Choose Your Own Adventure #25: Prisoner of the Ant People

The last time we dusted one of these off, back around Halloween, I took over the role of Batman and defeated an attempt by the Riddler to pull off some funny business at the Federal Reserve that had nothing to do with the massive crimes those real life financial super villains commit on a daily basis. Meanwhile, the timeline for completing the Choose Your Own Adventure series has been altered from "I'll still be doing this in my nineties" to "I'll still be doing this 10,000 years from now, in hell." The last review was in 2016, for crying out loud. Honestly, I'm trying my best, the difficulty in acquiring some titles and the curse of having so many brilliant ideas that there isn't time to properly address them all have taken a heavy toll, but here we go again.

  Those aren't Ant People, they're just huge ants.

The cover promises all sorts of crazy adventure, but it also contains the name "R.A. Montgomery," so it would probably be wise to temper those expectations. Let's dig in. I'm maxing and relaxing in my "living sphere," a perfect futuristic environment that can create holographs for my own amusement. Yes, the coolest thing from Star Trek: The Next Generation was actually stolen from a forgotten entry in a wildly uneven series. Anyway, I decide to get up into a Greek villa, but there's no time for this sensory onanism: an emergency is occurring. 

It turns out I'm part of something called "Zondo Group." Instead of being the bottom line, it's a wussy three-entity (myself, a robot and a martian) science squad dedicated to fighting someone called "The Evil Power Master." Besides bad branding, this worthy is apparently busy disintegrating matter in blatant violation of the law of conservation of such. Around here we obey the trite rules of the universe I learned in Middle School, so it's time to use reason and hippy idealism and certainly not direct violence to stop the destruction of our precious vital atomic structure.   

Not to be confused with the "Zombie Squad." This movie also cured my near-fatal "missed Rambo" disease.

This isn't to imply that I'm not kind of bitchy about this whole enterprise. I totally am, but the R2-D2 ripoff Rendox-Oll assures me in goofy half-poetic language that we must stop the coming annihilation of everything that matters. The third member of the team, a green-skinned Martian (Yeah, really) named "Flppto" is somewhat more fatalistic about the possibility of total physical annihilation, wondering what would happen, as if dying in this fashion would be some kind of fun adventure and not the most horrific possible fate made reality.

More robotic freak-outs follow, as we're told that another research team has vanished. Flppto's heartless reaction is basically "Oh well, can't mourn forever," earning the disapproval of the floating trash can who makes that "Lost in Space" bot look like a model of dignified self-control. Also, some other team is missing, too. Just keep raising the stakes, I guess. This is the heart of quality drama. It's also a cheap device to offer up the first choice, but after several pages of exposition it's welcome, one way or another.

The new, edgier re-boot.

I decide to "keep watch" while the rest of the team does the searching. This cowardly pragmatism is likely to be rewarded, right? I even quote one the rules demanding that someone stay behind at all times, like I'm a lawyer or something. Our hero. Naturally, this causes my robo-buddy to go nuts, declare that rules can be broken and then zap it's organic teammates with a "purple ray." Time to kiss the sky. 

As you probably already assumed, the friendly mechanical assistant is actually a "warrior ant" in disguise, shedding his lame and uninspired steel facade to reveal this deception. This is followed by villainous bragging, where the ant militarist declares the superiority of his species, our total defeat and even claims his fellow Formicidae have captured the Evil Power Master and what we thought was the real threat is now merely a puppet of creatures that ruin picnics.

Faced with this outrage, I exert will to try to resist the pacification ray. It's weak, but it's better than the other choice, which involved begging for mercy from a creature with acid blood and a hive mind. Somehow this works. We're almost done, let's just go with it. I blast the insect menace with a "pest eliminator" beam and the horrific monster that somehow successfully infiltrated a research station is completely defeated. Now to go find those missing teams, suggests an ending that really leaves us with a lot more questions than answers.

Seriously, there was a giant ant in that robot body the entire time? Really???

Hello, fellow Americans. I'm one of you, don't worry.

I actually thought this one was decent. Maybe taking a vacation of several dozen months has mellowed me on the whole R.A. Montgomery experience, but I'll take stupid and unbelievable over deary and patronizing, given those two options. Besides, disguised giant ant. That was really something. Wow.

You won this round, human, but the fight isn't over.

Aaron Zehner is the author of "The Foolchild Invention" available in paperback and e-book format. Read free excerpts here and here.