"I have been known to want things I did not yet know to be possible! I don't know, it's never been in the forefront of my mind? You are my first non-casual significant other."

Squeeze. "If things were less complicated and we could just co-rule the multiverse - I guess you still have very good reasons for not wanting a chip -"

"Those things. Both of them," agrees Cam.

And eventually he has picked out a dozen wedding presents - "one to give them, the rest to recommend to all the engineers when the wedding creeps up on us and they've forgotten to think about it..." and a lot of things to trade daeva once they're out of Milliways and need to worry about that again.

"Numerous hells will be delighted at the windfall."

"And I can get all of my planets infrastructured up even if my brother's wife doesn't want to fork twenty of her to cover it for me."

"Twenty would be kind of pushing it, even your dad doesn't have that many."

"I was initially thinking I might do twenty, or one per world, or something like that!"

"Well that would get awkward fast if you did it now."

"If I fork at all it'll have to be from pre-Milliways, I would really not enjoy trying to fall out of love with you. And I shouldn't need that many, when I really think about it. It's that - my customary management style is to know everybody better than they know themselves and have their personal trust, and that doesn't scale, and 'forks' sounded like a way to scale it. When really I should be thinking 'I currently have the resource of a couple million capable intelligent people who'll do what I ask, how do I use that to fix stuff' - personally acquiring local resources is a terrible way to rule an interplanetary empire..."

"And of course you know all these couple million people really well, so you'll be able to deploy them usefully."

"I can't tell if you're making fun of me. I had three thousand years and all the memory blessings in the world, of course I got to know them all really well!"

"It's just faintly ridiculous, knowing that many people!"

"You probably know that many vocabulary words? Not just the word, but what words it's similar to, what contexts to use it in, how to spell it and how to say it and the shades of meaning - those probably don't even feel like discrete facts you know - my brain thinks that people are as easy to learn as words."

"Okay, but I learned most of my vocabulary words via the most underhanded cheating."

"I have little indexed searchable notes and when I see someone's face I can pull up my notes on them."

"That sounds handy. I am a big believer in notetaking, I just can't consult them quite that discreetly."

"All these reasons to figure out how to make a sufficiently safe chip."

"I was so tempted when I was looking over a blessing catalog back in Singularity. All that stuff."

"It's lovely!! Magic Elves can do some of it with magic, though. I asked Midnight which the best ones were and then I asked my magic-elf father to make me a ring of grace for you. He's in a hurry on immortality because of his inlaws but he said he'd get around to it after that."

"Ooh, a ring of grace. I have an inertia thing as a non-chiploaded blessing but it's not quite the same."

"By Midnight's account I could leap between tree branches like some kind of flying squirrel - don't ask why I would, but I could - and you should be able to compete with the best humans in agility sports."

"But can I dance the supporting role in Atriama."

"This sounds like a question to settle with empiricism! Once I have my magic ring; I can't do it myself, you need magic Elf osanwë."

"Magic Elf osanwë is convenient in multiple ways."