Nothing visibly happens right away except that the blue area spreads, slowly.

Lotta hurry-up-and-wait, in war and space travel, Julie observes, when she next wakes up, a while later. Her lungs feel full of proto again but it's doing a better job; she can still breathe. 

:Definitely seems like that's the case: The Healer hands her a waterskin of fruit juice. :Drink up, please: 

Some of Leareth's mages are grabbing their own turns napping; they're planning to sleep in shifts, here.

She's so sick of fruit juice. She obediently tries to drink it, though. Puts on a new show. 

Her kidneys have been very busy filtering all the bizarre things happening in her blood and are starting to have a breakdown about it.

Leareth's Healers are really wishing they had Shavri here for this - she's sort of inexplicably incredible at the particular intersection of 'figuring out what's going wrong' and 'actually communicating to the Proto how to stop breaking everything'. 

The woman with the best fine-detail Sight has a close-up look at Julie's kidneys, though, and tries to push across to the Proto their sense of what's currently going wrong and what it needs to do differently to address it, while the others focus on dumping Healing-energy into her and directly Healing the struggling organs. 

It will try even though Julie is a very bad design and very hard to live in.

Can the Proto...have a bit less of itself in Julie? Now that they know it can relocate at all, the Healer with the strongest Mindspeech and best mental-visualization ability starts trying to explain to the Proto that maybe it could...move some of its activity out of Julie and into the rock outside the ship? 

(They do this very cautiously, since at this point the Proto has actively replaced a bunch of Julie's tissue and having her be infected is...probably not reversible, but maybe they can at least lighten the load?) 

There should be more of it outside the ship but it doesn't really comprehend why there should be less of it in Julie.

Is 'because they're asking nicely' at all persuasive? 

The protomolecule is so confused and frustrated!!!!!!! It echoes back everything they are saying at them in their own voices at increasing speed.

...All right they will stop asking it to do things when it clearly isn't following, and just focusing on throwing as much Healing as they can at Julie and trying to catch up a little. 

Leareth eventually wakes up; yet again he's pretty sure he feels worse than before, and isn't sure if this is because of the infection or the recent g-forces he subjected his body to. 

He asks Julie if there's any reason they can't run the drive for a while, without actually going anywhere, maybe just going in circles around the Moon? The Proto seems to find that energy helpful and he wants to let it grow, now, so it'll be smarter and he'll have more hope of teaching it various concepts necessary for actual cooperation here. 

There's not much left on the thrusters but I guess it's not that hard to take off from a moon. We shouldn't plan on being able to land again, though, if you wanna go hang out in orbit now.

:Noted: Sigh. :I need to...think it over...: 

Leareth spends a while trying to do this, and feeling like he's definitely failing to think of a number of probably-important considerations, but asking Nayoki to help doesn't turn up anything new. 

Eventually he tries to ask the Proto, mostly in mental images rather than words, whether it'll cause any trouble if they have the ship in orbit (and presumably some of the Proto there to take in the tasty resources from it), while the rest of the Proto works on eating the moon? Will it be able to move itself to rejoin the ship once it's done growing? Or - and this part is more hypothetical and harder to picture - eventually cast a Gate big enough to just move the ship and itself through? 

?

...Okay, he's pretty sure the grown Proto will be able to handle arbitrary sized Gates just fine. 

He's also pretty sure they don't want to wait for the Proto to literally build a wormhole, to Earth or anywhere else, that seems like overkill for their problem and also way too time-consuming. But that conversation will be easier to have in a day or two when there's more Proto. 

:I think we should take the shuttle to orbit and use the drive: he tells Julie, wearily, and closes his eyes again. 

All right. 

Strap in, she tells everyone, and sets the autopilot, and closes her eyes, just for a bit, on the ride up.

Leareth is exhausted enough that he nods off a bit despite the acceleration. Lately it feels like even just Mindspeaking the Proto leaves him tired. 

Nayoki checks in with the Healers. 

She's worried. About both of the patients, because they're going to need Julie if they want to make contact with her world in a non-politically-disastrous way, but moreso about Leareth. Leareth is her person. She doesn't know what any of them would do, here, without him. 

- of course, there's the echo-of-Leareth that lives inside the Proto, now, but she has no idea how to relate to that, and her thoughts bounce away. She goes back to watching Julie's current show. Wondering if it makes sense to try to learn the language, for when they do travel to Earth. 

(...If. It's still an if, not a when.) 

Julie is out for twelve hours. The show concludes and the next one on the computers is a drone cooking show. The one after that is low-gravity sports. The one after that is a show about a polycule raising a toddler on an orbital science station. 

Julie has a couple of quiet seizures, visible to Healing-Sight and not very visible otherwise.

The Healers try to half-wake her every once in a while to get more fluids down her. This is annoying enough that eventually they pull in one of the mages who also has Fetching and Mindspeech, to see if they can piece together some concert-work arrangement that lets them Fetch small amounts of fluids and nutrients into her stomach without needing the 'swallowing' step. 

They're alarmed about the seizures, and focus on throwing Healing-energy at her brain to mitigate the negative effects, plus tracing down whatever metabolic or other abnormalities are triggering this.  

They're just waiting, now. Leareth mostly stops trying to do any planning, or strategizing, or really having coherent thoughts at all. Save his energy for when it matters most. 

The proto spreads out thin and shimmery across the sunny parts of the moon, and eats, and eats, and grows.

The Healers figure out their Fetching technique. Now the biggest problem is that Julie is incredibly protein-deficient, and this is a lot harder to address by fetching spoonfuls of easy-to-digest liquids into her stomach. Also her digestive system isn't working that well thanks to all the Proto involvement. They're really hoping that the medicine in Julie's world will have better solutions to this, but they don't have that yet. 

Maybe they can make some protein-goo by sort of mashing beef jerky in a bit of water, and then - attempt to show the Proto close-up Healing-Sight of one of the nearby examples of a healthy human gut, then the comparison with Julie, and try to convey that it needs to help get more of these particular nutrients into her bloodstream?

(Julie's bowels are also very sluggish and half-shut-down, since she hasn't been eating anything solid for so long, but for now they'll intervene just enough to try to head off an actual bowel obstruction.) 

The next time she's awake at the same time as Leareth she asks him worriedly will it, uh, tell us. When it's ready?