Findekáno works out a ten-year plan for making Stork a major exporter of the golems that Vanda Nossëo thinks will sell best; it has a couple steps Cam can save time on, but the eventual goal is golem assembly lines that are run from the mining to the lettering all by golems, so the only work that need be done is designing more interesting servants and waking the ones for export. It looks like the number of babies on Stork might be scaling with the growing population, which will eventually be worrisome. 

The improved Valar are happy to reopen the portals.

That's nice of them. Kib and Aydanci can go have a look at how Lapis and Wrebb are doing these days.

They've changed a lot in sixty years, but they're still familiar. More crowded.

At various levels of indirection they probably saved the lives of nearly everybody alive on the planet today. That's nice. They go catch up with Aydanci's old friends who took over stork handling in their absence; they're still hanging on, retired, passed it all to those nice Elves in Little Valinor.

When they come home Kib remarks to Maitimo that it's interesting how the scenario is relying on literally nothing but Kib's own aversion to dissipation to get him to do - anything. I don't know where I'd get definitive proof, but...

But a sudden disaster demanding you servantmake would be a lot more strategic? Crossed my mind too. And the tech - even only counting the bits that we understand -

Yeah, the design work is impressive and often non-obvious...

I keep providing him with what he'd usually find deliciously entertaining opportunities to end it, he keeps - not -

I keep getting complete nonsense for dreams. It's not impossible he figured out a way to block them coming in and waited until I had a complete continuous set of memories to do it...

...do you want me to play devil's advocate on this?

...yeah.

I wouldn't do it by figuring out a way to erase memories, I'd do it by figuring out a way to fork you. Like can be done with the computer chip Elves, only we don't know it can't be done other ways - cut the brain hemispheres off from each other in a way that gets you two people, or find an oath that an orc can take that overwrites them with your personality completely enough they're effectively you - I don't know of oaths that can do that and the orc'd have to be as smart as you but there are a billion of them, maybe there are some - then confront you with a bunch of versions of you who have themselves all currently forgotten they're in Angband, might have to wait for the stars to align to have two of you up and thinking at once, get them to convince the third - if he can do that he could do dictionary attacks you don't remember because they're being conducted with disposable people rather than resets on memory. 

...you know, I think very highly of myself but I'm honestly not sure I'm worth that level of convolution.

Sometimes I comforted myself with the thought that time spent fucking with me was probably not being spent well, from a strategic perspective.

There are cheaper ways to fuck with me. If he has orcs as smart as me around he could just get them to teach themselves to program out of books, he has Stork humans on hand...

Are there cheaper ways to fuck with you? You were not responsive. I can see Thauron generating complicated ways to wake you up out of sheer vindictiveness.

I can go right back under again if the fucking with me part starts, though, I come pretty fucking close to doing it when I stub my toe or cut myself shaving, honestly, I have no pain tolerance left...

Hugs. There's a Thauron still loose; I half expect he'll run around the multiverse convincing people who are out that they're not, it wouldn't be that hard...

Okay, yes, that's concerning, but that's something we learned about in-scenario.

Yeah. ... your pain tolerance is lower? I had a lot of chronic pain Lórien fixed that I hadn't even parsed as not the default state of existing...

It's complicated - my physical pain tolerance is higher but my psychological pain tolerance is lower because I no longer have normal expectations about where it'll stop. I could handle far more than stubbing my toe without even blinking if I didn't expect it to escalate way beyond what I can handle. ...Probably also had fewer persistent injuries than you? Fragile human.

We should have protected you better.

And we should've checked the fake humans over better, should have, should have -

We've got forever. 

Speaking of which, we're probably going to take a long honeymoon. Don't mind what people think when we come back but don't want to deal with it immediately.

Should I plan on visiting you, or no?

That'd be lovely.