"Oh, I just assumed we were making fun of Florida because it's where the portal opens and my mother now lives."

"Nah, Florida just produces the most articles-like-that. Otherwise I'd be more likely to say 'New York' since that's where I lived."

"How'd you pick?"

"I wanted to live in a city and when I was first on the job market with a thirty-second range I got my best offer from a place with its office in NYC. Plus the public transit's really good and I am not a skilled driver."

"We should set up plans for a city of ten million, I don't think I have a concept of everything that'll require -"

"Plumbing gets complicated, for one."

"Oh no, I hate complications."

Giggle.

And so they get to work on city planning! The middle of the ocean turns out to add lots and lots of complications, but Mongolia is totally willing to let them set up the Earthside portal there in exchange for building all of the airports and transportation infrastructure that'll be necessary to manage a significant flow of people between Endorë and Earth. This costs more than even a really fantastic pop star makes over the course of her career, so she starts wheedling Ulmo for a London-New York portal they can get rich off. Extradition treaties are negotiated. Treaty negotiation is so much fun!!!! She comes up with a logistics problem that they have an excuse to play Governor over at least once a month.

Ooh, excuses to play Governor.

(Human treaty negotiation types totally cheat with psions. Isabella will help Maitimë also cheat with psion if desired.)

She will not decline help cheating with psions! Especially if the other side is cheating with psions; then it's just fair. 

(It's not fair, because she can totally study peoples' body language and condition off it better than anyone else can. She's had so much practice at that.)

Precogs aren't the only kind of psion that might be cheated with.

"Oh?"

"They're not supposed to get really creepy about it but empaths skirt the line that telepaths cross, and there's also people who go really heavy on internal optimization and can just juggle a lot of thoughts, and people who go really heavy on communication and can distribute things to think about among their staff in real time that way."

"I actually can't imagine how you'd run a country without that last one, but I guess that's just because I grew up used to it."

"Yeah, you have built-in cheating-with-psions type advantage there."

"Still indescribably jealous, though. The internal optimization and the eidetic memory and just the knowledge you'll eventually be omnipotent -"

"I'll get you eidetic memory one of these days! It's just slower than getting it myself because I can't automatically stretch it whenever I try to remember anything."

"I know! I'm being all patient, see how patient I'm being?"

"So patient. ...Florida Elf spends three and a half weeks on hold when phone system breaks, complains about hold music rather than the wait per se..."

She bursts into giggles.

"Some of our psions think they're making progress on oaths, too. Hard to tell until you're there, I take it, but - they think they're getting somewhere. No such luck on Vala-mercy-killing but that one's not time-sensitive."

"It can be hard to tell if you're going to get to the place you originally had in mind; it's definitely possible to tell the difference between learning to do something and not learning to do anything..."

"Well, we'll keep our braids crossed or whatever the human equivalent is that they're going to get something."