Various people are interested! Also they more urgently want to figure out how to morph Gifts, now.

Understandably! Leareth explains that mentally traveling to other planes, especially solo, is a moderately advanced skill; the Yeerk-morphing Andalite in particular can get the right procedural memory from an existing mage, apparently, but he's not sure how shareable that will be. 

He takes a nap and then checks in with his other people and then can do a few shorter trips to show other people, just in case they have insights he didn't catch. The quick trips are individually less tiring but he's still more than ready to head to bed when he's done. 

Newly motivated Andalites hang around having an incomprehensible question about morph and how it could be modified to allow for morphing Gifts.

The next day Leareth stares at math some more and does a short solo trip to the Void and comes back and finds the engineers again. 

:Does your ship by any chance have a record of the actual jump you made, rather than the intended course?: he asks. :It would be valuable to know how our current location would be recorded in your hyperspace coordinate system:  

The ship absolutely has records of that.

Amazing.

Leareth studies that for a while, and then starts hopping back and forth between looking at the Void (he can bring an Andalite along if they want) and going back to cast illusions of what he sees there and try to map the math onto it.

...actually, if the Andalites are willing to let him use their smarter computers, or accept instructions from him, this might go a lot faster, since he won’t be limited on how detailed an illusion he can hold in his head, or need to start over after each trip.

They ask Matirin, who says they can take instructions from him (the smarter computers don't have a great interface for humans anyway, the Andalites interface with them with brain chips.)

(Leareth is incredibly jealous of the brain chips but doesn’t bring this up.)

At the end of that day he goes by to update Matirin. :I think we are making good progress and I predict I will have this solved within a few days to a week. Given that, it might make sense not to plan on traveling with the ship at all, if it is more easily detectable by the Yeerks? Though I expect my Gates to show up to the same sensors - if your ship has those, we could test it?:

<Our ship has sensors that can detect hyperspace jumps, but we haven't been prioritizing repairing them. If we can travel without the ship that's certainly safer; even if they detect a hyperspace jump at the planet's surface I'm not sure what they'd make of it, and it would be advantageous if they had no idea we were there. I can prioritize the repair of those sensors.>

:Having them would allow me to test whether methods to obscure a Gate-signature from mage-sight also block the sensors. Gating underwater, for example, is fraught for several reasons but is certainly less visible:

If they give the mages morph it'd solve several of the associated complications. But it's crossing another line that'll be even harder to explain later. He decides not to mention it right now. <That makes sense. Shielding, such as that the ship is capable of, would also block the signs of a hyperspace jump but a ship cannot shield the signs of its own jump since they're released the instant it arrives.>

:That makes sense. - Gates, unlike a ship, can also be made very small, which would presumably decrease the signature. In any case, we can test the variables here once I have actually figured this out:

<By then the sensors should be repaired.> The man's flexibility and command of his magic are honestly very impressive, even if his choices of what to do with them are very questionable. At some point he wants to let Cayaldwin look at the AGI plan and see if it is obviously disastrous or not. (Even if it's nonobviously disastrous it could be disastrous but making something that isn't obviously disastrous is impressively difficult all by itself.)

:Thank you: And he gets back to work. 

More of Leareth's people arrive that night, to check in and meet the Andalites; they don't need to stage here, necessarily. 

One of them is the woman who Gated Leareth on a previous occasion; she introduces herself as Nayoki. "I have Mindhealing Gift, which is a rare one that shows different things from Thoughtsensing, and if it is all right I would like to test how Yeerks appear to it. Or at least how a morphed-Yeerk does, I expect a true Yeerk would show up differently." 

Andalites will politely say hello; a few of them are practicing being human at the moment and will try to hold a bit more conversation than that with the mages. 

The Andalite who can morph Yeerk will do that again, if Nayoki thinks it would be useful. He sounds less than thrilled. Does she want a volunteer whose head he can sit in or does she just want to check out the construct-body itself? If the latter he would like a little water to hang out in, he's pretty sure his Yeerk form is suffocating on land.

A volunteer would be good, it only needs to be for a couple of minutes. 

(The same mage as before will cheerfully volunteer for this duty.) 

The Andalite will turn into a Yeerk and then join her in her head again. 

<This really doesn't bother you> he says, a little disbelievingly even though he has direct sensory access to very incontrovertible evidence of it.

No, why would it, they're running tests with an ally and the experience in itself isn't painful or anything. She would be pretty upset about an actual Yeerk getting in her head and forcing her to murder her friends, of course, but just the being-in-her-head part doesn't intrinsically have the upsetting parts. Especially since even if she revoked consent and he didn't leave right away, Leareth could just make him, though she can't see why that would even come up because the Andalites are really respectful about this. (There was one mage in her training group, who ended up later getting kicked out before the learn-anything-sensitive part, who used to horse around a bit when they practiced compulsions, and that she wasn't a huge fan of.) 

Andalites usually find the intimacy also horrifying and the losing control of your body also horrifying separately from the part where you kill all your friends, but they may be - thinking differently about it because of the war that has lasted their whole lives. He doesn't know whether in Seerow's time when Yeerks weren't enemies people found it intrinsically horrifying in the same way.

Huh, she thinks a lot of humans would actively like the intimacy part. Usually the same humans who think (sex with Mindspeech) is the greatest thing ever (this human tries half-heartedly to censor that thought in case Andalites are bothered, although, really, they're aliens who walk around nude all the time.) She's definitely thinking a bit wistfully of how neat it would be if she could do this with her boyfriend, he's into being tied up and would probably find it even hotter to be Yeerked into immobility she tries harder to un-think that thought and feels a bit apologetic and embarrassed about it. 

...Anyway it makes sense that the war has affected Andalite attitudes. It sounds awful and horribly traumatizing and now she's feeling sad for them about it. 

Nayoki turns her Mindhealing Sight on both of them; she's receptive with Thoughtsensing but not actually trying to read thoughts at all, just help distinguish the two different mind-presences. 

The Yeerk's presence looks really weird, some of which is probably the part where the Yeerk is a construct-body being piloted from another plane and some of which is probably that Yeerks are just like that. It's like - a cast molded over the first mind, or a glaze that has soaked into it, its shape as a mind substantially altered by the shape of the brain it's in. 

The Andalite is wondering how it works for her boyfriend having her be a soldier. Andalites don't draft women - they still help with the war effort, but in research and development roles back on the home planet. ...also most Andalites do not get a girlfriend because their population is eighty percent male right now, because of the war effort.

Nayoki makes no comment even though she's suddenly very curious how Andalite gender works - can they decide the sex of their children? Actually, hmm, human Healers can do that if they want so it makes sense that it'd be possible with technology, moving on. 

:I want to try something on her mind and see if it affects you as well: she tells the Andalite-Yeerk. :Mindhealing works differently from compulsions: 

She warns the volunteer mage as well, and then: 

:DO NOT MOVE: 

Can the Yeerk ignore the set-command as easily as they ignored compulsions, or are they blocked too?