He has waited this long—so many years, so many eons—his is not an impatient species.

"No."

"I suggest that you avoid doing anybody any harm for the next few decades as a show of good faith and we will learn more about this neighborhood and get back to you about bringing back your counterpart. Is that agreeable?"

He still does not quite understand what "harm" means, he has too many definitions, some of which are mutually incompatible, and he is not sure how to optimize for them, what counts as something he should not harm—he does not particularly see humans as meaningfully different than rocks or for that matter his own shards, and he sheds shards all the time, is that harming them, what should he do instead—

—and there's the not-sadness, he doesn't need his counterpart for strictly rational reasons, he needs her, it's a part of him that's missing and that's wrong and a world without her is wrong and if he can't have her then he could have something else instead of her but he needs that part of him that's missing—

(—and because this avatar is humanlike enough there is in fact something very much like sadness going on there, as much sadness and anger and hopelessness as could fit in a human mind, even if it's comparatively dwarfed by the other thing—)

—but he cannot fight, and he is at their mercy—he could make it costly for them to impose this condition but he would lose and then he wouldn't get her ever except maybe he would but she was the one who knew how to weigh probabilities like that—

He cannot convey all of that through words. So he conveys all of that through thoughts -uncertainty.— at the Flat Elf and hopes they can convey that better.

" - he's not sure what we think counts as harm, might be that some processes involved in his magic are sapient not that he's thinking in those terms, I'm not even sure he can distinguish thinking and non-thinking beings except by checking against an exhaustive list - he's really sad about her -"

"He said he wasn't in a hurry -" Sigh. "Would his counterpart be better at interpreting things like 'harm'?"

Yes, the thinker could simulate all sorts of things and people, she had an outlined plan about how to interact with humans and how to translate what they were doing and saying into instructions for him, but she never told him the plan before she disappeared and then died—

"Yep."

"Okay. We can try taking him to Gem to wish for her back with some limits."

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?"