"Sure." Cam checks this list against his own to make sure there are no redundancies. He goes and prints off nondemonic chip instances of each. He brings them down and he makes bodies around them.

"Hi, guys, how long's it been?"

He explains to everyone what is going on, and since he selected them and since they are Amanyar they are very calm about this and universally want to go outside and sing and grieve, which is easy to facilitate.

"About a day and a half. Maybe it doesn't bother you but I think I'd find that time thing upsetting."

"It can be annoying. At least we weren't gone for two months."

"You were not! Though I suppose it's technically possible it's been two months for the engineers, someone could go check."

He goes and checks. It has only been four days for the engineers and they are annoyed to have been interrupted.

"I think I'm going to go outside and join them in singing, probably not for the whole mourning period but for a day or so."

"Yeah, okay."

No one conveniently walks into the bar with a magic system that'll solve all their problems.

Yet.

Cam continues with his project of loitering-and-decompressing. He plays the violin. He reads. He swims. He flies. He learns about other universes and tries their beverages. He toys with the idea of a chip-locked Elf-chip, but it doesn't work cause-and-effect-wise.

He will play Governor when there are games of Governor to be had.

There are games of Governor to be had. When Edie and Tyelcormo are off, which they often are, they can just two-person it. Cam gets harder to beat. Cam's clever.

He is!

He's pretty good at not wagging his tail when he does cunning things mid-game, at least if they're not done paying off, but there is totally tail-wagging after the first time he manages to win.

"Congratulations! I quite literally hadn't lost in a century - that was brilliant - how far back did you have it set up -"

"Inklings back here -" Cam finds the paper for turn three - "fleshed out the rest of it somewhere in the late twenties."

"Wow. Well, congratulations. I cede my throne. Until the next game, which had better be pretty soon."

"Sure, I'm not on a schedule."

And he goes for a long walk around the lake, and mutters things occasionally at the water.

I think, he says to Edie a day later, my dear brother has a crush on Cam.

Um.

Really terrible circumstances for it, right? He's obviously not going to say anything and I bet he won't even drop any observable hints beyond, you know, spending far more time walking around the lake than is Maitimo-typical.

Yeah, no kidding. I feel like we should do something about that but I'm not sure what...

I'd suggest conjuring him a fork of someone else but dunno who he'd want, and if he wanted anyone that badly he'd have arranged to get them already and also, pretty shitty thing to do to some random boy cute enough my brother noticed him.

That was not remotely the kind of thing I had in mind.

I mean, a century's a pretty long time to be single and sitting around checking in on the engineers every few days? What kind of thing did you have in mind.