<I am definitely important enough to assert that and also your mind would not be very reassuring on that front, since - well, much of your reasoning is still very Asmodean-flavored.> He doesn't know a better way to put it. <And I think it is reasonable to find Yeerking more invasive than human sexual intercourse. Humans do not share all of each other's memories when having sex, unless that is a magic thing that exists here?> 

Not that she's ever heard of and it sounds horrible! Most countries have marriages as a property rights arrangement of some kind where a man acquires partial ownership of a woman and prospective offspring and in exchange the woman...doesn't get stoned to death for fucking him? She's not entirely sure what the woman gets out of it. In Cheliax marriage is still a thing but it's not a property rights thing, it's just a declaration you're really into one and, among the nobility, that your children will be considered related. 

...this seems like one of those beliefs she should actually probably check with the locals and see what their opinion on how it works in other countries is.

<Parmida is not Chelish and her marriage with the wizard does not seem like that. But it had sounded like he was Chelish so maybe he imported your customs. I am not sure how long ago that would have been, he seems very old.> 

He might've left during the civil war; most people who could, did, and it's the least sketchy explanation for having a Qadiran wife. (In general if a Chelish man has a Qadiran wife, he looked at the way Cheliax does marriage and decided he'd rather have the property rights thing and she thinks that's pretty sketchy of him.)

<Anyway I think we should ask the locals about a number of things. This place seems like it has people from many different countries. I think that is not urgent, though. Lucia said she was talking to her superiors about something and I want to find out what and what their verdict is.> 

Mhalir's three other personnel are very relieved to be offered hosts! They're also pretty nervous about it, gods are scary and Good gods maybe especially so, but they'll accept the offer anyway, and they can follow Mhalir's protocols for friendly relations with voluntary hosts, which is basically 'let them override if they want to, unless they're about to do something extremely stupid.' 

These paladins of Iomedae are not nervous about it at all because they are paladins. Their understanding of the situation is that the slug-people come from an alien world with fabulous abilities but no gods, and they might be valuable allies, but they need context on Iomedae in order to feel safe entrusting the safety of their people to her. They hope they will be a good witness for Iomedae; her teachings might be harder to appreciate if you're a slug-person because they emphasize swords a lot but it is, actually, also okay to fight evil with metaphorical swords.

Estil 253 somewhat awkwardly introduces himself to one of the paladins while still in his Polymorphed human body - both of the them hated this, having no one else to talk to in your head is awful, and having your coworker in your head is better than that but so weird. 

Then he tries to think very hard that he doesn't want to be human-shaped anymore. 

Then Amarco will pick him up and hold him up to his ear! He's thinking that he's going to be a bit late for evening chores though hopefully by the time he gets back from the space expedition everyone will have forgotten one evening of being late for chores.

Wow. Estil has only been in a handful of hosts, but this is so different, even the voluntary Controllers on Earth are usually nervous, or self-conscious about having their entire minds read. Also being in a new mind is always the most wonderful thing, spreading out and everything being new and bright and fascinating and he explores half a dozen threads of it at once - 

- maybe he should focus on the part about Iomedae, what's the deal with Iomedae according to this guy who works for Her. He has pretty limited context on the gods at all, mostly just talking to the Yeerk who had the cleric host up on the ship, and Iomedae sounds way more into swords than Sarenrae which is alarming. 

Iomedae is into defeating Evil. Evil takes many forms, such as the orcs who overrun and pillage villages in Lastwall if the border patrols aren't vigilant, and the vampires of Ustalav who chew through the locals for the blood they love drinking, or the demons pouring out of the Worldwound, or the devils ruling Cheliax.  You do have to prioritize but the end goal here is to defeat all of the Evil. Sarenrae believes that all evildoers have a spark of good in them and can be redeemed; Iomedae doesn't disagree on this, exactly, it's a matter of emphasis, but it is definitely not her emphasis. The vampires probably have a spark of good in them but the villagers have way more sparks of good in them if you don't drink their blood, y'know?

Amarco wonders if it's okay if he goes to chores while his Yeerk looks at stuff, or whether that will be distracting.

Estil would be delighted to watch him do chores too! Most Yeerks like doing things in bodies, and riding along watching someone else do the things and getting the sensory experience of it is almost as good as doing it. 

He's a bit surprised that Iomedae would side with the Yeerks and not the Andalites? He doesn't think Yeerks are inherently awful and obviously much worse than Andalites but it's certainly seemed like the rest of the galaxy thinks so. 

In general the right side of random wars to be on is the side of there not being a war, because wars strengthen evil on every side of them. It would be pretty surprising if Iomedae wanted her soldiers to shoot at Andalite ships or burn down Andalite bridges but it doesn't seem very surprising that she wants them to go evangelize. Why do people think Yeerks are inherently awful?

Estil has some trouble explaining that, actually. They just do? With the Andalites it's probably because they think the Yeerks killed Seerow after he gave them technology out of the kindness of his heart - he thinks they must've tried to send a message saying what had really happened but obviously no one believed it. Also Andalites just seem to inherently hate hate hate the idea of a creature that goes in your head and reads your mind and uses your body. Taxxons don't hate Yeerks and in fact find them really helpful - he had a Taxxon as his first host, he didn't like it because constantly using his willpower to restrain the hunger was tiring, but his host was friendly with him. He feels like the Andalites also hate Taxxons for being gross giant cannibal worms, though. 

Amarco is going to catch up to his cohort mucking out the stables and murmur apologetically and join them. They sing hymns while they work, sometimes.

That description of the Andalites makes them just sound...racist? Which isn't rare or anything but it is really not the most sympathetic of motives. Maybe all Taxxons are chaotic evil because of the cannibal wormness and the Andalites think it's okay to kill anything that's chaotic evil, which is admittedly a stance that some paladin orders take. (The official stance of the church of Iomedae is that 'killing generally evil people' is not an acceptable mission objective, though sometimes you have mission objectives which cannot be achieved without killing evil people, like if they're invading and your mission objective is to stop them.)

Estil doesn't think the Andalites have any idea if Taxxons are chaotic evil, since no one has ever heard of alignments before now! He's really curious, actually, if they're bringing some clerics back with them, whether they can do the detecting alignment thingy and what the balance will be. Hork-Bajirs seem very not evil, even though they're covering in giant spikes, they tend to be really gentle and sweet as people. Also so dumb, no offence to them.

Estil feels a bit like Mhalir's stance on the whole involuntary hosts thing is like Iomedae's stance on murdering people? He thinks it's bad, and someday when they have more wiggle room they won't do it anymore, but he also thought it could be justified as a temporary measure in extreme circumstances. He's definitely more strongly against it than the Yeerk Council right now, except for that one Yeerk he gets along better with. He's really mad about how the invasion on Earth is being handled, he thinks they could be laying a lot more careful groundwork for most of the five billion hoped-for eventual hosts to be voluntary and instead Visser One is being sloppy about that even though she's also kind of against involuntary Controllers. (Mostly Estil thinks Mhalir is more pragmatic and willing to see propaganda and manipulation as at least better than kidnapping people, and also he thinks ahead more.)

He thinks it'd be really nice if they ended up winning the war and only having hosts who wanted Yeerks. It's just very socially awkward sharing a head with someone who shouts at you a lot. One of the Yeerks who'd been on Earth for a while brought back a collection of all the various human insults that his pool-mates there had heard from their hosts. 

You really really shouldn't enslave people! It's an intensely awful thing to do! They've rescued former slaves, sometimes, and they're - hollowed out, deeply traumatized, having painfully unlearned lots of the basic things you need to believe in order to feel safe in the world. It's not surprising that some Yeerks think it's okay, some humans do too, because some people don't actually mind doing awful things to other people, but it's awful. Presumably it has been communicated that the Church of Iomedae will not help people take or keep slaves.

Huh, he hadn't really thought about that. Somehow he'd been imagining they would win the war and then tell all the involuntary and semi-voluntary hosts that they could stop having Yeerks if they wanted - he was kind of worried this would be nine-tenths of all the Earth humans and suddenly billions of Yeerks would be waiting host-less in pools, he's wondered if that's a reason Mhalir wanted to go a less involuntary route. Anyway, he'd been picturing the hosts just - being fine? Are people not fine when they get freed after having been not-free for a while? That's kind of a horrible thing to learn about the world, actually, it's very upsetting! 

No! They're definitely not! Being enslaved is really bad for people for the rest of their lives and a long time after that! 

Okay if that's true he will grudgingly admit that maaaaybe the Andalites have any amount of a point about Yeerks taking involuntary hosts being comparably bad to murdering people - in a place, he reminds her, where as far as anyone knows there are no gods and dead people just cease existing. He's always thought that seemed obviously wrong, but... Actually Andalites think being Yeerked is a lot worse than death, which is why they bioweaponed an entire planet of Hork-Bajir about it. (It's upsetting every time he thinks about it, the poor things, they didn't even know what was happening. Estil likes Hork-Bajir, he hasn't had one as a host himself but he's heard what they're like, even the involuntary hosts are apparently pretty nice to hang out with.) He's always felt like Alloran kind of deserved to be captured and used by Mhalir because who was he to talk about doing horrible things in wartime, but - maybe he should be less mad at Alloran about it than he is? 

Well, murdering an entire planet of people is also incredibly evil! Amarco is so concerned for these poor people who have no detect alignment and just have to go off their best guesses about which things are evil. Murdering people to prevent them from being slaves is definitely not an okay mission objective. Murdering people because they are slaves also isn't! ...murdering people because they are slaves and actively trying to kill you while they are enslaved is but it sounds like that's not what was going on? 

Suicide is evil because you are supposed to do as much good as you can in this life. Taking on incredibly dangerous assignments is allowed, though, if you don't want to take very long about doing as much good as you can in this life.

To be fair the Andalites probably did it because they were afraid that if they didn't they would end up in a situation where all the Hork-Bajir were enslaved and being forced by their Yeerks to kill all the Andalites and then the Yeerks would win and enslave everyone in the entire galaxy forever. Which - he supposes is plausibly bad enough that someone like Mhalir would be that ruthless about stopping it. This wasn't ever the plan but it seems like most of the war is because the Andalites and Yeerks mostly can't communicate things like that even though Mhalir at least was trying really hard to for a while. 

Well maybe then the plan is to convince the Yeerks to stop enslaving people and then tell the Andalites this is done and maybe they'll stop wanting to fight the Yeerks since the Yeerks stopped doing the thing they wanted to fight them about.

They finish the stables and go to dinner and say a prayer asking that their meal give them the strength to defeat Evil and then they gossip about the aliens. Amarco, because he has one, has an advantage at gossiping. Everyone has lots of questions for Estil. Do Yeerks just not know of any gods? Does that make them sad? What do Yeerks who particularly want to improve the world do?

Estil never thought about whether he was sad there weren't gods. They've heard claims about gods? The Andalites claim a god gave them thoughtspeech and maybe some of their technology too, which - sounds less implausible now than it did the first time he heard it. 

He's not sure it's a very good time to be a Yeerk if you care about improving the world? Mostly the world seems really terrible and like it won't start getting better for a long long time and that's mostly not under his control. He thinks that when their people met Seerow was a good time to be a Yeerk who wanted to improve the world, because then you'd be one of the Yeerks who worked closely with Seerow, like Mhalir. Estil himself is way younger than Mhalir, he's, like, sixteen in Earth years, he only got the position on Mhalir's ship because he's an unusually good pilot. All he's ever known is being at war. 

The paladins mostly find this relatable. They share war stories from their world, which also has wars all of the time. There are still chances to improve the world, though.

Estil finds this really helpful, actually! He's decided he likes Amarco. He hopes Amarco finds him at least tolerable.