- Narrator: Rachel, Nice Rachel, Mean Rachel
Rachel gets cut in half while in starfish morph. Both halves demorph into a half of Rachel.
Tropes:
- Bond Villain Stupidity: After trapping the Rachels in a The Walls Are Closing In trap, Visser Three doesn't stick around to watch or even assign anyone to watch them, meaning their secret is safe when they demorph.
- Car Fu: Mean Rachel steals a truck that transports cars and uses it to smash her way into the Buyers Research Institute. She wrecks the truck in the process, but is able to use one of the cars that snapped off the rig to get further inside and runs down some Hork-Bajir Controllers.
- Chronic Hero Syndrome: Much to Nice Rachel's horror, she gets Rachel's sense of duty, meaning she isn't able to run away from the Animorphs' mission no matter how scared she is.
- Enemy Within: Nice Rachel considers Mean Rachel to be this. In her clearer headed moments, Mean Rachel finds herself afraid of her own violent tantrums. After the two Rachels are merged, Rachel sits herself down worries about what Mean Rachel's existence means for her.Rachel's narration: I wanted to cry. I was me again. For whatever that was worth. The coward was in me. The killer, too.
- Hopeless Suitor: Another hapless boy tries hitting on Rachel. She proudly teaches him that good looks and good personalities don't go hand in hand.
- Grievous Harm with a Body: Mean Rachel loses a grizzly bear arm to a Hork-Bajir Controller. She responds by picking up her severed arm arm beating the Hork-Bajir Controller with it.
- Hassle-Free Hotwire: Mean Rachel jams a bear claw into a car's ignition keyhole, and somehow it works.
- Hell-Bent for Leather: Mean Rachel prefers a leather bad girl look as opposed to Rachel's normal preppy style.
- I'll Kill You!: Mean Rachel says this frequently enough to that it's practically Catchphrase.
- I Want Them Alive!: Nice Rachel knows that Visser Three wants the Andalite bandits alive so he can make Controllers out of them, so she knows The Walls Are Closing In is a bluff. She threatens to cut her own throat instead, which successfully lures the Visser into the room.
- In Love with Your Carnage: Mean Rachel's attraction to Tobias has everything to do with him being a predator. Contrast Nice Rachel, who is only attracted to Tobias the human and finds a deal breaker in Tobias the hawk.
- Jekyll & Hyde: Nice Rachel is an airheaded Valley Girl who likes boys and fashion, and is also Prone to Tears. Mean Rachel is an aggressive Blood Knight always looking for an excuse to scream and cause trouble. Nice Rachel is largely ineffectual because she can't be mean, while Mean Rachel is a loose cannon because she can't be nice. The rest of the Animorphs make frequent references to Jekyll and Hyde while trying to deal with them.
- Kick the Dog: Mean Rachel doesn't like people, she just respects strength. Therefore, she has no qualms about harming people Rachel loves for any given reason.
- Knockout Gas: The Yeerks set up a gas trap to catch any small animals that may have been on their trucks. Jake and Nice Rachels are rendered unconscious and trapped in glass cages with a visible two-hour countdown running.
- Laser-Guided Karma: The female bully who makes Nice Rachel cry runs afoul of Mean Rachel not even two minutes later. Some playing with knives later, the girl is screaming in terror.
- Leeroy Jenkins: Mean Rachel cannot plan ahead to save her life; all of that stayed with Nice Rachel. Her only ideas consist of "kill it until it stops annoying me" and if that doesn't work, "kill it harder".
- Like Is, Like, a Comma: Nice Rachel speaks this way, even in her narration. It's one of the many things about her that annoys Mean Rachel.
- Lightning Can Do Anything: The two Rachels are merged by acquiring and morphing into each other while receiving an electric shock from Erek.
- Literal Split Personality: If a morpher gets cut in half while morphed into an animal that can regenerate into two separate beings, the result is the dominant parts of their personality separating between the two halves.
- Mexican Standoff: Nice Rachel sets up an escape plan where Mean Rachel morphs to fly and climbs into Alloran's ear, threating to demorph inside his head, which would kill him, her, and Visser Three. As expected of a Yeerk, the Visser surrenders against unwinnable odds.
- Out-of-Character Alert: For Tobias, it's when Mean Rachel hunts and eats a fish in bald eagle morph simply for the pleasure of killing something. For Cassie, it's Nice Rachel crying after an encounter with a bully.
- Prone to Tears: Nice Rachel cries when she's upset, which is one of the signs the Animorphs get that something is wrong with Rachel before Mean Rachel storms in.
- Rapid-Fire "No!": Nice Rachel's response to being told she has to morph to cockroach while on top of a moving truck.
- "Shaggy Dog" Story: The Anti-Morphing Ray, a potential massive game changer in the war against the Yeerks, remains undestroyed by the end of the book.
- Smarter Than You Look: Nice Rachel has all of Rachel's common sense, which means she can read her friends' intentions and plan ahead during battles; a far cry from the crybaby bimbo Mean Rachel considers her to be.
- Spanner in the Works: Mean Rachel derails the Animorphs' plan to find and destroy the Anti-Morphing Ray by showing up and destroying anything she could find, which tipped off the Yeerks that they were under attack.
- Split-Personality Takeover: Nice Rachel reiterates Rachel's fear that her own bloodlust will eventually take over her life the longer the war goes on.Nice Rachel's narration: And the worst horror of all was seeing what had grown inside of me like some kind of cancerous tumor. Mean Rachel was getting stronger with each passing month of my life as an Animorph. Pretty soon she would have become all of me and there’d have been nothing left of me!
- Trampled Underfoot: Jake in cockroach morph gets accidentally stepped on by Mean Rachel in Hork-Bajir morph. The roach is hardy enough to survive and cling to Mean Rachel's foot until both Rachels get away from Visser Three.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Some eight-year-old boy with a metal shovel who thought it would be interesting to chop a starfish in half causes a lot of grief for the Animorphs and nearly derails the war effort against the Yeerks without ever realizing it.
- The Walls Are Closing In: Visser Three sets one such trap up, which is meant to exploit an Andalite's natural claustrophobia. It doesn't work as well against humans, much less humans that know he's bluffing.
- Weirdness Magnet: Erek, a millennia aged pacifistic alien android, walks in to the Animorphs' meetings, notices that there are two Rachels, and decides that the Animorphs are too weird for him.
