"I was sort of assuming that you knew enough that I could not meaningfully give you any classified information."

Sigh. "I see. Is there any information you definitely do want me to have?"

"...not really?"

"Okay. Do you still want to stay?"

"Dunno."

"Okay. I'm going to be talking to some people about plans, but I'll be close by for a while if you want time to think about it."

"Thanks."

He will go sit under a cherry tree.

Jess meanders in the direction of the trees in the hope that Atsinni might want to have a different conversation while they're here.

"Hello."

"Hey. That got heavy as hell - pardon the pun, it was completely intentional - I'm just. Still curious about everything else about aliens that isn't about that."

"We're little mollusky guys. Andalites are furry blue centaurs with sharp butts and stalk eyes, but they can shapeshift. There's Taxxons, those are yellow and centipedey. Hork-Bajir are kinda like lizard people with knives attached all over 'em. There's Skrit Na, those don't work as hosts but we get along with them better than the Andalites do most of the time. There's Leerans, they're froggy aquatic folks."

"That's a lot. What are they all like, like, as people?"

"Oh, and there's our original hosts, Gedds. Gedds and Hork-Bajir are both pretty stupid. Taxxons are smart but they're also ravenously hungry basically all the time, they'll eat each other alive sometimes if they don't have Yeerks but we have good enough executive function to stop them. Uh, Skrit Na run around collecting junk and studying it, they've abducted the occasional human but I think they usually put them back after. Leerans can read minds. Andalites are dicks, they think everybody should be just like them but they don't think it enough to let anyone else have the shapeshifting technology."

"...The Skrit Na sound cool. I assume you don't have a single-sentence description for your own species because you know too many different people to sum them all up like that?"

"i mean, we're the ones that go into hosts' heads and operate from there, but I figured you had been read in on that part."

"Is that who you are, you borrow just any old body and do unspecified things even you don't care about? I also like having hands but I like having them for stuff."

"I mean, no, but I didn't think you were asking about my fiber arts hobby or what I thought about Avatar the Last Airbender."

"I totally was! I used to ship Zutara because I used to be a total dumbass."

"Zu... tara... wow, no, of her love interests I was kind of rooting for Jet but the canon ending was fine except I thought twelve was usually too young for humans."

"It's not, like, too young to have a crush, it just probably cashes out to wanting to hold hands and giggle a lot and feel special. Jet really deserved better but I think he would have been bad for Katara, they have really similar strengths and flaws instead of complementing each other."

"Yeerks don't do romance and neither has this guy so I don't have much of a template, I just thought Jet was neat."

"The script I use for romance is that you spend a lot of time together and do cool things together that you'd have a harder time doing by yourselves and talk to each other when you're making major life plans and have sex if you've been doing the other things for a few months and think you can trust each other. But that's not universal, different societies do things differently. I sort of wonder if that's like your thing or not really."

"Yeerks don't do life partnerships as a social institution and separately also don't do sex. We have friends."

"Hm. What kinds of friendships?"

"...what do you mean kinds?"