Ellimist

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The Ellimist is a fictional character from the science fiction book series Animorphs.

The Ellimist is an almost omnipotent, god-like being. By standard values, the Ellimist is a force of good and his foe Crayak is a force of evil. They played a game throughout the universe, with Crayak trying to destroy worlds and the Ellimist trying to save them. The Ellimist's backstory is detailed in The Ellimist Chronicles. He frequently interferes in the Animorphs' lives, sending them to possible futures and distant planets, so as to help defeat Crayak. The Ellimist also uses the Animorphs' Chee friend, Erek King, in his endeavors. When he appears to the Animorphs, he tends to take the form of an elderly male humanoid with glowing blue skin, similar to the typical wizard or wiseman archetype; in this form he can communicate normally.

Before achieving through abnormal circumstance a godlike omnipotence and omnipresence, the Ellimist was originally a Ketran named Toomin. (On a sidenote, it is later revealed in this book that the Ketran had no concept of music.) Toomin could be best described as a gamer. He frequently played a life simulation game, very popular among his people, which featured two species and gave the player the task of slightly modifying environmental or evolutionary aspects of the species and its planet, as to cause change over time. The game often resulted in extinction of another, less-evolved species. His game name was Ellimist.

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 transmission were only games, and a race called the Capasin 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. 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, integrated 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.

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. They battled for centuries, using vast technological powers in their attempts to destroy each other. In the process, they annihilated hundreds of worlds. In a final move, Crayak attacked the Ellimist, forcing him into a black hole. 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. 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.

The Ellimist created the Time Matrix, according to Andalite mythology (in The Andalite Chronicles, the Ellimist informs Elfangor that he indeed created the Time Matrix), which was essentially a time machine; however, The Ellimist Chronicles does not mention the Matrix at any point in the story. The Matrix was buried (on Earth, no less) by Elfangor.

[edit] Connection to the Animorphs

First appearing in #7: The Stranger, the Ellimist - without explaining about Crayak or their game - offers the Animorphs a chance to save a remnant of humanity. The Ellimist claims that he cannot interfere in the Yeerk invasion, but that he can bring some humans---as well as animals, human accomplishments, etc.---to a kind of "wildlife preserve" much like Earth, thus allowing a portion of humanity to survive. He also shows them a future where Earth is completely conquered, and all the Animorphs dead or Controllers. This, however, was a ploy that allowed the Animorphs to find out information they needed to destroy the Kandrona; by "breaking his own rules," the Ellimist helped to deal a major blow to the Yeerks.

The Ellimist appeared again to Tobias in "The Change," 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.

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 #6: The Capture, Crayak had seen that the Ellimist "had touched" Jake. As the Ellimist didn't appear until book 7, this implies (and Applegate confirmed on the Animorph website) that the Ellimist had "known" Jake before this point.

The eventual meaning of this comes out in Megamorphs #4: 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. 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 (Marco)---as he put it, 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.

The Ellimist had also meddled with the past, and caused Elfangor to go from being a human on Earth to an Andalite war-prince; this change was made in the timeline while allowing Tobias to continue to exist, thus preserving the Ellimist's plans.

The Ellimist makes his final appearance in the last Animorph book, "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 world.