Boots is in her bungalow with her boyfriend.

Elf hair is soft.

Pop! "Bella I can turn into a dragon! Bella Rúmil I can turn into a dragon! Um."

Bella and Rúmil have their hair unbraided.

Boots is telekinetic and some hasty telekinesis later they do not have their hair unbraided.

"Um. Sorry.

I can turn into a dragon!!!"

"What kind of dragon?"

"Any kind of dragon! Any kind of thing, actually. I shouldn't do it here because I turned into a dragon with a wingspan of a mountain range and that's really big and kind of wasn't good for the planetoid and this planet's bigger but it still might not be good."

"...not doing it here sounds prudent, then."

"Yeah! I could turn into you, though! Can I turn into you? Or there's a way to do it all blendy, I could do both you and Rúmil and then I would look like I was your kid, which.

Um.

Sorry about not knocking. I know I'm supposed to."

"Knocking is really preferable. Where did this new ability even come from?"

"Have you not been reading the crystal ball chat? I guess it all did happen pretty fast..."

"I saw there was a new Bell, but nobody had asked for me in particular, and T'Mir said she'd take point so I got some other things done. New Bell is handing out 'turn into stuff'?"

He makes an Escafil device. "It's called morphing. You can get the DNA of anything that has DNA and then you can turn into it. The new world was really bad but it's okay now and also T'Mir has her dad back!"

"That explains why she's taking point."

"So, it's another crowded no-magic world like Warp, and there are aliens, and some of the aliens are Yeerks. Yeerks are slug-things -" he makes a basement-dweller Yeerk so he can acquire it -"that crawl inside your brain and learn everything about you and then control your body and impersonate you. There's another kind of aliens that are called Andalites. My alt's an Andalite. The Andalites fight the Yeerks. They landed on Earth and they ran into the Bell and she wanted to help of course and the me was dead so the Maitimo was in charge and after they won the war against the Yeerks he said Bella should be the ruler of Earth because she was good at it so they worked on it and now she is. And they've got aging and healing through morph and lots of Andalite technology, I helped Vanda Nossëo find some they could sell, and by the end of the war it was just the Maitimo and the Curufin and so when they met everybody they were like 'hey, what if someone wished-on the power to make basement-dwellers have minds-"

"- does that work?"

"Yeah! The Curufin wished it to get our family back and then it turned out you can only resurrect people you feel really strongly about, unless you wanna be a magic rock and the Andalites didn't want to be a magic rock because it interfered with morphing and we don't know for sure if songs work on them, so then the Maitimo also wished it because he feels really strongly about all of the people who died when their Earth got dented. And Gem's going to find some other people to wish it so we can put Vulcan back and stuff."

"Sounds awesome."

"Yeah! And I can morph a grownup -" he concentrates - "I can't morph a grownup! Ugh stupid stupid adjacency ugh."

"Nobody checked adjacency on the turning into things power?"

"It works in Aurum and there didn't seem any reason it would have an adjacency limit, it's tech, not magic, usually it's just magic that has that, and I can make a cube here just fine..."

"Well, I don't know enough to speculate."

He's pouting. "Well, I can turn into a dragon but only near Cube, I guess. Also the evil Yeerk empire is still a thing so they're going to make it go away."

"That's very good news."

Nod nod.

"Well I was gonna teach you to morph but I guess I can't. And you were. Busy. And. I guess I will go to Vanda Nossëo and tell them not to make morph cubes but the biofilters'll still sell great."

"They should probably know that the cubes won't work before they have a big stack of them to get rid of, yes."

"Yeah." He doesn't leave.

Help. Just to Rúmil.

I am not really sure what to tell him. He - is not usually subtle about wanting to know something -

It looked like he thought maybe what he walked in on was just strictly less interesting than turning into a dragon but if that were his entire reaction he probably would have left...

Might have been less interesting than turning into a dragon but now that turning into a dragon is off the table -

"Do you have a question, Fëanáro?"

"Are you going to get married?"

And very, very, very quietly: "are you going to have kids?"

"...we're not engaged... or planning on kids..."

"Okay. Bye." Pop.

"Well."

"...hadn't actually occurred to me that he'd be threatened by the possibility but of course -"

"Yeah, especially now that he's heard about the other histories -"

"Yeah. He was so nonchalant about the idea that his parents might have more, but..."

"I don't think he regards them as his parents. I don't think he'd be shaken at the thought of competition for their affection."

"Yep. Well. Did you desperately want to have kids who were not Fëanáro at some point."

"Not - really, no. Did you?"

"Not particularly."

"It seems a little silly to make him promises about ever but we can at least tell him there's no chance we'd have kids in the next century."

"Yeah, that sounds pretty safe."

Squeeze. "He could have taken it worse."

"This is very true."

"And it was probably predictable that he was going to find out. Maybe we can both find him later, separately, and see if he wants reassuring about anything."

"That's a good idea."

"And resurrection! That's great news."

"It seems unlikely to work on people who run on anything - nonreductionist - which includes Materians and Flat Elves and possibly other kinds of people - but it is, and T'Mir will be so delighted about having her dad..."

"If we're putting Vulcan back and repopulating it that will be hard to pass off as non-magic."

"Quite. I mean, I think some people will assume a naturalistic explanation anyway but on top of the teleportation and the spontaneous cities and stuff, yep."

"Do we care if the secret is known?"

"A little, but not enough to not put Vulcan back."

Nod. Hug. "I should have asked Epic to check if I have an alt. Probably not, since it's not an Arda."

"Cam will run a full sweep if he hasn't already but yeah, probably not."

"Anyway," he says, smiling, "what were we up to before we got distracted?"

"Was it unmemorable? I will have to fix that."

She did not actually locate their hair ties and can just stop telekinetically holding it braided. Like so.

Ooooh. "That's pretty hot, you know."

"Telekinesis in general or applying it to our hair?"

"I was thinking of the hair trick. I am of course tremendously impressed by all that you do but that's a different sort of thing."

Giggle. "The other Bells think it's silly that I went native enough to even bother."

"Well, they were never happy even for a time in an Arda, were they? Except Kib and growing one's hair out is more of a commitment."

"Yeah. Besides, it makes me more distinctive from all the people who look exactly like me."

"It does! It is a little strange that you come in 'boy' and 'girl' but not in any other races or hair colors."

"Aly was darker, but for some reason that face is not so common? And Loki's technically blue?"

"True." More hair-petting, less speculation about the deep mysteries of the multiverse.

Yaaaay hairpetting.

Epic goes to Vanda Nossëo and fills a warehouse with pocket translators and another with Gleet bio-filters and then flies around installing them as a proof of concept. He tries a shredder on himself; the lowest-level stun setting doesn't do anything but the third-level stun setting knocks him out for (he's made a watch first so he can check) a minute and a half. He tries making shredders without settings higher than 'stun' and then fills three warehouses with those once he's got it. 

Then he bounces back to Cube so he can morph more things! He thinks he'll make an Andalite morph from conjured samples and then sneakily infiltrate the sleeping Andalites.

The sleeping Andalites fail to be sneakily infiltrated. <Hello?> one says suspiciously.

<Hi! I am Epic, I'm a Fëanáro, I'm a demon only not exactly and I'm morphed Andalite, and I just wanna hang out with you.>

<We do not have any way of verifying any of that.>

Demorph. Pop-pop-pop they told you they only give out the teleport to a few people, right? And I have it. And I can make stuff - he makes the grass taller and grassier - and they probably said it's just me and Cam who can do that and can teleport, right? Because you've got to be really really trustworthy. Which I am. I just saw you all close together and I wanted to join.

<All right. We're sleeping, though, so you should be quiet.>

I'll be sooooo quiet. 

And the Andalites relax.

And he snuggles in next to his alt and says do you want me to teach you wizardry? You're not adjacent so you don't have magic but we can go boop Olórin. Also I can teach you the languages in Hell, I speak some of those, and the way Warp does faster than light because it's different than here...

His alt does not mind this.

And eventually it's morning.

In the morning the Imperatrix Isabella sends a briefing email to a small selection of staff (her PA who will be fielding a broader array of possible appointments now, the person in charge of making sure Andalites and Ristrell don't have to talk to each other, and the liaison to the Earth-dwelling Yeerks), CC's Matirin so he'll know what they've been told, and catches up on peal things from overnight and greetings from her alts. (An indestructibleizing for a trusted troporter has been scheduled for a few hours in the future. It might have to be done twice, because people in that world have this habit of sharing bodies and they're not sure if it'll apply to the person or the body.)

And Matirin teleports on over (he is not going to be seen in public until the war ends, that's the plan) and also checks out the crystal ball and gets his giant document with names and faces of everybody in the multiverse who a Maitimo has interacted with and estimates of resources he can have for his plans.

"Are you ever going to meet so much as one percent of those people?" Butterfly wonders.

<Probably not, but I do not know which one percent.>

"What if somebody thinks it's weird that you recognize them without having been introduced?" she wonders.

<I would say 'hello, Zenith mentioned to me that he had really appreciated your role in paving the road from Erebor to Tumunzahar'. Not 'bwahaha I know your name'.>

"Fair enough."

<Anyway, I do not have a people anymore and it rather fills the void.>

"I'm glad it helps."

<Do you want me to accompany you today?>

"I'd appreciate it. Eidetic memory is so nice, thinking about complicated things goes so much smoother."

<I know! I am very excited about that one. ...I turned down retroactive, I do not think I could cope very well with remembering everything as if it just happened. Once I find a workaround for that, maybe.>

"I'm not finding it difficult to keep my train of thought more under control than that, you could try one of those on for a moment and see if it disagreed with you? How's your family doing?"

<Well. The little child version of my father showed up in the middle of the night and offered to teach my father demonic languages and get anyone any morphs they chose, so they're all racing around trying out being dinosaurs and dragons and things.>

"...are they keeping out of camera range?"

<Yes. Finleran showed them where they could expect privacy.>

"Okay, good. Apparently morph doesn't work in distant worlds; my guess is z-space counts as a dimension or part of this dimension, so Aurum can reach it but nowhere else can."

<That makes sense. Slightly disappointing, but it does make sense.>

"Yep. ...I'll let Boots know where Epic got to in case he didn't mention to her."

<He wanted it known that he filled up all the warehouses in Vanda Nossëo with modified stun-only shredders and bio-filters before he came here to be an Andalite with us.>

"Useful. The shredders in particular, I had a nightmare once about getting the setting wrong."

<Yes. I might try setting up useful social structures in a world adjacent to here, since morphing will make it a lot easier to integrate with the locals.>

"Makes sense. You may want to borrow Joy for finding places; worldleapers are random and you don't know if you're next to something uncomfortably Materia-like until you try it. They can rule out Materia in particular by earwire, but it could be a type."

<That seems sensible. I wonder if I can borrow Epic. The simplest way of pulling it off would be with a demon to save on all the manufacturing.>

"Your guess would be better than mine."

<I do not have a good sense of how much Epic's parental figures try to supervise him.>

"There's a note in Boots's files that if he turns up somewhere and it is not obvious that she knows where he is, she'd appreciate being notified, but that he is indestructible and will probably listen to reason if something is a bad idea anyway. So, not all that closely."

<All right. Well, if you want anything demon-providable while he is here...>

"Coming up with a list of such things is on the list but I don't have it done yet and Cam's expecting to know whether he can replace the Atlantic strike landmass safely soon and won't mind making a few other things while he's here for that if he can."

<Very reasonable. Am I intruding on morning appointments?>

"I cleared everything to catch up on stuff. Lots to read. Surprise surprise people who are me are busy."

<It seemed like there were so many close calls. I guess if all instances of you end up running places perhaps we had more of a margin for error than we realized.>

"I mean, there's still lots of room for things to go really badly and stay that way until someone from another universe saves the day."

Shiver. <There is that.>

"If they'd showed up and found an Empire-conquered galaxy this would be significantly worse than average but not demand a complete reinterpretation of their understanding of the multiverse."

<Yeah. And maybe after enough of your therapist alt we'd even be okay eventually.>

"She comes highly praised. I'd be tempted to poke fun but therapy is kind of a more serious profession when it's practiced by psychics, I guess."

<And my alts are indestructible. That is - impressive work on her part.>

"I've read less of their comments than my alts'."

<If you read Kib's you might have the idea anyway.>

"Loosely. Bells don't work the same way as apparently-you're-Maitimos, he's got a model but he doesn't have it in a way that he can just Bell at us."

Tail-nod. Quiet reading about the multiverse.

"I'm gonna have my lunch with Andi and Renée's dinner, since I can teleport now, want to do some unobtrusive morph and join us?"

<You do not want time in private with your mother?>

"Andi's been catching her up and I don't have anything particularly sensitive to say. Besides, Renée'll like you."

So he morphs something unobtrusive. 

And Bella drops them in Andi's hotel room, and Andi and Bella also morph unobtrusive (Andi has had a post-show nap to get enough morph capacity back to do dinner out without paparazzi), and they all go out for steak. Renée does in fact like Matirin; she is grateful and friendly and curious about everything and doesn't even reproach him for abducting her teenage daughters.

He is really glad he abducted her teenage daughters! If he'd grabbed someone else's teenage daughters it is possible a lot of things would have worked out much worse than they did. He regrets that they couldn't tell her her children were safe; that must have been a very painful time, and he hopes no parent ever need experience it again, with all this snazzy new magic.

And Renée is so proud of both of them, her politician and her artist, thriving so much! And Charlie was never dead at all and that is good too! And she hears everyone else who died is coming back too, like her boyfriend, right?

Yep! If she's in a hurry they could actually get him right now, but there is probably going to be a process and it might wait until the continent is put back.

Phil would probably rather have a Florida to be on. And maybe a Renée who has been slightly better acclimated and can explain more stuff.

(Bella is sorry that the we-are-running-away note sniped at Phil, she was kind of grasping at straws.)

Phil will soon have a Florida to be on. He has sixteen million names from Florida to put back once there's somewhere to put them.

"I'm actually kind of surprised that many names made their way to you - are they all from individuals or did you get some of them from official sources?"

"Cross-referenced, sometimes, if someone said 'my friend from college was living there with her ex and their kids, I don't know their names...' I'm missing millions but I got a lot."

"I think it's really sweet that you did that."

"I wasn't expecting it to be useful but it was very well worth the time even when we thought we couldn't do anything about it. I think it helps me make military decisions, too. I can't let anybody turn into just a number."

Nod, nod.

And Bella has been brainstorming ways to make it convenient for everyone brought back to life to be briefed and sent from a central resurrection location or locations home and reassert their legal identities.

That's a good thing to be thinking about. The demon can make them all with identifying documents in their pockets; transportation will be a little harder, but maybe not much, because their houses can be made intact and everything.

The ecosystem's going to be kind of wacky with all the vertebrates being either left out or very stupid, too. She expects to field complaints about dogs. Matirin probably does not want to spend time on people's dogs?

Matirin definitely wants to get started on an adjacent world before he resurrects peoples' dogs but he could probably care sufficiently about peoples' dogs - are people also going to want pets who died of old age decades ago, how unbounded would this be -

Huge can of worms, to be honest. Butterfly would not ask Gem to send her a magic rock with no other job description to work on dogs (cats, etc.), anytime in the next year or three until human mortality has been handled, let alone Matirin personally who might have to listen to a minute of exposition per dog before he could even do it.

...Bella might be underestimating how long this'll take. He could do it in a year if he does nothing else and taps three hundred people a minute. Eighty million is a lot of people. And that's just the people who died in that one event, they're also going to want to resurrect people who died other ways...

"If I cared more about people's dogs than I do, I might want a magic rock working on dogs in parallel with people working on dead people, sort of as a morale thing, but not until the humans-specific logistics issues and explaining to everyone what was going on was sorted out."

"Ah, makes sense. I... do not have a frame of reference for how much to care about peoples' dogs. Did Gem say how many helpers she can spare?"

"She's pretty sure magic rocks who make that wish will wind up with spooky allied powers, so she wants them heavily vetted, but she should be able to come up with a handful and I get dibs at least until Warp figures out how they want to handle Vulcan."

Nod. "Will they all wind up with the same spooky powers, so she at least knows what to look out for?"

"Inconveniently, no. Or not necessarily, anyway. It has to do with how they think of it, it's kind of a do-what-you-mean system. Might get one who can jolt people out of comas and one who's good with brain damage and one who can turn people into basement dwellers."

"Ah. That is awkward. My alts can recommend some of their people if she's having a hard time with the vetting process."

"She might take them up on that, albeit I think more for expedience than actual dissatisfaction with her system."

"Equally reasonable." 

And the conversation topic drifts around. Has Matirin seen any of Andi's shows, they're really something.

He has! They are! Andi should track down Epic, he's been handing out tissue samples so people can morph cool things. Epic is himself partial to dinosaurs. 

"Everyone'd wonder where I got them!"

"I think we're going public with the 'other dimensions' thing sooner or later. Epic's native one has dinosaurs. Also giant glowy trees. I'm honestly terribly tempted to visit but the files said to be cautious about that."

"How come? Dinosaurs can't eat you if you teleport away."

"It has gods! No one is sure who would win if the gods decided to just make our extradimensional magic stop working, but they might try that and they might succeed if they did."

"Oh. Why would they do that?"

"They are clumsy and kind of callous, though they're working on it. People've been trying to teach them to do better."

"Is it the only place with dinosaurs?"

"So far I think it's all Ardas, and all Ardas have a gods problem. Though if you went to Elentári or something it'd be easier to fetch you out if the Valar got upset. Elentári's a different Arda near where we've got some heavy-hitting versions of your sister."

"Man, I can actually remember all this weird stuff now and it's still confusing. Aliens were kinda enough."

"Were not!"

"I don't mean for like practical making you omnipotent purposes."

"I like Elves! And alts. There's a boy Bell with a tail, it's so sensible."

"I like having tails when I have them! They're fun."

"They are. I have no idea how anybody gets on without them."

"What are they - for?"

"Balance, communication, protection..."

"Fidgeting!"

"Dramatic poses!"

Renée laughs.

"Suicide if you're about to be Yeerked!' is not mentioned. They talk about all the new inventions and how convenient it'll be that there are no more mosquitos in Florida.

Renée for one will not miss mosquito bites, no sir.

Matirin doubts that anybody will.

And it's getting late, Dallas time.

Yup. Bedtime for Andi and Renée. Good luck with your interplanetary politics, guys.

Back to Beijing.

Where they still have time to do more reading before going to the Moon.

"I'm gonna assume we can't usefully morph Maiar to get unlimited mana..."

<It would surprise me if that worked but it has not been tried.>

"I'll ask one of the ones Talik's alts keep as pets, I guess. I wonder about Hex familiars, too."

<Has anyone checked if those have DNA?>

"Doesn't look like it's been investigated. Cam ran some DNA checks on alts - my results aren't in yet but I probably just match pre-vampirism Golden and Gem - but I didn't see anything about the familiars."

<Boots and Iobel also look identical to you and are human, right? Do they not match Gem and Golden?>

"Not quite! Or each other! Most of the genes that actually do anything are the same or equivalent, but all the junk DNA is different and Boots has a thing that might be what's making her a subtle artist or have a Materia-type soul or something."

<Fascinating. We do not seem to get Elf souls when we morph Elves; we do not get the oath-swearing, anyway. I have no idea about Materians.>

"Boots has a comment under the speculation about what her weird genes are doing that if Materia noticed that she'd learned that while she was in Materia, everything in Materia would probably quietly stop running on DNA."

<Well, that is terrifying.>

"Yup. Stay out of Materia."

<And have Joy world-scry so we do not stumble into something like it. Understood.>

"I'm not sure if I should ask an alt or, I don't know, a Vanda Nossëo representative or something, over to the meeting with Ristrell or not."

<As a sort of point person for relations between her and the multiverse? Might be useful, but it probably does not have to happen today.>

"That and credibility and more multiverse knowledge than I can cram in the next -" Clock. "- two hours."

<We could put out a request on the network.>

"Maybe T'Mir would do it. Apparently there's a species in Warp that works a little like Yeerks but they're invariably consensual; she said Yeerks sound like 'less friendly Trill symbionts'."

<Oooh. That might lend a useful perspective.>

"That's my thinking. I'll see how busy she is. ...This intention-reading computer is great, are thoughtspeak interfaces this great?"

<Just as good for the purposes they were designed for - I'd rather pilot a ship with our interfaces, or make or partake in Andalite media - but it looks like writing messages is faster with your computer.>

"It occurs to me that except for a couple of the estreen recordings Andi imported for inspiration I have not seen any Andalite media."

<I think you would find a great deal of it bewildering. And slow paced. Maybe the Elves'll like it; it is pretty.>

"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."

<Huh. All right.>

"It seems oddly appropriate for a Charlie. He's not emotionless but he's very stoic."

<It is strange to me that species in Warp can interbreed.>

"Yeah, it's pretty weird. Sometimes there are medical oddities but mostly it just works. They're also overwhelmingly humanoid; there's common ancestry hypotheses and some are actually known to be related."

<Common ancestry would explain it. Can demons check that?>

"I'm not actually sure if 'most recent common ancestor' is something they can conjure by."

<Presumably this happened after spaceflight was developed and there would be written records?>

"No. Well, yes after spaceflight was developed but not by any surviving civilization, so you'd have to know when you were looking for and then comb through all the writing of around then..."

<So a fascinating project but an inconvenient one. Warp's own historians might take it on once the truth gets out.>

"Seems likely. Man, the multiverse is already a spectacular array of fascinating things but imagine in twenty, fifty years..."

Swish-swish. <I know!!>

Giggle. "- T'Mir says there's a brief window after putting a symbiont in a Trill after which the Trill can survive having it extracted but the personality blending sticks in the symbiont - less so in the host - and after that window no such luck."

<Well. That does not sound ideal but there are more pressing problems.>

"It sounds like Trill is a perfectly nice planet with a pretty well-managed system and the most salient news item she found while she was looking this up was that somebody got in a fight with someone else who outcompeted them for the symbiont they were both trying to get, so. Maybe Yeerks would be popular there."

<Are you inclined to try introducing the assistive-Yeerk system here on other Earths?>

"Possibly. It does require everyone knowing what's going on and what the bracelets mean to really work, so it'd be a ways out."

<And there are more than enough people interested here on this Earth, I suppose.>

"Well, it sort of depends on how many Yeerks it turns out there are when we conquer the Empire and how quick they integrate into the paradigm."

<Ristrell should have some insight there.>

"Yeah, I'd expect so."

Read read read - <Our world's been checked for alts of Morgoth or Sauron ->

"Yeah. Doesn't have them unless they're inconveniently insubstantial."

Unhappy tail-swish. <Well, they at least did not make an appearance.>

"Yep."

T'Mir appears ten minutes before it's time to go to the Moon.

<Hello again.>

"Hello. One of the genetic engineering researchers on my planet is a Trill - unjoined - and was puzzled that I suddenly had all these questions."

<If we can convince Yeerks as a culture to be civil I think their arrangement will be more consent-compatible, since they have to leave every three days and the hosts can always speak up then.>

"And they don't have direct personality effects," agrees T'Mir. "A joined Trill is generally considered one person with two - or more, if the symbiont is in a second or subsequent host - histories, not two people."

Tail-nod.

"Chalek asked me to convey his personal thanks to you, incidentally."

<He is very welcome.>

And those of Butterfly's staff who are accompanying them arrive - and squint at Matirin, because telling Andalites apart is kind of hard for humans even if you don't take morph into account - and double-take at T'Mir - and then they are all on the Moon.

Ristrell and two staffpersons - not wristbanded; there's few enough unaccompanied vertebrates in Tide that the system hasn't been implemented and is simply enforced at customs - are waiting there. They are startled.

"This is going to be interesting," Ristrell says, glancing levelly at Matirin and T'Mir before settling her attention on Butterfly.

"You have no idea," says Butterfly.

<A civilization with teleportation powers made contact with us. They broke me out of prison and are planning to go to war with the Yeerk empire. We would like your insight both on potential flaws in our plans to achieve that, and on what to do with the Yeerks once the war is over.>

"I see. And you are?" Ristrell asks T'Mir.

"My name is T'Mir," she says. "Here as an expert on the civilization in question, its potential resource outlay, etcetera."

"And you look exactly like the Imperatrix with minor cosmetic variation because it amused you to partially morph her from a green point-eared baseline?"

"No, I look like this because I'm one of her alternate universe counterparts."

"I see."

...he goes Elf because it's looking like they're going to be indoors for the next long while. He sits down. 

"Pointy ears are a fad now," comments Ristrell.

"The pointy ears are beside the point, that morph just has better-than-human sensory acuity," says Butterfly. "At any rate. We expect to be able to locate and destroy all Imperial Kandrona generators, likely with zero casualties, and are investigating a way to render the original Kandrona sun and any similar stars useless for that purpose, and from there demand the immediate surrender of the Imperial Yeerks, then relocate them to totally inaccessible-by-local-forms-of-travel pools for sorting and, ideally, integration with Tide. Can you comment on likely complications?"

"You'll get some people holding their hosts hostage for the restoration of the generators under the expectation that surrender would be less pleasant than suicide," Ristrell says.

"Anything that can be publicized about the nature of the attackers that will reassure them on that front?"

"Being as conspicuously non-Andalite as possible may reduce incidence but not eliminate it," Ristrell says. "To the best of my knowledge there are no parties hostile to the Empire who have also cultivated a reputation as merciful captors that the Empire would be inclined to credit under such a display of force, and posing as a non-hostile party of any disposition, like the Skrit Na, would just look incoherent."

"And if they acknowledge being a previously unknown force - from another galaxy, say -"

"Then all they know is that you are bewilderingly powerful and feel comfortable tampering with their stars and destroying their generators in order to extract their submission, they know nothing about what you are likely to do with it once you get it."

"And expect it to be worse than death."

"And expect it to be worse than suicide, which happens to be most readily accomplished with the simultaneous death of the hosts, and in some cases be alive to the possibility that there's also leverage in being willing to do that," Ristrell corrects. "Cutting off the Kandrona is a death threat, and not a merciful one."

He looks at T'Mir - "we could knock out everybody making that threat, teleport them to Edda, extract Yeerks, right?"

"Not easily, if there's a lot of them. We're bottlenecked on physically locating things; we can do the Kandrona generators only because we expect it to be a tractable order of magnitude and can do much of the preliminary search before acting."

"The problem is that once we demonstrate capabilities far beyond theirs, any signal of good faith we do make could be feigned - I imagine there are people in Vanda Nossëo who would be willing to be Yeerked for long enough for the Yeerks to confirm their intentions, but once we can teleport and alter their suns they have no reason to believe we can't also mislead a Yeerk in our head."

"Elspeth works over broadcast, but she is not impossible to disbelieve."

"They don't have to believe it, just think it's a better bet than suicide.

We could do something convoluted, but it'd be a lot slower - and put people at risk, I wouldn't even consider it if we couldn't resurrect them -"

"What a fascinating civilization you have encountered," murmurs Ristrell.

"Quite," says Butterfly. "I'm not sure we should expect to be able to identify everyone lost to hostage-host suicide sufficiently to bring them back."

"They can do the people you lost on the Blade ship, too, though perhaps this is not the time," he says to Ristrell. And to Bella, "That's not what I was thinking of - I was thinking of letting the Empire encounter some non-teleporting consenting Elf 'scouts', infest them, learn what the civilization is, and have better expectations when the generators all go out. Only works if we are sure there is nothing they could do in anticipation."

"...Elves can read minds," Butterfly points out.

"Space Elves can't."

"- true. But it'd still be plausible that they'd been misled."

"And it would probably take time for the word to spread far enough - if the Empire did not keep it a secret anyway -"

"I'm skeptical of finding substantial numbers of volunteers for such a process but a forked Space Elf, missing eidetic memory but with complete and high-context memories of the general operative policies of the relevant entities - so, a fork of someone who's heavily involved in wide-spanning projects - would present a fairly unambiguous bid for good faith operation. The Empire choosing to withhold that information, or taking a long time to decide what to do with it while our scouts tolerate ambiguously tolerable conditions, is much less under our control even assuming unlimited convenient volunteers."

"I would have to ask whether anyone who would have the relevant qualifications would be comfortable volunteering, but I tentatively expect so, Elves seem very -"

He misses his tail. He shakes his head instead. "Pro-social with a bit of a martyrdom complex."

"They are, and some of the Space ones have a remarkable casualness about forks. I suppose the 'tolerable conditions' bit could potentially be alleviated if chiplocked suicide apparatus perfected during their war would still respond to them even while they were infested."

"That is at least straightforwardly tested. Shall I send whoever's handling personnel in Ambaróna a message asking?"

"Perhaps not right now, we may think of something else."

"It may also turn out that the idea for affecting the stars won't work."

"Do we have a way of testing that? What's the plan if it doesn't?"

"Oh, yes, an ordinary Kandrona generator plus an ordinary star and someone who can morph Yeerk should demonstrate proof of concept, it's not hard to test, just might not work. Solar shade is an option, if a more laborious one and harder to prevent the Empire from just blowing up."

"We can probably disable their ships' weapons systems without any casualties. I wouldn't know what to target but we can build a copy of the fleet they have in orbit and practice if necessary."

"But it is certainly preferable to avoid space combat, even if it may be accomplished without casualties - it probably adds nothing to our credibility that we have to conventionally defend our solar shields and can't just turn part of the star off."

"I wonder what would happen if we just advertised the availability of resurrection and affected not caring whether we get surrender de jure or surrender de facto via suicide?"

He glances at Ristrell, who must be finding this conversation fascinating.

Enthralling. "I suppose they won't know that you'd have any more trouble locating suicides than generators," Ristrell allows. "I would imagine some would call your bluff. You will certainly have to field demands, especially while demonstrating sufficient formidability that it will be easy to assume anything they might want would be trivial."

"Any particularly famously dead Yeerks who could be verifiably resurrected? What sort of demands - will demanding that everyone leave their current host body and take a basement-dweller host we provide for them at the generator site go over better than demanding they leave their host body for a pool?"

"We haven't actually checked basement dweller hosts yet, have we?" says Butterfly.

"Plenty of famously dead Yeerks. Nearly impossible to verify their identities. We all look alike," says Ristrell, "and people who could confirm that they provided information only they would know would be few. They will certainly feel less helpless in hosts than in pools."

"So maybe 'we have resurrection and intend to get everyone back if they suicide' works best as part of the good-faith scouting plan. We haven't checked basement dweller hosts but animals morphed human work -"

"What is the stupidest animal morphed human that has been tried?"

"I have spent the last several years in political prison. When I left it was 'lab rat'."

"There hasn't been a lot of call for experimentally going any stupider than lab rats and a basement dweller is stupider than a lab rat - and won't have human instincts, either, which morphing presumably provides rats just as effectively as it does people."

"So we could provide replacement nonsapient hosts for everyone but it would take a lot more effort, can't just make them."

"Basement dwellers might work fine, we just haven't tested it."

"Sovereign, are non-sapient humans the most desirable hosts we could offer under the circumstances? Is there something the Yeerks will rather be?"

"I imagine if you make an open-ended offer you'll have plenty who prefer Andalites, Hork-Bajir, Leerans, or possibly other species they've run into that haven't come into common use. If they sufficiently understand the non-sapient stipulation and anticipate that means it doesn't matter if the species is sapient either they may solicit more variety."

"I'm not vetoing offering them Andalites but the Andalites will never, ever trust us again," he says to T'Mir. "And Andalites and Hork-Bajir have the most 'kill the hundred people around me' potential if someone decides to play along until they have some natural weapons to enforce their 'suicide is better than capture' opinions on the other surrendering Yeerks -"

"I actually do not expect very much of that," Ristrell says. "Not in that context. That would be some sub-Visser deciding to blow up a lot of people at once, if they opted to make a group decision; sudden personal violence would be unlikely, especially absent the ability to tell who is who."

"What is the exact nature of the Andalite objection to providing basement dweller hosts resembling them?" inquires T'Mir. "Will this continue to be an obstacle even after the surrender has been completely secured?"

"Once the surrender is secured you can make sure the Andalites do not find out about it, but - no Andalite would consent to being a Yeerk host if braindead, and wearing someone's semblance is a fraught thing with a lot of associated cultural baggage and expectations and mores, and Andalites trust other Andalites, more or less unconditionally, and would have to stop doing that if there were impersonators, and also everybody would just be horrified on a level they could not justify."

"Sovereign, do you expect some substantial number of people to surrender conditional on being offered the opportunity to resemble Andalites?"

"No," says Ristrell, "but if you take any actions which are obviously intended to placate Andalites, you lose credibility as merciful captors."

"If the Elves are doing the public interfacing and just offer Elf basement-dweller hosts with no explanation, and communicate that more options will be provided later, they can just assume that the Elves found it most natural to do hosts of their own species."

"That would work better," agrees Ristrell. "When are you expecting to know if you can add and subtract Kandrona radiation to suns?"

"Later this evening," says T'Mir.

"Sovereign, do you think offering other hosts will be sufficient to stop people from taking hostages? If not, do you think sending in some people who know how we operate will help? Is there any chance that on learning what we're planning the Empire will just cooperate with us?"

"Some Yeerks become extremely attached to their individual hosts past the point of rationality, even if the hosts are involuntary or not comfortable to occupy. There is a Council member who occupies a Taxxon, albeit a very well fed one. You will certainly not get everyone happily into replacements however appealing you contrive to make the replacements. Cooperation is unlikely as well unless someone like me manages a coup the way I did, largely because it will signal weakness in people motivated to save face. Having it generally credibly known how you operate will make it less likely that you will face disorganized opposition."

He leans back and looks at Bella.

"What about having it credibly known that we can if necessary find and then via teleportation remove from their hosts the Council of Thirteen? Doing it for enormous numbers would be hard, but thirteen is tractable," says Butterfly.

"I would still expect fair odds of a Visser or two trying some stunt," says Ristrell. "Visser Three would have done it; he was not the only raving lunatic to make rank."

"Is there anything you anticipate successfully averts that?"

"I lack a complete list of the contents of your bag of tricks, but I imagine if you could cause Yeerks to peaceably leave their hosts en masse without having to convince them to do so in some way, that would be your plan regardless," says Ristrell. "Convincing them to do so will involve confronting deficits in apparent legitimacy - as comfortable people to be captured by, as threats to be reckoned with in the absence of surrender. Some people will believe you are lying about your motives, that your magical accomplishments of sabotage are faked or can be countered, or that they will be able to make a break for it and find refuge somewhere without your notice. Convincing them will involve dealing with Visser Three-like idiots and those they command, who will not necessarily respond to any rational presentation of evidence. Convincing them will involve making sure they can believe that they will fare better than dead under your care, and that is not merely a matter of making it emphatically clear that you will not be torturing them or making sure they can never have any host of any kind ever again, there is certainly a certain sort of Yeerk who would rather be dead than see their host operating independently of them. It certainly sounds like you can defeat the Empire sometime this week. I doubt very much that you can do it with the absolutely sterile cleanliness you had in mind."

"Are there ways of doing it that make it likelier we'd know the names of anyone who dies."

"Hosts bred in captivity often do not have names," Ristrell says.

"Identification numbers of some kind would do," says T'Mir.

"Those they have. Making generous estimates of your ability to process whoever you capture alive and correctly identify them, any strategy which gets you the Council's records and those of Vissers Nine, Seventeen, Twenty, and Twenty-Six should - unless there are breeding programs of which I am unaware or they are sloppier recordkeepers than I expect - get you complete lists from which to cross off whoever you found alive."

"Oh. Well, we can check how good they are at record-keeping now, so we know how careful we need to be -"

"Can you," says Ristrell.

"Not instantaneously, but before engaging the Empire," amends T'Mir.

"Deficits in the records won't necessarily be obvious."

"Are people bred as hosts - present at all, if they've had a Yeerk in their whole life -"

"Infants of any species are unsuitable hosts even in situations of extreme host shortage," says Ristrell. "Gedds can be taken as young as three, but it's arguable how much even Gedds captured as adults before Yeerks had the entire species yoked were 'present'."

"What kind of numbers are we looking at here? How many hosts and how many Yeerks will we be processing?"

"Yeerk populations can fluctuate enormously," says Ristrell. "Someone with a windfall of hosts and enough pool space can and will dectuple the population of Yeerks under their command almost overnight; Andalites with opportunities to destroy a handful of pools can and will slaughter millions at a stroke. My guess is that three billion Yeerks is correct to within an order of magnitude depending on the success or failure of various operations I knew about, likely existence of operations I didn't know about, etcetera. Host occupancy rate is usually five to twenty percent, kept low to encourage competition for spots."

<So we can process them all but we'll owe Ambaróna some favors> he says to Butterfly.

She inclines her head. How quickly?

Osanwë: another nice thing about being morphed Elf instead of human. <At short notice they can put about four hundred thousand people on it. Worst case of twenty billion Yeerks and two billion hosts, that's six, seven months, if it's really three billion Yeerks then inside two.>

That's not too bad.

"The numbers of the Vissers may be out of date," adds Ristrell. "If they've been promoted. I have been ignoring Imperial attempts to contact this ship but they may have presumed Visser Three deceased in spite of the lack of confirmation."

"Do you have names for those Vissers?"

"Not for Nine -" She has the others, though, name and number.

And they have eidetic memories. "Thank you very much for your time," he says. "I hope we made it interesting enough to make up for taking so much of it. Do let us know if you think of anything else."

"Of course," says Ristrell. Josefa's face is not made for sharklike smiles. Ristrell makes it work anyway. "Please feel entirely welcome to send messages with any further questions. I'll start sorting out people to help process and integrate surrendered Imperials."

"We appreciate it."

"A pleasure to meet you, Sovereign," says T'Mir.

"Likewise," Ristrell says.

"We'll be in touch."

And Beijing again.

"That was useful. So - are we sending in anyone first to establish goodwill, do we have results on the Kandrona, how good at record-keeping are these Yeerks - the latter is probably the most urgent, it will take a while for people to comb through all their works and find the records and then a while longer to verify there aren't people missing from them. I said to Butterfly during the meeting," he adds to T'Mir, "that I think we should ask Space Arda to do our legwork here, because there are more of them and they're less busy and they have native summoning and if there are non-informationally sensitive bits of this - maybe making places for ex-hosts to live - they can do it without drawing on our very overstretched demon."

"Checking - they're having to do indestructibility twice on the troporter and her 'cohabitor' both so there's a delay there, don't know yet."

"We can inquire if finding volunteer goodwill ambassadors with the necessary qualifications is likely or not, and ask Cam to produce the records so we can try to at least guess if they'll be accurate, although if someone is simply not written down we will miss them. I suppose we will have an opportunity to find our mistake by word of mouth during processing."

"Unless there's a whole - breeding camp or something - that never got numbered, I am not sure even that finding out about them'd help us at that point..."

He inquires with Space about the likelihood of finding volunteer goodwill ambassadors with the necessary qualifications.

"The obvious reason to number hosts is to distinguish them to allow continuity for their Yeerks. It's possible they don't number children who are too young. But the hosts might remember how many children they had and then we can check that against a database."

"Yes. Oh, and we need to check whether basement-dwellers are as good as animals-morphed-human - or morphed-Elf, I suppose - and if not we need to get billions of animals to morph Elf, ugh -"

"I think it's actually a bad idea to cause animals to morph Elf, since it comes with osanwë and that can do broadcast."

"Good catch. Human, then."

Butterfly adds this to Cam's request list.

Space says that if the suicide triggers are still possible to activate with a Yeerk in your head then volunteers won't be a problem, but if they aren't then finding volunteers will be a challenge.

Are they willing to assume that if other chip interfacing works the suicide triggers will too, or do they need to figure out a way to do a live fire test?

Well, it'd be an Aurum test, but it still might be hard to form the necessary intent for it. If other chip-activated features work they'll call it good.

Okay. Who wants to try it and with who playing Yeerk?

He'll come on over if it's his alt or Finleran playing Yeerk.

<I find it disconcerting that I would apparently care so much less about Yeerking if I had been born a different species> he says, but morphs it.

"Welcome to Cube," Butterfly says to the visiting Maitimo.

"Hello, Imperatrix! I enjoyed reading the account of your world, you did excellently. Other than a couple volunteers for this, are you going to need anything from us?"

"Butterfly is fine, 'Imperatrix' actually started as a joke. We will likely want a lot of personnel helping sort out the Imperial Yeerks. Sovereign Ristrell will figure out how best to finagle it but doesn't have the directly-Tide-employed population for as many as there may be."

"Sure, how many is that going to be? Is this -" he picks up Matirin, carefully, with fascination - "I just hold him to my ear -"

"Yes, that's all. Ristrell thinks three billion Yeerks to within an order of magnitude and five to twenty percent that many hosts, assorted."

He - cannot answer, because he no longer has motor control.

"He says they can do that," he reports. "Testing voluntary control over various chip effects now -

uh, there are mental controls we both have access to and can end up fighting over the switch for, but I can't consistently win those, so suicide trigger would work fine." And out.

"You okay?"

"One sec - yeah, fine -"

<It is awful.>

"It's pretty intense, I'll grant you that. Okay. So that works and you have your volunteers if you want them - what do you want them briefed about, or do you want to do the briefing yourself, if needed we can fork them from before they are told all of the things they need for real informed consent -"

"I don't have a briefing written up yet but loosely how Yeerks work and our intentions toward the Empire. - are there people who know enough to be thoroughly credible about our intentions toward the Empire without dropping a lot of sensitive intel?"

"Your big problem is that they're all going to know summoning. Which means don't put any Yeerks within a hop of the daeva worlds."

"All of them? It doesn't even serve an afterlife-securing purpose for Elves, does it?"

"They would ever have seen a valid safe summoning circle, but without eidetic memory I am not sure how much you could reconstruct."

"How good is baseline Space Elf memory?"

"Mine was very near perfect already, there were blessings for that, but not everyone took them. Without any blessings loaded we do not have any advantage on humans."

"That's something, but unbound circles are not hard to reconstruct from the general idea..."

"We could grab someone from four years after the war ended, who'd been working on reconstruction and repairing relationships with orcs during that time - that was before Cam was done repopulating Afterlife and summoning was not really on our radar, but then all they can testify to is that we were really generous to orcs after our war ended and they weren't a threat, can't speak to anything we've done since and the absence would be glaring."

"Yeah, that's the sort of omission we'd sooner - omit. Maybe Boots could edit it out?"

"Will that be obvious to a Yeerk? ...and if they know Boots exists, maybe we just implanted all the memories our scouts have -"

"It'd be - I'm hoping it'd be obviously impractical to have her implant that much in that much detail? My suspicion is that she could do it subtly enough that it'd be missed but when I've Yeerked people it's been for shallower inspections than we should be prepared for... maybe this doesn't work at all."

"Might not. Can Boots do tampering that the person does not notice?"