"You mean Leareth's project there, that went, er, messily? Some, I helped out a bit with the cleanup." 

<Can we do that. On the Blade ship. We don't have Leareth and we may have underestimated their capabilities. But I think if we summon demons to eat every living thing on the ship that will likely suffice.>

The mage blinks, startled. He licks his lips. "We, um - yes, probably? Leareth deactivated the artifact but - I think we could just do it with mages and regular summoning spells." He looks down. "It'd kill whoever volunteered for the summoning, probably." 

<I understand that is a difficult thing to ask of anyone but if we are lucky everyone in Leareth's base is dead and we do not know how they were found. If I get a volunteer now how long until we can do it.>

The mage bites his lip. "You'll - get volunteers. People know what war is, and - Leareth..." 

(This particular mage is not cleared to know about Leareth's immortality.) 

"It'll need to be someone who knows demon summoning, not everyone does, I don't really. But we're ready on the Gate." Gulp. "Pretty much. I think." 

He steps back and addresses all the mages. <We lost contact with Leareth's base. We think they are dead or captured. We do not know how they were found. We need a plan that is faster and has less potential to fall apart if we meet more sophisticated resistance than expected. I propose that we summon demons onto the Blade ship and step onto it only once every living thing on it is dead. This will likely have lower casualties in total but I need a volunteer, who will likely not survive.>

There's a ten-second pause while everyone absorbs that. 

He gets volunteers. Several. They think to be safe they should have several summoners, and the summoners need someone to shield them while they get the spell up, but they'll have more than enough volunteers.

Okay. He thinks they should do it right now. 

It takes the two mages planning to do the Gate a couple minutes to get themselves settled and ready, and for the others to line up. 

Now? 

Yes. (Even if they die after this, it'll slow the invasion down to have the Blade ship gone, it'll buy a little more space for -)

- how could things have gone so badly wrong at the other base, he can barely imagine -

It takes a couple of minutes and it's exhausting for the mages in question, but the Gate goes up - the final stage fast, so there's no time to blast it - not much time–

There are people in the conference room with weapons trained on the spot where the small Gate opened, even though they don't know for sure that there was anything in particular about this room - someone tried to get a message to the new magic-user-controller asking about how Gate targeting worked but she hadn't known either, had in fact thought that you had to have been there before -

They see the threshold of the door glow and they spin around and try shooting at it -

They are almost but not quite fast enough - the Gate is up and three mages burst through, shields fully up and also wearing multiple shield-talismans, and look around for anything that needs fire thrown at it while the three volunteer summoners creep in behind them, also as shielded as possible. 

The Gate goes down the second they're through. No point risking any more than that. 

The soldiers standing there with weapons drawn have just enough time to realize that they need their dracon beams on the 'punch through steel' settings you're not supposed to use aboard your own ship if they want to stop heavily shielded mages and not enough time to act on this realization. 

Alarms are blaring. Elsewhere on the ship heavy steel doors are crashing into place to segregate ship segments so whatever the enemy is doing they hopefully can't get out the part of the ship they're in. 

Seconds later there are so many demons! They have a binding to only go forward from the door, which should at least stop them from eating their summoners right away and to only stay for an hour - probably that's enough to eat everyone on the ship, or at least most of them, and the others won't be able to come back to it again until later. 

They get a message off to Visser 3, from one of the far corners of the ship. They have good video surveillance of their ship so they can watch in detail as people die horribly to demons and watch and wait to see if the demons are able to get through the emergency ship segmentation.

The demons certainly try but it takes them a while to hack at the steel. One of the bodyguards is a Farseer and has time to realize this, and they do a Gate and shove one of the summoners through. 

- the demons in this part are hungry, they've eaten all the easy targets, and the shielded ones aren't easy but they are there, and the binding isn't really that strong. 

It takes a while for them to get through the shields but they do, eventually, and then no more new demons are arriving anymore. There are plenty already here. 

Since the steel slows them down there is plenty of time to see if other things also slow them down. 

Some of the other things tried punch right through the walls of your spaceship and into open vacuum but is that, really, a worse way to die?

This does suck all the nearby demons out into vacuum too and then they're not left to keep rampaging through the ship, at least. 

Visser 3 responds with instructions and with borrowed time the ship's engineers rush to try to carry them out. And they evacuate everybody they can.

He paces. He can't do anything until the demons are gone, and they'll have to move quickly once they are. The most important next target is the Pool ship. It will be forewarned - this was slow, there'd have been time to get some messages off - but the Blade ship has better weaponry than the Pool ship and it's faster and it should be able to achieve this. And then - 

- destroy the pools on Earth and it might be over...

Did the Farseers see anything at the surface of the base where Leareth was.

They saw - equipment? Looks like this. They're not sure what it's for. There's no crater or anything. 

It does look like there are some helicopters around? The kind that hospitals have, when ambulances aren't fast enough. 

Tail-lash. 

<Someone should Gate in and Final Strike.>

There are flinches. Then nods. 

...Uh, none of them have the Gate location already, that was the entire point, but one of the Farseers looking right now is a mage and could Gate to the surface. They'll be so visible but, well, Final Strikes don't take long. 

Will a Final Strike at the surface even kill the prisoners who were incapacitated down inside the mine. If not, he has pictures of all the locations locked in a fashion where he and Cayaldwin (at the third camp) can collectively unlock them.

They have no idea! Probably not. A couple them can Gate from pictures though it'd be helpful to also have, like, a direction to aim. 

That's very reasonable and he can also point it out on a map.

He contacts Cayaldwin for the passcode. Cayaldwin quite reasonably wants to verify he is not being controlled. He tells Cayaldwin to get a look at the situation outside the base where Leareth (and Talik) were. Cayaldwin cheerfully agrees that Leareth is definitely in the possession of Yeerks and this is a disaster but Matirin might be too. Matirin observes that even if he were, the pictures of the base where Leareth is wouldn't make things worse. Cayaldwin wants to take a moment to think about whether that is true.

Cayaldwin watches people carried out on stretchers, at Leareth's base. 

Cayaldwin tells him the passcode. 

He pulls up the pictures. 

Leareth's mage Gates into the mine and between one breath and the next, before there's time to think or have regrets or second thoughts, calls down Final Strike. He's scared, and - it hurts, below the surface, that he might be killing Leareth himself - but mostly he's furious. 

The fireball gets all of the formerly-inhabited parts. Makes some ceilings collapse. Most people in the mineshafts are singed and thrown around but not utterly incinerated. 

<Pool ship> he says to everyone but not to anyone in particular, watching the space he left from. <And then the pools in D.C. and New York, we know the locations. And then they all starve, in three days, and it's over.>

There are tense nods. Someone glances at the timer counting down the minutes left until they can go back to the Blade ship. 

He has it in his head, but he looks at it too.

Fifteen more minutes.

An hour is plenty of time to rest between Gates. The pair who did it before get ready. 

They contact Cayaldwin's base to tell them to go in too; it's probably going to be incredibly dangerous in some fashion, there's a lot you can do with ten minutes and a starship, and the more people they have involved the better the odds of some of them surviving whatever's up. Mostly they want to send Andalites, though they'll need some Farseer-mages to Gate them to the bridge; the mages are going to be needed for the final stage, tomorrow, destroying the Pools on Earth. 

And a few Andalites will be needed in case this fails, to go back to Velgarth and get the Dome ship. The surviving part of the Dome ship doesn't have weapons that could be brought to bear on the Pool ship, but it is one. That's the backup plan. 

Matirin feels very numb. He's not really sure it's safer to be here than on the Blade ship but - they have people watching the surface of their own mine, now, they'll know if the Yeerks come here and they can Gate out to Velgarth the instant anything looks suspicious.

When the timer is up he nods and sends most of his people through the Gate.

Mages leap out first. No demons, as planned. Lots of gore. Moderate damage to the ship's interior, but this particular segment is holding atmosphere. No one in it had time to fight back, with dracon beams or otherwise. 

Farseers reach ahead. That section is open to vacuum. Move further. Do they have a floorplan of this ship or something, to help them find the bridge faster...? 

That is one of the many things they would have had in the version of this plan that was not a last-minute desperate pass at anything at all other than destroying planet Earth.

Four and a half minutes later they find something that looks plausible. :Is this the bridge?: Mental image held up. 

<Yes.>

A Gate goes up. 

The Yeerks are still using stolen modified Andalite starship technology, and Andalite starship weapon systems can be run, bypassing the computers, from the brain chip if needed, because usually when the computers are offline it's due to damage, because nobody boards other peoples' starships these days, it's so easy to make impossible - 

- he takes most of their computer systems offline because he doesn't have time to try to break into them and then starts working on the much simpler systems that grant direct access to the weapons system. 

<They're firing on us.> someone says. 

<Don't distract me> he snaps back. 

They try not to distract him. Mages are very underequipped to do anything about being fired on by weapons capable of destroying starships, but they can try...shields...? 

The other Andalites are more distractable. The Blade ship has its own shields, which should hopefully be holding; if they can do magical shields too that's good? They presumably can't Gate to the Pool ship or hit it with weapons from here?

No, the Pool ship is way out of their range. Leareth could maybe do a blind Gate to the Pool ship (with some chance of hitting vacuum but apparently he fixed his shields?) but it's well out of Farsight range and they can't get a scry anchored on it and none of them have Leareth's Gating skill. 

They'll try shields. 

With only the computer systems directly necessary to operate the weapons and shields still running, it's dark. The artificial gravity keeps hiccuping. Cayaldwin barely notices when he's floating as opposed to standing, totally lost in trying to reconstruct the ways this isn't an Andalite weapons system and fit into place the things that'd let him operate it

The mages wait. It's been eight minutes, give or take. The other ships are still firing on them but, it seems, not getting through the Blade ship's shields. 

Someone has broken into the shield system by now  - it's easier to operate than the weapons by far - and is reinforcing them. They should hold another couple minutes, which is all that is needed. 

<Pool ship's...flashing lights at us.> someone says. 

<Is it...surrendering?>

<They'd be bluffing, we can't listen - >

<Not surrendering. I don't know much of this code but I know the signal for surrendering.>

The antigravity glitches again. The Andalite's tail lashes irritably. <- okay, got it. They're saying the ship is dangerous and we should leave - seriously, are they wasting our time with that - ship is dangerous, we should leave, they want to talk ->

Cayaldwin is not a party to this conversation because he told everyone not to interrupt him. The last bit of the weapons system control setup falls into place.

<Got it> he says, and opens fire on the Pool ship. 

           <We've got a radio broadcast, telling us that the ship is dangerous and they recommend we get our people off immediately and they want to open talks.> someone tells Matirin. 

He is - very surprised. And confused. And - still numb - <Did the other base get that too.>

           <Checking. ...no>

The universe makes slightly more sense. <Might be an effort to pinpoint our location. By broadcasting in different areas.> The other base is in Russia. He thinks none of the captured people in Leareth's base had enough information to know that for sure. 

Nine minutes. One of the mages has their Farsight on the Pool ship, for a slightly better view. 

:...Can we, um, set it to keep firing and Gate off?: one of them asks. :Now that we've got the bridge and the weapons, I mean: Obviously they absolutely cannot open talks with the Yeerks, but also this mage is not keen to die horribly if it turns out the ship is booby trapped, which would be very smart of the Yeerks really. 

<We can get everyone off who isn't running the shields and weapons systems through their brain> one of the Andalites says. <Gate now sounds good.>

Gating back from the ship is much easier than Gating to it in the first place, though harder because they're tired now, but it's up within thirty seconds and they're piling through - a stressed glance back at the remaining Andalites - 

<If we leave the Gate up for them will you die if the ship does explode -

- the Pool ship shouldn't last another minute and they could come through after that ->

The mage, standing on the other side of the Gate, grits his teeth, resolutely. :I'll die. If everyone else in here keeps their distance the Gate should collapse before it hits anyone else. I can hold it: 

Tail-lash. <...they also told you that the ship was rigged?>

       <Yes. Flashing lights on the Pool ship. Said the ship was dangerous, we should get out, and they wanted to open talks.>

<They messaged us that. They may have been trying to pinpoint our location by broadcasting only to some areas where we might be.> But why message the ship. He's confused, something here isn't quite adding up. 

He can't reply to the Yeerks without revealing their location. 

He watches tensely through the Gate. 

<Another radio signal. - they - surrender ->

They're less than a minute from destroying the Pool ship, and probably also less than a minute from whatever they've planned for the Blade ship activating. What convenient timing to try to convince the Andalites to blink -

- but he is confused -

- the Visser is probably dead, the Blade ship went - some parts of it had time to evacuate but some didn't - and now the Yeerks are saying very different things, maybe there's someone else in charge -

- Vanyel, distressed, at the pointless tragedy -

- they can still do this, they can do it with the Dome ship in an hour if they need to - maybe, unless the Yeerks know something he doesn't - and if he can't pull it off then he loses Earth, what's one ship compared to that, what's Cayaldwin compared to that -

(Cayaldwin is the person who might be able to figure out how to morph Gifts) -

<Get out of there.>

<Almost done.>

<Now, that's an order -> and his eyes find the nearest Fetcher - <Pull them through NOW ->

They start to open their mouth to question that, and then break into a sprint - ten seconds to reach the Gate, they told everyone to back the hell off in case some blast gets through when whatever's rigged to happen to the ship goes off. All they need is their head through and pull, they'll be out for the rest of today with backlash from this but they are not thinking about that yet. 

Cayaldwin is now in the Fetcher's arms, well, part of him is, Andalites are not small, but three other people have caught up now and are hauling him through, a different Fetcher catches up and gets the next Andalite–

The Blade ship explodes.

The mage holding the Gate, and the Fetcher who had his head on the other side of with the second Andalite just now in his arms, die in an incandescent fraction of a second. The Gate-energies peak, wildly, as the energy is for an instant poured through the mage holding it - there's a sonic boom and blinding flash of light, it throws Cayaldwin and the two people holding onto him clear across the room and into a wall. 

Then everything is silent. 

He's not numb anymore, being numb still requires there being some kind of relationship between sensations and thoughts going on in your brain. <Tell the other base we are regrouping in Velgarth. Open a Gate there. To the medical bay, we have - three injured people -> hopefully, hopefully they have three injured people -

Marian heard the commotion and then the explosion, and running toward explosions is perhaps a debatable life choice but she appears to be doing that, sprinting out of the medical bay and snatching the supply-bag she painstakingly stayed up packing after the horrible evacuation. She's been up since three am and is currently running on coffee and fumes but that's not actually different from a lot of her hospital shifts, honestly. 

The mage who can Gate to Velgarth was involved in raising the initial Gate to the Blade ship but didn't go through, he was too important to risk, and so he's alive now - and very, very tired, but half a dozen others can hop into rapport with him to provide their energy, Leareth's mages have trained a lot for exactly this kind of emergency.

They appear to have two injured people, actually, and one human whose head is kind of burst open like a melon. One of the injured people is an Andalite - Cayaldwin? - damn it, she knows he's really important, she gets to work checking him over first. 

The most urgent problem here is probably that his spine is snapped and he's not breathing! There is also a lot of blood but not even an amount of blood that'd be fatal for humans to lose, and he's bigger, and there are some burns but they don't look that bad, honestly, they mostly just burned his fur away. But the not breathing and the spine look like a pretty big problem.

Marian screams in her best REALLY LOUD VOICE that she needs a Gifted Healer RIGHT NOW and she hits the emergency pager button in her vest pocket that she told the Andalite doctor she wanted to have, if she ever had a crashing patient and he wasn't right there, and then she fumbles open her supply bag.

You cannot actually do mouth-to-mouth on Andalites, due to their lack of a mouth hole, but she has the emergency life support equipment here with the oxygen setup, and the (really cool!!!) high-tech monitoring patch thingies you can slap on someone to detect right away if they have heartbeat so she doesn't need to fumble around checking for a pulse - she manages to waste one of the patches by sticking it to itself because her hands are shaking, damn it. Focus. The resuscitation equipment is fairly intuitive but also she learned to use it, like, yesterday, and she is panicking so hard right now which is not good for information retention. 

(What would Lacie do what would Lacie do - she would not panic - good start, there, really - please tell me the fucking Andalite doctor is almost here–)

She gets it out and in a second Cayaldwin will have some oxygen in his lungs - someone is talking to her but it's not a Velgarth Healer so she blocks it out...

The Andalite doctor rushes in. <We need the medical bay in the Dome>

<They are working on the Gate> His mind-voice is very clipped and robotic.

It takes a full minute and a half because the mage is so tired right now, but then the Gate is up. Someone is Mindspeaking everyone, sounding incredibly stressed, that can they please hurry they can't hold the Gate forever. 

Well, there's not as many of them anymore. They can get the injured people through and then everyone else, in a hurry. 

Marian stays at Cayaldwin's side and books it through the Gate and is only a teensy bit excited, in the very back of her mind behind all the internal screaming, that she is totally getting to visit the other world that has MAGIC. 

Ow ow ow ow ow Vanyel does not need to be told at all that something is happening, he feels it. Right through his and Yfandes' shields. 

Gritting his teeth, he searches for the minds coming through. Without heading any closer. :What's happening?: 

Melody, who ended up conceding that Vanyel was not going to listen to her on his unreadiness to go fight a war and deciding to limit the damage by going with him - apparently they need Mindhealers - isn't allergic to Gates and can race over to see what's going on. 

It takes him a - really worrying amount of time, actually, if he had any capacity left for worry, to formulate words to answer Vanyel. <Yeerks attacked in force. Leareth believed captured. Blade ship destroyed. Yeerks broadcast surrender. We don't know - who sent that, if they had authorization, if they meant it or - we were firing on the Pool ship at the time, it was about to all be over - we can still take it out with the Dome ship - also maybe need to kill Leareth the mindhealing block will have scrambled his interworld Gate knowledge but I worry he can rederive it - Mardic and Donni and Rasha were not at the captured base and as far as I know they are alive ->

He is standing approximately normally, if a bit stiffly, but if one happens to be a Mindhealer with Empathy he is in a staggering amount of pain and very very heavily disassociating and barely tracking any of his surroundings and his tail twitching with distress is not not doing that in a suicidal sort of way.

Yikes! Melody is very very concerned. 

...She's also feeling some amount anxious about going near an Andalite whose tail is doing that. But Matirin isn't any more dangerous than Vanyel, she reminds herself. Less so, probably, and she spent an awful lot of time at Vanyel's bedside when he was in worse shape than this.

:Matirin: she sends, privately. :Can we talk: 

He tries to figure out what needs to happen.

Cayaldwin. Getting medical attention. That's fine.

Mages. Gated across, need to rest now. That's fine.

Leareth. He needs to murder Leareth and he can't think how. That's - Melody might be helpful with that, actually, she has Nayoki's Gift -

- there are probably other things but he can't think of them -

<We can talk> he says - rearranging her words is easier than coming up with his own - and he walks steadily into one of the conference rooms. 

Melody shuts the door and looks him in the eye. This feels so fraught to approach - Andalites are weird about mental instability just as much as physical disabilities, she's picked up on that, even though it makes so much sense that Matirin is incredibly traumatized right now...

Trying to handle it delicately probably isn't going to work and will also be slow. 

:You probably want my advice on actual war things, but, um, the thing I actually wanted to say first is that I'm extremely worried about you. And - I really, really think we should talk about that before you make any strategic decisions: 

That was several sentences in a row and he's not totally sure he was tracking them. He can replay them from his chip. 

<I was not injured> he says, slowly.

:That's not what I mean: Melody sits down. It might make her look less threatening, and also her feet hurt. :Something really catastrophic just happened out there, and - you're trying very hard to cope and press ahead anyway, I imagine, but. I have Mindhealing Gift. Thoughtsensing talisman doesn't block my Sight for that. And I have the very strong impression that you're - struggling a lot, right now, with the coping thing: She tilts her head a little. :...You're having trouble even processing what I'm saying to you, aren't you: 

That was, like, six sentences in a row, that's not fair. 

<This is not the first time I have had the command for a battle that went badly.>

Melody looks him in the eye and tries to be very, very calm. :Matirin, look at me. I think you need to temporarily give someone else command and then we can figure out what you need right now to be okay. Does that make sense?: 

< - yes.>

He steps out of the conference room and notifies Ashul-Isfalet-Corrill that he has the command while Matirin is occupied with a Velgarth thing and steps back in.

...All right, wow, that honestly went a lot better than she was expecting. 

There's shielding on the room. Leareth's work, maybe. Her Thoughtsensing can't get out. As private as anything, although it's a bit scary not being able to call for backup. 

:All right, we've got some privacy and some time. Can you tell me what's going on in your head right now?: She goes slowly; going by her slightly-fogged Mindhealing Sight, he's having a hard time tracking his surroundings at all right now. 

<I'm confused. I don't know why they surrendered. I don't know if I was right to stop firing or not. - never really know that kind of thing.>

:I know. I don't get it either. We'll have more information soon, I guess. My sense is that you made reasonable calls and also the order to stop firing didn't actually change any outcomes - the ship exploded less than a second later, right: 

She sits back. 

:Sorry to be blunt, but - I'm an Empath, and what I'm picking up is that you're really hurting right now. Although it might be hard to tell because you're also dissociating a lot. What's upsetting you this much?:  

<The thing where it's hard to think. That's very worrying. I am upset about it.>

Nod. :I would be upset by that too. Can I spend a bit longer looking at your mind, and help you figure out what's going on so we can fix it?: 

<Yes.>

So she looks. It's not perfectly clear but she's not going to push him to remove the Thoughtsensing talisman just yet. It seems likely to her that he's mostly going along with this on automatic because making any independent decisions is too hard, and less because he actually trusts her to poke at his mind. 

...His tapestry is made up of so many parts. It's also more complex in layout than human minds, probably that's a species difference, she hasn't studied them before. The fascinating segmented-ness to it, though, she doesn't think is an Andalite thing, she suspects it's him. 

There are also a LOT of - it almost looks like Mindhealing blocks, in there? A number of the different pattern-segments are mostly cut off, thoughts bouncing away from them, and she suspects it's been going on for a while. His thoughts are very constrained to a few pathways he can still access without bouncing away from - grief, guilt, anger, just a whole lot of trauma, she isn't sure what originally did that. Also those few pathways are under an incredible amount of metaphorical tension. He seems to be refusing to interact with his emotions even though they're, at this point, eating the vast majority of his cognition. 

...

Okay, she has a better guess, what in all hells is she supposed to do about this mess. 

:Can I bounce my Sight to you with Mindspeech?: she asks him. It's really hard for her do that with non-Mindspeakers but hopefully the Andalites' thoughtspeak will count. 

He has no idea what she means by that at all. <That sounds good.>

Probably not the clearest explanation. :I'm going to show you a sort of semi-metaphorical picture of what your mind looks like, right now. Unfortunately I don't have a baseline for comparison or anything: 

She does this. Waits to see how he's going to react. She's half predicting it'll be with blank incomprehension. 

Yep. 

It's very visually complicated. He doesn't know what it's a metaphor for. 

<I have not tried morphing off - damage that came about in some fashion other than physical injury. I should try that, maybe.>

:...I am kind of doubting that'll work, but I don't know exactly how morphing functions, so you might as well try. It'll just take a few minutes, right?: 

<Yes.> He morphs another Andalite, it's the least exhausting morph, and then back.

He doesn't feel different. Maybe slightly less - wound very tightly around a fraying piece of wire, the aftermath of adrenaline from the battle. But not different about the thing that's the problem here, the thing where he is having trouble thinking clearly. 

<Can you explain your metaphor vision.>

She can see that he's calmer and that's helpful, if only a little bit. 

:Here, let me show you a simplified version: The conference rooms have pen and paper around, now, from the human mages' research earlier, and she grabs some and sketches a very rough outline of his tapestry. :These are some parts of your mind. Different areas of your thinking. Did you notice how a lot of them are kind of blocked off right now?: 

<Yes. I am having trouble thinking clearly.>

:I think we have to get you more able to access those bits of you. I'm not all the way in your head, I'm just looking at a metaphor for it, so I can't tell you exactly what's causing this. It's probably related to, er, everything that happened in the last twelve candlemarks, and it's almost certainly reversible, but it might take a while to go away on its own: 

She hesitates. :- Or I could use the kind of magic I have to unblock it some, which might be faster. Do you want me to try that: This is an extremely dubious plan and she's never treated an Andalite before but she has no idea what to do about this, and her patient is not exactly in a place to be helpful. 

<Yes> he says immediately.

She takes a deep breath.

Pauses. :...Um, would you mind morphing human for me, first? It'll make this easier for me: This is not quite a lie. She's implying it'll make her Sight easier, which is false, it'll make it a bit harder, but it will also mean that if forcing him to stop dissociating makes him instantly very suicidal, he won't actually be able to kill himself in the first tenth of a second before she can react. 

<I can do that.> Morphing twice in quick succession is tiring but an advantage of not feeling things is that you don't feel tired. 

Human.

:Thank you: Melody relaxes a tiny bit. :All right, here goes. This - is probably going to feel like something but I'm not sure what. Keep talking to me, all right?: 

And she goes in with her Gift - a tiny bit clumsily, around the stupid Thoughtsensing amulet's blurring effect, but this isn't exactly delicate work - and gets her mental hands onto the fan of threads that's doing the heaviest lifting in terms of keeping his emotions separated off from his so-tightly-constrained thread of actual thought and subjective experience, and - holds her breath - pulls them out of the way.

Well that is horrible! It feels - actually painful, like he's under attack, and Mindhealing can do that and he doesn't know how to check that she didn't do something awful but he can't think about that right now - he's not actually sure he can think any more clearly but it's a different kind of unclear, like right now the problem is that he's - sobbing and whimpering and shaking, which are presumably the human physical correlates for the feeling, which he's having trouble putting words to -

- the feeling is that he has already lost everything he ever cared about and only duty is holding the pieces of him to the task in front of him and even if he wins it'll - matter for the world, but not for him, everything that mattered to him is gone. Which seems like the kind of thing that shouldn't be a feeling, since it contains several claims about reality, but there you go. Oh also he's lonely. Achingly, exhaustingly, miserably lonely, he has no one to talk to - and it would be really stupid to try, because then he would have to send them to their death, exactly like every single other person he has ever felt close with except the one he can't speak to for a year for information security reasons - this is also stupid but at least it counts as an emotion, unlike the doom prediction thing -

- he got it wrong, didn't he, pulling Cayaldwin back off the ship, he thought he was doing the more reversible thing given uncertainty but maybe he was just scared that Cayaldwin would die, a feeling that has no business being in him, a feeling that five billion people do not deserve to have determine some corner of their fate -

Oof that was not the most comfortable moment to have her Receptive Empathy all the way wide open. 

That...is in some sense an improvement, his mind is way less contorted into bizarre knots around itself and more - the way she expects someone to look when they've just dealt with way more than they have the capacity to cope with, and now have time to breathe and feel it. Melody has way too much of a sense of what he's feeling, and no idea what he's thinking. She gives him thirty seconds and feels very bad about it but he's not human and probably offering him a hug isn't going to help. 

:Matirin: she sends eventually. He's still sobbing and shaking but she gets the sense he's going to do that for a while. :Can you tell me what's going on?: 

<I am not sure that this successfully improved my ability to think clearly. I think I am thinking thoughts that have more components but I have less control over which thoughts they are, which is also an important element of thinking clearly.>

:My read is that you're having a lot of very normal reactions to - the kind of situation people shouldn't ever have to deal with. You lost people, you made hard choices under a lot of pressure - you're grieving, that's really normal. And you're going to cope but you need a bit of time to do that: 

<We should get the Dome ship in the air. It'll take some time to get to Earth from here, travelling long distances in hyperspace still involves travelling in it.>

:Probably, but you put someone else in command because you aren't thinking very well right now. I'm sure they're not stupid and have thought of that. I can stick my head out the door and ask if you want, though: 

<They might be assuming that whatever Velgarth thing I needed requires staying here, so I should clarify that it does not.> He is still shaking and sobbing. <Perhaps you should? I think my control of this morph is much worse than I thought.>

:I'll do that. And - is there anyone else, who you know better than me, who you might find helpful to have around while you're really upset? Humans having the kind of emotions I'm feeling from you generally benefit from having a friend there: 

<Everybody I have ever cared about is dead or - gone. - Cayaldwin is not but he is in the medical bay with serious injuries and also I expect would find it distressing to see me like this.>

:...I'm sorry. I agree we shouldn't drag Cayaldwin in here or you over there, right now: A flicker of an idea. :I know you don't know Van or Yfandes that well, but they're here, and - Companions and Andalites seem to have some things in common, I think she might get it better than I do. Also she's very snuggly. But I'd also understand if you preferred privacy instead: 

<I don't ever like being alone.> A jolt of a dozen different emotions which are also all deeply unpleasant, who would have guessed there was such variety of deeply unpleasant emotions.

:I'm not going anywhere. Do you also want me to ask Van or Yfandes or both of them to come here: 

<I am having trouble thinking through the strategic implications.>

:I'm not sure there are strategic implications, but I'm not the strategy person. Vanyel isn't going to tell anyone else about your, er, current state and he won't think worse of you for it. Yfandes even more so. I won't tell anyone I asked them in or why. Can you set aside the strategic implications part and just think about whether it'll help you, personally, feel less lonely right now?: 

<If nothing else whether I recover quickly is a strategic implication> he says, maybe slightly impatiently.

Melody does not ask 'are all Andalites like this' in a frustrated tone because it won't help. :I'm going to take that as a yes. I'll pass on your suggestion to - Ashul, right? And ask the two of them to come over to this room, which has shields on it: 

She gets up and heads for the door, slowly, in case he wants to object. 

He does not object. 

She does that. 

Vanyel has been pacing around getting slightly more in the way of confused updates from various people, and trying not to panic at the fact that they've lost Leareth, stay in control, they need him - it's possible Leareth needs him...

He's confused by Melody's polite, neutral summons, but answers it promptly, heading in with Yfandes. 

- and stops inside, because: what. Instinctively opens his Receptive Empathy even though he's quite possibly about to regret that life choice. 

Matirin is in human morph and also in agonizing emotional pain that he has no experience at all coping with and is mostly kind of wandering through confusedly. 

His mind-voice sounds almost normal, though. <Hello. Melody thought it might be helpful for you and Yfandes to stay here. I am not sure if this will prove true but it seems inexpensive to test.>

Oh gods what is Melody dragging him into now.

:I heard you had a really, really bad day over there: he sends. :Do you, um. Want a hug or something: 

<I am not sure. I had thought I had this morph figured out but it's behaving really weirdly. If that's the kind of thing known to help then I think I want to try most things known to help, this is a very bad time to be distracted.>

:Um, it's known to help humans. I know, it's really annoying how - human bodies do that when you're really upset about something...: Vanyel is somehow doubting this is a morph control issue, exactly, but maybe Andalites don't cry and that would be really confusing to experience all of a sudden on top of the emotions themselves. 

He approaches Matirin, moving slowly, and hugs him. Oh gods what is he supposed to say. He should think of something and say it. :I'm - sorry everything is so terrible. But - you're not alone. Whatever your people need, we're going to help: 

He leans into the hug. <I don't know if things are terrible. Things were terrible for a while and I did not have some kind of self-inflicted brain damage about things being terrible. Things - might be all right. The Yeerks broadcast that they surrendered. If I did not have self-induced brain damage I think I would have come to some kind of conclusion by now about whether that was true.> Now on top of everything else he is feeling very tired, and is back to finding it a bit hard to string sentences together, which is terrifying - that was the most alarming part of the whole situation and he thought that at least had been fixed -

He seems calmer, which is maybe good? 

:I hate that feeling: Vanyel sends, sympathetically. :When you know you have to be making important decisions right and you can't think clearly even though you have to - when it feels like everything is terrible but you can't tell if that's true or just a feeling... It's so bad. It doesn't usually last that long though, once you calm down and get some rest I think it'll feel easier again. ...Um, when I feel that way it's often because horrible things happened and also I hadn't slept enough, when did you last sleep?: 

<Seventeen candlemarks and twenty one percent of another candlemark> he says instantly. <We were awakened after about three hours of sleep by the attack in New York.>

:That sounds like really not enough sleep! It's probably hard to sleep while you're this upset, though: He glances at Melody hopefully. 

:You're doing great: she sends privately. 

Vanyel tries to think. He - can keep giving Matirin advice about dealing with really overwhelming emotions? That seems to not be going terribly so far, anyway, and he asked to try things that would be expected to help. 

Yfandes, riding in Vanyel's thoughts, maneuvers herself around the conference table and cuddles up to Matirin's other side. :You can pet me if you want: she sends, with soothing reassurance. :That often helps for humans: 

He pets Yfandes. <If I just need to sleep I can take drugs to solve it being hard to fall asleep> he says, sounding relieved. <I am worried about needing to do something more complicated than that.>

:Van, can you try to get him to do a few more minutes of talking about his feelings with you and say we're working on that?: Melody sends privately, then turns to Matirin. :Do you want me to go to the medical bay and ask for drugs that help Andalites sleep? I don't think it's going to fix everything, but it might leave you with more resources to work with, if you also need to do complicated things: 

<Yes, please.> he says to Melody. <Has anyone properly briefed you> he says to Vanyel, <I think it would be good if you were thinking about the things I am failing to successfully think about.>

:That makes sense. I got a lot of updates from various people, right before this, and I think I know all the important pieces. I am thinking about it already and so is Yfandes, and I can think about it more once you're asleep and get a more thorough briefing from someone, but - I want to help you feel better first, because I care about you and that's also important:  

He keeps hugging Matirin. :- Um, sometimes that happens when I'm upset and it's making it hard to think, is that I'm having a lot of feelings about my feelings, er, maybe I'm really sad and then I'm frustrated with myself about being sad and feel guilty for not being better at it, or something. And when that's true it helps a lot to try to tell someone else what the pieces are, because then I can figure it out better and sometimes the frustration and such will just go away then. You could try doing that and see if it helps?: 

<Hmm. I ordered someone to go Final Strike the base that was captured - we think with gas - and in doing so kill about eighty of our own people, including Leareth though I bet they got him out first and including two of my brothers, and I was not having a lot of feelings about this because it was the right thing to do, but then the Yeerks surrendered ten minutes later, and probably they were lying or bluffing or something but if they were sincere, that is good news, but it is causing me to feel angry and sad about the earlier decision even though it was obviously correct, and angry with the Yeerks for not surrendering ten minutes earlier even though it doesn't make sense to be more angry with them once they surrendered than I was when they had not surrendered at all. 

Is that the right sort of thing?>

:...Yes, I think so. I, just - gods, war is so bad, I'm so sorry, I've...: Recounting some of his biggest regrets probably isn't helpful right now, actually. :All of those feelings make a lot of sense to me, too. I'm also angry with the Yeerks even though you're right, this is better than the alternative. It just makes it feel - stupid and tragic and wasteful, right, if it could've gone differently, if it was ten minutes away from going differently...:

He rubs Matirin's back. :I'm really sorry about your brothers. And - Leareth...: He's not sobbing but he is sniffling a bit. :We'll figure out the best way forward from the situation we have, but - gods, it's so much awfulness in so little time: 

<It was very dense with awfulness. Also one of the mages did a Final Strike in an inhabited city and about fourteen hundred people are dead from that and I am pretty sure it didn't even prevent his paired Mindspeaker from being captured, I think that must be how they got to Leareth...>

:I heard. It's really upsetting: 

Vanyel is silent for a while, just holding him. :...How are you feeling now?: he asks Matirin after a while. 

<I am not sure if I am entirely recovered yet. I keep trying to think things through and getting stuck. My theory of why the Yeerk surrender might have been sincere is that we killed a lot of their leadership when we had everyone on the Blade ship eaten by demons. But it would be pretty surprising, really, for Visser 3 to still be there when he knew we'd Gated in a few hours earlier.>

:Mmm, that makes sense: Hug. So much hug. :I'm going to think about this for you, remember? I have ten years of practice trying to outscheme Leareth, and I've fought a war too. You just had the worst seventeen hours I can imagine and you held it together the whole time, I'm honestly incredibly impressed, but - it's okay, you can rest for a bit now: 

<I am doing that! I am hiding in here hugging you two. But also -> Sigh - <I can phrase it to be about my feelings if you would like - if I mess up on Earth five billion people will die and it will be my fault. And maybe we will lose the whole war and it'll be - a thousand times worse than that. And it is very profoundly unfair to all five billion or maybe five trillion of those people for - my feelings - to have had ownership of their fate.>

Squeeze. :I know. The stakes are so stupidly high, just - I mean, it's not fair to the five billion either that Cayaldwin got tossed into a wall and can't help plan right now, sometimes the world is like that. And...just, hmm. That's kind of the thing I was talking before, having layers of feelings about feelings? I know you can't decide to stop feeling bad about it, but...I think it helps to notice when your mind is doing that thing, and fighting it really hard usually doesn't work until you've gotten some sleep: Patpatpat. :Anything else you want to talk to me about before you do that? Melody must be nearly back: 

<Is she not planning to strategically time her arrival for once she feels I have done an appropriate amount of emotional processing?>

- Vanyel bursts out laughing, he can't help it. :...Um, it hadn't occurred to me she would do that but I wouldn't put it past her. Er, do you think you've done an appropriate amount of emotional processing?: 

<My only metric for whether I've done enough emotional processing is whether I can figure out why the Yeerks surrendered and I cannot, but it is possible that in addition to emotional processing I need additional information. I think the morph is doing less physiological distress but I don't know how correlated that is.>

:For what it's worth, I think I now have all the information you do and I also don't know. Have some guesses but they're all really low confidence until we hear more. Less physiological distress is pretty correlated for me, so that's a good sign, I think. Is there anything else that, um, makes the physiological distress worse whenever you remember it?: 

<There is someone I love who isn't dead but he must be pretty sure I betrayed him and hate me, I am trying to not think about that since it's distracting. Whenever I replay the visual of our mages being eaten by demons on the Blade ship it makes the physiological distress worse but I could just...stop doing that...I am not entirely sure why I keep doing it in the first place, I do not think there is much valuable strategic information there. When I think that maybe our people are not dead but in the possession of Yeerks to live out the rest of their lives as their slaves I experience distress.>

:Oh, gods, the replaying things even though there's not really a lesson, I hate it when my brain insists on doing that. I - well, I don't want to make this about me, but there's a battle where I made a decision and it was probably right but it's how Mardic lost his Companion, and: yep now he is crying about it again. :It's... I think sometimes it's - important - to remember that real people pay the cost of war, even for the right decisions, and - remember that it's horrible - it should hurt, if it stops hurting it means you're starting to think of people as just - numbers on a ledger, or something... I don't know, but I think that's what my brain is up to when I have that kind of distress: 

<I told Leareth that when he was upset that on Earth they torture their pigs and chickens and cows. I think that in the past I have felt grief over losses and not - had trouble continuing to do my job - and I am not sure why this time is different.>

:They torture them? Wait, why–: Vanyel breaks off. :Nevermind. I think sometimes it adds up over time. But - I'm pretty sure you'll be all right, soon. You already seem a lot better than when I got here and it hasn't even been very long: 

<If I don't have a good model of what went wrong I can't reasonably try to start doing important things again.>

Nod. :That's responsible. Maybe once you've slept some, you could ask Melody to help you figure it out? She's really good at that: 

<Maybe. Of course, having had a lot of magic done to my brain is itself reason to worry I shouldn't do important things.>

:Is it? I, um, trust my ability to do important things a lot more because Melody's done some magic to my brain: 

<Well, if she's in your command structure I think that's different.>

:I don't think she's technically in my command structure, um, other than being Valdemaran, she reports to Healers and I'm a Herald. Er, we should ask her what she did and whether it's the kind that sticks around or just does something in the moment but you'll swing back to normal by tomorrow: 

<I would like to know that.> Empathy is now catching mostly tired. Confused and sad and very very tired. 

No wonder. What a ridiculous day, poor Matirin. Vanyel keeps holding him. 

Yfandes frees herself and nudges the door open so she can Mindspeak Melody. 

Melody has, in the meantime, been getting some actual briefings from various other people. She comes in still wearing her usual mild expression. 

:Cayaldwin's stable: she tells Matirin. :Not lucid enough to morph yet but he's going to pull through. Ashul is making plans to depart for Earth. How are you feeling now?: 

<I still don't understand why the Yeerks surrendered but I'm having fewer symptoms about it.>

:He wanted to know what you did on him and whether it'll have lasting effects: Vanyel prompts. 

:Oh. Right. It won't, it was a one-off - I did something you could've done on your own without any magic, actually, I just would've had to teach you how and I didn't think I could when you were so, er, unable to parse sentences:

She peers at him, gauging how well he's processing sentences right now. Better, she thinks. :Basically, what you were doing was - having a lot of normal emotional reactions in the aftermath of a very high stakes disaster, which were taking up tons of space in your mind, but you were blocking them out of your conscious mind, which meant that all you noticed was - not having any space in your head to think, and not being able to tell why. And the best way to get more ability-to-think back was to notice the emotions and do some processing, free up the cognition they were eating, so I just poked you to stop blocking it. You could go right back to ignoring all your emotions if you want, although I wouldn't recommend it, please don't do that yet. Does that make sense?: 

<I think so. I appreciate your help.>

:Ready to demorph and take some sleeping drugs? ...Or not, you look exhausted, you might sleep just fine without them: 

He starts to demorph. <I might. Are - the others getting ready to sleep also ->

:Think so. If they're not they should be, everyone's been up since the middle of the night and sleep deprivation makes you stupid, which we can't afford right now. Er, I'm sorry about human morph being unexpectedly bad for this, I do think it helped on my side: 

<Andalites exhibit distress less.> Indeed he's back to showing no signs of it.

:I noticed: Melody herself yawns. :Van, I know you had more sleep than these people, but don't stay up too late doing strategy, it'll be more productive when we have more information to go on: 

:...Can I sleep with the Andalite herd?: Yfandes asks. :I heard Rasha did, on Earth. And I'm the only Companion here right now: 

<Yes, of course.> A flicker of some emotion that isn't tired sadness.

Then Yfandes will follow him out once he's demorphed, and make sure she's snuggled up next to him as the herd assembles. 

And everybody can get some sleep while they leave Velgarth and head back towards Earth's solar system. They're leaving some people behind, just in case this was all an elaborate ruse specifically to get them to get the Dome ship which the Yeerks have been hiding the capability to shoot down. And they're going to land way out far from the planet, for the same reason.

But - but maybe they beat the Yeerks and now the Yeerks have surrendered? No one quite knows what to think about that.

Vanyel stays up for a bit thinking, then goes to bed as well, like a reasonable person. (Yfandes was very insistent.) 

....And he finds himself in an icy wasteland, standing at the mouth of a pass carved through stone, with an army and a man dressed in black at their head, fifty yards away. 

Leareth is silent for a long moment. 

"Vanyel!" he calls out. "I do not expect you to believe this at all, but I do not presently have a Yeerk in my head, and the Yeerks genuinely wish to surrender." 

...Very correct. Vanyel doesn't believe him at all, although he's wondering. One of his half-baked theories had been that finding Leareth was what changed the Yeerks' mind, somehow, he doesn't know what specifically but Leareth is very - himself - and it must've been quite something for the Yeerk lucky enough to go hang out in his head. 

Might as well talk to him, either to Leareth or to the Yeerk puppeting him. They can't actually hurt him here. He starts walking forward. 

Leareth waits until he's closer and speaks at a more conversational volume. "This is all extremely implausible and odd, but - the information I am aware of, is that their Visser is somehow analogous to a much younger version of myself. They did put him into my head, and - being there for a couple of candlemarks convinced him, via my past experiences and reasoning, to surrender rather than risk forcing the Andalites' hand and killing everyone on Earth." 

Wow that is, in fact, very implausible! Surely Leareth's Yeerk could come up with a better story than that. Which in itself makes Vanyel notice an edge of confusion. 

He still doesn't say anything. Leareth plus Yeerk equals terrifyingly good at making inferences from whatever leaves Vanyel's mouth, so he won't. He keeps looking at him, though. 

"They are trying to communicate with the Andalites about the surrender terms - they wish to give myself and Talik back - but no one is answering, either because the Andalites evacuated everyone or because they distrust the offer - reasonably so - and do not wish to give away their position."

Mardic and Donni are in fact still on Earth. Vanyel does not say this, of course. They might not be able to pull off the communication spell across worlds? It's very new and there wasn't a lot of time to properly train people. Vanyel could pull it off half improvising, probably, but he has power to spare and they don't. 

...Leareth is looking kind of visibly upset. "I know I cannot ask for trust, here, but - Vanyel, I very badly do not want everyone on Earth to die, and I fear we are so close to that edge." 

Huh. Could be Yeerk acting, of course. He doesn't say anything. 

"They have Emril, the Healer from Washington, but her Yeerk left her head voluntarily so she could use Thoughtsensing to confirm I was not mind-controlling the Visser while he was Yeerking me." By Leareth's tone and expression, he considers this not-unreasonable paranoia. "She is safe and they do not intend to make her a Controller again. She does wish to help Heal her Yeerk's previous host, who has cancer." 

Not saying anything. 

"I am not sure how many survived from the Final Strike in the gassed mine, but it was many. Eight Andalites, apparently. If you are with Matirin you could tell him of it." 

Leareth finally seems to run out of updates. Falls silent. 

...He looks so unhappy and worried. It's in every line of his body language. 

Wow. That's - unlike Leareth, but if he did just spend a while with a Yeerk in his head, after the day they all had, no wonder he's having a bad time. And if it's a Yeerk acting...

"Do you want a hug?" If it's a Yeerk acting, does that really give very much away. 

- Sure, Leareth would like a hug. 

So they hug, and Vanyel says nothing at all until the dreams ends. 

And wakes up with a start in his conference room on the floor mat. Melody is sharing it and snoring on the other side. He almost reaches for Matirin and catches himself just in time. 

Is Ashul awake? Any awake minds nearby? 

Ashul is awake. Pacing at some of the computers. 

:Vanyel here. Urgent news: Pause to make sure Ashul is listening. :I have a magic prophetic lucid dream with Leareth sometimes - been happening for a decade, Yfandes can confirm - and I just had it and talked to him: 

<I see.>

:He made a lot of claims that I'm obviously very suspicious of because I think a Yeerk would come into the dream with him, but - he says they put Visser Three in him and then un-Yeerked him of his own accord, and that the surrender is - because of that, I guess: 

<They saw Velgarth's capabilities and realized the war was hopeless?>

:Or made a significant update. The - weirder part - is, um, he claimed that, Visser Three went in his head and - thought they were versions of the same person? Or something? It was so bizarre and specific, I don't even know why anyone would make that up as a cover story: 

<I am not sure in what sense a claim like that could be true.>

:Neither am I! Going by Leareth's face when he said it, if it was him in control, neither does he! Something they think alike and have similar pasts, except this one is way sooner and younger? So Leareth's reasoning about what he'd do here was convincing? Anyway, the important part is the surrender and they want to give Leareth and Talik back, not infested, as a good faith thing. Eight Andalites got pulled out of the mine before whoever it was blew it up, apparently. Emril the Healer from Washington is fine and her Yeerk voluntarily left her head so she could mindread Leareth and make sure he wasn't mind-controlling the Visser into surrendering. I think that's all the claims he made here:  

<Thank you. We'll keep that in mind when drafting messages for them in the morning.>

And Vanyel goes back to sleep, though it takes him a while.

Matirin, when he wakes up, looks for Melody.

She's in the field drinking coffee and humming to herself. :Hey. How's everything today?: 

<I would like your help in evaluating the probability that that will happen to me again.>

Nod. :Of course. Want to grab a conference room again?: 

<We can do that.> 

She takes the same one. Paces rather than sitting down, she's fresh and full of energy this morning. 

:Hmm. Want to tell me your best theory of what, exactly, happened, or want to hear my guesses?: 

<My theory is that I was temporarily seized by madness because I was distressed that my brothers might have been captured.>

Brisk nod. :That's a start, but it's a bit short on moving parts and predictors for whether it'll happen again. My guess, here, is that this wasn't a single event - that you were having some trouble thinking before your brothers got captured, and it got worse as more stressors piled up. Does that seem right?: 

<Yes.>

:Can you tell me your recollection of when it started and which events correlated with it getting worse?: 

<An Andalite military outpost on the planet of Formeron was overrun unexpectedly by a Yeerk force with more than four times the strength we expected. About twenty thousand people died. I knew many of them. One of them was my grandfather, which caused my father a great deal of distress, and he started fighting with High Command about our plans for Earth - well, he'd been fighting, but it got worse. I think that is when I first noticed feeling numb much of the time but I did not know that this predicted madness particularly.> 

:I don't know that it did, particularly, at the time. If nothing else had happened I think you'd have been fine, sooner or later. But - all right, the numbness is a pattern I'm familiar with, humans do it too. It's a way of coping better in the short run but that's because you're shutting out pain. Blocking a signal of something wrong, just like taking painkillers all the time to push your body harder than it can sustainably manage. I think if you hadn't been doing that, you'd have noticed something was badly wrong in your mind a lot sooner, yes?: 

<Maybe.>

Melody is working so hard right now to translate this into concepts and framings that she thinks will work at all, and it's exhausting, she never thought she would be thinking this but can she please have Vanyel back, at least he's...capable of introspection... 

:I think: she sends, slowly, :that it makes sense to consider this as pretty analogous to having been running a marathon ever since Formeron, and occasionally running into fights and picking up injuries, and taking painkillers to keep going. Which might have been really important and a reasonable call! Sometimes it is. Just, it also means that as you were taking more and more damage, you weren't really noticing it, right? And so you weren't - trying to do things to take care of yourself, let the damage heal, even back in the moments when there might have been time. Obviously yesterday was not the time for that and you were probably right to push through, just - if you'd dealt with some of it earlier, you would've had more reserves to absorb it. Does that analogy make sense?: 

<I think so. It's important to schedule leave for people when they're having a hard time. There - wasn't really time to take any leave - but I did not have a very good picture of what the outcome of not taking any would be.>

Melody nods. :I understand that. Just - hmm. The situation we're in now, is one where you did not take leave, and you ended up in pretty bad shape before you even noticed. It took so much crap happening at you to do that, but - it'd take less, starting from here, because you're still pretty shaken up. So - I think the best way to make sure you don't end up at the point of not being able to parse sentences, is to deal with as much of all your built-up emotional damage as we can, and then you need to learn how to tell what you're feeling so you notice if it's trending worse and you can do something about it sooner: 

<That makes sense.> impatient tail-lash. <I am worried these negotiations are very delicate. I trust my officers to run a war. Negotiating a peace is very different.>

Melody nods. :I really, really get that. Vanyel asked me if I could please make sure you're able to do that: 

<I do not feel numb. I feel stressed about ending the war.>

:I'm going to call that an improvement, here, even though you may not feel like it right now. How much do you feel like you've got room in your head to have thoughts? Um, scale of one to ten, where one is when I pulled you aside yesterday, and ten is however normal-you felt before Formeron: 

He tries to think about something complicated. Leareth, supposedly, talked the Yeerks into letting him go by appealing to their better natures. It feels - absurdly improbable. But the situation they're in feels improbable too. He thought he'd have to destroy every pool to get the Yeerks to admit they'd lost. And then there'd still be the risk backup from off-planet would arrive in time. And - there are probably a lot of elements to realizing you don't want a war. Realizing you would lose it. Realizing you're outmatched. Realizing that the best-case scenario is the destruction of the planet. 

Realizing that your enemies are people, maybe. 

Probably Andalites are no more people to Yeerks than Yeerks are to Andalites, excluding the one Yeerk who took an Andalite host. Probably some of them were thinking of the enemy with the same uncomplicated hatred that plenty of his people feel, and it was - genuinely valuable to learn that the Andalites were considering how not to destroy them once the war was won. Something he was only considering because of Leareth and Vanyel. 

<Nine.>

:That's really good: Melody looks so pleased and relieved. :- Are there areas that still feel hard to think about, or - like you're running into resistance or bouncing off or you don't want to go there... Can you think about the events that happened yesterday as just events that happened and not 'everything is terrible'?: 

He tries this. They had to evacuate from all their cities when they realized the Yeerks were onto them. One of the teams in D.C. was caught away from their house and the mage did a Final Strike and killed more than a thousand people, which is definitely going to inform first contact, now, even if it was technically a human doing it. Sixty people were captured by Yeerks - the worst disaster in Andalite history, but maybe recoverable, now, somehow. He recruited volunteers for a suicide mission getting everyone on the Blade ship eaten by demons. He tried to use it to destroy the Pool ship and then changed his mind but not soon enough to prevent the deaths of more of his people. 

He's had worse days, when you put it like that. 

<I can do that.>

What are her Mindhealing Sight and Empathy reading from him? 

He's still moving very very carefully across his tapestry, picking and choosing very meticulously which bits of pattern to step in, but none of them look totally inaccessible from any direction. His emotions are level. A lot of blame-in-the-sense-that-is-meaningfully-distinct-from-guilt; he thinks he could have done better.

:Want me to bounce my Sight to you again? You might be better able to interpret it now: 

<Sure.>

She does so, carefully using the most zoomed-out focus on her Sight to show the closest thing she can to a simplified-schematic, shifting her focus to the part she finds relevant. 

<I think I am still not experienced at interpreting brain metaphors.>

:Hmm - so I don't actually know what these areas correspond to, I'm not reading your thoughts right now. The overall gist is that you've got most of your head working again, but it looks kind of fragile, still, and you're needing to tiptoe around a bit. And yesterday: she flashes him the memory of it, :this was your conscious mind, everything else was inaccessible to you. I would start to get worried if I see it looking more like that again: 

<That makes sense.>

:What I really want to do teach you how to track that yourself, just from introspection. I don't think I can do that in the next couple of candlemarks though. So: deep breath, :if you feel like you can think all right, now, I'm inclined to say you should have command back for the delicate negotiations part, but - with the caveat that stressful things will probably keep happening, and I want to not let it get to the point that you need ten candlemarks of recovery to be functional again. Which I think means you need to check in with me frequently, or figure out something else, and if you start losing bits of yourself again we do something about it: 

<Thank you. I will keep that in mind.>

:Can I have your permission to peek at your mind every so often for the rest of today? And then talk about what makes sense after that?: 

<You see only - proneness to madness, not specific strategic information?>

:I'm also a Thoughtsenser but you're wearing an amulet against that, so I can't read anything specific at all. I haven't asked you to take it off, partly so you don't need to worry about the strategic information side. My other Sight only sees what I showed you, the overall structure. And I'm an Empath so I can pick up some on your emotions, but, again, no content of thoughts: 

<You can observe that if it is helpful.>

:Thank you. And - good work. You've handled this really well: In most ways. He is still slightly making her want to scream but that's not his fault, and this went so, so much better than she had been expecting or fearing. 

He is slightly baffled by this praise but nods. <I appreciate your help.> 

And he goes to check in with Ashul. Ashul has assumed, quite reasonably and conveniently, that some Mindhealer-installed blocks for information security were inconveniently inflexible when the Yeerks suddenly surrendered and have since been adjusted to handle such bizarre Yeerk behavior a little better. Ashul shares the communications so far. Vanyel's thoughtsensing range is, he vaguely recalls, really far, so they can probably check from orbit (when the ship is positioned right) whether the Yeerks in fact provided the prisoners unYeerked. No way to tell if they were holding some back, of course.

Matirin thanks him. He goes to check on Vanyel's exact thoughtsensing range and explain this plan.

"...Um. How far is the nearest point. I can do two hundred miles comfortably and three, maybe four hundred if I boost - which I can't do from nodes because I'm told Earth doesn't have them, but other mages can feed me energy. Um, the other problem is duration - I need at least a couple of seconds per person to check the double minds thing, if Yfandes is boosting with me and reading alongside me for error-checking." 

<We can be in an orbit that comes within two hundred miles of the ground very comfortably. ...we can also not orbit and hold the ship still there, it'll just be a little more inconvenient. I am expecting about twenty of them.>

"All right, if it's two hundred miles I can do that. If I have really exact directions to aim. How long would we be within two hundred miles of them if we are orbiting?" 

<Only a few seconds each time, so it probably makes more sense to hold the ship there.>

"Right. I think you need to do that, then. It might take me more than a few seconds to find a cluster of minds two hundred miles away, it'll be faster once I'm anchored on the general area, but it'd also be good if I could be careful and not rushed." 

<Absolutely. Thank you. I - do not expect them to try anything here, honestly, but we need to be very very sure.>

Are there checks Nayoki will want to run on people when she gets them back.

She's going to have to undo the compulsions and set a lot of people's Gifts right, not all of the set-commands would reset in their tests even when the (mind controlled and harmless) Yeerk departed, it's idiosyncratic. Just checking for and doing that will involve a lot of poking in the minds of the Velgarth humans, she's pretty sure she'll catch anything else the Yeerks might have tried to slip in. Also it'll tell her which people are incredibly traumatized from the Yeerking and need leave now. 

She's less sure what they ought to do about the Andalites but probably they should quickly read them too, just out of general paranoia? 

Melody points out that she's also here, now, and they can split up the task. "I think I have relatively more experience with the, er, helping very traumatized people, and you're better at weird set-commands. Also I can't do anything about mage-compulsions." 

He thinks the Andalites should be looked at too. They're probably all going to need leave and if he makes it universal then it's not an indictment of anyone's particular coping (or a suggestion they were too unbothered by the Yeerk), but it still might be useful to know if anyone took it particularly badly and certainly to look for anything else the Yeerks could have done. 

:I am worried about Leareth: Nayoki admits to Matirin, in private Mindspeech. 

<I expect we will have a bit of a time getting him to take some leave. Are you worried about - more than that ->

:That, yes, and he is not wrong, his taking a break would be unusually costly to us. And - he might take this especially badly. Even if it is true that the Yeerk they put in him immediately was convinced to surrender and end the war. He - would find it very terrible, I think, to be without his Gifts and have so little control when the stakes were so high: 

Honestly it's people who don't find that horrifically traumatizing who he has trouble understanding. <I get the impression Melody is very good at this. Perhaps you can persuade him to see her. I would expect her to work with constraints such as mostly wanting to be in working order for treaty negotiations.>

Nod. :Thank you for telling me that, I have not had a chance to speak with her much at all. I mostly - feel better having registered this worry to someone else: 

<I can definitely try to look out for it.> Bouts of madness all around, apparently. 

Vanyel is also worried about Leareth but hasn't talked to anyone about this except Yfandes. 

He paces. Tries to practice the motion he'll need to do, reachreachreach through two hundred miles of thin air, just the right bearing, he should run right into them...

Matirin also paces. They come up on Earth. It looks innocent and unperturbed. They're going to have to explain what happened, to the local humans, pretty soon. He is actually looking forward to that part, talking to people is fun.

He directs someone to direct the steering computers in a trajectory that'll leave them hovering over the same specific spot on Earth.

Vanyel puts his hand on Yfandes' neck. :Whenever you're ready: 

<Now.>

He follows the bearing and pushes his Thoughtsensing out-out-out with Yfandes at his back, searching for minds far below through space. The ground looks very pretty from this distance, through the windows. Of course he can't see the people at all, much too far away. 

There are some minds, though. Mostly they want to be out of here as quickly as possible.

All right, focus in on each one, he's not trying to read thoughts just sense the bright-glow of the mind, are they separated, are there any overlapping in that very specific eerie way. 

There are not.

He takes a little extra time, to be thorough. 

:Clear: he tells Matirin. :Nine Andalites, seventeen humans: 

Matirin tilts his head slightly. <Should be eight Andalites.>

:I know, that was what Leareth said. I counted twice, though. There's nine: 

<If Visser 3 were in morph, that'd look different to your Thoughtsensing, right?>

:...Morph looks different but I wasn't specifically checking for that. Still anchored on them, I'll check now: Pause. :Definitely not a morph: 

Tail-lash.

<Visser 3 has an Andalite host. But I don't see why he'd - we didn't insist, that one knows a lot more strategic information...

...I think we should still send the mage down to Gate them out, and then we can ...figure things out from there.>

:That makes sense: 

The mage can do that. Someone else who can do blind-Gates on a bearing gets him to the surface, a half-mile away, and takes down his terminus very fast. If it's a trap they're only risking one more Adept. 

No trap is apparent.

Then shortly later nine Andalites and seventeen humans are going to be in Velgarth, in the forested area with an odd depression of dead plants recently vacated by a Dome ship. 

Huh. Leareth hadn't known this was the plan. Makes sense. 

He looks up at the sky. Familiar, but it's - not home, home means safe and he isn't, in this world, and he doesn't have magic. 

He stays mostly calm about this fact, but it's taking a lot of willpower. 

Emril is milling around asking everyone how they're doing and if they need food or water, thanking the Adept who Gated them here, reaching out with her Mindspeech to ask those Andalites nearby what's supposed to happen now. 

They're going to get some Mindhealers over to fix everyone's compulsions and Gift shutdown and other precautions, it shouldn't be too long.

Leareth should probably be doing something helpful but for some reason everything is feeling very hard right now. Probably it's the lack of Gifts and general feeling of overwhelming helplessness. Also he's kind of having an adrenaline crash, now that it's over and they seem to have - done it...?

Emril is watching Alloran kind of worriedly. She's sad about him and concerned the other Andalites aren't going to be helpful at all. 

The Andalites have huddled together in a tight circle on the grass and mostly aren't speaking. Alloran is worrying that he's forgotten how to move his body and is trying to move it a bit to check without being conspicious. He's pretty sure he'd lose a tail-fight very very badly and that feels simultaneously important to fix and impossible to try to fix.

He doesn't, exactly, want to die but he doesn't really remember wanting anything else.

After a while, when nothing explodes, and a couple more Thoughtsensers have read thoughts and determined that no one is secretly turned to the Yeerks' side and planning to betray them, one of Leareth's mages who stayed behind when the Dome ship left uses the communications spell to contact Nayoki. He lets her know that they have the prisoners and can they please get Mindhealers over, like, now? 

Nayoki passes this on to both Melody and Matirin. 

Damn this means, presumably, being in a different place from Matirin, which doesn't seem ideal. Melody has a peek at his mind and emotions again. 

He's scanning news from Earth, especially human media about the publicly-known events of the last day. They detected the destruction of the Blade ship. Speculation is rampant. He's operating in a corner of his brain that's not full of minefields. He's stressed and sad in the background; he knows which people they got back, now, which means he knows which ones they didn't.

At least he's not blocking out all his emotions again. 

:Matirin: she sends, as Nayoki grabs another mage to Gate them back to Velgarth. :I'm headed over to see the prisoners. Wanted to check in with you first since I could be gone awhile. Scale of one to ten, how well can you think right now?: 

<Nine.>

He didn't spend very long thinking about that or stopping to check, but Melody doesn't feel in the mood to argue about it right now. :Good. Er, if something happens and that goes below, hmm, five, please have someone send a message to me. If you start feeling numb again, I think you should take a five-minute break and try describing to yourself in words what emotions are in the background. Are you on board with that?: 

<I will keep in mind that if I do not do that something worse might happen and take your recommendation very seriously.>

:Thank you: 

And Melody follows Nayoki through the Gate back to Velgarth. 

Nayoki spends fifteen seconds taking in the gestalt of the full group of Andalites-plus-humans, and then goes straight to Leareth.

He looks fairly calm, though very tired. He's sitting on the grass looking at nothing in particular. 

"- Nayoki. Can you please fix the set-command, I would like my Gifts back." 

She kneels, looking into his eyes. "Yes, of course, just a moment." Peek at his mind. ...Well, that could be worse. She gets to work. 

:I want you to speak a little to Melody about how you are feeling: she says while she does so. 

It's kind of distracting trying to listen to her when also his entire visual field and/or the inside of his head feel like they're melting, Leareth thinks with irritation. And he still can't answer in Mindspeech. "Why?" 

:Because you had an unusually horrible day and are probably somewhat traumatized about it: 

"Trust me, I had not failed to notice."

:Matirin wants everyone who was captured to take mandatory leave, but I am somewhat concerned you will refuse to do that: 

Sigh. Now he has Mindspeech again, though, that's so much better. :Nayoki, I need to go back to Earth as soon as possible, and I need to speak with Matirin directly about my interactions with Mhalir. After that I would be delighted to take some leave, I am very tired, but - things are delicate right now and the stakes are very high: 

She doesn't answer right away, just finishes removing the set-command and then undoes the suicide-compulsion, phew, dealt with. 

:I know. Talk to Melody about the considerations, all right? We can see what she says: 

She reaches out and squeezes his shoulder, briefly, and then heads to the next person. 

Melody spends a bit of time also picking out glued-on set-commands in parallel, these people have had a bad enough day, they shouldn't have to spend any longer than necessary also Gift-less. 

Then she heads for the Andalites, turning her Sight on those minds, trying to do some very rapid mental triage for who she's going to talk to first. 

There are eight Andalites under a lot of stress and not-thinking about the last day and trying to believe that they're probably safe. 

And there is one Andalite throwing all of his energy at just holding his body approximately still in a normal-enough fashion, and every single part of his tapestry has worn away like it hung out exposed to the elements for decades or something. He's trying not to use it. it does not look like it would hold up to the strain.

What. Okay, he almost has to be the Andalite who was Visser 3's host for decades, that they were speculating about back on the ship. Also aaaaaaaaaaaah. This is what she gets for thinking to herself, out on the border at Horn less than a month ago, that the whole 'war duty Mindhealer posting' thing was getting repetitive after four years and she was bored. 

Melody is not at all bored and is only internally screaming a little bit, which is not noticeable at all in her body language. 

She takes a deep breath, and addresses all of the Andalites in Mindspeech. :I'm Melody. I think you all know of the existence of Mindhealers in Velgarth, and that Nayoki is one. I'm from Valdemar and volunteered for the war effort along with Herald Vanyel, so I'm here now. I actually spent the last four years down at the front helping soldiers who'd had traumatic experiences during Valdemar's war, and Matirin asked me to talk to everyone here about how you're feeling and figure out if I can help. All right? I think for now I'll take five minutes to talk to each of you and then go from there: 

She doesn't head for Alloran first. He might benefit from a bit more time to think about what, if anything, he wants to say to her. Also if she just does this in order around the circle, starting with the person closest to her, it looks less like she's singling anyone out. 

The way this Andalite feels is that he is overjoyed at the triumph over the Yeerks and now understands even better how evil they are.

Melody nods and says sympathetic things and asks them a bit what the worst parts of the last day were, and then moves on. 

Alloran is number four, in her randomized ordering. :Hey: she says, in private Mindspeech. :You're Alloran, right? You were Visser Three's host: 

He does not move. The other ones twitch their tails, at uncomfortable questions. <Yes.>

Well, he can answer a yes-or-no question, that's something. Going by his tapestry, she was worried he might be completely catatonic for the next while. 

...Damn it, why is she suddenly being a Mindhealer to aliens, working across a massive cultural gap she barely understands, with patients who seem to just not have half the concepts she takes for granted with humans. 

:I'm so sorry. I cannot imagine what the last twenty years have been like for you: Pause. :This is probably considered very rude among your people, so I apologize for that, but I think it's easiest to be frank. I have magical Sight that shows me people's minds, and yours is a mess. But I think it's fixable, with a lot of time, if you're - motivated to get better, and willing to work with me on it. I want to help: 

<I know that I am broken. It is my wish to still be of service to my people, for whatever I am worth.>

Now doesn't seem like time to argue with the entire Andalite framing on mental and emotional issues, even though she is starting to hate it with a burning passion. Also he's not actually wrong. 

:I understand. I'm still doing triage now, so I'll ask you a few questions and move on, but we'll come back to it. Can you tell me what kinds of feelings you're having right now?: 

Alloran doesn't have a Thoughtsensing talisman, which is really helpful, it makes it a lot easier to correlate what the aspects of his tapestry are actually like to him, internally. 

<I have forgotten how to move my body. I feel anger and hatred for the Yeerks about this.>

:That's a deeply reasonable emotion to be having right now, for that reason and I'm sure a thousand others. Would you like me to help you figure out how to move your body again? I'm not sure I can do it in five minutes, but I can try quickly, and if not I'll come back to you right afterward: 

<I would like that.>

:All right, hmm. Try to wave your tail or something? That might help me see what's going wrong that makes it not work: 

He can move it but not fluidly, and it doesn't move exactly how he expects, and it's dangerous to flail an Andalite tail around without precise control of it, he could cut off his own leg or something.

That is a pretty inconvenient problem to have! 

What does his tapestry look like when he's trying to do that? 

He's terrified of being too broken to be of any use anymore, and he's terrified of humiliating himself by moving his tail wrong in a way that's obvious to all the other Andalites, and he's not going to kill himself now that it wouldn't help, now that his information about the Yeerks is likely needed, he's not that weak, but it's all he's thought about for twenty years and still the only motion that feels like it would be achievable naturally, and whenever his body does move in response to his commands it's terrifying and disorienting and everything swims in his vision.

He hates Visser Three so intensely. He wants to personally watch when he dies.

Wow, where does she even start with that.

She takes a deep breath. :I - think there's a lot we can work on, here, from various angles. It'll take time and patience but I think you're up for that and I'm really glad of that. Hmm. I think a big chunk of this is - well, humans at least will get rusty at any skill they don't use for a long time. Learn a language, and if you don't speak it for a decade, it'll take a bit of practice to come back fluently. Much faster than learning in the first place. And - I think everything in your mind is like that, right now, because for twenty years someone else was using it instead of you: 

Only a hint slips through in her mindvoice of how awful and upsetting it is, looking at the results of that etched into the living, breathing, experiencing person in front of her. :I don't have an easy fix on the moving thing, but...would it help to not be around other Andalites for a while, so you can focus on getting back in practice without worrying what they'll think?: 

<I don't know. I've been - alone for a very long time. It's hard to be around people but it is frightening to imagine being alone again. They are my people, even if I am not worthy of them.>

She is not going to argue with him on that she is not going to argue not now she's doing triage, but gah. 

:I absolutely don't want to subject you to being alone. But - there are humans? Here on Velgarth. Or, I don't know how much the Visser learned about Valdemar's Heralds, but - there's a setup here where magical intelligent horse-shaped beings bond to humans. I think some of your people have been considering it sort of analogous to Andalites, except made of two symbiotic parts, and the Companions are herd animals and seem to get along really well with Andalites. You could, if you wanted, have some of them keep you company while you're practicing things that feel stressful to do in front of Andalites, they're so incredibly not going to judge you negatively about it: 

<I think that anyone with reasonable standards for conduct would judge someone negatively for being unable to walk.>

:If a soldier under your command had all of their legs broken by the enemy - and also couldn't morph it off yet for some reason - would you judge them negatively for not being able to walk?: 

<Yes! They would be unable to do any useful things. 'unable to do any useful things' is probably the most straightforwardly negative assessment of a person you can have, other than 'dead'.>

Gaaaaaaaaaah. Melody does not scream even a little bit, though. Her expression and mindvoice are mild. 

:All right, fair. Your current condition does - give predictions about what kind of work you can do right now. The way humans think about this, though, is - hmm. I think 'negative judgement' is maybe lumping two things together, here. One is predictions of what work we can give you. The other is - whether you're worth helping, whether people like you and want to be around you and care for you and help you get better. And I don't know how Andalites are with this, but among humans, if a soldier has their legs broken by the enemy, their colleagues will absolutely want to be with them and help them get better, if they can. And - for humans, again, someone being unable to walk because they were enslaved and tortured by the enemy for decades, is in principle not any different. It predicts that you'll need longer to heal, because you can't just morph off this damage, but it doesn't make you any less deserving of help and it won't make humans or Companions less willing to be around you: 

<Humans enjoy the company of crippled people?>

:I mean, not literally all humans, but - many humans get a lot of fulfillment and sense of meaning out of knowing that they're helping someone in need. Especially Healers. And - my entire job is that, right, and I actually like my job a lot. Also I know a human girl back on the Dome ship who stayed up most of last night even though she absolutely did not have to do that, because someone was injured and she wanted to be there to help. Do Andalites not have that motivation, at least in some people?: 

<- obviously duty frequently obliges a person to do many things that are unpleasant or difficult, and to do them uncomplainingly. There are many Andalites who work in medicine, and are frequently around injured and broken people, and they perform their duty admirably. But just as a soldier very accustomed to killing hopefully does not come to enjoy it, I would not expect a doctor to come to enjoy being around people who are not functioning properly. - satisfaction from fixing them, maybe.>

Melody nods. :...This could be a genuine species difference? I mean, no Healer is happy that someone is hurt and less able to function, but - watching someone get better in front of you, over time, and knowing that I helped, is one of the best feelings in the world for me. I have to work hard for it, usually, some bits are difficult, but that makes succeeding even more satisfying, right: Sigh. :It may be hard to explain because we're aliens who think and feel differently. Just - can you take my word on it, right now, that there are humans and Companions who would volunteer to keep you company and wouldn't find it unpleasant and difficult on net?: 

<Then that would be better than imposing on the Andalites.>

:That makes sense. Do you have a preference between staying in Velgarth awhile versus being near Earth?: 

<There are no Yeerks here.>

:That's an excellent point. In that case, how do you feel about staying in Haven awhile, down in Valdemar? The Companions have a nice big field all to themselves, you can join them, and there's an entire Collegium of trainee Healers who will be delighted to check in on you - they're so incredibly curious about the aliens, but you should tell them to go away if they're annoying - and I'll come by every day for a while. All right?: 

<I assume that whoever has the command on Earth will want to know what I know of Visser Three's activities but if arrangements can be made for that then this seems reasonable.

When they kill him I want to be there.>

Melody has no idea what to say about the last bit, so she just nods, ducks her head. :We can make arrangements for that, there are going to be lots of Gates around between places for the next while. I'll talk to you again soon: 

And she waits a beat to see if he has anything else to add before moving on to the next Andalite. 

He does not. He is happy; she said he was fixable.

Melody passes on in Mindspeech to Nayoki that she's going to need a Gate to Haven soonish, and then finishes triaging the other Andalites - any of them especially worrying? 

Talik has morphed a bird and flown off. None of the other ones are especially worrying. 

Can she...find him in Mindspeech range? 

Nope! Faraway bird.

Wow she is really not sure what to do about that. She did have the chance to glance at him briefly before she started the conversations and he didn't look suicidal then. 

She asks one of the Mindspeakers to try to reach a Herald on the Border and have the Companions keep an eye on whether he turns up in Valdemar (but not to talk to him, for now, if he wants to be left alone he wants to be left alone.) And she has a silent Mindspeech conference with Nayoki, so that updates can be passed back to the Dome ship. 

Nayoki finishes with the last of her patients who need set-commands cleaned up and/or hugs and crying, and contacts Vanyel. 

<Andalites assessed. Alloran is in bad shape but coping better than expected and wishes to stay in Haven with the Companion herd. Talik turned into a bird and flew away but Melody was not very worried before that and thinks he wishes to be alone. None of the others are taking it exceptionally badly> 

It's noticeably more tiring than the regular comms spell within-world but Vanyel can manage it fine. <Thank you> And he passes this on to Matirin in Mindspeech. 

<That's good to know.> 

He is listening in on human governments, trying to figure out how urgently they need an explanation and what explanation will go over best. Ideally he wouldn't explain until the Yeerks have surrendered their hosts, because people are going to start panicking over whether their loved ones are Controlled, but they gave the Yeerks a month and they might need to say something sooner than that.

 <The humans all have their Gifts back and most of them want to stay in Velgarth and return to Leareth's territory in the far north. Emril, the Healer, wishes to come back to Earth immediately because she promised the Yeerk who infested her that she would help Heal her former host, who has cancer. Leareth also wishes to return immediately to debrief on what happened with Visser Three> She does not say anything about whether she considers this a good idea or not. 

<We're ready for him, if you have anyone who can Gate back to the ship, or if you want us to pick you up from the surface.>

<We could use a pickup, for that, all of the mages present here who can do interworld Gates are very tired> Nayoki herself has just removed gnarly set-commands from a dozen people and she's exhausted and has a headache. <Melody wants to go with him. She points out that among other factors, Leareth expects you to want him directly mindread on what happened, and that seems better done by someone not under his command> 

Vanyel passes this on to Matirin with a slight wince. He spends half a second considering that he's not in Leareth's command structure, and then remembers that this would involve reading Leareth's mind, which sounds so awkward. 

<We can do it ourselves, but - yes, it seems useful to have Melody here again. I will arrange a Gate in ten minutes.>

It turns out that no one present meets all the criteria of 'has enough reserves left to Gate a few hundred miles', and either 'has been to Haven' or 'can do blind Gates from a map.' A message is passed down the Mindspeech relay asking for help. 

An elderly silver-haired human Gates over five minutes later. "Er, I would rather not hold this long - who's coming to Haven?" 

Nayoki is distracted talking to Leareth but replies in Mindspeech. :Alloran, the one who was enslaved by the Yeerks for decades, Leareth somehow convinced them to return him without being asked. Can you send your Companion to help him get over to the Gate?: 

:Oh, is he...: Savil decides not to ask.

A few seconds later, a white horse that is definitely a person trots over to Alloran. :I'm Kellan, Savil is my Chosen and she's got a Gate to Haven over there. Can we head that way?: 

Alloran does this. It takes a lot of concentration but he does it.

Melody watches him from the corner of her eye. She's so proud of him already.

Also she is so furious with Visser Three right now. So furious. 

On the other side of a Gate is a big spacious field; it's late autumn headed into winter in Valdemar now, and much of the grass is brown. It's now dropping below freezing at night but only a few places in the shadows still have a rime of frost on them. 

The field is full of a dozen or so white horses, male and female, all of them people, who look up at Alloran and send a wordless mental greeting, apparently he's coming to stay with the herd which is really neat?

And a trio of foals are bounding over, nearly tripping over their own legs in their enthusiasm. :Hi hi hi are you the alien we're so happy you came what's your name–:

They are told off by one of the adults, and fall silent, but line up and look at Alloran with large, curious, delighted blue eyes. 

Alloran looks back at them with some of his eyes (the stalk ones are whizzing around trying to take in all his surroundings; to an Andalite eye, they are clumsy at it). <I am the Andalite War-Prince Alloran-Semitur-Corrass.> he says after a second. 

None of the Companions know what Andalites look like normally and they don't notice this at all. 

A stallion, a handspan taller than Kellan who originally brought him across, steps forward. :Welcome to Valdemar, War-Prince Alloran-Semitur-Corrass. I am Taver, the Groveborn and Companion to the King's Own; I am the leader of this herd: His mindvoice sounds different from the others. Less human; there's a brightness to it, and a resonance like ringing steel. 

And then one of the foals pipes up again. :War-Prince Alloran, is the sky blue on your world too or is it a different colour?: 

:Does your world have birds?: 

:–One at a time!: someone admonishes them. 

He bows to Taver. <I am honored to be among your people, and will serve you however I can.

..my world has birds. Not as many as many other worlds, because Andalites manage our planetary ecosystem, and started doing that a long time ago when we could not do it with very complicated ecosystems. Our sky is red and gold.>

:Oh oh oh can you show us a memory that sounds so pretty–:

:We have SO MANY birds. I think there don't need to be that many birds: 

:Do you eat the same things Companions do, we can show you the greenhouse that has nice grass even in winter–:

The foals are so curious and delighted to talk to him and ask a million questions; the adults give them periodic hushes and tell them to go one at a time, and they remember for a while, but they're so excited. They show him the greenhouse with grass in it (though the Companions mostly eat grain and stored hay, in winter, since they can, but they're not sure he can.) 

The Companions talk to each other constantly, in Mindspeech. Even the ones who aren't talking directly to Alloran don't bother to shield it out, so it's like being in the same room as half a dozen conversations, which can be ignored fairly easily but are there if he wants to pay attention. They're gossiping - about their Heralds, and the war that Valdemar just won with the Andalites' help, and Queen Karis, and whether it'll be a good harvest next year.

Emotions aren't hard to read, when everyone is Mindspeaking and leaking overtones, and none of them are at all resentful about his disability. They're very curious about his world and his people, and pleased to have him here. 

Perhaps it will be a good environment in which to relearn the things that he needs to relearn. He does feel slightly less at loose ends, answering children's questions. 

And grass is nice. He can eat pre-cut hay - the Visser often didn't find it convenient to have grass around - but he doesn't like to.

Back in the north, Leareth waits with Melody for the Gate back to the Dome ship.

He feels...tolerable. A little numb, and definitely - brittle, or something, his surfaces are holding together fine but his insides feel fragile. Metaphorically. It's inconvenient, that was one day of things going horribly wrong and he wasn't even conscious for most of it. It was very densely packed with things-going-wrong, though. 

Gate! 

Nayoki nods to Leareth, and stays back with the other humans and Andalites; they haven't coordinated on what the other Andalites want to do next, but it seems preferable not to fling them back into the Dome ship mid-negotiations.