Melody is by the next morning to get the croissants out of the oven and tell the kids this. "There's a building right near here where you can meet with your dad and with anyone else you want supervised visitation with, if there's anyone else."

The kids would like to see their father! Including Ingolfr, according to Sigrun, who claims that he nodded very emphatically when asked. There are other people they would miss if they were staying here for very long, but they won't be, so they shouldn't need to visit them immediately.

"Are there other people Frey and Ingolfr might miss, since they will be staying here?"

Nobody's quite sure who Ingolfr will miss, since Ingolfr's very quiet and he doesn't see many people except his mother anyway. Frey didn't know he was staying here and is not used to making decisions like this and actually just wants to talk to his dad first please.

The visitation center is a big park and playground and attached arts and crafts center. Excursions to the zoo or pool are also supported. There are a lot of kids there, and parents - mostly fathers but also some mothers - coming to meet them.

Well. This is clearly mostly for show, and is much less impressive than it would be somewhere else, given the massive wealth levels that this new empire has to work with, but they could be keeping his children in worse conditions.

Frey runs to his father and hugs him, and gets a hug back in return. Tyr and Sigrun report being kidnapped but tell him that they can return whenever they like, and they think they would like to go soon, unless he has some reason why they shouldn't. He doesn't, not at the moment - perhaps he will have a reason later, but for the moment he he would like to be assured that they can, in fact, return - so they tell him that they will come back as soon as possible and perhaps they will visit their mother again later. He asks them how the baby is and they tell him that she's about how babies typically are; she doesn't sleep through the night yet. They ask him if anything's happened to Scandinavia and he tells him about the plans to turn all the thralls into freedmen. Eventually they investigate the playground together.

He sends them back to their mother after a while, then repeats the process with his other children, who are at various other visitation centers.

His children return to their mother and report that they would like to go back to Scandinavia now.

"Would you like someone to go with you or do you want to use your phone to navigate? It can give you instructions all the way there, but we can also go with you if you'd like - it can be confusing figuring out the bus transfers."

"Someone can go with us," says Sigrun, before Tyr can declare that they don't need help. She frowns at her mother, who looks fairly disappointed in all this. "We'll visit."

"Okay," Melody says. "I'll ask Zuzu to walk you two there - is it just you two?"

Sigrun and Tyr are pretty sure that Frey wants to come. Frey is not very sure of this.

" - you two, and if Frey wants to come later, we'll take him over with you then. He will still get to see his dad all the time, his dad will visit."

"Where do you want to live," asks Sigrun, kneeling next to him.

"I don't know," says Frey.

"You like hunting frogs in the courtyard, and you like that the chef knows all your favorite pastries, and you like your room and you like being able to run all around the castle."

"Yeah... but I like mama."

"You can visit mama."

"But she won't be able to tell me bedtime stories every night then."

"I guess not."

So they leave without Frey, and he bursts into tears afterwards.

"It's up to you, of course," says Melody when Catherine is done comforting him, "but I think maybe we should spend today at church. It - it seems like it would be good to seek God's guidance in this, and also they're resurrecting your sister today and it's traditional to spend the day in prayer, for that..."

"Yes, that sounds like a fine idea," she says. "Would you like to come with us, Frey?"

He nods tiredly and holds her hand as they walk to the church. She holds Ragna in the other and checks to see that Ingolfr is following along as well.

She prays. She tries not to think too much about what it will mean if her sister is alive again.

The church has a big children's play area that goes up five stories high in a set of little plastic tubes and nets and so on. There's also a water fountain; kids are running in it. 

Frey and Ingolfr will play in the play area, then. 

She'll just... pray.

Elsewhere, several people hurry down a field of thirty thousand unconscious bodies. The field helpfully changes around them as they go through, so the reawakening people don't awaken in too uncomfortable a setting.

This one awakens in a field of soft grass, with tree branches meeting in the sky above her.

...huh.

Heaven looks lovely this time of year, doesn't it. She supposes it probably does at every time of year.

Probably. It's quiet. There's the sound of a stream in the distance. 

Ahuh.

Welp. Time to find out what sort of place heaven is. She stands and checks if there's anyone else around.

There's no one immediately within view; there might be people talking down near the water, or it might just be the sound of the water. 

She'll look around for water, then.

It's both! A brook and a few women sitting on a bridge over it, dangling their feet in the water and talking.

They wave at her. "Hey!"

"Hey. I'm, uh, dead and stuff."

"Yep! Welcome to Lórien! It's, um - what kind of background do you have on things that might happen when you die -"