Ma'ar is so startled. He squirms for a moment, involuntarily, and then catches himself - don't resist - and goes even more limp than before. 

He feels - he isn't sure what, he doesn't have words for it - his heart is pounding but not, exactly, with fear. It has some of the same bright time-slowing clarity of being in a fight (odd, how when he's actually being attacked he usually isn't feeling afraid, or maybe not odd at all, when there's no time for it and it wouldn't help). And at the same time it's not like that at all; it's the exact opposite of staying in control. 

He wonders vaguely if Carissa is still reading his mind, and if so whether she has any idea whether this emotion has a name. 

She is, in case it gives her any hints about what she's trying to do here, but she doesn't know what that is!! Sex is maybe like that sometimes?

She checks very carefully that none of their very few possessions are on fire in a way they're not supposed to be and then she kisses him again, more thoroughly, and holds his hands against the ground, and then - her brain is bouncing back and forth between ideas -

- oh. 

This will require preparing a spell. She pets him absentmindedly while she does it. 

She dismisses the fire. 

And she turns him into a Yeerk.

Ma'ar also has to step on his instinctive reaction to having his hands pinned, which is to instantly fight back preferably with magic. He does not do this; he feels like he's starting to get the hang of the not-resisting motion a little more. It's very easy, in a way, when you think about it; it's just not doing something. 

- What???? This is not something Ma'ar was expecting at ALL and it takes him several panicky seconds to even guess at what she did - he feels very small and helpless and he can sort of sense his surroundings but not very well and he's not very effective at independent movement, at least not out of water, he sort of just flops. And then stops bothering. He - feels like he's fallen through to the other side of fear, and he's not sure what's there, yet, but it feels spacious and quiet and he will just wait and see what Carissa intends to do next. 

He might be mad, once he's had time to think, but it seems fair enough, at this point. She raises him to her ear.

Fortunately the Yeerk body seems to come with instincts for what to do about this. He slips into her ear - and there's a feeling that would be very disorienting if not for the fact that his current body is expecting it and ready. 

And then her mind is there, sprawled out around him, in a way far more vivid and close-up than what Thoughtsensing conveys. 

She is still mostly consumed with anxiety that she did it wrong but she tries to think a few things through more clearly than that, which will presumably be very boring. (She spends an awful lot of her attention convincing herself that her own feelings are contemptible and stupid. It looks, from this angle, like a new habit; she didn't do it when she had Mhalir.) 

Nine minutes, is the first thing she thinks at him. Usually Polymorph when it reverts puts you in an empty space but usually you aren't in someone to start with and she doesn't want to learn what'd happen.

The second thing she thinks at him is that she was halfway in love with him, sort of, as much as she was trying not to be, And she thinks the missing piece isn't - something he wasn't doing, that'd make her feel safe, but it might be - an understanding of him? That isn't about not getting hurt herself, that isn't treating him as an unusually generous adversary - she's not sure, it's not very clear and her heart is trying to make enough noise in her chest to call judgment down on her - Mhalir could sometimes get it to do less of that -

- is he okay?

<...I think so.> Talking to her - thinking at her - in this form feels odd, quite different from Mindspeech. <I was - you scared me but it was - not bad? I am not upset.> 

Ma'ar does feel very disoriented, or something, presumably this is half because he's in a completely unfamiliar body - and now able to control her body, if he wants, but even the Yeerk instincts don't scaffold it enough to make it feel non-overwhelming. And, more than that, the entire suite of emotions he's been tumbling through over the last few minutes is unfamiliar territory. It's, again, not unpleasant, or somewhere he doesn't want to be, just...different, and something he has no expectation of being skilled at. 

He could try to calm her heartbeat, if she wants? He's a bit nervous about doing something wrong though. 

She's not invested either way, really, she wouldn't have done this if she had strong preferences about what he did once he could see all of this. ...she does have some, but they're both stupid and pretty likely to be met, like, she hopes he doesn't tell her that she's very stupid and horrible, and she hopes he doesn't tell her that he was joking all along about the idea he might respect her, and there are a hundred permutations of that, and there's - a deeper sense that perhaps she is most useful to people when she's powerless and obedient, either a body for a Yeerk to move or under compulsions or something other than - free and doing the things that advance her own goals -

...Ma'ar wants something that he's not sure is possible to get, and so he had never quite made it clear even in his own thoughts, before now - and possibly it's stupid to ask and will just make everything else worse and harder, but...well, Carissa was thinking that she wanted an understanding of him, and this feels relevant... 

<I am sure you are a very useful puppet but - that is not what would make me feel safe. I want - hmm...

...so, the other Carissa was kidnapped by Nefreti and left with little Ma'ar in his Velgarth. She...feared that it might actually be the same Velgarth, that she - went back in time, and that her arrival meant - erasing her version of Leareth from reality... And - she still tried to do what he would have done. Still planned to raise little Ma'ar and teach him as best she could and stop the Cataclysm, and then make both of them immortal and - figure out how to fight the gods, eventually, or talk to them...> 

<I want that kind of ally. I...realize this is not a fair thing to demand of anyone - and it cannot be coerced, obviously, that would not work at all... I lived so much of my life thinking that no one else cared, that no one else would try.> 

Another pause as he tries to gather his scattered, tangled thoughts. 

<You know how to try. And - how to do math - that is why you tried to blow up Mhalir's ship... And there are so many worlds that need rescuing and I want you on my team. I would feel safer. If I had that.> 

Well obviously she's going to keep trying on her own, whether or not anyone's on her side. Not at - exactly the thing they'd try at, maybe. But - at trying to fix everything, yeah.

<I am glad. It - feels much less lonely, knowing that. ...I half knew it already, I think. But seeing it - seeing you, like this, is different.>

He tries to push across some of what he's feeling, since he does not currently have the usual channels that let humans convey emotions to each other. He feels grateful and touched and - he's still not sure if this is what 'feeling safe' is but he feels less alone than he ever has, before. 

<...What else do you want to understand, about me.> 

She wouldn't have said she wanted to understand anything but now actually she thinks she was failing to interpret him - as a fellow human being? He was in a lot of reference classes she had rules about - a man, a caster, a person who was more powerful than her, a man she was sleeping with in particular, a Mhalir, but none of them were quite like a person, none of them were things she could imagine being.  She doesn't think it's essential, she's not sure other Carissa imagines being her husband, but - but she's more ambitious than other Carissa, isn't she -

<No, that makes sense. I - think it would feel very good for me, as well, to - feel understood. By someone who is not another me, I mean.>

Carissa feels like Mhalir made sense to her. Eventually. She has been leaning a lot on that. Whenever she's tempted to - plan defensively, to assume it's a bad idea to have a preference or say something - she checks it against her understanding of Mhalir. Sometimes that lets her stop worrying. Sometimes it mostly points at not worrying but she decides to ignore it anyway because it'd hurt too much to be wrong (for example, she wouldn't turn him down for sex, even though her Mhalir-model wouldn't mind at all, because if that were a place where they were different it'd hurt so it's much safer not to check) -

- Mhalir wanted to fix everything, and he wanted people to work with him, to see what he was working for and not need coaxing into it because it was good and they wanted it for its own sake. And the thing Mhalir wanted is all tangled in her head with the destruction of Hell, and so she can't exactly want it the way he does, but Mhalir is the best person she has ever met, and that - is something, right, even if Mhalir is wrong, or - not exactly wrong but just different than her -

- Ma'ar mostly makes less sense in the places where he's not Mhalir, which unfortunately include their entire relationship. Mhalir was lonely because he had to spend his time sharing a brain with someone who hated him; Ma'ar was lonely - just because he didn't know how to shape people into the thing he wanted? Mhalir was scared because he'd spent most of his life in a war for the survival of his species, Ma'ar - well, Ma'ar was at war too, recently ...

...It's so much more than just the war. 

(- also it's kind of upsetting that Carissa doesn't feel that she can say no to sex, but he puts that aside for right now -)

The Yeerk mindreading only goes one direction; Ma'ar can't show her the entirety of who and what he is as easily, but he can still give her more than Mindspeech can convey to someone without the Gift themselves. He pushes across a blurred impression, made up of a thousand fragments. 

The plains of the Clan Kiyam lands, grass withered, mud dried and cracked around what was left of the watering hole after months, years, of drought... A man's broken body. An infant's skull, crushed by the chief's club. A woman's screams, from inside the tent he was forbidden to enter. 

They were decent people, who he grew up surrounded by. Not like him, and he never belonged, but...they never hurt him. It was a world where almost no one was evil and almost everything was broken. 

Travelling through Predain, alone, terrified, confused all the time. Reading everyone's mind constantly, and most of them were decent people too - worth saving, though he didn't quite have that concept fully-formed yet at the time - but none of them were like him either. 

Seeing Urtho's Tower for the first time, and the hope he felt, seeing a place that was less broken. Thinking that Urtho, too, understood, that Urtho was like him, that he wasn't alone.

The slow realization, smeared out across years, that no, Urtho didn't understand at all. 

Going back to Predain, and how it never again felt like home, nowhere did, the Tower came closest but that almost hurt more. 

Ma'ar has spent decades carving out just one corner of the world where slightly fewer things were broken, and he nearly lost all of it in a fiery cataclysm - and Leareth did, and then picked up the pieces and spent years, centuries, millennia working to fix everything, and sometimes he had allies, for a brief time, but in the end he was always alone. 

Ma'ar is the same person, the same pattern, and he can see how he could be shaped that way, pared down by the passage of time and loneliness, into something optimized for that one goal. But he isn't that person yet. 

Oh. 

She's not sure what to - it feels obvious, to her, that no one would be really trying to fix the world for everyone, it's such a generous goal, and it's so hard, and it's not like they'd see the reason for it. But she's not sure that holds up, really. 

In Golarion if you're Good and clever and determined you get picked by a god and then you're not alone and your plans might be in vain all the same but not - randomly. Though Aroden was never a cleric, that she knows of; maybe the gods don't see the thing Ma'ar is as Good, even though it seems like obviously the thing Good would be if it weren't stupid.

<...I think I am not Good and neither is Leareth. I think that...Good is a different thing - Mhalir tried to explain it to me... I think that being Good in Predain would not have worked, and - the thing that I am is the thing that works - I am sorry, I thought I understood it more at the time than I seem to now.> 

Carissa thinks that he's probably right but this is because Good is stupid and - the thing that it should be, the thing you actually get if you take all those ideas about caring about people and run with them as far as you need to, that thing, he is. And if Good is about having reasons to stop short of that but they're not enough reason to not destroy Hell then they're stupid reasons, any reason worth having would hold you back from Hell too.

<...I wonder if it cost Iomedae Good points - I know that is not really how it works, but - metaphorically... I wonder if it was not Good, to do that, but She did it anyway because...that was what it took to win...> 

Carissa has no idea how to feel about that, really. 

Neither is Ma'ar. Mhalir seemed to find relief in the concept of Good, but he doesn't see it, right now. 

<...I understand why most people are not me, or trying to do the things I do. I...would not ask that of them, and it does not make them any less saving, just - 

- just, I have felt alone for a long time - for my entire life, I suppose - and that is why...> 

Ma'ar is also vaguely aware that he hasn't been tracking time that closely and isn't sure when it will have been nine minutes. 

She's keeping track of that! Some risk of one's head exploding horribly is the sort of thing to keep track of even if you are having an emotional conversation about the nature of trying to fix everything in the universe. 

:I think probably it's teachable. Mhalir taught me. Asmodeanism is teachable and it's - more complicated, sort of -:

<- I know what you mean. It - the way I see the world is very simple? It is...too hard for most people - honestly lately it feels too hard for me as well - but it is not complicated, it flows logically from a small number of premises? Asmodeanism does not do that, I think.> 

:It doesn't. It's a bunch of habits of thought and most of them you only learn if it'd go really badly to learn something different. And still, almost everyone picks it up.: She remembers Iomedae, telling her it was fine to trade bits of yourself to gods for protection, if you were allowed to track which bits you traded and what you were getting in exchange. She cuts off this line of thought because she is mad at Iomedae.

<Leareth taught Vanyel, I think. It took a decade, but - they were enemies at the start, that must have made it harder. ...Did you meet Vanyel? He is an interesting person.>