<I can ask for a shuttle ->

<Oh, I can do Gates now. If you have your leave arranged.>

<What, just from ->

He marks out a doorway in the air with his tail and then puts it there.

<Remind me which one is Canada?>

<Snow, trees, not lots of people. Occasionally a bear.>

He shakes his head and steps through the Gate. 

Leareth spends candlemarks talking to Vanyel - odd, how he's back to thinking in their time-units as soon as he sees someone else from Velgarth who hasn't been on an Andalite ship with him for months. He feels a little lighter, at the end of it. Vanyel seems so well and cheerful and - happy, here. He's also become impressively knowledgeable about Earth fashion and wants to take Leareth shopping for better clothes, which, sure, fine. 

After that he goes to find Cayaldwin. 

He is working with Mhalir on morph.

Leareth watches, amazed by how nice it is to see both of them again. (Well, not physically see Mhalir, but he knows Mhalir is in there.) 

When it looks like they've reached an okay interruption point and Cayaldwin has saved his planar-modelling program and started to turn to another screen, Leareth steps closer. :We are back. Have you made progress?: 

<Oh, you> he says, not sounding displeased. <Done blowing things up, I hope? We worked out a much stabler tether, we can increase the morph limit to about an Earth day, inversely proportional to body mass as usual. It fails more cleanly, too. We haven't figured out the multiple-tether setup but I think we might be getting closer, at least within a gravity well and presuming all the tether points to be in a jumping ship with you. Do you want to see ->

:- Oh! That is wonderful: The first thought that comes to mind is that he can stay in Andalite form for an entire day and night, if he wants, once he has the new morph version. :Yes, I want to see: He moves over to them. 

Then Cayaldwin can explain all of the work they've done. He thinks the other tether points can be quite close to the first one - so, for example, you could be in morph as yourself and wearing the other two tether points on bracelets - but this has the disadvantage that many things that kill you will destroy them, too. It might work fine for a population-scale solution, most people don't get murdered at all and it's probably fine if their backups are on site, but it doesn't work well enough to make him happy. Also, it's cludgy and inelegant. What he's interested in doing instead is a setup that supports lots and lots of tether points with a way to tell whether one is in range, and attach to it if so, and breaks the connection nondestructively if it goes out of range.

Leareth is far enough behind that he's going to need a while to understand all the math well enough to make contributions, but he can follow the basics, and Cayaldwin's plan makes sense to him.  

Can he have the new morph version with the longer time limit? 

Yes, definitely. Cayaldwin Fetches the box into his hands and offers it to Leareth.

Leareth takes it. :How do I actually operate it. I do not know the codes or anything: 

<I will authorize it. The box is already updated with the latest morph arrangement.>

Leareth obtains the newest morph iteration, feeling quietly pleased the whole time. 

He tries his usual Andalite-with-Gifts morph and then launches his mind into z-space to check out his more-stable tether. 

It looks quite different! He can make more sense of Cayaldwin's explanation, now that he can see it. 

Incredible. Leareth explores it for a while, limited by his stamina for mage-work but not the morph time limit, and then returns with some commentary for Cayaldwin. 

That night he doesn't bother to demorph. Given that he isn't exactly going to fit in his bedroom easily, and also the fact that the Andalite instincts are so unenthused about this anyway, maybe he'll just join the herd and sleep there?  

(He goes to bed substantially earlier than the point at which Mhalir usually starts prodding Cayaldwin toward sleep.) 

There is a herd of Andalites already sleeping and slipping in among them feels like belonging, fitting, coming safely home into the arms of a friend.

...Wow. 

It's not true, Leareth has to remind himself, it's just a feeling, an instinct generated by this morphed body. But it's also not not true. These are the people he won a war with. They're not perfectly aligned with him in all ways, most of them, but they are his allies. And - it feels like this is probably something he needs.

He lets the feeling envelop him as he drifts into sleep. 

...

Leareth does quite a lot of things over the next few days, talks to Vanyel and Cayaldwin and Mhalir, catches up with his staff who he left in charge on Earth and on Velgarth, but it's at a pace that feels lazy and luxurious and actually quite restful. Settling back in often is, for him. And things on Earth have been going so well. Not perfectly, of course, there are plenty of snags to be dealt with, but the overall trajectory is one of improvement, and that in itself is soothing to hear updates on. 

He talks to Melody for several hours, as soon as he can muster the energy for it. She agrees with his overall assessment that he's exactly the predicted amount of tired a person would be from the pace of the recent war, and that pushing through was a pretty reasonable choice - except for the time he passed out in orca morph, she looks so disapproving about that. She thinks the emotional side effects he's noticed - the dullness and lack of motivation or enthusiasm for his usual interests like research, the difficulty in feeling curious, the sense of narrowing and tunnel-vision and only the next day and the next battle quite feeling real - are all very much to be expected. Especially when he was working through the first month in a semi-constant state of magical exhaustion; she doesn't disagree that his starship-Gates were a key factor in their victory, or that it was worth it, but she still purses her lips.

He's been very consistently getting enough sleep and meals and such. Melody praises him for that. She guesses he'll be less physically fatigued once he's not needed for ridiculous Gates, which should help his mood, though she's planning to check back in a week. More than just rest in the usual sense, Melody thinks he needs a few months of not being constantly responsible for the fate of the world. (She makes such a face when she says that phrase.) Presumably this is doable, since Earth and Velgarth have chugged along just fine in his absence. Her orders are that he do whatever he feels like doing, which will probably end up being insanely valuable to the world anyway because he's himself, but that shouldn't be why he's choosing to do it. 

This seems workable. Nayoki is back and Leareth tells her she's in charge. 

Four days in, he visits Velgarth, and while he's there he might as well see if Alloran is available and up for Gating north to spar? (Leareth is a little irritated with Melody for volunteering him for this, he's - pretty sure that the difference between his sparring and fighting-for-real is grounded in whether he actually intends to kill someone, he doesn't know if he can manage the headspace and attendant signs of it without the intention, and it would be so terrible in every way if he killed Alloran while attempting to do therapeutic sparring with him. Maybe he'll discreetly put a shield on him or something.) 

Alloran can come north to join him. 

<Leareth. Congratulations on your victory over the Yeerks. All the galaxy owes you its gratitude.>

Leareth is in Andalite morph, has been since his brief demorph-and-remorph first thing this morning. <Thank you. And I am grateful for your people's help, and for your advice.> He doesn't really want to talk about the war, right now. <Melody suggested I spar with you?> 

<She thinks that I am most likely to freeze up and act wrong in situations that are surprising and alarming.>