"Huh - does that make for genetic clones or do you have other mechanisms for making new generations vary?"

"We can trade genes among ourselves, though that's not something instinctual, and we can borrow genetics and material from other people for children - I spliced a few of my husband's genes into Bright."

"But that wasn't something you were intrinsically motivated to do to have a child who was more like your husband?"

"No. He'd even said he wouldn't mind whose child she genetically was, but... I mostly wanted to see what would happen, and he was there and willing."

"It's kind of surprising that worked between species at all!"

She will not make a joke about humans and their tendency for sleeping - and interbreeding - with everything in the cosmos, but it's really tempting.

"We in some ways have a common ancestor - humans technically evolved but their ancestors and shoggoths were made by the same people."

"How recently were humans' ancestors made?"

She does some math.

"I think there'd been a precursor lineage for hundreds of thousands of Amentan years, but they were re-modified a hundred thousand Amentan years ago - the Elder Things weren't prone to letting evolution run its course for very long, so the precursor lineages are more like draft versions. I know modern humans had definitely emerged by twenty five thousand Amentan years ago, probably by fifty to sixty thousand."

"Huh. If they weren't expressly designed to be compatible with shoggoths that still seems odd."

"I don't know. They're compatible with a wide range of species, though - a now extinct branch of their evolutionary tree, Deep Ones - though I don't know if hybrids are fertile or if they require intervention - and some rumors of odder things."

"Huh! I wonder if they were specifically designed for universal compatibility for some reason."

"That'd make some sense."

"Which combines very oddly with the xenophobia."

"Humans are a bit of a mess, though in some of them the weirdness instinct manifests as a strong fascination - it's possible some code for xenophilia ran headlong into their instincts for marked categories like 'dangerous animals' and got 'is this fascinating because it's dangerous or alluring' mixed up. Either that, or the xenophobia, or at least whether they love or hate weirdness, is mostly culturally mediated."

"Oh, that makes sense. I'm pretty sure Amentans don't intrinsically love weird things, but we've culturally oriented ourselves very strongly toward the hope that if aliens ever come here that might be our ticket off the planet."

"That does make sense. What are Amentan cultural instincts around diplomacy and international relations?"

"Well, in recent terms historically, it's been pretty focused on maintaining the balances that prevent anyone from escalating suddenly to warfare - so population control and immigration control, everybody's fraction of greys, all the trade agreements that would make it ruinously expensive to alienate other countries..."

"That does sound encouraging as far as being able to get along with same-planet neighbors goes. There probably are any empty inhabitable planets, but most in the Elder Things' old sphere will have at least shoggoths - who on my world aren't inclined towards anything resembling 'sudden escalation.'"

"I think everyone's really optimistic that since shoggoths prefer to live underwater anyway we'll make good neighbors on the same planets!"

"Yes. It'll also be easier for Bright and I to help those negotiations - though I doubt the different planets have cultures exceptionally similar to ours."

"Is there any communication between you, even if it's very slow since you don't have portals running right now?"

"No. Earth was cut off when the portals went down. We know what things were like at that moment, but..."

"How long ago was that?"

"Around twenty five thousand Amentan years - just before my mother was made, though most lines managed slightly more generations than 'three' in that time."

"So things might have diverged a lot, though plausibly less than they would have for us since you live so long."