His impression of the Earth legal system is that it won't have very much idea what to do with them but plausibly this is a problem Earth will need to solve sooner or later and might as well start solving now? Is there a non-Thoughtsensing way for Yeerks to communicate, can some kind of assistive keyboard or something be put in a pool.

They do have a keyboard-type communication setup for Yeerks in pools, although it's slow. None of the pools on Earth were destroyed so they can certainly relocate all the captured Yeerks responsible for the coup to one of them. (And move all the other Yeerks using that pool elsewhere, or back to the ship, a large fraction of them no longer have hosts at this point.) Mhalir would want to send a representative from his administration to supervise the human government figuring out how their legal system applies, but it seems like a good idea for them to work on that, it - puts their species on more equal footing, here. 

That's approximately his thinking. If they're going to have a lot of voluntary hosts (and there's a lot of interest, though he's still not entirely sure what to do with all of it) they are going to need a system for all kinds of combinations of the host and the Yeerk doing crimes. 

It's - surprising, to him, that Mhalir isn't sure what to do with the coup orchestrators. This would not be a difficult question for Andalites and he is not accustomed to thinking of Andalites as more ruthless.

(If they were still actively at war he would be more sure. But - peacetime isn't when it makes sense to be maximally ruthless all the time, and he can't trust any of them again but it makes sense, why they did it, the explanation they gave Leareth-impersonating-him was so reasonable... And he doesn't want to kill people who don't need to be dead for critical strategic reasons and this part is unclear. Probably they'll end up executed one way or another? It's not an open-and-closed question, though.) 

Leareth can contribute a legal scholar (on Velgarth law) to the figuring-things-out, in case Velgarth, which has mind-control magic even if not specifically Yeerks, can provide some helpful input here.

Leareth is doing a lot of practicing Andalite morphs. He gets a composite morph first, so he's not going to look creepily like a specific Andalite (he can now tell Andalites apart with so much more ease), and then he throws himself at morphing Andalite-with-Gifts, which is much, much harder than composite human-with-Gifts. 

It is disconcerting to see him going around as an Andalite who isn't one of Matirin's people! It's also kind of neat, though. He's picking it up quickly.

Cayaldwin has returned himself with renewed enthusiasm to the problem of lifting the morph limit. It's a much harder problem than morphing Gifts. Firayar had said he was close, but it couldn't be straightforwardly derived from his notes or anything. It'll be a matter of years, Cayaldwin says. But they have years. 

- and in the meantime -

<Do you suppose magic could be used to forcibly demorph someone who is stuck in morph?>

:- I had wondered about that question. I think it is possible. It would be - not quite analogous to reversing a summoning, but there are some vaguely similar kinds of Velgarth magic that exist already, and we have detailed models of the entire process now. ...Do you want me to try it with the Andalite trapped as a bird?: 

<If it's not likely to somehow kill him instead, yes. If we can get it then the morph limit becomes...much less constraining, even if Cayaldwin thinks it is years from being removed.>

:I think it would be risky to have anyone else research it, but I am unlikely to kill him by accident since I will be able to hop to other planes and see exactly what I am doing. It may turn out there are no safe avenues to reverse it but I am not going to attempt unsafe ones: 

<Then I think it is a promising avenue of research. Thank you.>

Leareth can have someone Gate the Andalite trapped in bird form over from Velgarth, since for other reasons he needs to be on Earth most of the time right now, and explain their hope and that it's by no means a guarantee of success and is inevitably a little risky even though he intends to be very careful and expects he will be able to avoid any dangerous moves here. Does the Andalite still want to proceed with this? 

Yes, very much so.

Then Leareth's first order of business is to find where his current physical form - or the template of it to be reconstructed, rather - even is, presumably somewhere in the Void with a link to the bird-form through some other planes. Is the trapped Andalite distinguishable from a non-trapped morphed Andalite? 

Yep! The bond that connects his template to the construct-body looks very very different.

Fascinating. It makes sense, of course, the bond is serving a different purpose here - it no longer has the ability to morph him back, just to convey signals back and forth from the construct-body to whatever's left in z-space/the Void. 

Leareth asks another Andalite to morph back and forth while he observes their bond very very closely to see what it's doing during the demorph. 

An Andalite can do that! The bond is far more active during the demorph; way more information and way more energy is being channeled along it, in addition to the actual matter being provided if the demorph is from a smaller body.

Leareth spends a few iterations watching himself morph from various angles, he's been morphing probably twenty times a day on average and is getting very comfortable with it, he can manage the concentration while simultaneously doing some other Velgarth magic. (And he keeps his Gifts in morph now though there's still a weird discontinuity somewhere in there.) 

All right. He can provide the energy, easy. The actual matter is coming from...where? A normal-space pocket in z-space? 

It kind of looks like there's a fairly large normal-space pocket in z-space attached to a morph-capable person, ordinarily, that contains the templates and enough matter to morph any of them, along with lots of complicated machinery to interface with it; the person trapped in morph has a very mangled one which does not contain much matter or any of the other things.

Huh. So - hopefully the information of them is intact, somehow, since they're conscious and have all their memories and such. It looks like he needs to replace the matter and maybe some of the complex machinery, though, he doesn't think he can run all of that remarkable complexity by doing magic in his head. 

He asks Matirin if they can give a rabbit morph so that he can Yeerk it and make it morph and then examine its z-space pocket and try things on it, with the eventual hope of trying to take it apart and reassemble it to replace the broken parts of the Andalite's mangled morph-mechanism. 

Matirin can enable this style of experiment.

Leareth is pretty sure he's going to inevitably kill some rabbits doing this, but he'd like to murder as few as possible, so he takes his time examining it. At one point re-morphs Yeerk and reinfests the rabbit, which is morphed as a random Thoughtsenser he was able to grab from nearby since a rabbit with an uncontrolled morphed mage-gift seemed worse, to make it demorph so he can take a nap, projecting his spirit to the Void is exhausting. Then he Yeerk-morphs and morphs the rabbit again and keeps going. 

Once he's looked at the machinery enough to have a sense of all of its components and which parts are the human morph-template versus the matter that can be re-formed into the rabbit's original body versus the energy supply versus the - computing part? Whatever contains all the information to make this entire thing work.

Hmm. He needs to be able to pick apart the different components of what he's calling the computing part, and he needs to locate the trapped Andalite's body-template and hook it up to the components that will let it reassemble, but without making the poor Andalite reassemble into a rabbit somehow. 

He asks to give another rabbit morph, and this time leaves it morphed past its time limit, so he can be in the Void and watch exactly what happens to the morph-mechanism when it breaks. 

It doesn't break instantaneously; it starts to waver, and jolts of energy shoot down it, and then it starts spending the resources in the normal-space pocket to hold the bond together, and then at some point, with a last burst of energy, it stabilizes the bond into a much much much smaller one and bleeds off almost all its contents in doing so.

Wow this is fascinating. 

Leareth asks Cayaldwin if it would be possible for him to learn more about the morph mechanism-design for this research. And also if Cayaldwin wants to piggyback on his senses for some of this, since it occurs to him that this might be relevant for his eventual plan of working around the morph time limit entirely. Leareth wants to attempt to nothlit another rabbit but this time see if he can delay it by providing mage-energy in the right place, since he expects he'll need to power the entire process to get their trapped Andalite out of morph. 

Cayaldwin can do that! The nothlit mechanism is an emergency safeguard kicking in so that running over your timer doesn't just kill you, which is how early versions worked. In theory feeding the system extra power ought to extend the timer, but of course Andalites were quite motivated to buy as much time in morph as they could and they have lots of mechanisms for cheap power generation, so he suspects that is not the only constraint somehow. He is happy to show Leareth design documents and watch his research.

It's a brilliant safeguard, Leareth thinks, it must have been so much additional work to design. 

He morphs another rabbit (to a different rabbit since he expects to nothlit it) and then takes Cayaldwin to the Void to show him the mechanism as visible to mage-sight, and asks him in Mindspeech what he thinks corresponds to different design elements. He doesn't want to spend candlemarks there (rabbits have even longer morph limits than humans since they're little) so when it's getting near to running out of time he brings Cayaldwin back. And then finds the spot where energy is flowing and starts feeding his own reserves into it, attempting to do so fast enough to stabilize it.