<It was great!>

<I hope we can work on this again soon.> Mhalir wriggles free of Cayaldwin's ear. 

Leareth holds out a hand for him. 

Yeerk! They're still pretty gross.

Leareth is mostly thinking about morph-components and not paying attention to the grossness at all as he holds Mhalir up to his ear, it's not a long trip or anything but Leareth didn't bring a glass of water to stick him in, and besides he's slippery and it would be awkward to drop him. 

:You get along well with Cayaldwin, I noticed: 

<He is very clever> And sad and in pain constantly. Mhalir says nothing about this to Leareth; it seems private. 

And Leareth Gates him back to where Amanda is hopefully waiting, and knocks on the door. 

Amanda is in the shower but comes out reasonably promptly, wearing a towel. "Oh good, I was worried you'd misplaced him or something."

"He made a friend. They were up most of the night doing math. I went to bed but Mhalir apparently thinks math is better than sleep." 

Mhalir extracts himself and can be handed back to Amanda once Leareth has removed all the compulsions on him. 

She holds him up to her head. "An Andalite friend? I thought they all hated him because of the thing where he, uh, enslaved one."

"I thought so too, I was very surprised, but - it seems that shared interest in staying up all night talking about math overrode it in this one case." Leareth thinks this is kind of adorable. Also that Cayaldwin should probably get more sleep, but, well. 

<He thinks it is tragic that I was not born an Andalite> Mhalir says as soon as he's in Amanda's head and can communicate again. <It was quite sweet. I think most of them still hate me, but...if I aid with some research breakthroughs, perhaps that will help.> 

Well if she had to pick a kind of alien to be she thinks she'd be a Yeerk, since you can sample all the other kinds. ...though the Andalites can do that too with the shapeshifting. 

I guess Andalites have a pretty good deal, she thinks.

(She hooked up with a guy. He had heard about the bodysnatcher invasion and figured that it was why his favorite band broke up. It felt very odd, being a normal person again.)

<I am glad you enjoyed your day off. I will probably do it again next week.> He's now just about at the point of having told Cayaldwin all the details of his past setup that he actually remembers, but Cayaldwin seems to enjoy just bouncing around ideas and find it valuable. He has a lot of politics to catch up on now, though. 

Leareth does one more unsuccessful but informative attempt at demorphing a nothlit rabbit, and then goes to bed, and gets up early to request a ship out to Saturn. He also sends a message to Nerefir confirming that he's doing so at Matirin's request and will be away for an unknown length of time, leaving Nayoki in charge of his people here. 

Is anyone else coming with him for this? 

Matirin also requested a couple of Nerefir's people, including Finleran.

Then Leareth will collect them either from the base or Nerefir's ship as applicable, and ask a different Andalite to fly them out, since they don't have a ton of ships to spare and he doesn't think it makes sense for it to wait in Saturn's orbit an unknown length of time. He'll take his Gate-crossing message robot with him and can have it transmit a pickup request through a tiny Gate once he has more information on when they'll be done. 

Leareth nods to Finleran and then decides to see how many morphs he can do back to back before he's tired. It's mostly a different kind of tiring from mage-work, so it won't affect the Gate much, and the flight is long enough that he'll have time to rest after. 

He can do eight full morphs and demorphs, which is a lot more than an Andalite can do; they're impressed. Someone has looked into this and theorized that it's basically the same kind of tiredness as distance running, which humans are weirdly good at. (Andalites are much faster in a sprint but cannot run more than a mile in one go.)

Leareth is pleased to be naturally good at something that impresses Andalites; he knows he's not naturally good at a lot of the elements of tail-sparring, he's not graceful. Though he's disproportionately good at winning, or at least taking longer and longer to lose every day, given his lack of grace.

After the eighth (he's very pleased at the increase in his stamina from when he first got morph), he stays human and sits cross-legged, musing about differences in physiology that would be upstream of the endurance thing. He's kind of amazed Andalites can't run more than a mile in one go; he can run five miles or so, if he paces himself reasonably, and he's not much of an athlete.

And humans are one of the few animals on their planet that can do that, and Andalites don't think there are any on theirs. (Their planet has fewer than a hundred species, though.)

Wow, Leareth hadn't known that and it's fascinating. He's also still very confused about the Andalite homeworld's ecology, and asks questions about that until they reach the Gate-point. 

They started out with the usual messy patchwork of millions of species that show up wherever evolution happens, but many of them went extinct when they made the planet more habitable for Andalites, either directly because Andalites eradicated them (disease carrying ticks and bugs, various creatures that are bad for the health of grasslands), or directly because their life cycle involved a fairly horrifying degree of animal suffering, or indirectly because they only lived in enormous equatorial saltwater marshes or something else Andalites did not particularly value, or because they were part of an ecosystem with something that did.

Andalites today disagree on whether this was a good choice by Andalites hundreds of years ago, but what with the war no one has gone ahead with reintroducing any of the species (they do have genomes and enough information to do so whenever they feel like it). 

Huh. Leareth has also been unsure what to do about species on Velgarth with lifecycles that involve horrifying suffering - once he gets to the point of that being the highest-priority problem, if that ever happens - and that's...a solution of sorts...but he has to admit not one he had considered. 

Velgarth is interesting because it has, in addition to its messy patchwork of millions of species, a number of created species from before the Mage Wars, and also all the weird species variants resulting from the Pelagirs waste magic. He can talk about this subject and which ones might be interesting to morph for a while. 

When they reach Saturn's orbit, he spends a couple of minutes properly centring and grounding, fills his reserves from the mage-energy generator packed onto the ship for this purpose, consults the planar modeling program to refresh himself on the routing, and does a full-size Gate to the surface of the Andalite homeworld. He informed everyone beforehand to be ready to cross very efficiently, and that he might need help getting himself across, because it's incredibly tiring to hold a Gate across this distance. He has to make the threshold on each end nearly three times as powerful as usual, in order to hold up against the force of pinching that much distance together.

They are ready to hurry across once it's up.