"We can absolutely find takers for the nonheritable version. How many slots?"

Let's say four a day. Same process as before - A few will need to come back the next day. If they'll let my students watch and are okay with it being slower, that is even better.

"We can make that a condition, if you'd like?"

It would speed up my instruction somewhat. But their instruction will be a season or so at the very best either way. You know better than I how to balance what you want out of my work. 

"All right."

Please let me know about alternate locations as soon as you find some.

"I can show you what I have now -"

It's mostly abandoned towns near played-out mines or in one case a dried-up lake, with infrastructure that could be started up again faster than building new.

Abandoned mine towns would actually work pretty well. Especially if it's a shaft mine and not open-pit. Caves and tunnels are comforting, especially to Ruby Draak, even artificial ones. The biggest criteria is individual spaces for every Draak decently far away from all the everything, and reasonable access to water and delivered food and visiting Amentans for treatment or whatever else. The abandoned mine towns certainly seem to have that.

They can move in to the abandoned mine town of Favu as soon as the water can be turned back on then! A few days unless there's some kind of unexpected issue turned up on inspection.

A few days with everyone crowded into here is tolerable. I'm glad we will be able to move, however.

Tomorrow, can you get me sets of live plants that are all genetically identical? A dozen or two per set? As teaching aids.

"...let me ask, I don't know if that's a naturally occurring state of plants." He types. "- yes, there are berry cultivars that work that way, I can get you a lot of potted berry seedlings. They'll be on rootstock, is that okay?"

That should be fine. I am going to have my students watch me nudge them, and then do it themselves as a sort of exercise and project. We can chance ruining plants by accident to learn without much concern. I did it a lot when I was learning.

"All right. - ah, he says there's other plants that work this way too, you'll have a selection, couple dozen per."

Good. It doesn't need to be all at once. I will want lab rats, eventually. I am not entirely happy about their use but if they serve some useful purpose of learning and are treated with dignity it's not the same as existing only to be eaten...

"I'll get those sourced too. Also identical? How many?"

I haven't decided when I want those yet, but not right now. In two months Ink and Vines and Longfeather might be advanced enough to move to animal subjects. And, perhaps some identical cloned cohorts and some not?

"All right."

May you be blessed.

Bloom tries to work on her memoir that evening after some more teaching, but nothing seems to be a good idea to write. Her thoughts circle in frustration and vague resentment. Amentans really are weird.

...She messages tree877, her writing friend from before.

Are you a red?

There is no reply.

Troubled sleep with all her pets huddled into her partition of the warehouse it is, then.

...In the middle of the night there's roaring and the sounds of fighting from inside the warehouse!

...nobody goes in but Ruan thinks as loudly as he can that that's really alarming and they'd like to know what's going on!

Hold on!

It only lasts for a minute or two. Bloom emerges, missing a few feathers, a bit after that.

Cloud and Longfeather insulted each other, accused each other of vague plots to undermine the other, and started fighting. Ink and I beat them both into submission and they won't try that again tonight.

"...okay. Uh, do you need... anything."

More space further away from each other!

"Would some of you like to move into an adjacent warehouse - I can have it cleaned out in a hurry -"