:Neither am I! Going by Leareth's face when he said it, if it was him in control, neither does he! Something they think alike and have similar pasts, except this one is way sooner and younger? So Leareth's reasoning about what he'd do here was convincing? Anyway, the important part is the surrender and they want to give Leareth and Talik back, not infested, as a good faith thing. Eight Andalites got pulled out of the mine before whoever it was blew it up, apparently. Emril the Healer from Washington is fine and her Yeerk voluntarily left her head so she could mindread Leareth and make sure he wasn't mind-controlling the Visser into surrendering. I think that's all the claims he made here:  

<Thank you. We'll keep that in mind when drafting messages for them in the morning.>

And Vanyel goes back to sleep, though it takes him a while.

Matirin, when he wakes up, looks for Melody.

She's in the field drinking coffee and humming to herself. :Hey. How's everything today?: 

<I would like your help in evaluating the probability that that will happen to me again.>

Nod. :Of course. Want to grab a conference room again?: 

<We can do that.> 

She takes the same one. Paces rather than sitting down, she's fresh and full of energy this morning. 

:Hmm. Want to tell me your best theory of what, exactly, happened, or want to hear my guesses?: 

<My theory is that I was temporarily seized by madness because I was distressed that my brothers might have been captured.>

Brisk nod. :That's a start, but it's a bit short on moving parts and predictors for whether it'll happen again. My guess, here, is that this wasn't a single event - that you were having some trouble thinking before your brothers got captured, and it got worse as more stressors piled up. Does that seem right?: 

<Yes.>

:Can you tell me your recollection of when it started and which events correlated with it getting worse?: 

<An Andalite military outpost on the planet of Formeron was overrun unexpectedly by a Yeerk force with more than four times the strength we expected. About twenty thousand people died. I knew many of them. One of them was my grandfather, which caused my father a great deal of distress, and he started fighting with High Command about our plans for Earth - well, he'd been fighting, but it got worse. I think that is when I first noticed feeling numb much of the time but I did not know that this predicted madness particularly.> 

:I don't know that it did, particularly, at the time. If nothing else had happened I think you'd have been fine, sooner or later. But - all right, the numbness is a pattern I'm familiar with, humans do it too. It's a way of coping better in the short run but that's because you're shutting out pain. Blocking a signal of something wrong, just like taking painkillers all the time to push your body harder than it can sustainably manage. I think if you hadn't been doing that, you'd have noticed something was badly wrong in your mind a lot sooner, yes?: 

<Maybe.>

Melody is working so hard right now to translate this into concepts and framings that she thinks will work at all, and it's exhausting, she never thought she would be thinking this but can she please have Vanyel back, at least he's...capable of introspection... 

:I think: she sends, slowly, :that it makes sense to consider this as pretty analogous to having been running a marathon ever since Formeron, and occasionally running into fights and picking up injuries, and taking painkillers to keep going. Which might have been really important and a reasonable call! Sometimes it is. Just, it also means that as you were taking more and more damage, you weren't really noticing it, right? And so you weren't - trying to do things to take care of yourself, let the damage heal, even back in the moments when there might have been time. Obviously yesterday was not the time for that and you were probably right to push through, just - if you'd dealt with some of it earlier, you would've had more reserves to absorb it. Does that analogy make sense?: 

<I think so. It's important to schedule leave for people when they're having a hard time. There - wasn't really time to take any leave - but I did not have a very good picture of what the outcome of not taking any would be.>

Melody nods. :I understand that. Just - hmm. The situation we're in now, is one where you did not take leave, and you ended up in pretty bad shape before you even noticed. It took so much crap happening at you to do that, but - it'd take less, starting from here, because you're still pretty shaken up. So - I think the best way to make sure you don't end up at the point of not being able to parse sentences, is to deal with as much of all your built-up emotional damage as we can, and then you need to learn how to tell what you're feeling so you notice if it's trending worse and you can do something about it sooner: 

<That makes sense.> impatient tail-lash. <I am worried these negotiations are very delicate. I trust my officers to run a war. Negotiating a peace is very different.>

Melody nods. :I really, really get that. Vanyel asked me if I could please make sure you're able to do that: 

<I do not feel numb. I feel stressed about ending the war.>

:I'm going to call that an improvement, here, even though you may not feel like it right now. How much do you feel like you've got room in your head to have thoughts? Um, scale of one to ten, where one is when I pulled you aside yesterday, and ten is however normal-you felt before Formeron: 

He tries to think about something complicated. Leareth, supposedly, talked the Yeerks into letting him go by appealing to their better natures. It feels - absurdly improbable. But the situation they're in feels improbable too. He thought he'd have to destroy every pool to get the Yeerks to admit they'd lost. And then there'd still be the risk backup from off-planet would arrive in time. And - there are probably a lot of elements to realizing you don't want a war. Realizing you would lose it. Realizing you're outmatched. Realizing that the best-case scenario is the destruction of the planet. 

Realizing that your enemies are people, maybe. 

Probably Andalites are no more people to Yeerks than Yeerks are to Andalites, excluding the one Yeerk who took an Andalite host. Probably some of them were thinking of the enemy with the same uncomplicated hatred that plenty of his people feel, and it was - genuinely valuable to learn that the Andalites were considering how not to destroy them once the war was won. Something he was only considering because of Leareth and Vanyel. 

<Nine.>

:That's really good: Melody looks so pleased and relieved. :- Are there areas that still feel hard to think about, or - like you're running into resistance or bouncing off or you don't want to go there... Can you think about the events that happened yesterday as just events that happened and not 'everything is terrible'?: