<Can you pay people to do a Plane Shift for you without asking why.> It's - still incredibly risky, and he maybe wants to separate the host-getting, he doesn't know that much about Neutral Good outsiders but they might be terrible hosts in a wide variety of ways.

<...Would you be my host. If I were not willing to risk asking for an outsider or if they are not willing to do that.> Why is he asking that question. He didn't mean to ask that question, it just happened somehow. <I would ask Carissa but I - did promise her she could work without a Yeerk, and I am unwilling to outright break that agreement and do not want to make her feel too pressured to change her mind.> 

"I wouldn't personally know how to pay for a Plane Shift. You can pay for most things in some places.

I can - pray on that. Carissa is the Asmodean girl? I am not sure that'd be good for you, Asmodeanism isn't very healthy."

Mhalir doesn't know how to respond to that either so he just waves his tail in vague acknowledgement. <All right. Thank you.> 

Once he's away from the cleric, he unblocks Alloran from his senses, but doesn't say anything to him. He tells the shuttle crew to get some sleep and start the Rahadoum surveillance again in the morning, without him. 

He tries himself to sleep. 

In the morning there's an update on the Rahadoum surveillance. They identified some low-level parties and will follow them and get a sense of their capabilities. 

Carissa is studying her spells and humming to herself.

Mhalir spends the morning pacing and feeling like he's making a dozen tactical mistakes at once and like none of the pieces of the world hold together anymore. 

Once they have a bit more of a sense of the parties' capabilities, he asks the shuttle to return and collect him. They'll fly back down and watch until nightfall and then Mhalir can morph owl again and see what's going on in order to provide thoughtspeech instructions to the shuttle, and they'll attempt the temporary-infesting-and-amnesia variant of the plan. 

He asks Carissa if she's willing to come. She can bring her spells to study during all the waiting. 

Sure. Also if they want to give her a combat role kidnapping people, she could eventually hit fourth-circle that way and then she'll be able to scry the Andalite homeworld which sounds valuable.

<- I would prefer not to kidnap large numbers of people unless we thoroughly try the recruiting method and it is not workable, but I will consider that> Mhalir tells her. 

The shuttle descends, cloaked, armed with the sedative gas - useful in closed rooms, less so for out-in-the-open camping - and Dracon beams set to stun, and amnesia-causing drugs. Mhalir's plan is to morph and Yeerk the whole party one by one, which won't take him that long and doesn't require any of his crew to stop doing their jobs and leave their hosts to do it. (Also this group's hosts are dubiously voluntary so that would be fraught.) He asks the pilot to hover invisibly over the party they identified. 

There they are, four men in their twenties, three of them sleeping and one keeping watch.

They're out in the open so he'd better go with stun beams rather than gas. Mhalir morphs owl, has one of his personnel put the tiny owl helmet on for him, and perches nearby. He orders the shuttle to descend close, still cloaked, and turn up the Dracon beam setting slightly higher than they would usually put it to stun people but not high enough to kill an ordinary un-enhanced human, and to have a second person ready with the higher setting that works on powerful warriors who've had a lot of magic healing or whatever; he has a lot of uncertainty about how tough this particular party is. 

He wants them to stun the one keeping watch first and then immediately stun the others too and then land and grab them and haul them into the shuttle. 

The first stun isn't sufficient to knock out the one on watch, who yelps, but the next one gets him and the others. They haul them into the shuttle.

Mhalir orders the shuttle to take off and hover a good distance above the ground, in case anyone somehow noticed that and tries to Detect Thoughts nearby or something. 

The ship medic is along for this. Mhalir asks her to judge when the men will be awake, and to make sure they're given the amnesia-causing sedative before that happens and so 'wake up' too out of it to do anything. He's ready to morph whenever one of them looks near consciousness. 

The ship medic is super confused about how local people who are tougher than normal work. She can monitor their vitals and have a pretty good guess who'll wake up first, though.

Mhalir morphs, ignoring Alloran's emotions - Alloran hates the Yeerk morph - and slips into the man's ear. 

He's a trained swordfighter who took a bounty with some friends to go kill a three-headed lion thing that was raiding local herds. The way he gets jobs is that people post the job and bounty, like that, in the city. He hasn't been to Absalom but vaguely expects it works approximately that way for higher-level wizards too. 

Mhalir searches his head for everything related, then exits his ear and waits to be put in the next, and then the third and the fourth. He's very efficient at this. 

There's a druid who can shapeshift better than morph and a man who specializes in a bow from which he can fire magic arrows and a wizard, first-circle but pretty good for first-circle. They have about the same impressions; none of them have left Rahadoum. 

All right, good, better than nothing. Mhalir emerges and demorphs and orders the shuttle to land again and drop them back at their camp. They're going to be a little suspicious, because the man on watch will be asleep and will wake up without a memory of why, but Mhalir doesn't see how they'd have any way to know what happened to them, or how the authorities would if they decide to report it. 

Once the men have been deposited on the ground again, the shuttle can head back to the ship in orbit and all of them can get a night's sleep. 

In the morning Carissa prepares some new spells she hasn't tried before and tries using an illusion spell to imitate the interface of her science tablet and then works on a very tiny sword (this apparently works!).

Mhalir makes notes on everything he got from the Rahadoum adventurers' minds, and listens through recordings of tavern conversations, and writes recruiting scripts.

For one of them, he pushes Alloran down out of the way again, and afterward, with Alloran still shut out of his senses, he goes back to the cleric of Sarenrae. <Did you pray to your goddess about - whether you would be willing to be my host.> 

"Yes. She didn't answer. I - don't see how it's worse than the current situation but I do not feel particularly charitably about you so I worry it will not bring you the healing that you seek."

<...I suppose that is fair enough. I still want to do this.> He supposes at worst he can kick one of his staff out of their long-term host, they had some Earth human hosts along on the ship, but that's kind of rude, and disruptive. 

He goes back to Carissa. <Can I ask you a question? I - genuinely mean it as a question, not an order, you can say no and I will respect that.> 

"Can I have Detect Thoughts up?"

<Yes.> 

She does that. "Go ahead."

<I realize that I made an agreement that you could work without a Yeerk, in exchange for your cooperation, and I do not wish to break that agreement, having your cooperation is worth it. But I wish to have a different host. My plan is to send Alloran - elsewhere, where he cannot interfere in my plans, however, I do need a host. You are very smart, and a wizard and - I think we might actually get along, you could use my cleverness as well as your own for the magic study. And I could let you use your body by default except when I need to take notes or talk to my people. I will miss having morph, but magic is honestly better, and we can try to hire a druid.> 

He's thinking that he hates torturing Alloran and it feels very very bad for his ability to reason, somehow, and maybe it's been that way for a long time and he just never realized, and maybe Carissa will have a hard time believing he's doing this out of altruism but it's also true that having his host constantly yelling at him and hating him and trying to think of ways to undermine his plans is unpleasant and exhausting, and he would really prefer not that. He's thinking about how the cleric thought Asmodeanism might not be good for him either, and he's unsure what to think of that, but that maybe he and Carissa together could figure out what is true and just believe that. He's carefully not thinking about the specifics of his plan for where to stash Alloran, because opsec. He's still blocking Alloran from his own senses. 

<However> he adds, <I will not do this against your will, since that would defeat the entire point of switching hosts to one who hates me less.>