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Out of Character Information
player name: ellie
player livejournal: darkluna
playing here: Nobody!
where did you find us? Sunny and Batty teamed up to enable me. XD
are you 16 years of age or older?: So very yes.
In Character Information
character name: Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill, a.k.a. Ax
Fandom: Animorphs
Timeline: I'm taking Ax from early in the series, the very start of book 18.
character's age: About 15 human years
powers, skills, pets and equipment: Ax can morph, which means he can take on the form of any animal, once he's touched it to acquire its DNA. This isn't an innate ability; it's a product of technology. Canonically, at the point I'm taking him from, Ax has acquired a shark, a human form, a lobster, a hawk, a black ant, a cockroach, a fly, a mouse, a flea, a rattlesnake, a termite, a skunk, a great-horned owl, a wolf spider, a bat, a horse, a hammerhead shark, and a mole. The morphing process is painless, but, we're repeatedly told, disgusting to watch. It also has a built-in limitation, in that if you stay for two hours in a body that's not your normal one, you're stuck forever.
Ax also has the basic morphs Andalites train with, a bird of prey with six wings (kafit), and a small, six-legged mammal (djabala).
Additionally, he has a form of telepathy, which is the basic mode of communication for Andalites. One can direct thoughts to the general area, like talking, or center them on a specific person. Thought-speak seems, canonically, to have a range slightly greater than that of audible speech.
Ax also has a finely-tuned internal clock, knows what time it is at any given moment, and can calculate exactly how much time has elapsed since a given point. For the sake of my own sanity, I think this power ought to go away.
Since Ax's normal appearance is like a fuzzy blue centaur with a scorpion tail, he's going to be stuck as a human in Anatole. I asked the mods about modifying his powers, and decided that if he stays in any form other than human for longer than two hours, he'll revert back to human. (Let me know if this isn't all right; it's basically resetting his "natural" form to be human and preventing him from being stuck as anything else.)
canon history:
Ax grew up on the Andalite home world, some dozens of light-years from Earth. Andalites are essentially herd creatures, and though their civilization is very advanced, they've largely eschewed city life, and live in communities of extended families, 'scoops' hollowed out of meadows, which are capable of housing large groups.
Ax's older brother, Elfangor, was a war hero and a legend among their people. Elfangor's timeline is wonky, but he was definitely 15 or so years older than Ax. The two never even met until Ax was (I'd guess) the equivalent of several human years old, and Ax spent most of his life feeling he was in his brother's shadow, hoping he could at least not totally embarrass himself by comparison.
Ax's people had been at war for his entire life, fighting a species called the Yeerks, sluglike, parasitical beings that have the ability to take over the bodies of hosts by controlling their brains. They have access to all the host's memories, and can perfectly mimic them as long as necessary. Beings who've been infested this way are referred to as (insert species here)-Controllers. The Andalites considered themselves the only real resistance left, and they knew the war had spread to threaten Earth.
Ax attended school at an academy that seems to have been a combination between a prep school and preliminary military training, and when he was approximately 14, he entered the military at the lowest level, aristh, which seems to be about the same as cadet, or even slightly lower. He served under his brother, on a large ship that was eventually dispatched to Earth. There, they discovered a Yeerk ship already stationed in orbit, and engaged it in battle. Ax wasn't allowed to fight because of his age, and was sent, reluctantly, to safety in the dome portion of the ship, the part that mimicked the Andalite homeworld. That portion was separated from the main ship to give it greater maneuverability in battle, but the main ship was destroyed, and the dome fell out of orbit and crashed to Earth, into the ocean. Ax was the only one who survived the battle. He didn't learn until later, but his brother's fighter ship had crash-landed on Earth, where Elfangor, desperate and fatally wounded, had told the human teenagers who discovered the crash site all he could about the war, and had given them the only weapon he could to help them resist the Yeerks: the ability to morph into any animal, once they'd touched it.
Underwater, Ax sent out a distress call meant to reach only his people, but the ones who heard him were humans, the very same ones who had been with Elfangor in his dying moments, and had decided to do all they could to fight the Yeerk invasion.
The human Animorphs, as they'd named themselves, eventually managed to reach Ax's ship, and just in time, because Visser Three, leader of the Yeerk force on Earth, had also discovered the ship was there. Visser Three was an especially formidable opponent, because he was the only Yeerk who had taken an Andalite host body, and had therefore gained the power to morph. The kids and Ax escaped, and despite his misgivings, Ax accepted their help. To blend in, he had to acquire a human morph, and he did this by combining the DNA of Jake, Cassie, Marco, and Rachel. (I feel certain he would also have included Tobias, the fifth member of the team, but Tobias was a nothlit, the Andalite term for someone who overstays the time limit on morphing and gets stuck in their morphed form, and was a red-tailed hawk.) Ax also adopted Jake, the (reluctant) leader of the Animorphs, as his prince, the person to whom he would be accountable. Ax would have felt uncomfortable without someone to follow, because he was well aware he was close to the bottom rung as far as military rank was concerned, and he would have felt lost without some sort of structure akin to what he was used to.
Ax immediately discovered some of the problems of fitting in, because he'd never had a mouth before, and was fascinated by both the sounds of speech and the sense of taste. He quickly became confident about his ability to convincingly pass for a human, but some of this confidence was unwarranted.
His immediate goal on Earth was to leave it. Jake came up with the idea to send a fake distress signal to lure a Yeerk ship to the planet, then steal it. This plan hit a snag when the team discovered humans hadn't yet invented the communications technology they needed. To deal with this obstacle, they stole the necessary transponder from a high-ranking human controlled by Yeerks. But once they used it, they realized they'd been trapped; Visser Three had figured out it was them from the outdated frequency they used. He captured them and took them onto his ship to show off to his boss, Visser One. Luckily for them, there was a rivalry between the two vissers, and Visser One allowed them to escape to embarrass the other. They got away, but this meant Ax was trapped on Earth for the time being.
The kids discovered a plan to use a hospital as a kind of assembly line: people would come in uncontrolled, and leave as hosts to Yeerks. They destroyed the Yeerks awaiting hosts there, but in the process, Jake was infested. Ax figured it out quickly, and took Jake's place with his family while the others held Jake. A major weakness of Yeerks on Earth was that each one had to leave its host every three days to feed on Kandrona rays, basically the equivalent of their homeworld's sun. If someone under their control was kept from feeding for long enough, the Yeerk in his or her head would starve to death. All we find out about Ax having impersonated Jake for the necessary two-plus days is that Jake's parents took him to a psychiatrist after they swapped back, but Ax managed well enough to keep from making Jake's brother, who was a human-Controller, too suspicious.
Finding a way to the Yeerk pool was a priority for the Animorphs. They knew destroying it would be a major blow. Once they discovered an entrance, Ax's immediate reaction was to want to attack, the impossible odds, to him, making the attempt even more worthwhile. The humans talked him down, and embarrassed him slightly, by pointing out that they knew the risks involved, and he didn't. They decided to spy on the pool instead, and make their target the generator of Kandrona rays.
They were in the middle of trouble, scouting out the pool, when time stopped, and they encountered the being called the Ellimist for the first time. The Ellimist is like a (mostly) benign trickster god, who's nearly omnipotent, but, for reasons of his own, wants to help people along with minimal interference. His appearance badly rattled Ax, who'd grown up with stories about Ellimists and their powers. The Ellimist offered the Animorphs a choice: accept that the human race was doomed to extinction, and allow him to take them away to a safe planet, or continue their fight. Ax abstained from voting, firmly believing it was a choice for the humans to make. The humans decided to stay.
But the Ellimist had also showed them a way out, an exit they wouldn't have noticed without time being frozen around them. Later, he sent the group forward in time to see a world after a Yeerk victory. But this had a hint hidden in it, too, in that it allowed them to figure out where the Kandrona ray generator was kept so they could succeed in destroying it. Ax still disapproved of the Ellimist's methods, though, and continued to distrust him and believe he toyed with humans and other species for his own amusement.
The Animorphs got confirmation that the destruction of the Kandrona ray generator had hurt the Yeerks when Ax went with them to school for a day, and a teacher began to babble about aliens in his head: the Yeerk who controlled him was starving. However, human-Controllers swiftly moved in to bundle him off and dispose of him, and Ax had to tell his human friends what he'd known all along, that the Yeerks were after total destruction of the planets they invaded, and that they wouldn't leave humans alive to tell anyone else about the war. So while they were making small steps, they were more aware than ever of the enormity of the fight they faced.
Ax wanted to trust and be friends with the Animorphs, especially Tobias, with whom he felt a special bond, since they were both outsiders: Ax was the only Andalite on the planet, and Tobias was a human stuck in a hawk form. (Ax was also Tobias's uncle, but neither of them knew this yet.) But at the same time, he felt unable to be completely open with them; one of the most important Andalite laws forbade him from giving humans any advances in technology, and the origins of the Yeerk war weren't a comfortable topic for any Andalite. The stress of not being able to trust and be trusted in return bothered Ax deeply, but at first, he couldn't see any way to resolve the problem.
Then Ax accidentally gave humans a major technological leap forward, when he mistook Marco's father's programming work on a radio telescope for a game and corrected the errors. Instead of erasing his work immediately, he used the transmitter he'd created to contact his people, making what had been an inadvertent crime deliberate. In speaking to them, Ax had to admit that Elfangor had broken that very same law against interfering with less-advanced species by passing on the morphing technology to humans. This would have posthumously destroyed Elfangor's reputation had it gotten out, and Ax took the official blame for it when given the chance by the head of the Andalite Council.
While making the transmission, Ax was discovered by a human-Controller with a grudge against Visser Three, who told him when and where the visser would next be feeding (because his host body was Andalite, Visser Three had to eat as they did, using his hooves to absorb nutrients from grass). By now, the human Animorphs had realized Ax was keeping secrets from them, and they confronted him about it. He had already decided to face Visser Three alone, because the responsibility of dealing with his bother's killer fell to him, and he left them, upset and conflicted.
Ax morphed a rattlesnake for his attempt to kill the visser, but the Yeerk left the body and escaped, and Ax found himself talking to Alloran the Andalite, free for the first time in decades. Alloran begged Ax to kill him, but couldn't bring himself to do it, even though he knew leaving Alloran alive would mean he'd be re-infested.
Soon after, Ax explained the law of Seerow's Kindness to his human friends. Seerow had been an Andalite warrior and scientist, who had been part of the first contact with the Yeerks. Out of pity and a misguided optimism, Seerow gave the Yeerks the technology to go into space, bringing about their war against other species. Ax had hidden this information out of a sense of guilt and shame, but after he came clean, he felt much better. He realized that despite their differences, he and the humans had the same goals and the same hopes. Both their people only wanted freedom.
The Animorphs continued to make some progress in holding back the tide of the Yeerk invasion, including making an alliance with the Chee, a race of robots who had been on Earth for millennia, using holograms to appear human. They were capable of being powerful weapons, but were literally hardwired against violence. The Animorphs teamed up with one, Erek, to retrieve a crystal they could use to rewrite their programming and remove the prohibition against violence, but when Erek was forced to use it, he was traumatized, and put the ban back in place. Everyone but Ax was sympathetic toward Erek. Ax felt it was dishonorable to opt out of the war when help was so desperately needed. It was becoming clear that while the Animorphs could win small victories, they could only hang on for so long, and hope the cavalry would arrive in the form of the Andalite fleet before their small resistance was wiped out.
They did have time for some fun, and most of Ax's preferred fun included eating way too many Cinnabons. He did just that (in his human morph, of course) at the mall and caused a scene, being unaware of the limits of the human stomach. Marco stepped in to get him out of it, and it's right as they leave the mall that I'm pulling Ax into Anatole.
personality:
Ax has a healthy dose of arrogance, some of which is justified, given how advanced his civilization is compared to humans'. However, he's also still a lowly aristh, and has a lot to live up to in the form of his older brother. Ax idolized Elfangor, and he's devoted enough to him that he takes the official blame for having given humans morphing technology, a move that he's sure will prevent him from advancing any farther in the military. By Andalite custom, it's also Ax's duty to avenge his brother's death, a quest he takes extremely seriously, even feeling ashamed that he encounters Visser Three several times and doesn't kill him, despite knowing the attempt wouldn't succeed, and would almost certainly mean his own death. He's eager to prove himself, but also worries that he won't be able to live up to what he and others expect of him. He sometimes thinks that no matter what he manages to accomplish, he'll still always be thought of as Elfangor's little brother.
An innate optimism goes hand-in-hand with the inherent Andalite arrogance. In a book later than the one I'm pulling him from, Ax explains to Tobias that his people have learned to temper that optimism with realism. They are, at their heart, a peaceful species, but have been forced to become warriors because of the sense of responsibility they feel for the Yeerk war. The ideas of individual and cultural responsibility are very deeply ingrained for Ax, and the achievements and missteps of his culture are personal for him in a way they aren't for a lot of humans.
He's not a natural leader, and automatically defers to the unspoken leader of the human Animorphs, calling him Prince Jake. In fact, he would feel uncomfortable without someone to follow, because Andalite culture is very hierarchical, with each group of people accountable to either someone ranked above them or the general population. Ax is still young, impetuous and awkward at times. He's also very curious about human society, mostly because he feels it's his duty to learn all he can about Earth, as long as he's stuck there. A large part of his motivation for this is that he doesn't want to be embarrassed by not having made the most of his opportunity to study humans up close. Ax is basically a typical teenager who happens to be an alien: not a great student, not a great fighter, not even great at morphing (Cassie, one of the humans, is more naturally talented at it), but with a lot of potential that even he doesn't really recognize sometimes.
He tends to see the world in terms of absolutes, but this begins to change over the course of the series, as he spends more time with humans, and faces, with the other Animorphs, decisions where the only options are often bad and worse. Moral grey areas don't sit too well with Ax, but he has started to see that they're necessary.
Though Ax can be stiff and formal in his demeanor and speech patterns, he's also pretty goofy when he's a human, even coming across as outright bizarre at times, thanks to his continuing fascination with the noises he can make using his mouth. He's ignorant of a lot of the unspoken rules of human interaction (he has to consciously recognize sarcasm and some facial expressions, for example), and doesn't have much of a sense of humor. This is partly because he's naturally rather serious, but a lot of it is also not understanding humor. He tends to take things literally, and to lack a context for most human jokes. After spending some time on Earth, he does start to try (usually badly) to joke.
Ax has an almost childlike delight in the new things he discovers, like tastes. He doesn't always know what counts as food and what doesn't, his definition of 'food' being broad enough to include cigarette butts and cardboard boxes. There's definitely a contrast between how he acts when he's human and when he's in his usual body, and Ax is aware of the pull between these different aspects of his personality. He both longs for the familiarity of home and feels a strong loyalty to his human friends. When forced to choose, he chooses to help the humans he's come to care for in their battle, though it seems unwinnable in the long run, even saying that they've become his people.
why do you feel this character would be appropriate to the setting?
Ax may be young, but he's mentally tough, and very resourceful. He survived for weeks at the bottom of the ocean, dealing with the almost certain knowledge that he was the only survivor of the battle that had stranded him on Earth. He's an idealist, but he's not sentimental; he's capable of ruthless pragmatism when he has to be.
Writing Samples
Network Post Sample:
[text]
I require an explanation for how I have come to be here. My presence in this place, and the circumstances in which I find myself, are impossible. Additionally, this place appears to be an alternate reality, and, as such, is even more impossible.
I recognize that 'impossible' is already an absolute, and that it does not make sense for one thing to be more impossible than another. However, in this case, I feel the linguistic liberty is warranted.
There is only one entity I know of who is capable of doing the impossible, and if it is you who is responsible for taking me away from my world, I know I do not need to remind you what my opinion of your interference is.
[A pause, as if the feed were shut off, and the next hastily added:] It serves neither of our purposes for me to be stuck.
Third Person Sample:
Starts here, continues here.
Anything else? There was a live-action Animorphs TV series in the 90s, but it didn't exactly follow book canon. Given the scarcity of icons from it, and the fact that the actor who played Ax, while cute, looked about 19, I'm using a PB.