He leaves him control of his body. He is silent for a few minutes and then says I don't know that sharing this will advance your goals; may I do so anyway?

I mean, I know there's some stuff in here that's not going to make them very happy, but the thing I want to get across is - what it means to be a Taliar. The rest... I don't know. I don't mind in principle if people know about me and Midnight, but I mind if they, um, understand it incorrectly, d'you know what I mean?

Yes, I do. To be clear, my concern about Midnight is not his private conduct but that he allied with - he spits it - Yeerks - and I have no desire for the peal's energy to be wasted in trying to resolve a non-problem.

...he's heard the peal is allied with Yeerks too, but different Yeerks, he supposes.

Well, is there anything I could do to help with your concern, then?

It seems like not even Elaneth-Imire could stop the evil Maitimos if they decided to ally with the next enemy of the peal to come to their attention. I think that is the essential dilemma we will have to solve to feel comfortable with allowing them to accumulate power, but I should articulate all of this to everyone else so other concerns can be discussed. ...the thing that would really help would be ceasing to disseminate or use Loki's stolen spell.

...I can do my best, but I'm not sure even I can manage to get Dawn, Independence, and Nuime to all give up their only distributable means of interdimensional transport. We'd be down to Nezhefena and Tyela, and Tyela's too traumatized to go anywhere. Is there a substitute available?

Not that I know of. When I summarize this for everybody I will solicit suggestions on other things that might serve as sources of reassurance.

Sure, all right, he says.

...he can't quite articulate the question, but he wants to know if - if it worked, if Finleran now understands what a Taliar is and why he's so convinced that this situation desperately desperately needs one.

Yes. And I hope you succeed, I really do, but I cannot be as optimistic about it as you are.

Well. You're not a Taliar, he says, smiling. I can be optimistic enough for both of us.

His soul shines a soft and beautiful blue, the colour that represents his optimism as the force of nature it is.

(And in the back of his head, Nahira keeps whispering, as she's been doing all day. He barely thinks about it. He has a project, an even bigger one than he thought.)

He demorphs. <I think> he says to T'Mir <I should write up my thoughts for the consideration of all the interested parties.>

"I agree."

And he pops out, and a short time later:

I will note firstly that I asked his leave to share this and received it; he would actively prefer any information be shared that might lead to a positive outcome. The positive outcome he envisions is that magic and advanced technology are shared with Dawn, Independence, Nuimë, and the neighbors they anticipate seeking out, and that the instances of Taliar are personally able to provide so much value to the peal that we consider this worthwhile.  He is very competent, very resourceful, positioned with access to a lot of resources, and very very confident that he can achieve this outcome somehow, and he's willing to incur practically arbitrary personal costs to achieve it. I am less confident, in particular because both Maitimos have irrevocable continuous access to their consorts' thoughts (when in range) and the second evil Maitimo (chosen name Tivarante) irrevocably has the ability to incapacitate his husband at will. That seems like a likely trajectory of the dynamic between Midnight and Raika-seren, if Midnight decides that having a nearly-omnipotent consort is of use to him. 

The original Taliar landed in his evil Arda in its year 400, fell in love with the local Maitimo, and was informed by his soul of the conditions under which the local Maitimo was keeping his consort only when the Maitimo attempted to arrange a threesome. Taliar's soul magic gets stronger off strengthening people around him and particularly people of significance to him; confronted with a problem whose obvious solution (removing the rapist from power) presented practical challenges and also meant doing grievous harm to a person of significance to him, his soul instead lost nearly all its power. That is the moment that Raika-seren was forked from, when his alt decided to give a fork of himself as a present to Midnight; how long it will take him to build up to the power levels that allowed the other one to trivially kill the Enemy is hard for him to estimate, but not longer than a few years.

(The relationship between Raika-seren and Midnight would certainly meet most standards of abuse but he's happy, his stance on it was not formed while being manipulated by Midnight, it would be counterproductive to attempt to extract him and he expects to be completely fine whatever happens. I think he is right to expect this; he has more-or-less modified himself to make it true. He categorically cannot be persuaded to leave Midnight, if prevented from returning to him he will either be rescued by his alt or manifest a power to do it himself, and if Midnight is executed - as, to be clear, I think is at this point entirely necessary - he will spend as long as it takes trying to figure out how to resurrect him and given the undirected nature of his magic system plausibly figure it out eventually. He is also pretty much categorically unable to consider betraying Midnight or working against him or aiding an effort to meaningfully contain him; because Midnight can read his thoughts he is in the habit of not having any that might damage Midnight's trust in him.) You might as well assume the Taliar template impossible to talk out of their commitments in full generality.

He is very confident in his ability to persuade Midnight to participate in some kind of plan to build enough trust that his world can get advanced technology and magic, but through a general conviction he can achieve results he wants rather than any specific basis for thinking Midnight inclined toward compromise. He is genuinely very gifted at this and I am inclined to assume him correct that he could achieve it.

My assessment of Midnight's aims, based on Raika-seren's memories, is that he wants to use his consort to acquire first modern technology and then probably wizardry and any other transmissible magic, win favor by sharing these with Nuimë, and then explore for adjacent dimensions. He is contained at least to some degree by the desire to use his consort for powerful magic - Taliars will not aid him in anything overtly evil or likely to endanger civilians - and Raika-seren believes him likely not to act badly to a greater degree than this because the degree of trust present in Tivarante and Elaneth-imire's relationship - and the state of their souls, which is very informative to people in Nuimë - is in his assessment incompatible with Tivarante still being a rapist or for that matter an irresponsible ruler. Raika-seren thinks that given more power Midnight would be less inclined to desperate acts, which is how he interprets helping the Yeerks and teleporting the planet and stranding the subtle artists and so on. Raika-seren is categorically opposed to efforts to contain Midnight and thinks they're almost certain to fail. His alt has had good results from never trying to make Tivarante do anything and he thinks that is the correct approach to evil Maitimos, at least beyond intervening for specific victims. 

 It should be possible to sustain good relationships with Nuimë independent of the other two and perhaps even while acting against the other two but that'd take finesse we've so far been underequipped with.

He might be right, but he does not have any special advantage that would make it more certain he is right - he has extraordinary social skills but so do Maitimos - and Midnight Yeerked him and is thus very well equipped with a picture of how to manipulate him. I do not think Midnight merits any benefit of the doubt at this point and the consequences of being wrong would be catastrophic. That is why I think the compromise he hopes for may not be achievable. In the spirit of attempting one anyway I suggested they give up the stolen teleport; he thought that would be impossible. If anyone wants to offer other gestures of good faith that might help salvage this, he is certainly open to hearing them.

(T'Mir, meanwhile, escorts Raika-seren back to Warp and lets him borrow an ethernet connection to inquire after available appointment slots with subtle artists.)

So he makes some inquiries, and then he reads Finleran's summary.

"...The perspective gap actually managed to be even wider than I thought," he concludes. "Wow. I'd kind of like someone from a different template to do it and add their thoughts, just - to get more angles? I don't exactly feel like Finleran misrepresented me in any glaring ways, but I feel like he's... giving a more limited picture than I'd like."

"Can you be more specific?"

"When you look at my soul, what do you see?"

(Integrity and compassion and optimism and wisdom and insight and charisma and contrariness and mischief and strength and resilience and determination and love and hope and the fundamental drive to give everyone what they need to be happy and safe and fulfilled—)

"Are you looking for a list or just wondering if it works at all?"

"Not necessarily a list, just - an impression. What sort of person you would think I was, with what capabilities, if you unconditionally believed everything my soul says about me. I hadn't actually considered that it might not work at all, although I should've."

"It might not work on, say, Golden, whose mental defense power has been known to be overprotective; I do get an impression from it. You come off as having very useful skills and admirable values and if that were all I knew about you I would be uncomplicatedly delighted to have you as an ally - if that were all I knew about you I would be having emotions, relevantly. The problem is that you are aiming your useful skills and admirable values at a project which may inherently balance poorly with ours however much skill you throw at it, and you are irrevocably committed to prioritizing that project to the point where there are apparently literally unthinkable thoughts."

"The unthinkable thoughts thing is one of the parts of that summary that was... technically not false but that I think suffered from an issue of perspective. I'm not tying my brain in knots to stop myself from thinking things that might make Midnight trust me less - I don't have to do that, because I am actually just trustworthy. And, yes, the amount of trustworthiness it takes to gain Midnight's trust is pretty extreme. But I'm a Taliar." He gestures at the summary that ensued from his casual offer to have someone on the peal's side Yeerk him. "When I want someone to trust me, I do not fuck around."

"But you also want us to trust Midnight, and, well. He does not have this property."

"I hope to eventually convince you to trust Midnight by giving you legitimately good reasons. I don't expect you to do it just because I showed up and said so. Although - can I ask, when you say you would be having emotions...? I'd been assuming you were just really good at locking them out of all the important stuff; are you saying you actually turned them off?"

"Yes. I can turn them back on at any time, but the reason you're talking to me in particular is because, as I mentioned earlier, historically our handling of Midnight has been governed by unproductive emotional reactions and so far our best idea for a new thing to try is 'definitely not that'."

"...It's kind of making it hard for me to get a good read on what you think of me," he says, "but from your perspective that might not necessarily be a bad thing. Anyway. At this point I think it's probably worth getting Dawn-shining to fork again from before he ever met Tivarante. Then we can send that Taliar to handle all this, and you won't have to worry about him being under the control of someone you don't trust."