"Seems to be an Elves theme."

<It's one of the morph instincts, fairly strong, not that you'd be able to tell.>

"I do occasionally wonder if I'm missing something really cool, not getting those."

<Sometimes they are fascinating, but in general I would say it is a strategic advantage not to experience them. I wonder if you'd still have the Elven instincts for singing, if not the impulse to do it.>

"Maybe. I could try it. Pity there aren't Elves of me. Ooh, I wonder if Lúthiens are usefully morphable even if Maiar aren't."

<I can ask Epic to come here and let us have a try at some of these, if you want to squeeze some experimenting in before the meeting.>

"Probably not the most defensible use of time. - Oh, but Boots wants to know if he's getting along with your family nicely."

<Splendidly. He took tremendous offense at the suggestion he morph a child Andalite and he tail-fights like he is holding a long piece of string with a knife tied to the end, but they're talking at each other in miscellaneous languages and the ground is rather scattered with prototypes of research projects and everyone involved seems very happy.>

Butterfly relays this to Boots. "She wants to know if tail-fighting is reasonably safe for the involved parties, if his indestructibility slips in morph or if his piece of string with a knife on the end flails unpredictably."

<There is no chance at all any Andalite would hurt him accidentally, and he's too inept to hurt them. It would not be unheard of for him to hurt himself, but he can morph out if he does - oh, or he could morph Yeerk and pick it up automatically, my father might be all right with that if it were an alternate universe version of himself involved ->

"The friendlier Warp version, unfortunately, requires major abdominal surgery, can't be removed without killing the host, and involves bidirectional personality blending."

<What do they do if the host changes their mind?>

"I have a one-paragraph summary, here. There are a lot more Trills than symbionts and it sounds like there's a lot of evaluations before somebody gets one? So maybe that doesn't come up, or maybe there's a way to remove one that didn't come up in a one-paragraph."

<Fair enough.>

Epic? It occurred to me you could get tail-fighting and all my father's languages if you morph Yeerk. I do not know if he will be okay with that but you can ask him.

Yeah, we did that! Both ways, so now he has what I know too. He doesn't mind if it's people who love him, and we're thinking about testing with someone who's not as smart to see if the engineering knowledge is persistent.

<Ah> he tells Bella, <they arrived at the Yeerk solution of their own accord.>

"Somehow I do not think my alts would feel similarly about it."

<Nor would mine. If it were necessary we could tolerate it - especially reciprocal, that soothes some of the anxiety about what it is they picked up from you - but as a convenient method of skills transfer, no. And there is no way my relationship with my father would survive having him in my head.>

"I occasionally thought about what would happen if I were, not gotten, but plausibly looked like I had been and needed to be checked right away and not in three days and there wasn't an MRI handy, trying to figure out if I could live with it if it were Andi or if it'd be totally intolerable no matter what and it might as well be somebody I never wanted to talk to again particularly anyway... I wasn't really sure."

<Even if they could then be made to forget it?>

"Yeah, even then."

<Huh. That is a stronger preference against it than I have.>

"Well, part of it is that I'm also not necessarily comfortable with amnestics."

Tail-nod. <For me - the experience is terrifying and traumatic and would be regardless, but that does not have to attach to the person doing it, and once it is over the only problem is the invasion of privacy and absent that I have no problems with the person. Assuming, of course, they had consent and did not do more than agreed on and everything.>

Nod. "- T'Mir says she'd be happy to come. And preempted my question about whether she wanted a little longer with her dad since she doesn't have an Andi to hand him off to, apparently her dad is a kind of alien that makes a virtue of being extremely nondemonstrative if not outright void of emotions and he'd find it irregular if she hovered."