Sure, he'll do that. It's still nervewracking to go interact with Andalites in person, but Mhalir thinks that he needs to get used to this sooner or later anyway. 

<Mhalir. Can you just read my mind about it? We'll waste less time. That's what I did with my alt, to pick up arcane magic.>

Mhalir is sufficiently surprised that it takes him an entire ten seconds to formulate an answer. "That - would be much more efficient, if you are willing to do that." 

<You can have ten minutes, I have a model running and it's not going to finish until then.>

"...Sure." Ten minutes is plenty this way, he thinks, Yeerk mindreading is very efficient and he's particularly practiced at it. 

He's also terrified, but it's recognizably the flavour of fear that doesn't have much to do with Firayar or this situation in particular, and it's easy to dissolve and ignore. 

<I will be back soon> he says to Carissa, and extracts himself from her head. Waits. 

Firayar picks him up and offers him his ear.

This is not a point where being scared will influence any decisions and so he mostly isn't. He slips in. 

He is very smart; he was already and then he got a headband and now he's even smarter and he loves it. 

He was making progress on improvements to morph even before this and it all came together once he had the headband and six uninterrupted months. Now he's trying to shove all of his thinking about morph at Mhalir. This worked quite well when he morphed Yeek to learn arcane magic from his alt; he came out of it capable of casting first level spells, and apparently you have to practice to improve from there, which is frustrating but at least he can practice illusion-spells while he works if he uses them for visualization. 

He is not thinking at all about Mhalir being Visser Three; he died, for one thing, and it feels rude to hold against someone things they did before they died and repented and had an afterlife and all, and also Mhalir seems clever so it'd be a waste for him to be stuck being Visser Three and never getting to do anything worthwhile.

Mhalir spends half a second noticing, privately, that this is - sweet, of him. He also would prefer not to be stuck spending much time being Visser Three, there are historical reasons why he still has some political responsibilities among his people but he's hoping to steer toward less of that rather than more.

Firayar's mind is GREAT. Mhalir is not nearly as clever. He was just very, very stubborn and motivated for the one particular application of multiple morph tethers that he wanted, and spent a decade hammering his way through one obstacle after another, and what he figured out in the end wasn't elegant or scalable or even something where he totally understood all the parts, but it did work. He has enough to go on from it that at least he's pretty sure where his gaps are, and can pull on those threads specifically in Firayar's head, making ruthlessly efficient use of his precious ten minutes. It's delightful, how he doesn't even have to think his questions in words. 

It's not annoying or distracting! He wasn't sure whether to expect it to be but it's not, which is convenient. His model finishes running and he pulls it up to look at, adds another layer with an illusion spell for practice, and starts concentrating. He's trying to figure out how to have morphs handle jumps gracefully. They currently don't handle them at all, but there's a research group getting close, but their solution isn't going to work for his variant on morph, which is more complicated.

That's even more interesting! Mhalir had been expecting to be kicked out after the ten minutes, and now Firayar seems to have forgotten about that, but Mhalir can hover non-distractingly in the back of his head and soak up everything and, once he feels at all sensibly oriented, nonverbally-poke at some points of confusion. 

- Farin notices that, and feels at once a flicker of irritation at the distracton and a flicker of interest at how, exactly, that works, and then is immediately diverted by considering the thing Mhalir is poking at, which is the way morph is configured in z-space. The problem is the tether. Local wizards can put their spellbook in the Ethereal Plane and recall it from anywhere because it's not tethered, the transmission point is 'magical', and this feels kind of like cheating but would be the ideal thing to do for morph, if it were possible, have the instruction set in one fixed highly-secure location and in communication with the body not because they're tethered to each other but because they can mirror each other with magic...

Mhalir doesn't see why that shouldn't work, in theory - they were able to do input-ouput to the database computer in Nirvana (originally just Alloran's brain chip) with magic rather than any kind of tech-based link, that was of course a much lower bandwidth transmission and it would require a different kind of spell to do this, maybe a kind that doesn't exist yet, but they know Aroden - or at least Mhalir does, he's been in Aroden's head - and Aroden is better than anyone in the world at inventing new spells by using his remembered god-intuitions for magic, Mhalir already has a meeting planned with him in a few weeks and can ask then? 

(This is the most fun way to do research, he's already concluding, there's so little friction in the way of communicating ideas.) 

- huh. Sure, if Aroden can figure out how to do the magic or give an immediate ballpark estimate of the feasibility of doing it, then that'd be very valuable. The main advantage of the technical approach is that the Andalites can just manufacture morph boxes, and magic isn't as suited to that yet, but Cayaldwin was working on that - he calls over Cayaldwin to ask some questions about that -

Cayaldwin trots over and can get them up to date about that.

This is also very useful, Cayaldwin and Firayar communicate in such a dense-packed way and Mhalir is getting so much so quickly from this - 

- though eventually he remembers that it's been a lot longer than ten minutes and he doesn't want to take too much of Firayar's time, he feels caught up enough now that he can mull over it usefully on his own and better make sense of written updates. 

<Oh, right.> He looks around for Carissa, who has sat down in the grass and is watching the Andalites practice magic. He trots over to her. <Do you want Visser Three back?>

"- Mhalir. Yes."

<Thank you. I will be in touch.>

And he slips out of Firayar’s ear for the transfer.

She puts him back. She was kind of worried and she is relieved he is back now!

<We can go now.> He's also relieved to be back, though his thoughts are all sparkly about morph research and how it's the most interesting thing and Firayar is so clever. He's also very impatient and his head is kind of overwhelming to be in, though. And he's not Carissa. 

Carissa does have that edge over other people, for as long as it lasts, that Mhalir's familiar with her. What sort of research was he doing?

Mhalir tries to get her up to speed on it as they head back to their room, especially the role that magic could play in getting it to work with hyperspace jumps (and Plane Shifts). He's very excited, though, which means he has a tendency to bounce around between ideas and go way too fast. 

She could probably learn how to follow it eventually but she is missing a lot of background and planar arts was never really her greatest area of interest. Does this mean we might get to have the magic shapeshifting?

<I am not going to push too hard on that just yet, but - I hope so, eventually.>