So, last time she had a memory and freaked out because her host talked to her and messed with her mind, so now she’s visiting a comforter.

I could see that the Comforter found my reluctance a bit amusing. At the same time, I could sense her frustration that I was still uneasy coming to her.

Huh. So she doesn’t think much of this job, either.

And we learn she’s been avoiding appointments. So, her wangst about not being good enough is even dumber, because it means she’s not upset she thinks she’s a weakling but that she thinks she’s ordinary and needs help like other people.

She was attractive for an older woman, as humans went. She’d let her hair stay a natural gray–it was soft, tending toward white rather than silver, and she wore it long, pulled back in a loose ponytail.

Huh, that reminds me, I wonder if the brainslugs can be gay? I assume that just won’t be existing as usual.

Anyway, we really seem to be getting to the point where they’re just copying everything and it’s boring. So, most brainslugs/female brainslugs dye their hair like we do? Are they also super judgey about older women, or just doing it because their hosts did even though the significance has no meaning?

The comforter explains she understands why our wanderer brainslug doesn’t like this, it’s because apparently she never needed this before. So it is a weakness thing? Except what she’s worried about apparently never happened before.

They switch topics to happier stuff, like that she likes her job, which is at a university which still uses semester formatting, and she’s a history teacher and her class is super popular.

“Do you know how rare it is for a Professor of History to have experienced even two planets in the curriculum? Yet you’ve lived a term on almost all of them. And the Origin, to boot!

Okay, this is getting confusing.

Most of the brainslugs on this planet should be at least on their second host, simply because I can’t believe they could do an active invasion with inexperienced brainslugs – and that’s before we consider that they can’t even talk to each other before being put in a host, so they wouldn’t even know what they were or what was going on. And you’d expect the planet’s reputation – difficult, short lived violent hosts, some of which are still running around wild – to be more attractive to the experienced.

I guess maybe most of them have their perceptions altered by the host to like the current planet, so that while they’re in that host, saying they want another makes the most sense. But in that case we have the question of why they’re expanding in the first place. Is there some sort of system where you have to have at least two planets under your belt, but no one pushes you to get more so the average soul lives on its birth planet and then gets a host elsewhere where they live the rest of their life? But that wouldn’t fit well with seekers, whose job only matters on planets currently being taken over, and given the sniping about it being a job only the underevolved take, you’d think it’d have been mentioned if it was a job people usually only took up on one planet and then gave it up again.

Or perhaps there’s two distinct groups, with the seekers and others who are part of the expansion living lots of places, but pacifist whiners like her and the rest of her species usually don’t and they never have those other people speak as history teachers despite the fact living through occupations would probably give you better insight to the species than just living as one on a conquered planet.

“Honorary Professor,” I corrected her.

What?

How would this even have meaning for them? Their whole thing is jobs using skills learned in past lives, sometimes on other planets. And it’s not like normally if they want to be a professor they get stuck in a professor body, because Brainslug-eaten-by-Kevin was stuck in a mechanic’s body when he was supposed to do music stuff.

The comforter guesses that she’s been avoiding the appointments because things have gotten worse. She stares at her hands.

My hands were light brown–a tan that never faded whether I spent time in the sun or not.

So she’s not sun-browned at all? Author. Someone sewing up her shattered body would be able to tell if she was tanned, because he’d see her naked and notice tan lines or not.

Also I’m not sure if there’s any skin color that just ignores the sun. I’m pretty sure everyone with melanin has a variable default amount and then it gets darker if you’re in sun. Unless she’s a tattooed albino, sun should be doing something here.

Maybe the author really did mean for her to be Latina but only decided here and didn’t go back to edit.

Of course, there’s also One dark freckle marked the skin just above my left wrist so she’s also freckling, which I’m even more sure has to do with the sun. Really this sounds more like a mole.

And apparently her fingers are unnaturally long. Okay.

She asks the healer why she goes by Kathy.

Did it make you feel… more at one? With your host, I mean?”

Nope, apparently it’s because she was in the first wave, as was her husband, so they had to act like one all the time. She also adds that her former name didn’t translate well at all, so I guess I’m not going to be seeing any Paddles Fast Oxygen.

I’d had no idea that this soft, cozy woman had been a part of the front line. It took me a minute to process that. I stared at her, surprised and suddenly more respectful. I’d never taken Comforters very seriously–never had a need before now. They were for those who struggled, for the weak, and it shamed me to be here. Knowing Kathy’s history made me feel slightly less awkward with her. She understood strength.

My, you are a judgey brainslug for a species that’s all about harmony. I don’t even get this – even if the job is about caring for the weaker, how does that translate to being weak themselves?

Showing that apparently, our wanderer has kept her wandering away from the front lines, she wants to know if it was disturbing to pretend to be a regular, brainslug-free member of the host species, you know, as every occupation requires.

You see, this host was a lot to get used to–there was so much that was new. Sensory overload. Following the set pattern was quite as much as I could handle at first.”

Huh. See, that sounds a lot like the host calling the shots for a while, which suggests the problem with Melanie is something that likely would be a lot more common if they were using hosts that were already aware of them.

Brainslug Kathy also defends staying together with brainslug Curt, saying that they lived through a lot together.

As the university’s president, Curt had many contacts, you see. Our house was an insertion facility. We would entertain often. Humans would come through our door and our kind would leave. It all had to be very quick and quiet–you know the violence these hosts are prone to.

I think this was a plot in Animorphs. Or maybe it was something with government officials that they had to disrupt? Been a while.

And I could lie to you, assuage your fears, by telling you that these were the reasons. But…” She shook her head and then seemed to settle deeper into her chair, her eyes boring into me. “In so many millennia, the humans never did figure love out.

Pheromones and imprinting.

How much is physical, how much in the mind? How much accident and how much fate? Why did perfect matches crumble and impossible couples thrive? I don’t know the answers any better than they did.

PHEROMONES AND IMPRINTING.

Not liking the answer doesn’t mean not knowing the answer.

My host loved Curt’s host, and that love did not die when the ownership of the minds changed.”

That’s a really bizarre way of looking at it. You took over the owners themselves and not just their possession.

Anyway, point is she’s obsessed with Jared, who may be actual married to Melanie because they used to sleep next to each other and I’m not sure the book would let that happen otherwise.

“How? How will it help to tell you that I see his face every time I close my eyes? That I wake up and cry when he’s not there? That the memories are so strong I can’t separate hers from mine anymore?”

Could you normally?

So, are post-insertion memories stored in the brainslug? We know language isn’t, but that could be that they don’t learn anything their host already knows, but all post-brainslug learning goes into the brainslug directly.

If so, that’s a good explanation for why humans are messing them up so bad – human memory works by withdrawing a memory and then rewriting it back into the brain. (There’s some drug they’re using to try to help with traumatic memories by deliberately triggering those while the person’s artificially calm, so when the memory’s put back it no longer has the panic part attached.) That’s probably why our memories are so shitty and prone to getting corrupted and full of stuff that never happened, but it would mean that any time the brainslug actually relives a memory, that’s getting processed as a current event and written into the brainslug’s own memory too. If we hadn’t just learned that almost no one lives on multiple planets and also humans have much shorter lives than normal, I’d guess here that resilience isn’t about some nebulous strength but how long the brainslug’s lived, where the more brainslug memories, the less an individual human memory affects things.

Anyway, so, brainslug protag cries a bit and the comforter comforts about how that’s true for everyone at first. Then she asks why brainslug protag’s cut her pretty hair so short, because brainslugging won’t change that people comment on women’s appearance like this.

She’s been lying about it being just for convenience, because apparently lots of people ask this because seriously, not even brainslugging can stop it, and confesses the truth now:

“It bothers her. She likes it long.”

That horrifies the comforter, so apparently this is pretty unusual, and brainslug protag explains that yes, she’s there, she’s always always there.

The comforter points out that if things have gotten bad, she needs a new host.

“No one would think badly of that choice, Wanderer. It’s understood, if a host is defective –”
“Defective? She’s not defective. I am. I’m too weak for this world!” My head fell into my hands as the humiliation washed through me.

This, of course, just makes Melanie more confident, as should have been obvious, and there’s a short “no u” argument about who needs to get out of whose body.

“Wanderer, dear, no. You are not weak, and we both know that.”
“Hmph.”
“Listen to me. You are strong. Surprisingly strong. Our kind are always so much the same, but you exceed the norm. You’re so brave it astonishes me. Your past lives are a testament to that.”

It’d really, really have been nice to actually see this.

I swear female protagonists are the most annoying with this. Male ones get informed attributes like being nice, but female ones get it about basic competence.

Anyway, the healer’s theory is that humans have a lot more variation than brainslugs, and some are “stronger” in what continues to be a nebulous, unclear manner, and she’s sure anybody else would’ve been crushed immediately by the host. So I guess that’s my answer, brainslug protag might suck but at least Melanie has something resembling strength.

Brainslug protag then says that in that case, how can she get a new body because who will they put in this one?

“I don’t think this host would be considered for reuse.”

No shit. Brainslug protagonist is dumb on top of weepy.

Anyway, time for the brainslug manifesto~

I was no quitter. Through the long revolutions around the suns of my last planet–the world of the See Weeds, as they were known here–I had waited. Though the permanence of being rooted began to wear long before I’d thought it would, though the lives of the See Weeds would measure in centuries on this planet, I had not skipped out on the life term of my host. To do so was wasteful, wrong, ungrateful. It mocked the very essence of who we were as souls. We made our worlds better places; that was absolutely essential or we did not deserve them.

This seems a weird jump.

The only way skipping would be wasteful is if no one else could take the body afterward and it’d have to be discarded. But it’s been made very clear that isn’t true. And there’s no sign someone wouldn’t want to take a host with part of its lifespan used up, since if it wasn’t tempting for some to move on to new hosts faster, they wouldn’t need huge taboos against it.

Also, you just got through saying human lives are super short, and we can live a century, so why is several centuries now an extraordinarily long time?

But we were not wasteful. We did make whatever we took better, more peaceful and beautiful. And the humans were brutish and ungovernable bluh bluh murder torture bluh Even the huge sphere of the planet had been put into jeopardy through their careless and greedy mistakes. No one could compare what had been and what was now and not admit that Earth was a better place thanks to us.

I’m pretty sure the planet is still in jeopardy. You’ve still got commonplace milk and chicken, which are resource intensive even before getting into that presumably you’re trying to feed the whole world and not just the US. You’re eating baby carrots, which are just laved regular carrots. You’re living spread out, needing oil to travel around and move supplies there. You’re still living in hellstates that can’t support human life without draining the aquifers. Hell, you’re busy lecturing people on history when, if you were actually trying to fix the globe, I’d expect this to be an all hands on deck moment of frantically trying to reverse global warming and desertification, with whoever you could spare being busy keeping the marginal species alive.

You murder an entire species and then pat yourselves on the back.

Humans murdered a whole lot of entire species, Melanie. A better accusation would be that they murdered all of you while claiming you deserved it for being murderers.

Our soul’s reasonable and harmonious response is to remind Melanie that she can have this body disposed of, which, would be a good sign of the whole human corrupting soul bit except this doesn’t seem to occur to her and instead it’s because she won’t admit defeat.

And… this was my body. I was used to the feel of it. I liked the way the muscles moved over the bones, the bend of the joints and the pull of the tendons. I knew the reflection in the mirror. The sun-browned skin, the high, sharp bones of my face, the short silk cap of mahogany hair, the muddy green brown hazel of my eyes–this was me.
I wanted myself. I wouldn’t let what was mine be destroyed.

This, though, is interesting. We’ve seen they think of themselves as their hosts immediately, and this also fits with their disgust at leaving a body even assuming someone else will take it over. Their self-image is really weird – they’re so thoroughly parasites that even their concept of self is someone else’s.