<I imagine so.> 

Leareth isn't all that much in the mood to discuss future magic surveillance right now, though. He's silent for a moment, then turns and reaches to softly pet Matirin's face. 

Awww. He will pet him back. <I am glad you came.>

<So am I.> 

And they can snuggle and pet each other for however long Matirin is up for and then sleep. Leareth is kind of impressed that he doesn't seem to get bored of this activity. 

And then they can get to work. He spends a while just spending time with people, learning what they're up to, reading news articles, getting a sense of how contact with Velgarth and the alliance and the end of the war has played in the Andalite press. He does a few interviews. There is a full investigation ongoing of the circumstances of the start of the war; he is very sincerely interested in how it'll turn out and promises to try to help get them access to Yeerks who were there. Not Mhalir, not anyone they'll want to put on trial while they have them, but there must be some lower-ranking Yeerks. He arranges for other people to do other things - sociological studies of humans who are voluntary Controllers, articles about why they do that and what seems to make it work. 

As he finds his feet he does more interviews, attends more events. Buys people presents.

A story runs in a journal of political and military strategy, titled "Could we have offered the Yeerks terms?" It argues that Andalites should have at least tried to offer the Yeerks terms of surrender before the Hork Bajir massacre. Let them keep the Taxxons. The Yeerks would of course almost certainly have refused but it would have been better for that refusal to be on them. 

A story runs in the popular press, titled "Did divine interference lead us to Velgarth?" It mentions in passing that maybe the Ellimist didn't help the Andalites more sooner in the war because they weren't meant to win it until they'd met people who could handle the Yeerk situation afterwards.

A battery of stories run about reparations to the Hork-Bajir for the deployment of a bioweapon on their homeworld. A timeline of the war with a distinct emphasis on Mhalir's contributions. The early products of the studies of human voluntary Controllers. Matirin shows Leareth things, shows what he's tracking. Andalites won't say things until they're pretty sure they are agreed on but they'll say various other things that are more salient or more interesting if you believe a controversial thing.

Interesting. Leareth finds Andalite conformity somewhat wearing, but he's used to it at this point, and he's grateful for Matirin's interpretations. He tries to stay on top of watching and reading the Andalite news, which he finds less tiring than talking to strangers, though he ends up doing some of that too. 

He attends Vanyel's talk about makes himself available afterward to anyone who has questions about Velgarth shields and wards. Mostly he spends his time working on his class. It is harder for him to keep up given that he for now lacks an Andalite brain chip, he's constantly needing extra time for math they take for granted everyone can do in seconds, but conceptually he follows well enough. Maybe he'll just ask for extra time on any exams they do.

In his limited free time, he starts working out the design for an adapted permanent Gate that can handle the interworld routing. His current class should actually be helpful here. 

He worries vaguely about Mhalir, but mostly this doesn't leave him with any specific next actions. 

Vanyel stays for a couple of weeks, to meet people and be a glamorous-war-hero representative of Valdemar (he hates this so much but he's pretty good at it.) He's also available to be acquired by Andalites who can morph Gifts, he's guessing lots of them want his Gifts in particular. 

Lots of them do, they heard he has all the Gifts. Composite morphs take them a lot of practice so there are a bunch of people going around looking like Vanyel, for a while. Andalites think highly of war heroes; they've been at war for half the population's entire life.

Well, that's weird and uncomfortable! Vanyel does his best to ignore the weirdness, and offers lessons in all the Gifts. (He's not sure how to train them on Bardic - Andalites don't sing, or seem to have very much in the way of musical culture at all - but they can do it in human morph, if they want.) He tells some stories about the war, carefully picked to show off Valdemar's advancements and not emphasize the part where their un-Gifted soldiers still fight with swords and pikes.

It seems especially worth training some of the Andalites in artifact work, and specifically how to make the various shield-talismans, both against Thoughtsensing and against mage-attacks and physical attacks. Lots of Andalites are going to be walking around as Thoughtsensers now, and Vanyel doesn't think there's a way to shield against that with technology at all. And he's not sure if the Andalites have a technological way to armour people against Dracon beams and similar weapons, but the shield-amulets for that are pretty efficient and not obtrusive to wear around on their passive mode. Making them takes a lot of fine control, though, he needed years of training and he expects the Andalites will need to practice lots on less finicky mage-work before they can learn to do it. 

After a couple of weeks Vanyel wants to head back to Earth. 

Leareth doesn't have the permanent Gate down yet, but can do a regular Gate to a ship waiting by Saturn. 

There's a lot to do, but in moments he can find, he squeezes in some time to read about the Andalites' work in theoretical artificial intelligence research. He asks Matirin about the possibility of meeting with some of the researchers who specialize in that. It's not something he's in a rush for, but eventually he would like to get their advice on his plans for the new god in Velgarth. It's still not clear to him that there are any other routes to getting a good negotiating position with the current set of gods, and the plan comes out much less horrible if he can power it with electricity converted to mage-energies, rather than deaths. 

Matirin can introduce him to theoretical artificial intelligence researchers! There is a fair amount of overlap between the work they're interested in and the work Leareth has done on his god; the details are mostly different but you have to solve many of the same problems, and they've explored a lot of similar approaches. They have it written up, the thing they are most confident they would do, were it ever better than the alternative, and they'd love him to review it; the more eyes on that kind of thing the better. 

Matirin tail-fights with him in the evenings, and doesn't behave appropriately about it at all; sometimes he will cut a little fur off at Leareth's throat, which is normally quite a thing to go around your life with but Leareth has to morph it off anyway. 

Well, Leareth is gradually getting better and he can also behave very inappropriately on the occasions when he wins, though he doesn't leave Matirin with any visibly missing fur. 

He talks to the artificial intelligence researchers, learns their conventions for notation and tries to wrap his head around their work. He doesn't have all of his own notes at first, but on his next checkin trip back to Earth, he swings by Velgarth to retrieve them. 

He does his classwork diligently and continues to make steady progress on the permanent Gate design; he's ready to bring over more of his trained mages to start building components. He actually wants to do some more planar mapping and see if he can get a routing that goes surface-to-surface, even if it requires more power that's fine given the generators. He can also build a larger Gate for ship transits, in space on both sides, but for his own travel back and forth he'd prefer not to have to fuss with getting a ship back to Earth. Ideally once it's built he'll be able to pop directly back and forth. 

The Andalites with Gift-morphs are of course welcome to watch the work, though none of them have the control or training to help yet. 

There are a lot of Andalites with Gift-morphs, by now, and they're very interested in magic. They watch the work fascinatedly, and separately attempt to persuade him to teach some classes on the interworld comms spell and the making of magic artifacts and on regular Gates. Gifts, it turns out, suit the Andalite instincts about how life should be lived, and there are a lot of suddenly unemployed soldiers and they won't have wives for twenty years and magic is a promising thing to funnel them into.

Leareth kind of has negative free time right now, but the mages with him on the Gate-project aren't currently trying to take engineering classes too, and he delegates magic tutoring to some of them.

He finds a better routing, it's not feasible for a mage to cast directly, but permanent Gates are more efficient to begin with, and powered entirely from the generator without needing a mage to channel the energy.

It's a long project. Months of research, and months more to actual build and test and assemble all of the components. Leareth spars with Matirin in his precious downtime. He's finally friendly enough with the nearby Andalite herd that sleeping there isn't weird. 

He asks Matirin how the politics is going. 

Well, he thinks. He has a good sense of how people will be appointed for the trials. <I cannot, you understand, directly control the outcome of a trial, that is not how they are supposed to work. But - our courts seek consensus, like our other institutions, and it matters what people are saying, it matters how the - aim of the courts in this case is conceived of, and I think I'm getting there. And I think Mhalir can - present it sympathetically, right.>

<I think so.> He hopes so. <Do you know when it will happen? Ideally he will have time to make more progress with Cayaldwin on the morph research, first, show his value to your people - once the Gate is done, I can visit easily enough on my days off classes, so we can safely transfer him to Cayaldwin's keeping and back again.> 

<Yes, that's one of the things I've been pushing for is delay, which will buy time for that. The primary reason for the delay is just that we are trying to figure out how to try them. It won't do to have them in slug form, and we can't countenance -> Tail-lash. 

<Enough Andalites with Gifts will be able to do compulsions by then, I think. I suppose Andalites might still be very against temporarily hosting even a helpless Yeerk for questioning. Probably there are humans who would volunteer? Certainly some among my own people.> 

<Yes, but don't volunteer them just yet since solving this problem is imposing a delay> he says dryly. 

<- Right, of course.> Unhappy tail-wave. He hesitates before asking. <Do we know anything of what Alloran has been up to? I do not recall hearing about any kind of Velgarth tech scandal or rumours.> 

<I have been periodically looking for it. I think I will feel better once the last hoof drops, whatever it happens to be. Maybe he's writing a memoir. Maybe - at the trial - I did have a friend of mine reach out to someone in his scoop, ask about news, and they said he seems all right. They wouldn't have told us more, though, probably. He writes to Melody but I'll make her very angry, if I ask her whether he's planning something at the trial or anything. It's - his right, of course, to testify. And I am sure that he will be very compelling.>

<Yes, I am sure. I suppose we had better just prepare to be very thorough about shielding and other precautions.> He's got ideas, of course, Leareth is always thinking about safety precautions in the back of his mind, even now on a planet where (as far as he knows) no one is out to kill him. 

He leans against Matirin. Doesn't say anything, because he's said all of it before, dozens of times. I wish the past were different. I cannot make it so. 

He doesn't say anything either. <If nobody is going to die then everybody is going to have to live with each other, eventually. For - understandings of living with each other - Mhalir will never be welcome on this world ->

<I understand.> 

<Yeerks in general will not, I think.> Sigh. <This is important work and in some ways it is satisfying but - I think I like some things about how humans do things.>

<Oh?> Leareth can't follow what he's gesturing at and is very curious. <What sorts of things - politics?> He finds human politics tiresome, a lot of the time, especially on Earth. It's all so loud and strident. At least there's less of the oppressive-feeling atmosphere of conformity, though.