The energy requirements to stabilize the bond seem to get higher every minute; first he can do it comfortably, then he can do it not-comfortably, then he can do it only with great effort and then not at all.

Interesting. Does Cayaldwin have a guess about why that happens? 

There's some inherent difficulty to stabilizing all that matter and machinery in z-space and the way they did it must have growing energy costs over time...or maybe the relevant thing is not time but space, planets are in motion -

Huh. And so maybe the normal-space pocket in z-space is 'moving' relative to the morphed construct-form? He wonders if it's worth getting on a shuttle and leaving Earth so they can try to get themselves 'stationary' relative to the Void and see if this impacts morph at all. 

He thinks it's worth it. Morphing doesn't generally work differently on a ship but of course ships are also in motion, usually.

Leareth wants to do that, then. And maybe at some point do it on a ship in hyperspace, since then they can be verifiably stationary relative to it, but that's more costly than taking a shuttle out since there aren't that many jump-capable ships right now.

He can project his mind to the Void once they're up but in a different way from usual, where he's trying to stay as closely tethered to his physical body as possible rather than staying in a specific Void 'location.' ...On reflection he's curious if this will make the mental projection less draining as well. 

It looks like some of the work that the link between the z-space bubble and the morphed form on Earth is doing is tethering the z-space bubble so it travels along at fairly extraordinary speeds with whatever the morphed form is doing (actual motion by the morphed form is nearly irrelevant compared to the movement of the planet or ship it's on). This introduces some swinging back and forth, for lack of a better metaphor, like any ball at the end of a long tether would do, which gets worse over time. 

Without that there is no discernable increase in energy expenditure as the morph runs out of time, though after the morph time limit is up the safety mechanism still kicks in and jettisons most of its materials to stabilize the much-diminished link that lets the nothlit still control their body.

That's very interesting although not immediately relevant to Leareth's work here, probably, but hopefully of interest to Cayaldwin's longer-term project. 

Once they're back on Earth, he spends some time staring at morph design schematics, and then takes one of their two nothlit rabbits, morphs a third rabbit, and then goes in and attempts to transfer the link and what he thinks are the computing-parts along with the available matter for reconstruction to the nothlit rabbit. Almost certainly this is not going to work on the first try and instead something bizarre and probably very bad for the rabbits will happen, but it'll be informative anyway. Cayaldwin can watch if he feels like. 

The first try of this disrupts the link to the nothlit rabbit, after which it's catatonic.

Huh. (Poor rabbit.) Leareth gives the catatonic rabbit-construct-body to Nayoki, though, to see what's going on in there - it's got a brain, along with a body, but - not active...? 

He drops back into the Void to try to figure out if the reduced normal-space pocket still exists or is entirely destabilized now. 

Nayoki examines the catatonic rabbit body with Mindhealing-Sight, which sort of works on animal minds as well as human ones, and has a Healer check it with Healing-Sight as well and compare it to a normal, non-morphed rabbit in their cage of rabbits. 

Once the link broke the normal-space pocket is entirely destabilized and quickly bleeds off.

The rabbit is in fine health. Its brain looks normal. Its mind is - there's something there but it's way less complex than even what's going on with a normal rabbit.

That's so weird! Its brain is...being suppressed somehow? This is obviously true, on reflection, since rabbits morphed as humans don't have human intelligence or consciousness, thank the gods for that. Nayoki is going to spend a while poking the rabbit to see if she can un-suppress the brain somehow, but isn't expecting much. 

Sigh. He wasn't expecting it to work on the first try and 'kills rabbits' is really not the worst humanitarian problem that magical research can have, but it's still irritating. 

Leareth tries a second time with the other nothlit rabbit and a newly-morphed one with the full mechanism intact. He wonders how many tries this is going to take. 

More than two! The mechanism for the link seems really complex and sensitive for this angle, the overwhelming majority of things you can do to it break it.

...Okay, he's going to back off on that research angle for a bit, he'll come back to it if dissembling an intact morph mechanism still seems like the best avenue. He now has the full schematics for what the link does, and can try to design a Velgarth spell that will let him do all the same things by casting while in the Void. It'll be far too complex to cast unaided from his concentration alone, but he can put most of it into an artifact-focus. (This is, after all, what he would have done when creating a baby god.)

This is going to take him days if not weeks, though. In the meantime he's happy to, on his breaks, teach Cayaldwin to morph a mage and then use his mage-gift to project himself to z-space directly, so he can do that research on his own. 

That evening Melody comes and finds him. :Hey. Can we talk?: 

:...Certainly: He's caught off guard, but he can go to his room with her, it's shielded. :What did you want to talk about?: 

:Well, I haven't checked in with you in a while. Also Matirin asked me to talk to you. He said you seemed really stressed: 

:I think I am fine?: Leareth frowns. :He is probably talking about when I Gated out to the other Andalite ship. I - was quite stressed then, it was very unexpected to return and find they had arrested him and I did not understand why: 

Melody narrows her eyes at him. There's a lot of tension in his very-complex-multilayered tapestry, right now - not throughout all of it, but in a particular segment. Which she doesn't recall being as active, the first time she saw him. 

:You seem to have reacted strongly to it: she sends, after some thought. :And - to the fact that it was Matirin specifically that this happened to. Something about it made it seem like a threat worth escalating about?: 

:I did not actually end up escalating very much, I do not think. I probably startled the other Andalite crew, by Gating in suddenly, but - it was relevant to know what was going on: 

:Nayoki said you spent multiple candlemarks inventing a new Gate-routing technique on the spot so you could find the ship at all and then Gate to it despite it being really far away. That's - a lot of effort. Would you have done it if they'd taken, hmm, Talik instead?: 

Leareth blinks. :...I am not sure why they would take Talik, he was not in command: He considers it for a while, though. :I mean, in that case I would just have asked Matirin what to do, I think: 

:You didn't ask Ashul what to do in this case, though, even though he was in command. I know you're not technically under his chain of command, but he still had more context than you: