He tries this. They had to evacuate from all their cities when they realized the Yeerks were onto them. One of the teams in D.C. was caught away from their house and the mage did a Final Strike and killed more than a thousand people, which is definitely going to inform first contact, now, even if it was technically a human doing it. Sixty people were captured by Yeerks - the worst disaster in Andalite history, but maybe recoverable, now, somehow. He recruited volunteers for a suicide mission getting everyone on the Blade ship eaten by demons. He tried to use it to destroy the Pool ship and then changed his mind but not soon enough to prevent the deaths of more of his people. 

He's had worse days, when you put it like that. 

<I can do that.>

What are her Mindhealing Sight and Empathy reading from him? 

He's still moving very very carefully across his tapestry, picking and choosing very meticulously which bits of pattern to step in, but none of them look totally inaccessible from any direction. His emotions are level. A lot of blame-in-the-sense-that-is-meaningfully-distinct-from-guilt; he thinks he could have done better.

:Want me to bounce my Sight to you again? You might be better able to interpret it now: 

<Sure.>

She does so, carefully using the most zoomed-out focus on her Sight to show the closest thing she can to a simplified-schematic, shifting her focus to the part she finds relevant. 

<I think I am still not experienced at interpreting brain metaphors.>

:Hmm - so I don't actually know what these areas correspond to, I'm not reading your thoughts right now. The overall gist is that you've got most of your head working again, but it looks kind of fragile, still, and you're needing to tiptoe around a bit. And yesterday: she flashes him the memory of it, :this was your conscious mind, everything else was inaccessible to you. I would start to get worried if I see it looking more like that again: 

<That makes sense.>

:What I really want to do teach you how to track that yourself, just from introspection. I don't think I can do that in the next couple of candlemarks though. So: deep breath, :if you feel like you can think all right, now, I'm inclined to say you should have command back for the delicate negotiations part, but - with the caveat that stressful things will probably keep happening, and I want to not let it get to the point that you need ten candlemarks of recovery to be functional again. Which I think means you need to check in with me frequently, or figure out something else, and if you start losing bits of yourself again we do something about it: 

<Thank you. I will keep that in mind.>

:Can I have your permission to peek at your mind every so often for the rest of today? And then talk about what makes sense after that?: 

<You see only - proneness to madness, not specific strategic information?>

:I'm also a Thoughtsenser but you're wearing an amulet against that, so I can't read anything specific at all. I haven't asked you to take it off, partly so you don't need to worry about the strategic information side. My other Sight only sees what I showed you, the overall structure. And I'm an Empath so I can pick up some on your emotions, but, again, no content of thoughts: 

<You can observe that if it is helpful.>

:Thank you. And - good work. You've handled this really well: In most ways. He is still slightly making her want to scream but that's not his fault, and this went so, so much better than she had been expecting or fearing. 

He is slightly baffled by this praise but nods. <I appreciate your help.> 

And he goes to check in with Ashul. Ashul has assumed, quite reasonably and conveniently, that some Mindhealer-installed blocks for information security were inconveniently inflexible when the Yeerks suddenly surrendered and have since been adjusted to handle such bizarre Yeerk behavior a little better. Ashul shares the communications so far. Vanyel's thoughtsensing range is, he vaguely recalls, really far, so they can probably check from orbit (when the ship is positioned right) whether the Yeerks in fact provided the prisoners unYeerked. No way to tell if they were holding some back, of course.

Matirin thanks him. He goes to check on Vanyel's exact thoughtsensing range and explain this plan.

"...Um. How far is the nearest point. I can do two hundred miles comfortably and three, maybe four hundred if I boost - which I can't do from nodes because I'm told Earth doesn't have them, but other mages can feed me energy. Um, the other problem is duration - I need at least a couple of seconds per person to check the double minds thing, if Yfandes is boosting with me and reading alongside me for error-checking." 

<We can be in an orbit that comes within two hundred miles of the ground very comfortably. ...we can also not orbit and hold the ship still there, it'll just be a little more inconvenient. I am expecting about twenty of them.>

"All right, if it's two hundred miles I can do that. If I have really exact directions to aim. How long would we be within two hundred miles of them if we are orbiting?" 

<Only a few seconds each time, so it probably makes more sense to hold the ship there.>

"Right. I think you need to do that, then. It might take me more than a few seconds to find a cluster of minds two hundred miles away, it'll be faster once I'm anchored on the general area, but it'd also be good if I could be careful and not rushed." 

<Absolutely. Thank you. I - do not expect them to try anything here, honestly, but we need to be very very sure.>

Are there checks Nayoki will want to run on people when she gets them back.

She's going to have to undo the compulsions and set a lot of people's Gifts right, not all of the set-commands would reset in their tests even when the (mind controlled and harmless) Yeerk departed, it's idiosyncratic. Just checking for and doing that will involve a lot of poking in the minds of the Velgarth humans, she's pretty sure she'll catch anything else the Yeerks might have tried to slip in. Also it'll tell her which people are incredibly traumatized from the Yeerking and need leave now. 

She's less sure what they ought to do about the Andalites but probably they should quickly read them too, just out of general paranoia? 

Melody points out that she's also here, now, and they can split up the task. "I think I have relatively more experience with the, er, helping very traumatized people, and you're better at weird set-commands. Also I can't do anything about mage-compulsions."