"Oh. Yes, thank you, I would appreciate that. Also, who should I talk to about the politics required for Andalites to be comfortable with Golarion hosts more generally?" 

Impatient tail-flick. <Not me. Matirin, probably.> He gestures at Matirin, who is elsewhere talking to some other Andalites.

"Thank you." 

He is way less interested in this conversation, but he won't be able to usefully keep up in the interesting part until he's caught up on their progress in the interim, and figuring out this part is important even if it's not as shiny. He heads over, greets Matirin politely, asks the same question but with more detail. 

<- honestly most of it is that the locals are very powerful and it makes us nervous, and that'll get better over time with more work on un-enslaving everybody. The other things we're looking at are - a lot of the Osirian state's system relies on truth spells, which are easy to circumvent if you can vary who is speaking; we are unsure the effects it'll have on peoples' afterlives, and that's a pretty major uncertainty to ask them to embrace, considering how bad some of the afterlives are; we are having a vicious internal debate about whether it's our business that they have slavery themselves and depending on the outcome of that might intervene a bunch more here...>

He agrees that all of those concerns are reasonable, and describes Carissa's idea for an artifact that could show who was in control or speaking at a given moment, which might help with the Truth Spell-related concerns? 

That does sound very helpful, for truth spells and also for various other concerns about situations where people might have the right to know if there's a Yeerk present. For example Andalites kind of think that sexual partners have a right to know that? The locals disagree but Matirin thinks this is because they don't have the concept of consent for sex anyway. 

...Mhalir is a Yeerk and he suspects that results in him being sort of inherently baffled about both human and Andalite sex, but it does seem like some of the locals' beliefs here are concerning in a broader way, reflective of the overall thing where they're used to existing in scarcity and under threat? He suspects that both Yeerks and sex would be less fraught if those conditions no longer held. 

That is as Matirin understands it a very Nirvanan perspective about it, and probably correct. If the vicious internal debate goes the way he's hoping, then Andalites will be helping with ensuring the conditions stop holding, and at that point he'll of course be happy for Yeerks to have voluntary local hosts. 

- Carissa is outside the parameters agreed upon in the peace treaty, because she was kidnapped and Yeerked involuntarily at first, he's trusting them both that it's fine and that Carissa's time dead can count as time free to consider whether she wants him back but Mhalir should be aware that if it turns out not fine it will sow significant distrust about how well the peace treaty is being abided by.

...Does Matirin want him to leave Carissa's head for a bit so he can ask her without any chance of interference? 

(It occurs to Mhalir a moment later that he should have checked first if Carissa is up for this, and he sends a vague sense of apology at her.) 

<I trust the pharaoh, especially on matters I know myself to have a blind spot about. And the pharaoh is confident you would not lie about who is moving your body. I am not sure he can be wrong about things like that. He's very magic.> He's faintly jealous.

"I," Carissa says, "got a choice about whether I wanted to come back to life, and did, and it'd be entirely reasonable for Mhalir's people who spent thirty thousand gold raising me from the dead to have done that in the expectation that I'd host Mhalir afterwards as I have already agreed to do in the past, but instead of expecting that Mhalir said I could go spend a year in Axis being a rich person, if it'll make me feel better."

<Thank you. You think we're being - immature, and stubborn at the expense of some very important things.>

"Yes. You're - even richer than Mhalir's people - you could just solve everything -"

<We are trying to! But last time we tried we made a really bad mistake and now we're trying to definitely not do that again and it's not trivial.>

Mhalir doesn't say anything. It's a very effortful not-saying-anything and he's leaking to Carissa more than he would maybe intend.

He - doesn't think that Seerow obviously made a mistake? Not the first part, anyway, the technology-sharing; that still feels bright and blazing and right to him. 

He misses Seerow so much and he wishes they could bring him back for just thirty thousand gold, that would be so cheap, and - they can't - because the universe is broken and unfair and there was no one, not even Asmodeus, to hold onto his pattern when he died. 

He's so angry with Seerow, for not talking to him, not having that one additional step of patience and charitability, to check if he was understanding correctly what the Yeerks meant and intended to do...

...and he understands why, because Seerow was scared, because he felt under threat, and Mhalir himself has a hundred times noticed his uncertainty and decided he didn't have the luxury of giving the benefit of the doubt or waiting to learn more - 

There are so many feelings he has that he didn't have handles for, before, and are now so much clearer to him, and - he's not sure if there's anything at all useful that he can say, here, given all the history between their two peoples, but - he wants Carissa to understand that he doesn't judge Matirin for feeling that way. It's very reasonable of him. 

She's kind of impressed with Nirvana. And kind of unsure, whether the fact they can push people in that direction makes them right, or whether that even means anything.

"You didn't - weigh a thousand different considerations and err in favor of nonintervention - when it came to fighting Hell."

< - you had nine planes ruled by a very intelligent evil god who had billions of people in his service. It's - bad, obviously, it's getting worse every day, and Asmodeus had the intelligence and resources to, if we didn't act very quickly, make it impossible to do anything. The general situation is also bad but it's not intelligent and opposed to us, it doesn't get worse if we think.>

"People die who can't come back. On the other planets."

<Yes. More of them, if you - spark a war, by trying to roll out technology stupidly. I think that we should figure out how to share a modified version of morph that gives people the healing and de-aging with everyone. I think that is probably what we'll decide once we discuss it. But...we want our approach to fail more gracefully than it did this time. We know that we're paying for that in innocent people dead forever. I'm sorry.>

" - no one - cares about - people from other worlds. They just don't. I don't - believe you, that you're weighing that, appropriately, or at all...and why would you, no one ever does -"

<...I think Cheliax was worse than most places, and in some of them this would seem less implausible. But certainly - people are worse at caring about faraway people, both in the sense that many of them do care about them less and in the sense that even if you care about them your guesses about how to do right by them will be worse. This is - part of what the original interest in morph was for, actually, before the war. Interworld diplomacy. That you can understand people better if you can - see the world how they see it.>

"Have Andalites morphed Yeerk?"

<...yes. We don't like it.>

"Just seems like Yeerks might be better than morph for that thing. For - seeing how other people see the world. Not missing big pieces of it."

<...maybe. Some of us have morphed Yeerk to - look at our alts. To understand the alternate universe versions of people thing.>