That makes sense. She - thinks she also felt it less when she was alone. Because obviously the only alternative to moving forward was giving up, and she wasn't going to do that. Whereas now there is the very tempting option of leaning back and hoping Mhalir can make all the bad things go away. 

She wants to get drunk. And hook up with her ex girlfriend from when she was in the army but there is no reasonable way to do this, at all, so she will settle for getting drunk. First they should report this and make arrangements to go tell the Council about it, probably. 

They could kidnap her ex-girlfriend they should absolutely not do that. Mhalir doesn't recall ever experiencing his host getting drunk? (He's briefly Yeerked people for interrogations when they were on a lot of drugs so they wouldn't remember it, but he suspects many parts of that experience are different.) Anyway they can go back to the ship and he'll brief his staff on what happened at the palace and after that he's sure the ship can turn up some alcohol for them. 

Yeah she has thought about whether there is any way to pull it off and she thinks her ex-girlfriend would only bit a bit upset to be kidnapped by aliens but being specifically kidnapped by your ex is kind of a different animal. 

Getting drunk is much easier than that, though!

Meeting with his staff and briefing them on everything that's happened is a lot easier than the happenings themselves, and Mhalir gets through that efficiently. His people are nervous about the Andalites but agree that it seems to have gone well overall.

Mhalir wants to stay in orbit here until the Andalites have spoken to Alloran, he decides, and he knows what if any updates they've made from it. Which means that it's not going to delay them, particularly, if Carissa spends tonight getting DRUNK. 

<What kind of alcohol do you want?> he asks her.

Fancy technological alcohol? She doesn't know what the options are.

The ship's "kitchen" can mix and recombine its stores of chemical raw materials to output food suitable to various different species' metabolisms and nutritional requirements. It's not the highest-end version of such a device that exists, it doesn't plate foods prettily for you like an automated gourmet chef, but Mhalir is sure it can handle 'liquids containing ethanol plus interesting flavourings'.

He sets the percentage-alcohol at 20%, which seems like it should get Carissa drunk efficiently but not too efficiently, and then pokes around the options a bit. Does Carissa want her fancy technological alcohol to taste like: tea, coffee, any of these fruit or vegetable juices, or any of these other flavour extracts normally used in food dishes? He assumes she doesn't want it to taste like meat or fish or chicken broth, that sounds terrible. 

What a world. That does sound terrible. Maybe they can ask some of the other humans on board for suggestions?

Sure! He goes to ask around with the human hosts. 

Several of them have opinions about their favourite Earth drinks! 

"Does she like beer or wine or straight liquor or mixed drinks?" one of them asks. "If it's mixed drinks, sweet or fruity or bitter or something else?" 

"You can talk directly to Carissa," Mhalir says, "she is the one who has opinions here, I am just along for the ride on this." 

Carissa doesn't have any idea but it gives some ideas for things to try at least!

One of the hosts is delighted to be a 'bartender' at the food-fabricator and give her ten different tiny sample cups of different drinks so she can pick her favourite! There's fake-bourbon with lemon and bitters, there's a raspberry one, there's a Bloody Mary, there's a creamy chocolate mint liqueur, and lots more! 

Oh wow this is fun. She likes the bourbon and the raspberry one and the chocolate mint drink and several of the wines and she really likes the thing where the more of these she has tried the less possible it feels to hold herself tightly enough that nothing awful happens, which didn't work anyway even when she was trying very hard at it. She wants to have so much to drink, right now, because she talked to a god today, and also to the aspect (??) of another god, and also to the mystic theurge of - yeah, today was really really ridiculous. 

She finds it incredibly charming, how whenever she conceives of some random irrelevant thing she wants Mhalir goes to some trouble to arrange for it. She thinks Mhalir is very charming. Right now her brain is actually generating the opinion that Mhalir is cute and she wants to kiss him, even though this objectively does not make a lot of sense and when he was actually in a human body she mostly felt sorry for him and wanted him to stop having to be stuck like that. Probably that was because he looked like a kicked puppy.

It's fascinating to discover that Yeerks do, apparently, get something-like-drunk along with their hosts if they are present in the brain the entire time that substances are being consumed. Mhalir had expected less of that, since Yeerks have a synaptic interface but a separate circulatory system, but he's only ever Yeerked drunk-and-drugged people very briefly and after the substances in question had been consumed or administered.

This is at first very mildly alarming, but - well, he's on his ship and pretty safe and he trusts his people and right now this is what his host needs and he thinks maybe it's what he needs too. He instructs the 'bartender' to let them have So Much to drink but to space it out and make sure they drink water and maybe some of the drinks can have fancy food pairings? Wine and cheese tastings are a thing humans on Earth do, he thinks vaguely. 

This is nice! He likes it when Carissa is happy! He feels kind of sparkly about it, in a similarish way to how he felt sparkly about economics before when he was in Merenre's head, except that this is HIS Carissa and he gets to be in her head ALL THE TIME and he's so happy about that!

- honestly he's always been kind of confused by what humans get out of kissing, and what Andalites get out of their equivalent activities, Yeerks don't have an equivalent there, but maybe Carissa can explain it to him better. 

Hmm, she can try? It's like, you spend all your time being very very cautious and reasonable and managing your expectations and not letting yourself want things, if you have any sense at all, and then there's this one context where it feels like all the ordinary rules are a bit topsy-turvy, and you can step out of your ordinary life into the situation where you're topless and kissing someone and instead of feeling strange like it objectively ought to, it feels nice, the way sitting close to a fire feels nice and the way doing challenging magic to the point of exhaustion feels nice, the sense of tasting something past the things you ordinarily do - you want something, and normally you try not to want things, but in this context wanting this thing is entirely fine and reasonable, and it collects all the cached-up wanting from a thousand other things and tries to carry you off.

And you still have to be careful and not an idiot, this is the main reason she doesn't hook up with men, because if you're hooking up with men and you lean too much into pretending that everything doesn't follow the ordinary rules you'll get hurt, but if you're with someone who is getting what they want from this interaction without having to maneuver you too much for it, then you can just let wanting carry you, and it's unlike everything else about being alive, and it's nice.

...Possibly they should talk to someone who's not an Asmodean about what non-Asmodeans get out of kissing. He's suddenly very curious if Malduoni kisses his wife, or used to when both of them weren't so ancient, and if so what he gets out of it, that feels more helpful because he's supposedly the same general-person-shape as Mhalir, who - doesn't exactly avoid letting himself want things, he wants so many things so strongly all the time, but exactly because of that he's usually prioritizing ruthlessly between them and he's not sure 'kissing' would ever make the cut before all the stupid problems in the world are fixed. 

But...maybe there's a similar shape of thing, in that? If you're someone who wants a thousand things very intensely, and some of them are bigger and harder and loomingly urgent and it's hard to set those aside and focus on the things that are small and restful and just...nice...then maybe there's a thing there that gets piled up the same way. Because it does feel kind of like there's some pressure held behind a dam, and he's not, yet, quite relaxed enough to let go of it fully, but - stretching the metaphor - he's opening the sluicegate and letting some of that pent-up something through. 

Maybe? She doesn't know much about what powerful people get out of sex and would have guessed from first principles that mostly they get the ability to make someone else not at all dangerous to them and then whatever nice things you can have after that, adjusted to taste. This is probably a pretty Asmodean opinion. ...and also, actually, many powerful nobles she's heard of take up with devils and not even necessarily bound devils, which suggests that maybe many people want something other than safety out of their sex life. 

Maybe - this is kind of hazy but she thinks it holds together - a nice thing about having a voluntary host is that you have to be at least a little nice to them, so they'll keep working with you, and this means you can put nice things on your to-do list and have them be legitimate strategic priorities, and Mhalir would actually be happier if Carissa had higher standards because then their priorities would include more nice things.

That seems right but also incomplete and he's not sure how to describe the missing piece. Probably because they're drunk. He doesn't feel very motivated to dig into it further, right now, instead he wants Carissa to ask the bartender-host for another drink, and they can stop trying to hold themselves tightly enough that nothing awful will happen, and just - live in the world, as it is right now, the very small world defined by the walls of the ship dining-room. It's a nice world, when you define it that narrowly. It doesn't have very many problems at all. 

He's both nonplussed and amused by the fact that nobles like to hook up with devils??? Are devils just hot or something? Now he's wondering if devils can be Yeerked. And if Carissa would find it hot if he captured a devil for her and infested them so she could have sex with a devil who was temporarily harmless. This is presumably a bad idea in a dozen different ways, of course. 

It is a bad idea and most of the appealing bit is Mhalir having a body with which he could hook up with her, the devil is pretty incidental. Devils come in lots of shapes and some of them are hot but she has no particular desire to hook up with one, even when she thought that they were the thing she should inevitably aim to become. Also it seems like sex with Mhalir would be worse if there were some other party present to keep track of even though this is pretty inevitably going to be a feature of sex with Mhalir, unless they're counting it as having sex if she gives him her hand to get her off. Which ought to count, now that she thinks about it. 

Well, if she gets powerful enough to cast Polymorph she can make him a temporary human body that looks however she wants it to look? Although Mhalir would have to get used to not knowing all her thoughts and feelings all the time, and right now he doesn't think he understands how human sex works nearly well enough to manage without that. ...If she wants to do a sharing-partial-control of her body thing, though, that sounds easier?

(Mhalir is not really thinking of this as different from 'getting drunk because Carissa wants to', they're both human things that are a bit baffling to him but also fun to the extent Carissa finds them fun.) 

Sober Carissa might think this is a terrible idea but drunk Carissa thinks it is a great idea though they will have to go back to their rooms not the ship's dining room and she is not sure she is very steady on her feet. Maybe she can cast Cat's Grace and then they will be able to walk, except casting drunk is also hard. Is Mhalir less drunk, can he do it.

Mhalir thinks he's somewhat less drunk than Carissa, or maybe it's just that Yeerks experience different effects from drunkenness and he's less impaired in his ability to pilot their her body than she is, or that he's the same amount of drunk but they can combine their still-working skills and get twice as much ability to do things.

He can take over, politely thank the bartender-host for the lovely evening, use Carissa's knowledge of spellcasting to cast Cat's Grace, and then very carefully walk drunk Carissa back to their rooms. He spends a moment wondering if he should try to stop drunk Carissa from doing something sober Carissa might think is a terrible idea, but he gets stuck on the fact that he can't figure why on earth she would think that, it seems actually a lot less risky than getting drunk since humans can get sick from drinking too much.

He makes them drink more water and then conveys Carissa's body to her bed, and - waits to see what she wants him to do next, he is somewhat hazy on the details and he can probably figure it out by diving deeper into her memories but it seems respectful to let her do some of the prompting here. 

Sober Carissa's worry will probably be something like that once you're fucking a guy he doesn't see you the same way but she is not really sure it's applicable to Yeerks, it doesn't seem like any of the usual reasons for it are, and also sober Carissa worries about too many things and tries too hard not to want things and not to react to things and not to make anything complicated and it's very very tiring and sober Carissa is FIRED from making decisions about Carissa things right now. She thinks this is unreasonably funny and starts giggling. If Mhalir can drag up instructions from her brain that would actually be great because she is not sure she is sober enough to give very good instructions.

Mhalir thinks maybe he will learn things about Carissa he hadn't fully grokked before, but he's definitely not going to see her in a worse light, that would be so silly. Worrying about things is maybe reasonable for the tomorrow versions of them, who will have to forge out into the bigger world that has so many problems in need of fixing, but right now the bounds of the world are defined by the walls of their bedroom and it's fine and there is nothing worth worrying about at all. 

He will drag up instructions from Carissa's brain and go from there. 

Drunk Carissa thinks she made great life choices. It is incredibly convenient how with Yeerks you can get the precise combination of 'knows exactly what you really want next' and also not having to make decisions! Yeerks should advertise this advantage of having them. Though it would probably not be nice at all if it wasn't Mhalir, who she trusts not to hurt her. (Sober Carissa would caveat that, would remember Mhalir the first time she read his mind, absolutely willing to puppet her body through making him magic items for the rest of the war, if it was the best way to get what he wanted, would remember that she has to make sure it isn't, but drunk Carissa thinks that this is a fake problem she doesn't actually have or need to worry about, and also thinks that Mhalir being scary is hot.)

The best state of affairs turns out to be if Mhalir controls only her hands because then the rest of her can squirm. It is kind of like being tied down which is one of those things which seems like it'd be hot if it were ever not really stupid.