"Unless Space Elves are different in this respect also, you also only have two Elf hosts for a week, maybe two. Elves can't handle being held prisoner. I did it but I knew what I was doing and my prisoner was in less psychological distress than your host currently is and had no incentive to die on me."

"I'm aware. I have not yet needed to experiment with obliging him to swear oaths and it might not succeed. Another reason to be quick about it. There are some Hork-Bajir hosts I was able to retrieve, if nothing else. They cannot hear Space Elf osanwë, but they will be able to hear your variety, and they can wear eidetic memory necklaces."

"I swear that in exchange for a necklace of my own and the functional contents of the teleport spell I will act towards your goals until or unless I find out someone's trying to put a Yeerk in my head."

Issiak smiles broadly and fetches him a necklace and signals Yomenië's Yeerk to start relaying.

And he listens, for several hours, and then pops back and forth just to check if he can, and then - "there's a no-magic dimension-leaping solution, has your world developed it?"

"No. Our faster than light travel relies on something called z-space, which seems to be a local phenomenon, but it does not generically move between dimensions."

"We could steal a worldleaper, but they drop you somewhere arbitrary in the new dimension, and they don't take enough cargo to leap a whole spaceship, peal handles that problem by being indestructible. We could summon daeva to do it for us, but my guess is that if they realize we're doing that the peal stops time and Gem takes a truly grueling amount of subjective time to track us down. There are enough of me that I could credibly impersonate one of the others, but not to get us indestructibility. Let me go home and tell everybody to cover for my absence -" he does that - "but without an empty dimension we're running very short on time."

"There is a known dimension they fear entering, but it would likely pose as much hazard to us. And indestructible people are immune to infestation if they don't choose to permit it. However, unhosted Yeerks are very small," gesture, "and I have a few ships which contain Yeerk-only escape pod models. If an unhosted Yeerk can usefully wear one of the necklaces, it should be able to be worldleapt in such a pod, then come back and retrieve a ship."

"Magic items work by skin contact, it should be possible to get a necklace working for a Yeerk. Any ideas on where to get a worldleaper?"

"That, Ehtelion does not know," says Issiak, shaking his head. "Short of summoning a demon, which he does know how to do. Probably from Revelation, which is not adjacent to Edda."

"And which we might need anyway, demons are how you narrow down for habitable worlds within a new dimension once you find one. Right, Ehtelion?"

It's a version of the prince Nelyafinwë, it does not make sense on any level that he'd - What the fuck are you thinking are you an idiot he'd happily enslave all your people, if the new dimension has a Melkor he'd happily side with him -

 "All right, so we summon a demon."

I doubt very much a Melkor is capable of tolerating an independent Yeerk Empire, Issiak chides his host. "Yes. It's not obvious to me how to find a relatively safe staging ground in Revelation."

"Likewise. Do you have the invisibility spell?"

"No, only the teleport and the healing."

"You've got ships? We can just teleport to somewhere very distant from the Earth."

"Yes, there are a few ships here, they were irrelevant to the peal and left behind. They are not capacious."

"In principle you just need room for yourself and a summoning circle, in practice I can read minds and negotiating with a demon seems like the sort of thing much simplified by that."

"I suppose a sufficiently tractable demon will obviate the need for anything left here."

"You're offering them the means to leave Hell without getting a summons. You should be able to ask for very nearly anything in exchange. ...do you know if when a hosted person finishes a summoning circle, the host or the Yeerk is considered the summoner?"

"If it's been tried it was without Ehtelion's knowledge but it seems likelier in principle to be the Yeerk."

"Because if it's him we've got a demon we can't dismiss or make a deal with."

"Well, we could kill him, although it seems like a waste. Or you could provide some more tractable host. I believe you have humans in your world, they won't have the inconvenient expiration dates, and rumor has it that humans include many people happy to cooperate with their Yeerks."

"I can get you some humans. I can also summon the demon, though, and am inclined to do that first because the peal is not stupid and the instant they realize you have a teleporter we are out of time."