[All right.]

[Then we'll update you on how this went. Or you will update yourself on that.]

[Good luck.] 

Which feels like a somewhat odd thing to say about this, but he's not sure what else to say. He occupies himself reading the Internet. There's a lot of it. 

Cayaldwin still isn't allowed on the homeworld because Matirin is worried he'll murder Alloran, so he asked Matirin to get Leareth for this. Cayaldwin in principle knows which bits of the altered morph-infrastructure he wants swapped out but no one can match Leareth for precision with Fetching bits of complicated infrastructure into place while in z-space watching a morph-tether.

(Mhalir thinks this is DUMB because obviously if Cayaldwin has said he isn't going to murder Alloran, then he won't. He isn't going to say anything, though, because it's not like he actually has enough information to confidently make this declaration; this version of him hasn't been in Cayaldwin's head.) 

Leareth can be summoned for this. Transit is really easy with the permanent Gate. (The space one is finally nearly done too, mostly constructed by his other mages and with Leareth only doing quality control checks.) 

He's surprisingly nervous. Trying to demorph a Mhalir who might not work properly is way more stressful than testing de-nothliting on rabbits. 

Cayaldwin finds it non-stressful because if the attempted-Mhalir doesn't run, it doesn't run and isn't Mhalir. His body language is very tense but he hasn't noticed this. <Ready?>

<Ready.>

He's in morph with Vanyel's mage-gift and a different mage's extremely strong Fetching, both of which he's now practiced with enough to be sufficiently confident in his fine control as well as brute power. It's a lot of draining work and using a stronger mage-gift for it gives him less backlash, and he's got lots of slack in his morph time limit. 

Once they've reviewed the planned sequence of manipulations one final time, he can start hopping back and forth to z-space, moving and merging and linking things up appropriately. 

He knows exactly how it's supposed to look and they've modeled it with the spatial modeling program but there are still half a dozen ways it could fail to work. He paces.

Leareth goes slowly and carefully and follows the plan exactly. It takes a long time and it's very tiring. He takes breaks whenever he starts feeling drained, rather than end up doing it sloppily. 

And eventually he tells Cayaldwin he's ready to attempt the 'demorph'. 

It has to be a forced demorph, like for the nothlits; Mhalir is there, they hope, but he's not conscious; that would have been an entirely different problem to solve. But they have a good generator setup for the forced demorphs, now.

Leareth starts the forced demorph process and then watches anxiously in z-space as the power requirement spikes higher and higher. The tether holds, though, the generator more than able to meet it and the components held stable enough. 

The originally-a-rabbit 'demorphs' to human. Stops at human, rather than overrunning horrifyingly - they understand now how that happened and how to make sure it doesn't. 

Does not move.

Leareth pops back to normal space. Anything to Thoughtsensing or Mindhealing Sight? 

It looks like a perfectly normal rabbit-force-morphed-human.

<We seem to have a rabbit brain in there still> he says to Cayaldwin. <I am not sure if you have a guess at something to do differently so we can try again? ...In any case I cannot try again until tomorrow, it is very tiring.> 

Unhappy tail-swish. <I have a couple of guesses. I might go poke it in z-space in case that helps. You can rest, though, I am competent enough to look at things, it's all the moving them around that only you can do.>

<All right. I will stick around, though, and I can inform you as soon as I am rested enough.> 

<Thank you.>  Swish swish swish he's so miserable.

His misery is very obvious in his body language, and Leareth also wants to make it work as soon as possible, but trying again right away when he's tired isn't going to accomplish that. 

Instead he morphs and demorphs to shake off the physical correlates of his mage-work fatigue, then runs around the field a bit, stretching his legs, and looks for Matirin to see if he's up for some tail-sparring. 

He is up for that! It is tense, watching your brother and your boyfriend try to secretly reembody a war criminal who three worlds believe to be dead using a technique that was just invented.

[Didn't work]

[I have a couple guesses about what might've gone wrong]

And he expounds on them.

Leareth listens and asks questions, and then decides it'll be a lot more efficient to morph Yeerk for a bit so they can poke it together. 

He doesn't end up wanting to try again that day, but the second try will go a bit faster since they're mostly not changing the protocol, and if they do it first thing in the morning and it still doesn't work he'll have enough energy for another attempt the same day. 

Cayaldwin's head is EVEN MORE OF A MESS because his father wouldn't have failed at this and his father would have figured it out already and his father isn't backed up. But he agrees with this plan.

Leareth updates Mhalir on the unsurprising fact that the first attempt didn't work.

It's less nervewracking on the second try, even though there isn't a good reason for that to be true. 

The second try doesn't work but the third does. Halfway through the forced-"demorph" there is a mind there -