envisioned that. from his little Yeerk-box, he’d actually prove invaluable in skirmishes, and possibly die a hero’s death to save the group, unsure how though.
There’d be other crew members, namely a Taxxon-anaconda pilot. An earlier plot idea involved bringing whale-Aftran, no matter how unfeasible that might be. I was mainly interested in how these various characters would interact.
But that would all be prelude to the point where the group meets some of the refugees from Kelbrid space. Only, these aren’t Kelbrid, they’re members of a species enslaved by the Kelbrid, a species of translucent, three legged cyclops that call themselves the Orff. (Oh hey, a bridge to the out-of-nowhere book 41!)
So, it turns out that the Kelbrid are a bunch of xenophobic little shmucks who believe that they are the superior race and that most other species need to die for the crime of not being them. The Orff were spared genocide due to a religious belief among the Kelbrid, that the Orff’s enormous single eye was the symbol of the Kelbrid god. It’s here that Cassie gets an odd feeling and asks what a Kelbrid looks like. And, oddly enough, the species looks extremely similar to the Drode.
(DUN DUN DUNNNN!)
The reveal is that the Drode was part of an ancestral species to the Kelbrid, a superpowered Neanderthal to the Kelbrid species (ala Vandal Savage, for DC fans). The Drode is considered a culture hero to the Kelbrid. Anyways, the Kelbrid mostly believe that they as a species should strive and be Crayak’s ultimate destroyers, though they keep away from species that they believe to be competitors for that title. At least, until they’re certain that they can be crushed.
One of those competitors were the Howlers. The other are the Andalites (and of course, exhibit A for that belief is standing in the room).
When the Howlers lost their spot as Crayak’s top soldiers and the Kelbrid realized that they were now the dominant players in their god’s toybox, the Orff try and figure out what happened. They may still be alive thanks to being monocular, but life under Kelbrid boot-heels sucks big time. So, the Howlers are no longer a threat. They look into what neutralized the Howlers. The one word they manage to get out of rebellious non-genocidal Kelbrids was “Jake”.
So, the Orff were the ones who created that dream scenario Jake experienced in book 41 to see if he was a possible key to defeating the Kelbrid theocracy and freeing them. They had access to technology allowing them to sync their minds together and create dream scenarios, using tissue samples from species of telepathic sponge-like organism as a matrix, and transmitted it through Z-space. Meanwhile, they managed to extract how, exactly, Jake defeated the Howlers
So, a group of Orff got the idea to expand on the tech they had, to make their psychic-sponge-computer into a superweapon to try and force some empathy onto the Kelbrids. They joined together Orff into it to combine into the most powerful gestalt they could imagine. And it went horribly, horribly right. The result was a new malevolent entity that was built on revenge and wasn’t all too careful about who it enacted it on. The result was The One Who Is Many, The One Who Is All.
So, then, we get our first glimpse of the Animorphs as they are now. And what they see isn’t a group of kids. What they see is a mish-mash of organic and technological parts that have formed into a ship. Pieces of The Rachel and Visser Three’s Blade Ship are recognizable. The ship seems to be in the shape of a hawk...
So, we find out what happened: The Rachel rammed into the Blade Ship. The One, who had become part of the ship, used the crash to assimilate the Rachel and its crew. And, much like a similar creature known as Father did to a Ketran named Toomin millennia ago, it tried to break them and play with them. And, through strength and willpower, Jake, Marco, Tobias, and Ax managed to unite within the One’s network of minds upon minds. And thus united, they were able to repeat Toomin’s feat and overthrew The One. And thus, the four were now a single being, who referred to its collective self as the Animorphs.
And their goal? Well, there’s a few. But they came up with a solution for all of them. They are a being that is extremely powerful, but not quite on the level of the Ellimist or Crayak. They are, however, on the cusp of becoming a being equal to them... they just need two things.
First, they need their minds and timelines to be grounded sub-temporally. And they need a piece of the Ellimist’s original body. For the first, they need Cassie, and for the second, they need the Time Matrix.
The Time Matrix turns out to be easier than expected. See, Erek King was there for his own reason, namely that Earth was swiftly becoming a bad place to store a Time Matrix and this little galactic excursion provided a means to ship it elsewhere. However, the Chee’s got a grudge against the Animorphs and, while he can’t be violent towards living things, he can try and destroy the Time Matrix... an attempt that fails.
As for Cassie, it’s going to be a much harder sell. The four boys aren’t going to force the issue, but there’s so much they want to do, so much they can do, so much good they can achieve....
For an epilogue
The Ellimist and Crayak meet, to see the arrival of a new player. The Ellimist looks on them warmly, like a proud father seeing a child grow up and become successful. Crayak seethes in rage, as the creatures he tried to eliminate are now a threat to him and the balance of power has shifted. He is cornered, but the new player knows well that a cornered animal is the most dangerous there is
The Animorphs aren’t exactly happy with the Ellimist, though, which is taken in stride. If the Ellimist wanted a peon, he’d have made his own Drode eons ago. The idea that the races Ellimist tried to protect and save have now grown to be his equal is beyond his wildest hopes.
He does give them a gift... something he saved... the last bits of a consciousness he kept safe within himself when its timeline fizzled out... He gives it to the Animorphs, lets them add the mind to their own, and finally, finally, they are complete.
There is something I've been meaning to ask you: do you have a headcanon for what the Kelbrid and the Anati might look and be like?
Something we didn't get a ton of in Animorphs that I'd love to see more: dramatic size differences or dramatic difference in styles of communication. So since the Kelbrid are described as "mysterious," I like to imagine they're sort of like the veleek — both much larger and much smaller than a human, maybe not exactly like the veleek is but in a way that renders communication between the species basically impossible:
Anati have a few more constraints on them, seeing as you can definitely get a yeerk inside of them so they're at minimum a Class 3 species (central brain + some kind of orifice + basic survivability in an andalite-designed environment). We also know the yeerks ultimately lose that segment of the war, so I like the idea that they get underestimated. Maybe they're only just bigger than yeerks themselves but with massive brain-to-body proportions so they're basically all skull with tiny limbs that also excel at predation enough that they can fight off the yeerks:
How do you see the Ellimist and Crayak's game post-54?
The Kelbrid Wars by Shane C is a great fan fic series more or less that idea, obviously built on the premise that the kelbrid are the next great challenge the cosmic meddlers are about to throw the Animorphs’ way. And to be honest I’d entirely forgotten about until I saw this ask. So now I have to go back and reread it, and y’all should too because I remember it being hella rad.
