<You betcha.>

There's already an awful lot to think about.  Talent shows sound like something people here might not have come up with but Colley's glad they did.  She wonders whether she could get a music career with only the skills that she already has.  She misses her twin, and her girlfriend; she's probably going to miss her girlfriend increasingly much in the coming days - ISPALT IS FOUR.  Obviously she's in some sense an adult but also she's like a twelfth of Colley's age and that's fucked up.

Thinking about the time conversion segues nicely back into missing things from home, which is sad but at least not very fraught, unlike just about everything else she could be thinking about which is all extremely so.

<Yeerks don't actually do sex as a thing at all, we just sorta glom together a few in a bunch and then split apart into hundreds of babies, killing the parents, so don't worry about me not being sexually mature, there isn't really a thing that means.>

That's . . . . differently concerning.  Wow that just wasn't something she expected at all even knowing that hundreds of baby Yeerks happened at one time.

Also completely nonsexually it's still fucked up that Ispalt is a twelfth of Colley's age!  She's trying to keep the condescension to a minimum but four is way way way way way too young to have to worry about your boss killing you over a slip-up.  Or like obviously that's fucked up at any age but seriously.

<If you were a regular person I'd be like 'well at least I won't die of being old' but you also won't do that I guess.>

<I also will not do that.>  This is good news for the future when they know how to make suns and have totally gotten everyone to defect to their side by virtue of not murdering babies, and convinced the blue guys to just let everyone chill and invented a portal back home where probably lots of people will volunteer to be hosts and then Zarian will invent a way for Yeerks to get the copying power and everyone can have their own bodies be however they want and then they can all live happily ever after for literally ever.

<I dunno if a lot of Yeerks would want to just copy bodies with eyes and hands instead of doing the hosting thing? Seems lonesome.>

<If we're already daydreaming that they could copy, then they could just make themselves not mind!  And then anyone who would mind not minding can stay as they are and pair up with someone who doesn't.>

<Yeah, I guess that'd work out fine.>

And then Zar will probably have so much alien sex and they won't be girlfriends anymore - they probably aren't girlfriends right now??  They were going to call it off and renegotiate if aliens ever came to Citrelia but this sort of scenario isn't really something they planned for.  Probably everyone is just going to think she ran away for some reason to go live as like a normal unfamous person or something, ugh.

<I can ask to be trained in z-space navigation but it's not like we know where Citrelia... is... even if that would let us figure out how to get there, and also finding it might get it caught up in the war.>

<What's z-space exactly?>

<It's like a parallel dimension where distances are different so if you pilot a ship through it you can find shortcuts for long distances.>

<Huh.  Well, we could copy the training from someone and see if that gets us anywhere, and then decide whether to ask.>

<Yeah, there'll probably be somebody at the Pool. Unless they all go to the one in space.>

<What's space like?  You were born there?>

Their taxi arrives. <On a Pool ship. I couldn't have been born in the space part of space, there's nothing there, no air or water or anything. But we've got a great big ship with a great big pool in it and I was born in that.>

Colley tries to think of a tactful phrasing to ask what Ispalt's relationship with her siblings is.

<Basically don't have one. They like, exist, but we don't have anything much in common I don't have with unrelated folks.>

<What are your friends like?  Will I meet any of them?>

<Might do, my friend Asjana works in the Sharing, host's name is Pauline. I haven't seen much of her lately since Pauline has like a family and human cover stuff to do and stuff.>

<Do you think I'll like her?  What was your life like, like before this?>

<In the Pool all the time. We talk to each other with little electrical pulses, about the same as we send and receive information from host brains, and we can read books from computer terminals that do the same thing, though there's always more Yeerks than terminals so there's kind of a wait for anyone who isn't building up their skill capital to be of use to the Empire. Me and Asjana used to hang around eavesdropping on the same books, stuff about Earth and humans.>

Colley has a small and very brief metaphorical internal scream around the relative numbers of Yeerks and terminals because it reminds her of the 'Yeerks are cheap' thing.  <We should read some - actually we should watch something on TV!  Since that's new to both of us.>

<The computers are not actually that expensive but you want them to be mostly situated on land with just part of them stuck in the pool, and not an end where folks are going in and out of hosts either and there might be splashes, since a lot of their parts would be damaged by the moisture, which limits how many you can have to a pool.> They emerge from the taxi. <Hell yes to TV.>