Carissa is curled up being mopey. Also she keeps thinking about how Mhalir and Malduoni are supposedly the same - person? The same story? And maybe that means that the difference between Good and Evil is in fact like the difference between Andalites and Yeerks, not fake but - everyone convinced they have no choice but to destroy each other when they do - she kind of wants to petition Iomedae about this even though it almost definitely won't help and anyway Iomedae can't interact with the time dilation either, she doesn't think, if She could then presumably Asmodeus could and it wouldn't be helpful.

Mhalir has also been wondering about that. He doesn't know how to address it productively here. It - seems different? Asmodeus wants everyone to go to Hell, where they get tortured. This seems...very hard to deny, at this point, whereas the whole thing with the Andalites is that they turned out to have very different values from the ones he thought they did. 

He doesn't share those thoughts with Carissa. At some point they should talk about it - and maybe she's right and they should talk to Iomedae too before committing their resources - but right now they're not committing to action, really, just helping plan. So he might as well do that. 

The Andalites are trying to figure out how the various layers of Hell relate to the other planes and particularly to z-space; they have better planar travel than Yeerks and frequently fight battles by hopping into and out of z-space so they can choose when to engage, and they'd much prefer to do that here but they're not sure how the planes they know of are configured relative to Golarion's Outer Planes, which they had not previously heard of. 

Nefreti knows all of these things though her explanations do not tend to immediately make sense or indeed have any relevance at all. She explains one point about planar distance with a long meandering analogy about a rabbit with three burrows.

<How did you get to this world in the first place> he asks Mhalir at one point.

"I have an experimental jump ship design. - I have not shared it with any of my people except those here in the system with us." 

And he hesitates only a few moments before offering to explain it now if the Andalite is interested. 

The Andalite is interested! And perhaps an impolite amount of surprised that he came up with something this clever.

Mhalir is not offended. He's happy to explain; it's interesting, and will generate goodwill with the Andalites, and it means he's not being useless during their precious time-outside-time. 

At some point he mentions offhand that one of the avenues he explored was informed by his previous independent research on morph. 

He has been doing independent research on morph? - well, it would make sense to want to reinvent it if you could. It'd be hard though, it was a massive project.

He didn't expect he would ever be able to reinvent it entirely on his own but he was working on some edge-case pieces. 

(Mhalir considers, briefly, whether he should avoid talking about this at all, and then decides it hardly matters anymore; he can't maintain that contingency-plan for immortality now that he's no longer in Alloran's body, and Golarion Resurrection is a better option for that anyway.) 

He can explain what he was working on, if the Andalite scientist wants to know! It involved hooking a second tether to an existing morph setup... 

- oh, wow, really? He had a similar project; with multiple tethers you could eliminate the time limit and maybe make it possible to retrieve people if killed in morph, and there's a related tweak that means a Yeerk infested a morphed form would have very little control or information - unapologetic tail-twitch - so they could maybe send people on more dangerous missions to learn what's going on on Yeerk planets. Eventually, of course, you could use it to make everybody immortal.

Mhalir doesn't explicitly say that his variant was for surviving if Alloran died in morph; he implies it was more exploratory and less complete than it really was; but he cheerfully explains the aspects he studied and some of what he figured out. 

He is impressed and thoroughly distracted from the discussion of the planes and just wants to talk about that for the next several hours.

It seems like the planar stuff is mostly bottlenecked on Malduoni finishing his explanation to the Andalites, and he's busy, so Mhalir is happy to keep talking at it until they're interrupted or Carissa's body is tired enough to need to sleep. 

With her Ring of Sustenance Carissa doesn't actually need very much sleep anymore. She's tired in a more fundamental sort of way. She can't follow their conversation. She has occasionally idly considered trying to grab her body back and lunge at the Andalite so he will kill them. This solves absolutely none of her problems at all and in fact gives her far worse problems which makes it odd that her brain even generated it as a prospective solution. 

Mhalir, when he manages to free enough of his attention from planar math to notice, thinks it's very worrying that her brain generated this solution! Asking if she's all right is an incredibly stupid question, though. 

Eventually he manages to extract himself from the conversation, says he needs a break to walk around and eat. Starts doing this. 

<Is there anything I can do to make this easier?> he asks Carissa. <We are going to be much more pressed for time after we leave this demiplane, but - telling the Andalites about my previous research is not actually time-sensitive, we can take a break if that would help.> 

Carissa feels a very unreasonable flash of irritation at the very reasonable question. Everything is about as easy as it possibly can be. They're in a beautiful bountiful demiplane outside of time and whenever in this planning session they need to know things about the Chelish military the things in question will be lifted out her head neatly and painlessly without even taking her hair off. And then they will leave this place and destroy everyone in Hell. And it's not as if Hell wouldn't do the same to them. 

It feels kind of like if she were valuable enough then it would seem wasteful to them to kill however many million of her there are in Hell but she doesn't exactly believe that either. Probably it wouldn't matter. This is about Asmodeus and Iomedae and - 

- she kind of wishes Mhalir would just tell her to shut up and stop being silly and then it'd be easier to - be Asmodean about all of this which ironically means being unbothered by fighting Asmodeus.

<I could. But - I think it would be bad for– I was going to say 'bad for you' but I should be honest about what I mean. Bad for the person I would prefer to see you grow into, as you - learn that you do not need to stay small. Becoming small again would - make it hurt less, I suppose, right now, but, just...> 

There's a nameless emotion rising in him, he's struggling to pin it down. 

<...We are doing something monstrous> he says finally. <Because we believe the alternative would be even worse. But - I would not ever ask you to say it was all right, for us to march on Cheliax and melt Hell into slag. It is wasteful. I...do not want you to cut out your own values in order to be more convenient to me.> 

She wants - 

- she has no idea what she wants. She doesn't want to want things she can't have. It seems like a waste of wanting things. 

Mhalir isn't sure what to say to her. He...wishes she could feel that someday she would be stronger and bigger and able to demand of the universe everything that she wants. But she isn't that strong, yet, and neither is he, and - he doesn't know how to convey what let him bear it, losing the things that mattered indescribably much to him, over and over. 

He remembers what it felt like, the first time he saw his own world from space. 

The first time he saw the stars through Hork-Bajir eyes. Gedd vision isn't good enough to really give the same gist. 

The feeling he felt, then, was: this is mine. This is worth protecting. 

Mhalir has always wanted so much, and more every time his horizons widen and he sees more that's worth protecting, now he knows that there are many many worlds and he wants to fight for all of them forever and - 

- and he's going to lose, over and over, that's the price of having wildly ambitious wants, and maybe it's a waste, but it would be a far greater waste, surely, if those very real things out in the world fail to be protected, and they still exist whether or not he lets himself want to protect them, and, and, and... 

She wants to prepare spells. They didn't do it before leaving and she'd like to have them, even if it doesn't matter here. And she wants to - help with planning for after they've won in Cheliax. Because everyone will be so scared, and she's worried that they'll consider it good enough, to build Osirion or something, where people mostly don't go to Hell - 

They should prepare spells, then! Mhalir also thinks it's very reasonable to want them, even here. And - yes, Mhalir thinks it could be very valuable to have Carissa's help planning what to do with Cheliax, later, when all of this is over. He absolutely agrees that building Osirion isn't good enough. 

She will try to pull herself together to prepare spells, then. 

She feels like she should apologize to Mhalir because he is very nice and she's been being really difficult all day but she doesn't actually want to, she isn't quite up for caring about specific other people right now, and he can presumably tell that so it'd make it not worth apologizing. She hopes he's having an okay time anyway since he can talk about planar research with Andalites.

<I am fine. I have been doing this kind of thing for decades and trust me, working with you is a hundred times easier than working with Alloran even when you are having a bad time of things.> 

Once they're done preparing spells and having a snack, he goes back to the Andalites and says that he would be delighted to keep talking about morph research but maybe they should figure out an agenda of topics that need to be discussed before they run out of demiplane time. 

<I hate politics and think they're stupid> Farin says. <But I guess you should go sort that out with Matirin.>