<Hmm, if you try it for a few days how much information will that give you about how hard it would be?>

:I should know in that interval if it seems equivalently hard or much harder than Velgarth to Earth was; if it is much harder, it could take multiple weeks, it seems unlikely it would take months if it is doable at all:

<I am not, actually, ready to talk to our homeworld yet, I need to make sure Nerefir and I are in accord and that this is presented as something we're unified on. But - in a week it will probably be worth switching to doing that.>

:Of course: Leareth pauses, thinking. :Do you also intend to have a plan for the other fronts of the war to present to them? I have been thinking on that a little, though mostly I was busy with the morph research: Which is far more satisfying and enjoyable than coming up with plans to kill lots of people.

<I have some ideas. I think that the main advantage your magic grants is a meaningful way to hijack ships, and that's probably the best approach on the other fronts as well. Hopefully with Yeerks working with us we can get artifacts brought on board for you to Gate from. Alternatively, you have Farsight now, can you Gate from that? And I want to talk to Mhalir about whether there's anywhere where he'd have the authority to just - show up and order a surrender - if he had a Gifted host and they could do some mind-control to get the Yeerks to go along with it ->

:I can Gate from Farsight, although the range needs to be under five hundred miles and ideally under two hundred: Though a neat trick with the morphed Gifts is that backlash doesn’t persist across demorphing and remorphing; drained reserves do persist but he has a setup for converting electricity to mage-energy to replace nodes, and it should scale well. 

:I have wanted to develop an interworld version of a scrying as well, which might be longer range. Talking to Mhalir makes sense: Pause. :You would be comfortable giving him a Gifted host, for that?:

Tail-lash. <I feel very confident he won't betray us. Given how bad it would be, though, it may not make sense to take even extremely probable-looking bets. And I have to defend my actions to people who will feel much less confident. But we could do an arrangement where the host controls the Gifts and Mhalir controls the body, maybe.>

:That would be possible to set up with compulsions or Mindhealing: Leareth agrees. :...I thought you were less sure that that, of his not betraying us. Did something change your mind?:

<I have been getting more information over time. Also your speech as him on the merits of not picking a fight with Leareth was very convincing.>

Leareth smiles a little. :I did intend for it to be. Also I think it is what he believes, since - I would feel that way in his place:

<It was a little unfair to Andalites.> But his tone is teasing again.

:I hope I will learn that it was very unfair, and be pleasantly surprised when I meet others of your people. My plans do not depend on your leadership especially caring about the moral worth of Yeerk lives, though. Merely on their wanting to win, and not being stupid. And on you being calibrated regarding your ability to wrangle the politics of it back home, I suppose: 

<We want to win, and we are not stupid.> He won't comment on the politics; it doesn't seem like a thing where he can provide substantive evidence until he's done it.

:It was a little unfair to claim 'Leareth' might be mind-controlling you and it would not matter: he admits, lips twitching. :It...does matter. Also I promised I would not mind-control your side and I usually keep my word: 

He flicks his tail at him teasingly. <If you ever need me to do something and I won't agree to do it please just threaten to kill me, it will be so much less alarming and hard to work from.>

:Of course: Leareth doesn't jump at all at the tail-flick. Having spent a lot of time recently in Andalite morph helps with that. 

<And I know you have a lot on your plate but if there's anything I can do to help you figure out Andalite-with-Gifts composite morphing, it would be really really nice to have.>

:- Actually, my next step on that had been to watch an Andalite morph to a Gifted-human with Healing-Sight and Mindhealing Sight: He tried doing this with Cayaldwin but it turns out Cayaldwin's mind is VERY DISTRACTING to Nayoki's Sight; Leareth didn't say anything about this but he didn't ask a second time. 

<I can do that, if it would help.> He acquired one of Leareth's Healers who is also a weak mage and also acquired Vanyel though he is not going to try being Vanyel until he has way more practice with magic.

Leareth morphs himself-but-with-all-the-Gifts, which he eventually did get the hang of doing without the step of morphing a different body and partially demorphing. He opens Healing-Sight, which is straightforward enough, and focuses on Matirin's Andalite brain, and then tries to superimpose Nayoki's bizarre bread mind-metaphor on it. It's less disorienting after enough practice doing it on rabbits, and he can pick up more detail now. 

And he morphs human. This involves a fair bit of shuffling of brain regions; Andalites have different senses and much better proprioception and worse balance and their memory is connected up oddly with their brain chips. And of course they don't have the brain regions for Gifts; these unfold in his head as he morphs. 

Leareth watches very closely, asks him to pause mid-morph a couple of times so he can squint at it. Having the Mindhealing Sight (which he's used on Gifted humans a bunch already) lets him map over which regions of the brain are appearing on the more literal Healing-Sight.

:I think I understand Andalite-to-Gifted-human better now: he says. :Of course, what I need to get first is human-to-Gifted-Andalite, which I can test myself, and then Andalite-to-Gifted-Andalite, which is probably simpler than the former, you would just have to morph someone with Mindhealing and watch me do my morph, to figure out where to move the Gift-regions. You can already do your composite human morph with or without Gifts, right?: 

<Yes, I can do that.>

:It should be similar to that except with the brain mapping done differently. - Honestly I am still confused how morphed brains work, clearly the Gift-regions are functional, but the rabbit we broke the morph-link on was catatonic despite its brain appearing normal: 

<The way we understand brains to work is that when they send electrical signals to each other, this subtly changes the physiology of the brain, towards greater efficiency - electrical signals can travel faster along pathways they frequently use. I think if you have all of the cells in the right place but none of that information, or an implausible configuration of that information, the electrical activity will be very undirected and meaningless and fail to do the computation that minds do, except by very unlikely chance. - I have a computer metaphor in mind but maybe it would be meaningless to you. >