"I did!!! I don't see how I could possibly have married into more money! Maybe if I married Abadar's incarnation on Golarion but I'd have to share him and he's gay and he's Osirian."

"How do you know whether the pharaoh of Osirion is gay? When would that possibly come up?"

"Oh, he and Leareth are -" handwave. "And Iomedae told him She couldn't find him a wife too because he's gay."

"...Iomedae told him."

"Well, I don't think Abadar could, since it's not a money thing so I bet he couldn't notice, and I don't expect anyone in Osirion could lest they be beheaded for lèse-majesté -"

- giggle. 

Leareth paces and takes notes and draws up and discards half a dozen plans by the time they reach the point in the Void that they left. Ma'ar makes food and offers it to the Carissas and then they can take turns on the mattress, since each of them only needs two hours of sleep. 

And they arrive. 

"Mhalir?" Leareth says. 

Oh. Right. 

"Would - it be all right if I take, er..." Vague gesture at his current body; it feels too weirdly possessive to keep calling them 'Leareth's Carissa' and 'his Carissa'. Maybe they should have nicknames or something. "My people are not going to notice and I...would not have to explain..." 

She thinks that maybe a Carissa-swap would be good for everyone and in fact proposed a longer-term one but Leareth was opposed. She expects he'll be fine with a few hours, though. I can do Disguise Self to match her clothes.

Leareth doesn't seem delighted by this, but he nods. "I will Gate you over. Do you want to do a Sending to your people first or something, so we do not startle them into a hostile reaction?" 

...That's a good idea but he's not sure if this Carissa has the spell. "Carissa," he says to his, dully, "would you mind preparing a Sending if you do not already have one, and then contacting my ship and just saying that we are back and Leareth is Gating me over." 

She does this, silently. 

She is faster and defter at preparing spells, which is deeply unfair. 

"We're back, Leareth will have a Gate up in a minute," she says tonelessly once the Sending is ready.

Leareth thanks her politely, waits a little bit, and then does a Gate. He's not quite as fast this time; the Void moves relative to planetary systems in the material plane, and the ship has presumably moved relative to the planet, and he doesn't have a target there to scry this time so he's going purely off his memory of the interior. 

Within a minute, though, there's a milky glowing threshold. 

"Be careful," he says tightly. "Carissa, I should be able to contact you if I urgently need you back for any reason. Otherwise I can retrieve you in - how long, Mhalir...?" 

"Four hours ought be plenty, I think." 

"All right." He meets Carissa's eyes and nods. 

It is very sweet how much he wants her around but she's not actually worried about this at all and it'll probably be interesting.

Mhalir seizes tight control of Carissa's body, with a mental note of apology, and they cross. 

It goes smoothly enough; it's maybe interesting for Carissa even though Mhalir finds it quite tedious. His staff are worried, in the usual way they are when something big and overwhelming and complicated is happening. (Which occurs kind of a lot, actually.) He goes through all the usual steps of reassuring them that he has a plan and that being involved is worthwhile in expectation and there are a lot of possible upsides here. 

It takes some convincing that Leareth is definitely another of him/Aroden/Ma'ar, but less than the first time this came up. They are, eventually, amenable to following Leareth's Void-ship back and hanging around nearish the other Golarion. 

Mhalir does a lot of reassuring them that he's definitely considering the Yeerks' interests in whatever treaty they eventually make with Leareth'a Cheliax or other powers in his Golarion; it's just that for now infosec comes first. (In actual fact he's barely thought about the political formalities side of things, but he's surprisingly good at sounding like he's on top of it anyway.) 

Leareth doesn't like the parts of politics where you just reassuringly say over and over again that you're being reasonable either. Carissa kind of does like it, though she's mostly distracted by the experience of having her body under someone else's control. It feels kind of like it's important to complete the movements he's making, or like she'll trip over her words if she doesn't relax into the part of her that knows what she's saying, though presumably neither of those things are true. She concludes after some thought that normally the movement of her body is strong information about what she was intending and she keeps trying to interpret it that way and that's why it keeps feeling like she is in the middle of doing something. 

She considers, vaguely, that Yeerks would be terrifying adversaries, though she's not actually concerned about Mhalir or those who are loyal to him.

The Andalites were certainly terrified. Mhalir doesn't really feel like getting into that right now, though. 

He explains, in a way that makes it sound very reasonable, that he needs to be on Leareth's Void-ship for now to continue talking to him, but this time they can set it up properly, he'll take a comms device that works at least short-range in hyperspace so they can stay in touch, and he'll Gate across again once they arrive to catch them up on whatever he and Leareth have figured out by then. 

And four hours later Leareth does another Gate to the ship and transports them back across. 

With great relief, Mhalir sets down the comms device - it's heavy, since it needs to be very high-powered - and releases control of Carissa's body. <Thank you> he tells her. 

:Of course.:

Other Carissa found it surprisingly awkward to be in the ship without Mhalir and with the King of Cheliax who is married to a Iomedaen version of her. She hasn't moved from where she was sitting on the floor, though she stopped crying.