"I believe the Empire fell in ignorance of Tide's existence; we did not correspond."

"That would explain it. Though the brevity of our acquaintance would explain it just as well; I only knew them about five hours."

"It probably does me too much credit to imagine that the existence of an independent Yeerk polity on friendly terms with Earth would have given them any pause."

"I think they found it intolerable for there to be anyone who had the power even in principle to interfere with their operations, which is an impulse I will confess to finding sympathetic, and I think they found the idea of concern for the consent of the hosts similarly upsetting. I suppose you could resurrect them and ask."

"I, not hardly, Matirin or one of the imports in twee outfits would have to do it. And they would have a long waiting list ahead of them, unless, I suppose, anyone expected asking them to yield strategically useful tidbits."

"Ah, they'd been projecting the impression resurrection was trivial. I would have tried harder to save the hosts if I'd known otherwise."

"The Elf hosts are some sort of special case," she says. "Already restored to life. The Hork-Bajir may wait a little longer."

"The Elf hosts I knew of. They knew it themselves at the time, they were anticipating that their allies might try to trace them through the multiverse by forking them. They were uncertain of whether they'd do it - the principles to which the host of meddlers hold themselves are obscure to me but certainly strongly held."

"Well, I can at least assure you that the Hork-Bajir are not missing any urgent appointments back home while waiting their turns."

"I'm sure."

"They seem to think they've pieced together most of the facts of the events, but did ask me to check with you."

"Check what in particular?"

"Oh, whether there is a rogue demon, what information any applicable demons may have, your intentions regarding possession of the teleport, and they seem oddly fixated on your sex life but did not explicitly ask me to inquire about that."

"The demon knows Elves can teleport, doesn't know they can do it interdimensionally, and is back in Hell where other demons may wonder how she was summoned to Revelation by an Elf or what the Hork-Bajir were. I've been using the teleport to settle disputes in far-flung bits of my empire and to help the Dwarves mine and once we're at the tech base I might use it to build a space station, I've always wanted a space station. They had better not be bothering other parties about my sex life."

"Do you have the demon's name, or could you provide identifying information sufficient to summon her in particular again?"

"She's the one who put the plaque in the Andromeda Galaxy saying 'Willa was here'."

"That will probably do, not that they wouldn't entertainingly scratch their heads and pace if you had more details to offer."

"Issiak, who styled himself Visser Two, appeared in my castle and urgently requested an audience. The host was in a state of shock, expecting rescue by the meddlesome busybodies, and trying to avoid thinking about the avenues that rescue could come by lest Issiak close them off. Issiak said to me that he thought we had common cause in our dislike for the meddlesome busybodies. I agreed to accompany him, it being apparent that my voluntary cooperation was hardly required and that the voluntary cooperation of my people would have been easily enough achieved by hijacking me. 

He had the teleport and some eidetic memory necklaces and wanted someone with native osanwë so he could give it to his Hork-Bajir hosted allies, not all of whom had learned the private thoughts distinction and from whom I confirmed that there was, on their planet, a vegetative source of the Kandrona nutrient they require, making it possible for them to visit their pools less frequently and thereby wait out the attempt by the peal to starve them. Issiak had then retrieved them from the Hork-Bajir planet to which they'd been relocated. 

I implied his Elf host was dying on him and that we'd have no warning of peal intervention because they would stop time as soon as they realized what was going on. I swore to help him in his goals in exchange for the teleport 'until or unless someone tried to put a Yeerk in my head', which is a wording careless enough only an idiot would accept it but most people are idiots when as rushed as he was. I got the teleport. I convinced him I had to be the one to summon the demon. I asked the demon to put a Yeerk in my head, teleported every Yeerk in a host and their host out of the ship, took the demon to a concert as payment, and then visited an alternate universe version of my ex-boyfriend because I'd spent the last day in acute terror that if I slipped up at all or the Yeerk noticed I was playing him I'd spend the rest of eternity a slave assisting him in enslaving my people and absolutely no one else in the multiverse would care at all, or even believe I wasn't helping willingly."

"Issiak was in fact Visser Two," confirms Ristrell. "Lower numbers being higher ranked and Visser subordinate only to Councilmember, one of whom was secretly Emperor."

"Thank you. I'd wondered why not call himself One, with the rest of the empire apparently in shambles, but perhaps he intended to steal it all back out from under you. He could have done it, too, you know - not trivially, and not if the peal were willing to use their resurrection method to fork them and chase them down, but if he'd had someone competent helping -"

"They seemed surprised you didn't go along with him."

"They really do not understand me at all."

"Which seems irregular, because Matirin et al are supposed to have a head start."

"I think on some level they consider it virtuous to find me incomprehensible. And also the way my template does people is by caring about them, until we understand them, and they don't want to care about me. I cared about Issiak. Couldn't have lied to him so convincingly otherwise. I liked him better than any of the peal."

"He was my sibling," remarks Ristrell. "Don't read too much into that, we had a hundred and thirty of them."