And Bella drops them in Andi's hotel room, and Andi and Bella also morph unobtrusive (Andi has had a post-show nap to get enough morph capacity back to do dinner out without paparazzi), and they all go out for steak. Renée does in fact like Matirin; she is grateful and friendly and curious about everything and doesn't even reproach him for abducting her teenage daughters.

He is really glad he abducted her teenage daughters! If he'd grabbed someone else's teenage daughters it is possible a lot of things would have worked out much worse than they did. He regrets that they couldn't tell her her children were safe; that must have been a very painful time, and he hopes no parent ever need experience it again, with all this snazzy new magic.

And Renée is so proud of both of them, her politician and her artist, thriving so much! And Charlie was never dead at all and that is good too! And she hears everyone else who died is coming back too, like her boyfriend, right?

Yep! If she's in a hurry they could actually get him right now, but there is probably going to be a process and it might wait until the continent is put back.

Phil would probably rather have a Florida to be on. And maybe a Renée who has been slightly better acclimated and can explain more stuff.

(Bella is sorry that the we-are-running-away note sniped at Phil, she was kind of grasping at straws.)

Phil will soon have a Florida to be on. He has sixteen million names from Florida to put back once there's somewhere to put them.

"I'm actually kind of surprised that many names made their way to you - are they all from individuals or did you get some of them from official sources?"

"Cross-referenced, sometimes, if someone said 'my friend from college was living there with her ex and their kids, I don't know their names...' I'm missing millions but I got a lot."

"I think it's really sweet that you did that."

"I wasn't expecting it to be useful but it was very well worth the time even when we thought we couldn't do anything about it. I think it helps me make military decisions, too. I can't let anybody turn into just a number."

Nod, nod.

And Bella has been brainstorming ways to make it convenient for everyone brought back to life to be briefed and sent from a central resurrection location or locations home and reassert their legal identities.

That's a good thing to be thinking about. The demon can make them all with identifying documents in their pockets; transportation will be a little harder, but maybe not much, because their houses can be made intact and everything.

The ecosystem's going to be kind of wacky with all the vertebrates being either left out or very stupid, too. She expects to field complaints about dogs. Matirin probably does not want to spend time on people's dogs?

Matirin definitely wants to get started on an adjacent world before he resurrects peoples' dogs but he could probably care sufficiently about peoples' dogs - are people also going to want pets who died of old age decades ago, how unbounded would this be -

Huge can of worms, to be honest. Butterfly would not ask Gem to send her a magic rock with no other job description to work on dogs (cats, etc.), anytime in the next year or three until human mortality has been handled, let alone Matirin personally who might have to listen to a minute of exposition per dog before he could even do it.

...Bella might be underestimating how long this'll take. He could do it in a year if he does nothing else and taps three hundred people a minute. Eighty million is a lot of people. And that's just the people who died in that one event, they're also going to want to resurrect people who died other ways...

"If I cared more about people's dogs than I do, I might want a magic rock working on dogs in parallel with people working on dead people, sort of as a morale thing, but not until the humans-specific logistics issues and explaining to everyone what was going on was sorted out."

"Ah, makes sense. I... do not have a frame of reference for how much to care about peoples' dogs. Did Gem say how many helpers she can spare?"

"She's pretty sure magic rocks who make that wish will wind up with spooky allied powers, so she wants them heavily vetted, but she should be able to come up with a handful and I get dibs at least until Warp figures out how they want to handle Vulcan."

Nod. "Will they all wind up with the same spooky powers, so she at least knows what to look out for?"

"Inconveniently, no. Or not necessarily, anyway. It has to do with how they think of it, it's kind of a do-what-you-mean system. Might get one who can jolt people out of comas and one who's good with brain damage and one who can turn people into basement dwellers."

"Ah. That is awkward. My alts can recommend some of their people if she's having a hard time with the vetting process."

"She might take them up on that, albeit I think more for expedience than actual dissatisfaction with her system."