His human avatar feels an echo of the not-emotions his whole self is feeling: hope, anxiety, fear, expectation, anger, uncertainty—

"Yes."

"Not intending to betray us but it'd depend what the other one thinks when back."

...well. Wishes are granted in Wish, where Gem can conveniently rewind time.

"All right. It's nine hops, so I guess nine shards."

"Yes."

He starts selecting shards—ones that are not particularly useful, or ones that are very stable and unlikely to change. Several hundred million shards, he has more than enough. He picks nine of the more managerial ones.

Hop.

"This entity needs somewhere to deposit its shard."

"What traits does the place need?"

"It needs to be big."

He's thinking about as big as a soccer stadium.

"Half a square kilometer."

"Is it all right if it's in vacuum?"

"Yes."

She leaves the Elf behind and takes him ludicrously far away. "Let me know when you're done."

It takes a second.

Then a huge mass of—something—appears out of thin vacuum. It's a gray blob with distorted limbs sticking out of it and each other, fractals of body parts folding into one another in mind-bending non-Euclidean—or, at the very least, more-than-three-dimensional—spatial folds.

"This entity is done."

He's ludicrously powerful and hasn't mastered pronouns. Joy.

She collects the Elf, hops again, repeats the process.

The next universe gets a smaller piece of the shards dropped in the previous one.

They are all sooooo far away from anything the peal cares about at all.

And then they are in Wish.

"You will need a wish wording," she says. "Do you have one you expect to be agreeable?"

"Will this entity need to use words in this human language?"

"Yes."

"This entity is unlikely to produce an agreeable phrasing."

"I can write it for you. What are the desiderata it needs to include?"

"This entity's counterpart needs to be active again."

"There any nuances we're missing here?" she asks the Elf.

"He's not pretending to be worse at language than he is, he's actually really bad at it. He doesn't want her constrained - he could probably wish for her to be restricted but he's not going to come up with ideas - can't -"

Gem checks his emotional read.