The Pool ship has about thirteen hours lead time but they ought to be faster, and they have ways of detecting its passage through hyperspace which they think the Yeerks don't know about. You can't deploy any conventional ship weapons in hyperspace but, well, that's not the plan here anyway; they don't want to destroy the Pool ship if they can possibly avoid it. 

Cayaldwin would like Leareth to morph repeatedly while he watches in every plane, please.

Yes, of course - does he need Leareth to carry him along while projecting his mind to the other planes? He doesn't think he can maintain that during a morph but he can probably - bring Cayaldwin there and then leave him? 

Huh, that might work. He does need to be able to see from there.

Leareth can try that then. He does, at this point, lose access to his Gifts about halfway through a morph, and he's not aware of his body enough to concentrate on a morph anyway while he's also projecting himself to another plane. But un-Gifted humans can be brought along to the spirit world by shamans and he thinks they can stay there on their own - he'll come back after he's done morphing to get Cayaldwin back to his body, that part seems harder. 

He's curious how many morphs he can do before exhausting himself. He does the morph to Marian because human-to-human seems like it'll be the least tiring. 

Cayaldwin watches - he can't take notes here but he can work very hard to commit it to his excellent Andalite memory.

It's going to be more tiring if he has to hop back and forth from various planes in between every morph but he'll see how many he can do. 

< - I'd expect at most two before we have to take a break. It's pretty rare for people to be able to morph and then demorph and then morph and then immediately demorph. Almost no one can do more than that.>

Well, he'll try one and see how tired he is and then a second and check how he's feeling after that. 

Tired like he's been running for a while; it's a bit different from magic tired. He could keep going.

"I could do another," he tells Cayaldwin. "It is somewhat tiring but it is not affecting my magic as much. From the Elemental Plane of Air now?" It's not what the Andalites call it but it's what he knows it as. 

<Huh. Yes, that sounds good.>

"Maybe humans have more endurance." 

After three he's tired enough that he wants to sit down for a while and eat a snack, but he's pretty sure he would have another morph and demorph in him if it were an emergency. :Did you learn anything interesting?: he asks Cayaldwin. 

<I think so.> He is trying to transfer everything he saw to his planar mapping program; this involves a lot of dabbing at the twelve-dimensional projection with his fingers, trying to get it right. <I think Gifts get - disconnected - both somewhere in the templating process and somewhere in the link stabilization -> he trails off as he gets frustrated with his modeling program.

Leareth eats his yogurt cup and watches. 

His model is incomplete; he doesn't have enough angles on it. <Maybe we can do some more tomorrow.> 

"I think I could do a few more later today, but - I suppose it is better not to push myself to exhaustion, given the circumstances." 

<I think it is better not to. And if you can do one more morph you might want to do a more distinct one, get some practice with it. Morphs come with some procedural instincts about how to use the body but it's a good idea to have tried them out in safe conditions before you need them.>

Sure, he'll morph Matirin. (Morphing Mhalir sounds...awkward...though he should practice it at some point anyway, maybe ask Nayoki if he can go in her head.) 

It's gruesome and involves way more bizarre shifting in his joints and squelching in his organs than morphing another human and back, but it doesn't take that much longer. And then he's an Andalite and has way more sensory input from his extra eyes - they want to be looking around him in all directions - and he's paying automatic attention to the other Andalites in particular, are they behaving regularly, it feels important - and the grass has a desirable quality not quite best described in sensory terms. 

Cayaldwin is watching him with mild distaste because his body language is all wrong.

<Fascinating.> He's lost Mindspeech and his mage-gift but he has thoughtspeak. It feels quite different. 

He tries moving around, sees if the body cooperates with it. Looks at how the other Andalites are holding themselves and makes more effort to match it. 

His body moves pretty naturally; it clearly has memory built in for how to walk around, at least, and how to move its tail. The other Andalites are tense about him, and graceful as they gradually relax back into what they were doing; he can imitate them pretty tolerably. 

Leareth spends longer in this morph, getting used to the body and especially the tail. It's a pretty neat natural weapon, although honestly if he had to choose between that and his mage-gift he'd far rather have magic. 

He demorphs eventually and this time he's quite tired. 

The Andalites have a better estimate by now of how long it'll take them to catch the Pool ship; it'll be about five days, if they're trying to stay concealed themselves. It does seem to be making for Yeerk-controlled space.

"- It would be faster for me to Gate there and attempt to bring it back toward us, but that is also risky and I am not sure I can at this range."

He's confirmed, by testing it on two doorways, that he can Gate even when they're in 'z-space' a.k.a. some weird part of the Void - they've done something akin to folding up and budding off a tiny bit of the material plane and detaching it to move through a different kind of space before rejoining the material plane somewhere else. He has no idea how that affects his ability to reach the other ship, though. 

That would definitely save a lot of time and trouble; is there a safe way to test whether he can do it?