<If we leave the Gate up for them will you die if the ship does explode -

- the Pool ship shouldn't last another minute and they could come through after that ->

The mage, standing on the other side of the Gate, grits his teeth, resolutely. :I'll die. If everyone else in here keeps their distance the Gate should collapse before it hits anyone else. I can hold it: 

Tail-lash. <...they also told you that the ship was rigged?>

       <Yes. Flashing lights on the Pool ship. Said the ship was dangerous, we should get out, and they wanted to open talks.>

<They messaged us that. They may have been trying to pinpoint our location by broadcasting only to some areas where we might be.> But why message the ship. He's confused, something here isn't quite adding up. 

He can't reply to the Yeerks without revealing their location. 

He watches tensely through the Gate. 

<Another radio signal. - they - surrender ->

They're less than a minute from destroying the Pool ship, and probably also less than a minute from whatever they've planned for the Blade ship activating. What convenient timing to try to convince the Andalites to blink -

- but he is confused -

- the Visser is probably dead, the Blade ship went - some parts of it had time to evacuate but some didn't - and now the Yeerks are saying very different things, maybe there's someone else in charge -

- Vanyel, distressed, at the pointless tragedy -

- they can still do this, they can do it with the Dome ship in an hour if they need to - maybe, unless the Yeerks know something he doesn't - and if he can't pull it off then he loses Earth, what's one ship compared to that, what's Cayaldwin compared to that -

(Cayaldwin is the person who might be able to figure out how to morph Gifts) -

<Get out of there.>

<Almost done.>

<Now, that's an order -> and his eyes find the nearest Fetcher - <Pull them through NOW ->

They start to open their mouth to question that, and then break into a sprint - ten seconds to reach the Gate, they told everyone to back the hell off in case some blast gets through when whatever's rigged to happen to the ship goes off. All they need is their head through and pull, they'll be out for the rest of today with backlash from this but they are not thinking about that yet. 

Cayaldwin is now in the Fetcher's arms, well, part of him is, Andalites are not small, but three other people have caught up now and are hauling him through, a different Fetcher catches up and gets the next Andalite–

The Blade ship explodes.

The mage holding the Gate, and the Fetcher who had his head on the other side of with the second Andalite just now in his arms, die in an incandescent fraction of a second. The Gate-energies peak, wildly, as the energy is for an instant poured through the mage holding it - there's a sonic boom and blinding flash of light, it throws Cayaldwin and the two people holding onto him clear across the room and into a wall. 

Then everything is silent. 

He's not numb anymore, being numb still requires there being some kind of relationship between sensations and thoughts going on in your brain. <Tell the other base we are regrouping in Velgarth. Open a Gate there. To the medical bay, we have - three injured people -> hopefully, hopefully they have three injured people -

Marian heard the commotion and then the explosion, and running toward explosions is perhaps a debatable life choice but she appears to be doing that, sprinting out of the medical bay and snatching the supply-bag she painstakingly stayed up packing after the horrible evacuation. She's been up since three am and is currently running on coffee and fumes but that's not actually different from a lot of her hospital shifts, honestly. 

The mage who can Gate to Velgarth was involved in raising the initial Gate to the Blade ship but didn't go through, he was too important to risk, and so he's alive now - and very, very tired, but half a dozen others can hop into rapport with him to provide their energy, Leareth's mages have trained a lot for exactly this kind of emergency.

They appear to have two injured people, actually, and one human whose head is kind of burst open like a melon. One of the injured people is an Andalite - Cayaldwin? - damn it, she knows he's really important, she gets to work checking him over first. 

The most urgent problem here is probably that his spine is snapped and he's not breathing! There is also a lot of blood but not even an amount of blood that'd be fatal for humans to lose, and he's bigger, and there are some burns but they don't look that bad, honestly, they mostly just burned his fur away. But the not breathing and the spine look like a pretty big problem.

Marian screams in her best REALLY LOUD VOICE that she needs a Gifted Healer RIGHT NOW and she hits the emergency pager button in her vest pocket that she told the Andalite doctor she wanted to have, if she ever had a crashing patient and he wasn't right there, and then she fumbles open her supply bag.

You cannot actually do mouth-to-mouth on Andalites, due to their lack of a mouth hole, but she has the emergency life support equipment here with the oxygen setup, and the (really cool!!!) high-tech monitoring patch thingies you can slap on someone to detect right away if they have heartbeat so she doesn't need to fumble around checking for a pulse - she manages to waste one of the patches by sticking it to itself because her hands are shaking, damn it. Focus. The resuscitation equipment is fairly intuitive but also she learned to use it, like, yesterday, and she is panicking so hard right now which is not good for information retention. 

(What would Lacie do what would Lacie do - she would not panic - good start, there, really - please tell me the fucking Andalite doctor is almost here–)

She gets it out and in a second Cayaldwin will have some oxygen in his lungs - someone is talking to her but it's not a Velgarth Healer so she blocks it out...

The Andalite doctor rushes in. <We need the medical bay in the Dome>

<They are working on the Gate> His mind-voice is very clipped and robotic.

It takes a full minute and a half because the mage is so tired right now, but then the Gate is up. Someone is Mindspeaking everyone, sounding incredibly stressed, that can they please hurry they can't hold the Gate forever. 

Well, there's not as many of them anymore. They can get the injured people through and then everyone else, in a hurry. 

Marian stays at Cayaldwin's side and books it through the Gate and is only a teensy bit excited, in the very back of her mind behind all the internal screaming, that she is totally getting to visit the other world that has MAGIC. 

Ow ow ow ow ow Vanyel does not need to be told at all that something is happening, he feels it. Right through his and Yfandes' shields. 

Gritting his teeth, he searches for the minds coming through. Without heading any closer. :What's happening?: 

Melody, who ended up conceding that Vanyel was not going to listen to her on his unreadiness to go fight a war and deciding to limit the damage by going with him - apparently they need Mindhealers - isn't allergic to Gates and can race over to see what's going on. 

It takes him a - really worrying amount of time, actually, if he had any capacity left for worry, to formulate words to answer Vanyel. <Yeerks attacked in force. Leareth believed captured. Blade ship destroyed. Yeerks broadcast surrender. We don't know - who sent that, if they had authorization, if they meant it or - we were firing on the Pool ship at the time, it was about to all be over - we can still take it out with the Dome ship - also maybe need to kill Leareth the mindhealing block will have scrambled his interworld Gate knowledge but I worry he can rederive it - Mardic and Donni and Rasha were not at the captured base and as far as I know they are alive ->

He is standing approximately normally, if a bit stiffly, but if one happens to be a Mindhealer with Empathy he is in a staggering amount of pain and very very heavily disassociating and barely tracking any of his surroundings and his tail twitching with distress is not not doing that in a suicidal sort of way.

Yikes! Melody is very very concerned. 

...She's also feeling some amount anxious about going near an Andalite whose tail is doing that. But Matirin isn't any more dangerous than Vanyel, she reminds herself. Less so, probably, and she spent an awful lot of time at Vanyel's bedside when he was in worse shape than this.

:Matirin: she sends, privately. :Can we talk: