Carissa thinks that even if the Andalites feel about this the same way she felt about the hundreds-of-Yeerks version if your other best plan is blowing up planets you are obliged to suck it up.

"You should go talk to Alloran before we finalize any arrangements," Mhalir hears himself say, dully. It's not going to help his cause, but - it seems fair, and important. 

Nod. 

"I don't suppose it'd help to try to explain the -" he says very quietly but Carissa has magically enhanced hearing. If anyone answers they do so with thoughtspeech.

Mhalir is sure he would normally be curious about that, but right now he's mostly thinking that he wants to be not around Andalites anymore. He's not sure where he does want to be. Somewhere else, somewhen else.

"Do you have any other questions for us." 

He glances at the pharaoh again. 

"Should we be coming up with accommodations? Do you want to meet with people in the church while you are here?"

"We have the ship in orbit and were planning to stay there, I think. Also we already went to the temple of Abadar to ask about Him. If there are others in the church who we should meet with, we can do that." 

"It seems like it might be helpful for you to read their minds for the same reason as it would be helpful with the Andalites. We suspect you cannot safely read Ours, it can be debilitating for humans to do so at a lower bandwidth. Prince Merenre, though, perhaps." He gestures at one of the humans, who waves.

Mhalir turns to look at Prince Merenre, startled. "You - are offering to have a Yeerk in your head so that our people will understand the Church of Abadar better?" 

"Is there any reason not to do this? It doesn't hurt, it doesn't cause long-term problems that a healing spell cannot solve, there is not an epidemic of people who did not predict caring about it declaring that there was some specific indescribable respect in which they were wrong about thinking it seemed fine?"

"It does not hurt or cause physical damage. I - think we have limited data on your third question, due to the conditions of the war, but I doubt that a few minutes of allowing your mind to be read would be indescribably upsetting, and if you discover it is unpleasant I can and will leave right away. I - suppose I am just surprised that you trust us with that." 

"I think probably under ordinary circumstances it will make sense for Yeerks to pay for people to host them," he says. "I am not sure that is a sensible solution in this case, though, given that most of what we are trying to establish is the foundation for being able to do normal trades like that in the future from a position of not being clear on other peoples' sincerity about wanting this."

"That makes sense. I - appreciate your willingness."

Mhalir is feeling suddenly very reluctant to leave Carissa's head, which his emotions are insisting is safe and cozy, and go into someone else's head which he probably won't like nearly as much. Or maybe the problem is that there are Andalites right there and Yeerks, while outside of a host, are very very squishy. 

"Why don't we get you a room somewhere quieter, we can have someone chaperone."

"Of course." He stands up, nods to the Andalites. 

<Carissa, are you doing all right?> he asks, even though this is sort of redundant because he can read her thoughts. 

She's fine. She wishes she could read everyone's minds. Mhalir doing diplomacy more than other things tends to make her feel - the word that comes to mind is 'Asmodean', but she thinks she's overapplying it lately - like she's terribly interchangeable, but on examination this is a stupid feeling and she doesn't expect Mhalir to do anything about it. She's confused about why they need a chaperone.

<Probably to make sure I behave, but I am also glad if it is more difficult for Merenre to decide to murder me when I am helpless.> Pause. <I am grateful to have you here, since you are a wizard and also I assume you are motivated to prevent my death.>

He follows the pharaoh.

Merenre's rooms contain an incredibly messy desk and are incredibly neat otherwise; clearly there is one place the servants are not allowed to touch. He sits down in an armchair near the fireplace and gestures at the one next to it. A pretty woman younger than Carissa follows them in, and stands against the wall. The pharaoh nods to Mhalir and leaves.

Carissa is absolutely going to try to prevent anyone murdering Mhalir but it's going to be hard, probably, if they try, because she thinks if you get into fights with Osirian royalty you get executed, and you can't Teleport in the Dome. The best shot would probably be to try to knock him out and then get a Sending off to Malduoni and hide and pray he has some way to work around the Dome.

Hopefully they won’t try because Abadar is Lawful and it’s not in the economic interests of Osirion to murder the Yeerk leader on Golarion.

“All right, I am leaving Carissa’s head now,” he says to Merenre, and then steels himself and starts doing that.

A few seconds after that he is held up to someone's head.

He slips in, looks around. Tries not to automatically take control, which he has more practice with now at least.

Merenre is a sixth-circle priest of the god of economics and the only thing he cares about in the world is economics. But he cares about it so much! He thinks it's so incredibly cool! He exclusively gives people gold for child and wedding presents because it is more efficient for them to use the gold to buy things they care about than for him to do so. He met his wife because she opened a shop that was selling magic items cheaper than anyone else and he went to check it out and got really excited about her strategy and invested a lot of money in it and courteously hit on the proprietor, who he thought was a man, and then later it came out that she was a crossdressing woman so he married her. 

He spends most of his time working out taxation and state insurance schemes and he has written several dozen economics papers elaborating on bits of the theory of how taxes affect wealth or how insurance changes which crops farmers grow. 

That means that by far the most overwhelmingly salient feature of this situation is that there are ALIENS with whom they can trade. He met his alternate world version, who is an Andalite who is similarly obsessed with economics, and he knows that electricity and computers and robotics and spaceships are all things that a civilization can build and he wants to pay people to teach his people how to do it. He is - mostly paying absolutely no attention to any other features of the situation. Wars are bad, and the war needs to be ended so that everybody can trade. Enslaving people is bad because it inefficiently allocates them and also means that their preferences don't get reflected in any of the functioning of the economy; instead, Yeerks can just pay people to be hosts for them. It also vastly improves on the current Osirian systems for criminals (execution, hard labor, or sale as slaves) and he wants to work that out but the Andalites were all horrified so he's not prioritizing it right now. The Andalites have weird values, which is fine, the whole idea of trade is that it works even when everyone has wildly different values. Evidently you'd have to pay Andalites a lot of money for them to agree to have a Yeerk in their head and they are entitled to feel this way even though it's impossible for him to identify any feature of the situation that would justify the high prince to Merenre.

Maybe if you are Khemet and know a lot of state secrets and also your mind is being constantly seared by contact with Abadar. (Merenre is the obvious next candidate for the pharaoh but he dearly hopes he'll never have to take the job. One of the most wonderful Andalite technologies, artificial insemination, was used immediately once Andalites explained it and now hopefully the pharaoh will have lots of heirs like he is supposed to.)

Merenre is unclear how this works; does Mhalir make a copy of him he can peruse later, or is he limited by his bandwidth (a new concept! a wonderful concept!) right now, or does Merenre have to shove thoughts at him. Merenre attempts to shove at him the sincere conviction that all war should end and everybody should instead trade freely with each other and end up richer than they started. (His Andalite alt agrees with this but thinks that trading with the Yeerks while they are actively enslaving people might be the wrong thing to do since none of the gains from trade will be distributed to the laborers who made it possible, what with how they are trapped screaming in their heads. Merenre acknowledged the point but thought you should mostly trade anyway in case it helps, sometimes it does in unexpected ways.)

Mhalir is mostly thinking that Merenre's mind is delightful to be in, in a very different way from Carissa's, he doesn't think he'd want to be here all the time but he's learned a dozen new concepts despite having studied the literature on economics from every planet that has it as a field (except the Andalites, it was impossible to get his hands on anything except what Seerow shared with the Yeerks right at the start.) 

He agrees that it's reasonable to ask the Yeerks to stop enslaving people as a condition of doing trade. The involved parties have enough leverage to ask that and make it happen, and - well, Mhalir's opinion is that the Yeerks never actually wanted to enslave people in the long run. It's possible some of the Yeerk Council would disagree with this, if it's the case that mandating voluntary hosts means fewer total hosts and hostless Yeerks in pools, but in fact Mhalir is the one conducting these negotiations on their behalf and so he can express his preferences, which are that it's excellent if the Yeerks have strong incentives to stop doing that.

...It's actually a really interesting question, how to allocate profits between a Yeerk and host working together, because the relationship can vary so much, it depends on both the Yeerk and the host's interests, obviously the host should always get something for offering the use of their eyes and hands and legs, but sometimes the host is the one with an existing skillset like engineering or accounting and is doing a lot of the cognitive work - like Carissa when they work together on magic research -  and sometimes they're not, and it seems like that should be reflected somehow.