"I was unusually good at explaining humans, they were somewhat concerned that Yeerks might have a way to uncover forgotten memories, and my father had already been assumed into the Yeerk front organization and spent a good deal of energy trying to convince my sister and I to join it likewise. They'd screened us for infestation, and our mother because we lived in her household, but he was in a different state and they neglected him. I offered my human-explaining services in exchange for the opportunity to fake my and her disappearance and his death, get him uninfested, and confirm with him that they were telling the truth about Yeerks. Matirin - that's the person who looks like you, although he only looks like you in morph, the rest of the time he looks like a blue centaur etcetera - accepted this offer."

"Fake your and whose disappearance?"

"My sister. They'd abducted us both."

"And 'in morph'?"

"Andalite technology includes the ability to acquire the DNA of people and animals at touch range and use it to shapeshift into a copy thereof, or, if you get several of the same or sufficiently similar species, a blend. Matirin's favored human blend looks like you, except... human. Which is very strange, although perhaps it's entirely to be expected, I don't know how alternate universes are supposed to work."

"Weirdly. I would not have necessarily predicted that but I am not stunned. Does Matirin have six younger brothers and a bunch of half-cousins?"

"He had six younger brothers. There's one left. I never inquired about his extended family."

"Ah."

"At any rate," she says, "there ensued a war."

"Do tell."

"Depending on how much detail you want we may be straying from information sufficiently public that it will appear in my forthcoming biography."

"I can promise discretion and if we are going to go try to end the interstellar war tomorrow we should probably be operating on accurate information when we do."

"...does promising discretion usually get you classified information?"

"I can actually bindingly promise things but inconveniently I can't prove I can bindingly promise things. Observing that I will be acting on whatever information or misinformation I have sometimes gets me classified things."

"Well," she says, "perhaps you can go visit Matirin; he knows everything about the war I do, at least, and if the resemblances are normally particularly striking you should be able convince him of your identity and good faith."

"We might do that. Let's have the public-consumption version of the story first."

"We tracked down the location of most of the Kandrona generators in the American continents. We blew them up. The Yeerks were alerted to our presence and we lost considerable freedom of movement; Andi, my sister, and I became even more useful than we had been for our ability to do things like spend more than two hours bipedal - that being the morphing time limit state of the art at the time. We had not found all the generators; there was one in the capital of the United States. Our operation attempting to warn the government was a failure. The Yeerks used their presence in the U.S. government to blame the terrorist attacks on some loosely plausible Middle Eastern countries and start a war and infest soldiers and the invaded alike. Some but not many Andalite reinforcements arrived and we regrouped in Australia. We determined that humans have a dramatically higher radiation tolerance than Yeerks do, negotiated with China about the use of their arsenal, and irradiated the planet. This killed most of the Earthside Yeerks. There is one strain of them with a natural resistance to the radiation and we hadn't done enough testing to notice the variance in the population, and many of those managed to consolidate in Syria. And there were still ships in orbit - a big one and a medium sized one - with unmitigated capacity to strike from there."

"Do you mind if I take notes?"

"No."

Getting Cam to check things?

Yeah.  He pulls out a little stick which projects a little computer screen, writes "letter to Cam", writes a summary, asks 'can you check what you get for a model of a Yeerk and an Andalite, check who else there's alts of, send someone to give me an osanwë heads-up if anything fails to verify or anything urgent appears'?

"Let me know when you're caught up."

"All set, thanks."

"There's a Resistance faction among the Yeerks, who prefer to take voluntary hosts and disagree with the way the Yeerk Empire conducts itself. We made contact with some of the Syria "cousin" Yeerks meeting that description -"

Something about that was horrible for her personally.