"Which I understand entirely but I assume if someone then put the Earth back afterwards you would not make visits there. So. I don't go to Afterlife, Bells probably shouldn't go to Afterlife, they wouldn't necessarily recognize the girls but still."

Tail-flick-nod. <I wonder if we should somehow make reparations for the Hork-Bajir genocide ->

<I have been thinking about that too. Soon we can resurrect them. I - actually think they'll be okay - if Aldrea-Iskillion-Falan can tell me that we did the right thing ->

"...context?"

<Before they attacked Earth the Yeerks infested a planet of Hork-Bajir, tree-dwelling pacifist vegetarians. The Yeerks wanted them as shock troops; they are terrifying. We got there too late. We fought, for a few years. When all but around ten thousand Hork-Bajir had been infested we released a biological weapon that killed virtually all of them.>

"I haven't gone and personally visited the preserve but from what I hear Hork-Bajir seem pretty chill? Who's Aldrea?"

<The daughter of Prince Seerow, whose name you know from the laws prohibiting the distribution of technology. She got morph while it was still in early testing stages and fought the Yeerks after the murder of her family. She became a Hork-Bajir nothlit, married, and had a son, who lived out his whole life a Yeerk slave, as did his children and their children. Aldrea died of the bio-weapon.>

"Ah."

"Nobody from Afterlife has told Cam they get it. Loki wound up obliquely threatening not to resurrect the Space Valar to the Elentári Aulë who she'd consulted on the project to make sure Cam would be okay and they wouldn't go after him when she did."

<Has Cam talked with my mother?>

"I don't go there at all now that they're all back."

"Cam is extremely conscientious about making sure that nobody else has to deal with his emotional ramifications. Loki has mostly taken on the role of doing useful things like 'telling people not to fuck with him about it' since he's abdicated the option."

<I apologize, are we fucking with you about it?>

"You are not, or, in Loki's absence, me and Gem would have told you not to do that. I'm just providing context on how very much he is not going to turn up at Space Nerdanel's house and say hello."

<And I suppose I can narrowly grant that she did not have enough information to make that inference and come find him.>

"Presumably."

<Well. Given marginally more context about what is going on an alt of my mother would have come and thanked you for everything you did for her world. Is nudging her into doing that likely to be valuable beyond the value of the information that she would have done it?>

"It's really not necessary."

<The Andalte law is that if you do something like that you spend the rest of your life on restricted assignment and in disgrace. I - understand the reason for that law. But I have seen what it does and I do not think what it does is respect the right of the victims of calls made for the greater good to resent being used like that. At least with Andalites.

Somewhat off-topic but the Yeerk who infested me and murdered my brother with my body is my penpal.>

"I didn't know that. That's sorta fucked up."

<I wanted to kill him. I do not prefer to have the desire to kill people in vengeance, and - it wasn't exactly vengeance, but just the knowledge he had all my people skills, all my personality - anyhow, I thought that if we talked then I would stop desiring to kill him, and it worked. I want him to be happy insofar as that's possible without harming other people. I should want that for everyone but sometimes it's hard and I need a bit of help.>

"I wonder what's taking Alice so long."

"I suppose it's possible I have not sufficiently formed the intention to try experimental brain surgery? Name me something I can make with a map of the Andalite brain so I can consult that and form a clearer guess."

He suggests a thing.

Cam peers at the map, and a minute later Alice runs up. "Doesn't kill them but it doesn't work either," she reports.

"Thank you," Cam says. "What if -"

"Doesn't work either."

"Damn."