- Narrator: Jake
The Animorphs find that some humans are posting information about Yeerks on the internet.
Tropes:
- Ask a Stupid Question...: Esplin the Lesser's response to Cassie asking him how he gets Yeerks out of their hosts.
- Badass in Distress: Rachel and Ax get captured by Joe Bob Fenestre's guards. Esplin the Lesser places them in bio-stasis, which thankfully pauses the morphing clock.
- Bittersweet Ending: Jake lets Esplin the Lesser walk free to continue killing humans and eating Yeerks. Cassie tells the boy in the chat room to not trust his Controller father. Someone, maybe Visser Three or Cassie (possibly Jake himself), burns down Joe Bob Fenestre's mansion, leaving him exposed to be murdered. The Animorphs are able to pick themselves up and work on their next mission.
- Catfishing: Marco tries to prank Jake by sending him a flirty email while pretending to be Cassie, which Jake sees through. Marco later learns that his online girlfriend is actually a retired 73-year-old postal worker.
- Cain and Abel: It's possible for Yeerks to be twins if they grow from the same grub. Joe Bob Fenestre's Yeerk is Esplin 9466 Lesser, twin to Esplin 9466 Prime, AKA Visser Three. When Esplin the Lesser greatly helped the invasion by founding Web Access America, the Visser took exception to his lesser brother being almost as important as he, and banned him from the Yeerk pool, condemning him to Kandrona starvation. It didn't take...
- Fly Crazy: Jake gets swatted while in fly morph, leaving him dazed and dying while the others drag him to the bathroom to demorph. When he does, he notices that his first instinct is to swat his friends. He's left in a Heroic BSoD for a while after that.
- Hot Sauce Drinking: The Animorphs get kicked out of a Taco Bell because Ax slurped up all the packets of hot sauce. The manager advises them to buy him a bottle of Tabasco.
- Let's See YOU Do Better!: Ax is unable to hack Web Access America because Marco's computer is too primitive. When Marco, a little miffed from all of Ax's previous posturing, mocks him for it, Ax responds with this.
- Monstrous Cannibalism: Esplin the Lesser has found a way around his Kandrona ban: Capture a Yeerk, blend it into a smoothie, and have his host drink it. He no longer needs a Yeerk pool as he can just draw the nutrients he needs this way.
- Out-of-Character Alert: Cassie nearly blows their cover when she attacks Esplin the Lesser for indirectly admitting he's a Serial Killer. Jake notices the Yeerk visibly wondering why an Andalite would care so much about humans dying, and has to make a hasty excuse.
- Refuge in Audacity:
- The Animorphs need a distraction so that Ax and Marco can get into Web Access America's command center. Jake and Rachel adopt their battle morphs and proceed to start mopping the floor, which turns out to be carpeted. It works, though it helps that they're far away from Yeerk activity.
- To get Joe Bob Fenestre's guards off his back, Jake talks to them as a tiger and convinces them that the situation is way above their pay grade. It also works, thanks to the fact that all of Joe Bob Fenestre's personnel have to be normal humans, not Controllers.
- The Reveal: Web Access America is not a place to find allies against the Yeerks, but a way for Esplin the Lesser to spot Controllers so he can capture fellow Yeerks to consume.
- Rhino Rampage: Jake needed a morph that can bust through walls and shrug off shotgun pellets, but not accidentally crush Ax and Rachel, who he's trying to rescue. Rhinoceros is what he chooses for this.
- Riddle for the Ages: Whoever burned down Joe Bob Fenestre's mansion, either trying to kill him or leave him vulnerable to be killed, is never revealed. Jake's narration opines that it could've been either been Visser Three or Cassie, possibly one of the other Animorphs...or he himself.
- Schizo Tech: From Ax's point of view, at least. Apparently, Andalites invented computers before books, and instant messaging before telephones.
- Serial Killer: Jake and Marco are prepared to leave Esplin the Lesser to his business until Cassie asks how he gets Yeerks out of their hosts. His response leaves no ambiguity that whatever he does kills the hosts as well.
- Spotting the Thread: Jake's first clue that Joe Bob Fenestre is not a normal Controller is that his security is completely Earth-based. No dracon beams, no Hork-Bajir, and no human-Controllers screaming about Andalites, just human security guards with guns, bug zappers, and guard dogs.
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Technology Marches On: A reminder that the series takes place in the late nineties is the fact that Jake's modem, the fastest around, is dial-up and only works at 56 kilobits per second. The average modern modem can do 22 megabits per second. - There Was a Door: The rhino's poor eyesight means that Jake misses the door he was aiming for and hits a wall instead. He gets through anyway, though it takes him two tries instead of one.
- Toilet Humor: Tobias morphs to fly for the first time and gets lost in the fly's instincts. He finds himself in a smooth bowl partly filled with water, which Marco recognizes as a toilet. And then it goes dark...Marco: <Caution: falling objects.>
