#escafil device

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Escafil Files - 2021

You and I are going to have to agree to disagree about the costs vs. benefits of keeping the morphing cube around, Anon.  By my read, there are a ton of uses for that box that the Animorphs immediately lose out on if they destroy it.  For the Animorphs, the risks of keeping it are purely theoretical.  Until, of course, they aren’t.

It’s really easy to go back with hindsight bias and say “well duh the Animorphs’ keeping the morphing cube ends with it in yeerk hands” because that’s obviously what happens in canon.  But that’s not the frame the Animorphs are working with.  They’re working with questions like “How well can we protect this?” and “Are we better off having it, or not?”

Let’s speculate on if they do destroy the box after David finds it.  Without the blue box, the Animorphs watch Aftran starve to death and cannot save her.  Without it, they can’t prevent Loren from being killed by the yeerks.  Without it, they can’t recruit James and the Auximorphs, and pretty soon the final battle plan is falling apart around them.  Without it, Arbron would never go to Jake with the proposition “I know you don’t have the cube now, but I trust your past uses of it so much more than the yeerks’ and andalites’ that I want to ally with you anyway.”  Without it, the internal yeerk rebellion never tears the empire apart.  Maybe things are better, maybe worse, but definitely not an unambiguous case of them having been better off without it.

IMHO the decision to hang onto the blue box is not a bad one.  With it, they can use it or not, and they always know where it is.  It’s actually about as secure as six kids can make it: it’s hidden in Cassie’s dad’s fridge, underneath the feeder mice.  So they’ve put it in the safest area any of them can access, behind conventional human security measures — both the barn and the fridge lock (#42).  It’s secure-ish for the same reason the barn is secure-ish enough to be their default meeting space: it’s in the largest house they have between the six of them that has no curious younger siblings or yeerk-controlled older siblings who might snoop around.  They bury it under the feeder mice, an area so gross that even Cassie (who fears blood nor guts nor morphing nor eels nor spiders) fears to tread.  While it’s with them, it’s about as safe as they can make it.

It’s also not clear it’s possible to destroy the thing.  We know it can’t actually be broken into component pieces, no matter what lies they feed to David in #22.  Ax even speculates that it might be indestructible, given it survived Elfangor’s ship being annihilated by dracon fire.  The Animorphs don’t know for sure, and they don’t have anything lying around that could come close to matching the firepower of a Blade ship.  Yes, it’s entirely possible that the cube surviving is Ellimist Fuckery at its finest, but the fact remains that it survived.  They could still try smashing it with a hammer or whatnot, but then they have no guarantee its fragments won’t fall into yeerk or helmacron hands for reverse-engineering... unless, of course, they hoard said fragments somewhere safe, like under the feeder mice.  At which point we’re back to Square One.

Animorphs Initiative first panel of a four panel GM screen for our campaign! I am pretty pleased with the way it turned out. Hopefully it will look ok in print. The first panel will actually cut off halfway through Tyrel so his face will be on the second panel. He will bridge into the second scene with the group touching/about to touch the Escafil device (glowing cube that gives them the morphing ability).