The Andalites aren't routinely killing planets! Because it's evil and monstrous and awful and they didn't have orders for it even at the time and he doesn't know if there's anyone else on his entire planet who would be willing to do it no matter how dire the circumstances! The Andalites could've won the war long ago if they were actually willing to just routinely kill planets but they aren't, because they're good people!!

<Thank you> Mhalir says to Carissa, distantly. 

And he goes off to pace and think and pay more attention to Alloran's thoughts than he has in years. Maybe it's not surprising that exposure to this bizarre world is giving Alloran new sorts of thoughts too. 

Eventually he goes and finds the Yeerk with the cleric again. <I want your host to read some things> he says. <And - give his opinion on them, and tell me what version he would write, or...which one he thinks is true...?> Everything is coming out as a question again, even when it should be a statement or a command. 

The cleric can have a tablet with the history for teaching baby Yeerks, and Carissa's version, and a transcription of Alloran's Andalite version as recorded on his brain chip. 

"My host can't read very well," the Yeerk says. "I can read them to him." 

He does this. 

"He says that all of the stories are incomplete because all of the stories lack the concept that redemption is possible or that people can make mistakes while seeking good."

<...I know that people who are trying hard to do the correct thing can make mistakes. I have done it. I - think I am still confused about the difference between - a mistake in tactics, where your plan does not work because you misjudged something or lacked knowledge, and a mistake that is - doing something Evil while meaning to seek Good. The latter does not feel like a coherent categorization to me, but I would still like to hear your host's explanation of it, if he has one.> 

"The Andalites want to stop the Yeerks from enslaving the galaxy, so they launch a surprise attack against them. The Yeerks want to stop the Andalites from senselessly destroying them, so they enslave the Hork-Bajir. The Andalites want to stop the Yeerks from enslaving the Hork-Bajir, so they kill them all. Doing Evil while meaning to seek Good."

<What would you have done instead of those things, if it had been your choice somehow? - I mean filtering for plans that would work, not plans that would be Good if they did work but in fact would not have.> 

"- no plan is guaranteed to work. None of the above-mentioned plans did work. The Good versions also might not have worked but they would have had much less collateral damage in failing, if they failed." 

- okay, the point that his actual plans also didn't work to achieve his aims is a good one. Mhalir doesn't know what to say, again, so he absently thanks the cleric and Yeerk, and goes back to pacing. 

He checks back in with the surveillance team on the shuttle. He'd have thought there were some adventuring parties whose wizards aren't powerful enough yet to make pocket dimensions just to sleep in, but if they still haven't found anyone, he wants to come down in bird morph and deposit some concealed recording devices in various taverns where mercenary recruiting happens, so he can listen to some sample conversations about it. 

They eventually tracked down some adventuring parties that can't do the pocket-dimension thing but they're very weak ones; even a wizard of Carissa's caliber can easily do it overnight if she's trained for it.

That makes sense. Probably even a very weak adventuring party will know something about recruiting practices. He doesn't really - need or want them as hosts, though? And it feels off, right now, to involuntarily enslave them just because that's simplest. 

They have access to drugs which cause amnesia in humans while still leaving them awake enough that a skilled Yeerk can pull relevant information from their minds. Mhalir orders his people to prepare doses of that drug, and track a very weak adventuring party, ideally one that's traveling through more wilderness-y areas where they're camping or something, but snatching them at an inn will work too. 

He goes to Carissa, explains his plan of temporarily kidnapping a weak adventuring party so he can infest them and absorb all their local context, and then releasing them with amnesia about it. Does she have any suggestions for the capture itself, or warnings about things to be careful of? 

They might have familiars or animal companions who'll need getting too. They might be able to notice memory modification though probably not. It might be that Protection from Evil protects against Yeerking, though it's likelier to protect against Yeerks controlling you than against them just going in to get local context, and they probably won't have it up in the middle of the night unless they wake up as the kidnapping happens. Sarenrae seems to, confusingly, be tolerant of or ignorant of them having kidnapped her cleric but some deities won't be.

Maybe they can avoid grabbing the cleric. How do you tell if someone is a the cleric when the whole party is asleep and you haven't Yeerked them yet. 

Carissa could go along and use Aura Sight to see their alignments, clerics have strong alignments from their deity. Or they could do it in Rahadoum which bans all the gods or Razmiran which only permits worship of its god-impersonating king. 

- Oh, right, he forgot about Rahadoum. On reflection that's a safer place to attempt to recruit, but it also might be worse than Absalom in other ways, and besides they've already done all the surveillance for Absalom. 

This isn't urgent on the scale of hours or even days, though, and it is very high stakes, he can't afford a mistake. 

Mhalir thanks Carissa and says he'll consider the plan some more and then tell her if he wants her help. He gives orders to take the shuttle down again so he can morph an owl (immune to Detect Thoughts with a lead helmet) and sneak some tiny concealed high-tech microphones onto the windows of various taverns, by cover of night so it's less conspicuous. And then he asks the shuttle crew to relocate to Rahadoum, and start the same sort of surveillance while he sleeps; he can explore the major cities in morph once it's light out. 

Alloran is thinking. 

He can't get the Good gods' attention. This is probably not because they wouldn't want to intervene; any Good entity would want to make Yeerks stop enslaving people. But it might be because he's Evil right now. It has been mentioned that clerics have to be near the alignment of their god, and one could imagine that generalizing. Maybe the thing Sarenrae's stupid confusing message meant was that he needs to be Good before they can help his people. Which is very unfair - he's sure most Andalites are Good, it's hardly a coincidence that the one Andalite the Yeerks captured is also the single Andalite most natively inclined to have done the thing which Alloran did - but evidently the gods can't act all the way across the galaxy. 

How to be Good. The cleric did seem to think it was something he could do only inside his own head. And that it'd involve regretting the Hork-Bajir planet, which still feels immensely insulting - yes, it was evil, but Alloran has spent fifteen years wishing someone would kill him and it's not, actually, ridiculous to think that it was worth anything, to stop the Yeerks doing it to more people. And yes, the Yeerks use it as a justification for their later crimes, but they'd have found some other justification if he hadn't done it. And it seems to be influencing Carissa, which is upsetting, but also Carissa is a terrible person and it's not that much evidence about how a decent one would see it -

- all of this is true but it's not a route to what he wants. He wants something, and he's not used to wanting something, and he has to focus on how to get it. 

(He is trying to ignore that Mhalir might be listening because this is agonizing enough without imagining Mhalir feeling all gleeful and righteous about it.)

Mhalir isn't feeling very gleeful and righteous at all, actually. He's feeling tired and sad, the way he often does when he pays any attention to Alloran's thoughts, and he's also feeling confused, and - 

- and what - 

- and he doesn't know, yet, what the Good gods are, whether Sarenrae's values are anywhere close to what her cleric described, or if they're instead something alien and incomprehensible. But - hmm, no, it's not exactly that there's a fact of the matter, in reality, about who's right and who's wrong here, because it depends on what ethical frame you're using, and what perspective. But there's a fact of the matter about what happened, and - it matters, that there are other perspectives, which would assess it differently than either his or Alloran's... 

He's chasing after something here, going in circles, and he doesn't know what it is. 

Mhalir never wanted there to be a war. He wanted to do science with Seerow. To fix the rest of the universe together. He can sort of model Seerow's perspective, now, where Mhalir was only one among many Yeerks, and some of them were more alarming in expressing their aims, and where Mhalir himself was too young and naive to know how to bridge a cultural gap between them that he hadn't even noticed until after the betrayal. Which he hasn't thought about much, since then, because it hurts so much. 

Alloran thinks that the Good gods will inevitably side with the Andalites. Mhalir thinks the Yeerks acted reasonably in the war, not perfectly, he made mistakes and so did the others, but understandably, and he thinks anyone smart and openminded and in possession of all the facts will realize this.

And - whether or not the Good gods' ethics are something Mhalir would endorse, there is, nonetheless, a fact of the matter about which of them is right. He finds that he wants to know the answer to that question, very badly. 

He and Alloran are both not sleeping at all right now. 

<Alloran> he says finally. <If - I agree to leave your head temporarily while you are restrained with magic or something, will you agree to use that opportunity to think whatever thought you want to think, rather than trying to kill yourself?>

What. 

He's so confused. 

<...I am trying to get you killed> he says. <I am trying to do whatever it is I have to do to count as Good so that the Good gods can hear me and then they can destroy you.> He's vaguely aware that this is itself not a Good attitude to have, not as the priest of Sarenrae described it, but it's impossible to feel anything else about Mhalir while Mhalir has him. <I don't see why you'd want to let me do that.>

Mhalir, honestly, isn't sure either. He feels like he's drowning and grabbing at random for anything solid to hold onto. 

<Because I think you know that you need to find the actual Good attitude in order for this to work> he says eventually. <And - based on what the cleric said, the Good attitude is that neither of us deserves to be destroyed and instead it would be better if there were not a war at all. And - I think if you have any mental privacy at all, you will be able to think those thoughts better.> 

If he kills himself he denies Mhalir himself but - Mhalir can probably just take Carissa, at that point, she's nearly as smart as him and claimed that her headband would make her even smarter and she will be very impressed if he deigns to not torture her for thinking mean things about him and will be incredibly trivial to brainwash into adoring him, especially with magic, and then Mhalir will have powerful magic and probably mindread everyone constantly and enjoy it immensely. And Alloran will be dead and have no way to reach the Good gods. He wants - he doesn't actually want to be dead, he wants to be free, it's just that he can never have that -

They can have people standing by to stun him if he starts to morph, it'd probably be pretty difficult to get anywhere -

- Mhalir will come back afterwards and somehow that thought feels even more unbearable than the thought Mhalir will be here forever -

<I don't know.>

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah. 

He knows he should be trying to have actual thoughts about this, but instead Mhalir's internal monologue is a solid block of aaaaaaaaaah. 

He doesn't want Alloran to die. He especially doesn't want Alloran to die here, because of the thing where Alloran would also be categorized as Evil and therefore go to one of the horrible afterlives and get tortured more and - and - and he doesn't WANT Alloran to be tortured, he never wanted that, he just wanted - what - to achieve his goals, and he felt so constrained at the time, and Alloran was smart and himself a war criminal which made it feel more like fair play and was an Andalite which meant Mhalir could buy back the Council's regard, indicate he was sufficiently anti-Andalite... 

None of that feels very compelling, anymore, it all rings empty in his head. 

- he's aware that he's acting practically at random, at this point, flailing for any nearby lever on the world rather than making plans. He can't seem to stop, though, and suddenly it's nigh-unbearable being in Alloran's head at all. Feeling his pain and dread and hopelessness. Like witnessing that, every moment, is sapping all the colour out of the world. 

He doesn't address Alloran again. Instead he thoughtspeaks the shuttle pilot. <Return us to the ship now, please.> 

The pilot does not question this.

It's still the middle of the night and probably the human hosts on the ship are sleeping, but Mhalir ignores this fact. The first thing he does is shove Alloran down, blocking him fully from his body and senses. It's not something he does often, it makes the body feel clumsy and only half controlled when he can't use Alloran's reflexes and procedural memory, and there isn't really an opsec reason to do it now. Just, he - would be getting Alloran's hopes up, when it might not be possible to do anything? (Yet, some part of him whispers, and he ignores that too.)

Once Alloran is blocked out, he heads straight for the cleric of Sarenrae. <I need to talk to you.> 

"...yes?"

<This is Mhalir, not Alloran. Alloran is not listening right now. I - am aware that I am torturing him and keeping him enslaved and - I do not actually prefer this, I - felt my hand was forced, before, but all the previous considerations no longer apply and I - want to do something different. He is thinking about how to become Good so the Good gods will speak to him. I do not think he can do that with me in his head listening and I am not sure he can cope with my leaving if I am going to come back, which is perfectly understandable.> 

He takes a deep breath, tail lashing. <I want to free him. But in order to do that I need to have another option for a host, since without that I cannot even interact with the world. Ideally I want a host who does not mind having me. Also I need a place to leave him where he can heal but will not be able to disrupt my plans without a god's help. Because I do not think the Good gods will actually help him revenge-murder me, and - I suspect that in order to become Good by their standard he will need to feel differently anyway. I...thought I might be able to Plane Shift him to Nirvana, since - you said it is for everyone - but I cannot do that myself, obviously. So I need your help figuring out if any of this plan is feasible.> 

"...I think it's good that you're trying to do this," is the first thing he says, after some hesitation. "I'm proud of you. I ....guess Nirvana would probably take a person who isn't dead, under unusual circumstances. And they might have an outsider who would be willing to be a host for you so they have the chance to redeem you. A powerful cleric could take you there. I know the Dawn Priest in Katheer could do it, there might be others but I don't know who, or where."