"I'm scheduled tomorrow afternoon."

:Matirin, can you think of any other questions we should ask while he is still in Dave's head? After this I will let Nayoki have him for her experiments, and then...I assume he will starve, unless you can place him into some kind of stasis, which is probably still not worth the resource expenditure but would let us take him out later if we think of more questions to ask: 

<We do not have a way to do that. It is not a particularly large resource expenditure to toss him in a cryopreservation chamber on the Dome ship if we can otherwise make use of the interworld Gate, but we don't have the medical faculties there to revive him from that, it would achieve nothing except perhaps making him retrievable after the war and I do not know if it would even do that.

I don't have further questions.>

:If that part is cheap for you, I suppose I could contact Valdemar and find out if Herald Vanyel is recovered enough to join us, I had intended to do so this week and that would be a valuable use of an interworld Gate and could happen by tomorrow: 

And he tells Nayoki that she can now compel Osset out of Dave's head and take him away for various Yeerk experiments. 

They are going to put him in a few kinds of animal and determine how smart he is in smaller brains, and try to Thoughtsense him when he's not in a brain at all, and check how Healing interacts with him, and see if compulsions work as well as set-commands, and various other tests. Probably none of them will be able to kill Osset. Most don't require a huge amount of active cooperation but for the ones that do, Nayoki can set-command him into it and does not at all feel bad about this. Yeerks are kind of made of mind control already. 

Osset is very unhappy about all of this! He's still pretty smart in smaller brains or no brain but he doesn't fit into particularly small ones in the first place; he retains a lot though not all of what he got out of Dave in all those situations but the animal stuff he picks up is a little harder to hold onto. Healing can see that he is a rather homogeneous slug with bioelectrical stuff going on. Compulsions work.

Nayoki thinks this is all fascinating and very useful. 

Marian sits down with Dave, the ex-Controller. "I'm, uh, sorry you got Yeerked and then kidnapped, it sucks." 

"Did they get you too?" he asks.

"No, uh, the aliens - Andalites - put out a job ad for a nurse and I saw it and applied, even though the phone call was so weird, and then they interviewed me and told me about the aliens, and - I thought I was probably on drugs or having a psychotic episode, but then it kept going on and making sense, and hallucinations usually aren't coherent, so at this point I'm pretty convinced it's real and they need my help. Also they have really cool medical technology." 

"Good for you." He's staring at a wall.

She takes a deep breath. "You could probably go to the other world that has magic. If you don't want to stay and join the resistance here, I don't know what your skills are but I'd so get it if you were really done with all this. I can't go because they do actually need medical people, but it sounds very interesting and it'd be safe. Uh, they don't have flush toilets though, or anything, they're sort of medieval except magic exists." She asked Leareth, earlier, and he said she could offer if she wanted once the Yeerk was out. 

"I have kids," he says. "I guess if I can't see 'em it doesn't matter much, but, you know, if all the spaceships break, or they just forget I exist. - you know those dreams where your dream self is doing stuff but without the part where you decided you were going to do that, sometimes? That's what having a Yeerk's like. Hell of a way to wake up."

"I won't forget you exist," she says, fervently. "You don't need spaceships to get back and forth from the other world. It's some kind of magic that does the same thing, and the Yeerks don't know about it." Yet. "I'm - sorry, it really must be a lot to wake up to. Did you...not mind it at the time, then?" She'd gotten the impression, from talking to the others, that people with Yeerks in their heads would spend the whole time mentally howling in anguish at their imprisonment. 

"I didn't say it was a nice dream, it was a dream about having a shitty boss who lived in my skull, I'm glad to see the back of him, but he was keeping up my life, laying low, you know, I saw my kids most days."

"I'm sorry." It's starting to feel very scripted but Lacie said that's fine, when you're dealing with someone who's grieving, it's better to be repetitive than say something tactless by trying to be creative. "They think we have good chances of winning the war. Because of all the secret magic. So hopefully that'll happen and then you can see them again." 

"Yeah? Before or after my four year old can't remember what I look like?"

"They didn't say how long a war they thought it'll be." Leareth did say that if their cover gets blown or they decide to begin operating openly, he's worried the man's family could be in danger and intends to kidnap them, but Dave didn't want his family kidnapped, and she's getting the feeling that saying more words here is not exactly helping. She falls silent, picking at her nailbeds.

"...You hungry?" she asks finally. "We've got food here." 

"I could eat." Snort. "Osset was following doctor's orders, had me on a low fat diet. What've you got?"

"Do Yeerks not like food? Andalites go crazy for it, because they don't taste things normally."

They have an eclectic assortment of food, lots of grab-and-go stuff. Today it's yogurt cups and cheese strings and granola and cherries. It's all vegetarian, she's just noticing now; she wonders if the Andalites object to meat-eating, maybe she'll ask them. 

"I guess he was piggybacking on me? That or he was just authentically delighted about rice cakes and baked chicken. This looks like a snack platter at a Girl Scout meeting, is this what they're feeding you too? Not even a TV dinner?" He takes a yogurt anyway.

"Everyone is either from a medieval world or an alien, they just grab things at random. And we don't have a proper kitchen here. I started making a proper grocery list for them, though, if you've got requests I can add them." 

"Is there a real kitchen? I want a bacon cheeseburger."

"I really want a kitchen too, I'll ask them about it. The Andalites have a machine that can print any kind of parts so probably they can just make us a kitchen." Even if the Andalites are vegetarians for ethical reasons - which would be kind of sweet, actually, if more advanced species care more about animals - she still thinks Dave has been through a lot and should get his bacon cheeseburger. "We can probably get you takeout for now, they've got a house in Anchorage and can do Gates from it to here, I'll ask." 

"I'll settle for Burger King. Or whatever they have in Anchorage."