"Hello," she says. "How am I meant to keep track of all of you, do you perhaps have numbers?"

"Believe it or not we tried numbers and the Bells found it terribly objectionable. We can set up whatever command structure you're accustomed to, though, and no one expects anybody but me to know all their names."

"How odd, the Imperatrix has never expressed displeasure with the Yeerk system of naming, which involves numbers when names match. My people are accustomed to a structure like so -" She explains the hierarchy and division of labor customary among Yeerks, plus Tide-specific modifications like allowing hosts time to do host things according to their individual agreements.

"Should work fine, except Elves can put in about double the hours, how do you want to adjust for that?"

"So long as they can handle rotating management very little adjustment should be called for; they'll just remain on duty for longer periods of time than their supervisors. Minor disagreements across supervisors, the higher ranking or more recent, in that order, takes precedence; they can escalate up a rank if there is some non-negligible judgment call or procedural difference to account for."

"Alright. If any of your supervisors wants an Elf host coordinating over osanwë is significantly more convenient, and I don't know if Yeerks get to access the chip-loaded attentional capacity blessings but it seems like they ought to -"

"I don't know either; Issiak didn't write up a report on the subject before dying," she says dryly. "Most of my personnel have managed to secure particularly tight-knit partnerships with their hosts, having more demands on their time than the average Yeerk who can devote their life to being an assistive device of sorts, and will not want to switch, but some of them might take willing Elves up on that, and those can be spread around into coordinator roles."

"Alright, I'll tell people who are interested to write up introductions or something."

"Will they want to go through the entire rigmarole that Amicus Terra insists on when 'matchmaking', or will something more streamlined do?"

"We've got wished on immunity to nonconsensual Yeerking, your people are committed to having good working partnerships, if someone wants to do it that's sufficient for me. I would like to know who I'm talking to, so it'd be nice if there were a list somewhere."

"A list is easily done."

"Thank you. And thank you for getting the story of our near-miss from Midnight."

"You're welcome. Although I'm not sure the rapport was as expected towards the end."

"Oh?"

"It was a bit abrupt. I suppose it's possible he just had other matters to attend to and felt the important topics had been covered, but the ostensible reason was that he was not interested in an ethics lesson, which I hadn't presumed to supply."

"Huh. Do you have a transcript?"

"Yes - chiplocked computers are not quite accessible for Yeerks but it does let Josefa make herself additionally useful at clerical work -" She sends it to him.

"We in fact don't understand him well at all - I'll concede we haven't been trying, and I guess we probably should have -" he reads - "if I had to guess I'm guessing that he's interpreting 'why is it you think Issiak came to you' as 'you were in this situation as a consequence of being a sufficiently terrible person that Issiak reasonably thought you'd side with him'?"

Eyeroll. "This is supposed to be the template with approximately supernatural powers at reading people, is it?"

"Bells just think that because they're not people people at all. Practically all of my advantage is having known everyone I know for the last thousand years. But yes, Midnight is a bad instance of the template and an embarrassment and we all want him dead."

"I assume that Issiak went to him because he seemed based on Ehtelion's information likely to be bribable with resources Issiak commanded, interested in taking aim at Issiak's chosen enemies, and disinclined to take substantial issue with Imperial modus operandi. Plenty of thoroughly despicable people lack those qualities. There might exist lovely people who possess them all, albeit it's less likely."

"Well, I will have someone point that out to Midnight and he'll probably apologize to you for being rude."

"I don't particularly require an apology, although I suppose it would be useful to have the misunderstanding cleared up if I'm going to be asked to convey things to him on a regular basis."

"I don't expect it to come up very often. He doesn't have much in the way of resources anyone needs, except when he saves the multiverse and we're curious why and how. There are a lot of flat Ardas and most of them are much more value-aligned."

Eyebrow raise. "I see."