andalite Elves land in Amenta
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<A few local decades ago Andalites made contact with a species called Gedds, which were - please ask your engineers not to dissassemble the working computer terminals, we need them - Gedds were by themselves very unintelligent, barely sapient, and had a symbiotic relationship with parasites called Yeerks. Yeerks crawl into a host's brain through the ear, assume control of it, access all the memories and instincts and habits of the host, and can impersonate them perfectly or puppet their body towards the Yeerk's own ends. The Yeerks avowed peaceful intentions - they wanted to spread out and find more planets, the vast majority of them had never had hosts and lived their whole lives blind and deaf and alone in the pools where they can survive without a host. Some particularly foolish and idealistic Andalites believed them, and taught them space travel, and they tore off into the galaxy to enslave every species they could find. We were a peaceful people but retooled to exterminate them. The Yeerk home planet is besieged but it's hard to stamp out a plague that's spacefaring.>

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"...are they likely to come here?" she asks. "It'd also reduce the risk of paraphrased miscommunication if you spoke aloud and we could record you, is that something you can do?"

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<Our intelligence suggests they have not discovered this planet. They would enslave you if they knew of you. In principle it should be possible for me to speak aloud but I have never before assumed a physical form with vocalization and am not confident in how to interpret the instructions from my translator.> "Transaor. Transator. Or. Or. Tran - slate - or."

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...the blue represses giggles. Some greys fail to.

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<That sound I have no idea how to make> he says of the giggling. 

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"...it's not verbal. So that shouldn't be very impairing."

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"Impairing. Ing. Impairing. Impairing impairing impairing." <Perhaps I can practice on my own time and instead mitigate the risk of miscommunications by producing a transcript for you.>

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"That would be great."

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He glances at the computer terminal and a transcript of the previous explanation unfolds after a minute. 

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"That's amazing. So your telepathy is computer-audible. How does it work?"

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<The telepathy is not computer-audible, I separately have an implant. I cannot read your minds, alien thoughts are not relevantly legible.>

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"Can you read each other's?"

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<We send and receive only what we intend to but there is far more casual communication than I imagine would exist among a species that had to verbalize to communicate.>

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"That makes sense."

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Leerans can read minds and he has the morph but he thinks he'll neglect to mention it. <The fleet of which this ship was part was en route to a planet called Earth, population five billion, tech level behind yours, who the Yeerks are currently enslaving. We encountered more resistance than anticipated on entering the star system. Most of the ships were destroyed. This one managed to jump.>

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"Is the jump method one which allows them to potentially follow?"

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<It is not. Jumps can't be traced at all; our people will not be able to find us either.>

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"If we manage to get your ship working are you likely to go back to Earth?"

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<If the Yeerk invasion there has not yet been handled it is my obligation to handle it, but it would surprise me very much if the situation had not changed by the time non-starfaring aliens reverse-engineered the ships.>

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"I see."

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<Anyone anticipating contact with the Yeerks would of course be ignorant of the jump path to get here.>

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"But you did get here while on your way there."

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<Absent reason to look it is vanishingly unlikely someone else would happen across the jump - or bother taking it, most jumps that land you this close to a gravity well just kill you - but it is not impossible. There are some precautions you could take against Yeerk infestation if you saw fit.>

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"Such as?"

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<It sounds like they would need only to infest a vanishingly small fraction of your population before they could order everyone else marched to Yeerk facilities unopposed, is that impression too pessimistic?>

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