"Ideally we'd get someone who knows how to provide you with better conditions than that."

"That would certainly be ideal and it is not currently clear that you are actually going to wait for ideal conditions."

"Before what?"

"Before - showing up and trying to chivvy people out of their hosts and keeping them in fishbowls?"

"So my intention here is to make it possible for people to leave what seems to be a startlingly poorly run polity, and to make people aware that it's possible. There's a bootstrap problem here where it would be easier to offer better conditions with more help from people who know things like what substances ought to go in the water with you, but I wouldn't have brought you here without both the ability to keep you alive in a human head indefinitely and the ability to take you back immediately. I am very concerned about all the slavery and I would like it to stop but at the moment I'm seeing how far I can get on that without making anyone I interact with worse off for having interacted with me. I don't want to keep anyone in a fishbowl if I can reasonably avoid it. I would appreciate your advice on making that clear."

"Don't sound like an Andalite," he mutters.

"I've never talked to one."

Shrug. "Neither have I."

"Do you have a sense of what they sound like?"

"Well, they offered us help at first, and then when we wanted anything beyond our own shitty little planet, suddenly they started doing genocide about it."

"That reminds me of some of the hells. People get very distrustful when they've been toyed with like that, and it's better than if they just blindly trusted demons again and again and never learned their lesson, but it's exhausting. Intentionally. Because making it harder for people to trust each other is funny, to them, or because it makes it harder for their enemies to coordinate against them. I'm sorry that happened to you."

"I wasn't there."

"I'm sorry it happened to your people. And that you had to live in the shadow of something like that. It doesn't only harm the people who were there in person."

Shrug.

"Is there any way not to seem like them that isn't just by being openly hostile?"

"I mean, you could also... not... propose crippling anyone for any amount of time for any reason."

"Okay, I'm confused about when I proposed that."

"Outside a host we don't have hands, or eyes, or the ability to communicate with anyone besides another Yeerk in the same pool without specialized computer equipment I'm going to guess you don't have. If somebody took your hands and your eyes and your voice would you say that was crippling? He's my hands and my eyes and my voice and every time you say 'slavery' in that voice I know you're thinking about how to take him from me."

"I am expecting a list of volunteers soon. I'm not the one who suggested that I speak with your host before then."

"- if you mean when I said I could let him talk, I can do that without leaving!"

"Huh! Verifiably?"

"Not unless you have a way to do that I don't know about."

"Then I'm willing to talk to him but I don't think it will be strategically important until you're comfortable leaving. Can I get an introduction to - things like that, that you might be assuming I already know?"

"I don't know what you already know, it seems to be kind of a weird combination of things."

"Maybe you could tell me what you are and where you're from and how you came to Earth and who the Andalites are and what your plans were before I interrupted you. Just pretend I don't know anything and that way you won't miss anything I don't know, and I'll try not to get impatient with you repeating things I do know."