<Hello again.>

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

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

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

Tail-nod.

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

<He is very welcome.>

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

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

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

"You have no idea," says Butterfly.

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

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

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

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

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

"I see."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And expect it to be worse than death."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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