"I guess I can hardly criticize her for working on that before she helps me. As long as the world is paused I suppose nothing's particularly urgent other than - well."

"I think a lot of things are urgent but that makes them if anything harder to face alone."

"Yeah, I guess that makes sense."

"I might get some sleep. If anyone needs Mahdi and I they can interrupt us though Mahdi won't get his spells back if interrupted too much."

"Good to know. I think we should be fine. Better for everyone to get enough rest. It's nice, getting enough sleep every night. Still pleasantly novel."

" - I guess you wouldn't have seasons, yeah."

"Seasons? - I mean, I know what seasons are, Earth has them, I'm just not super sure what they have to do with getting enough sleep."

"Labor on our world is sunrise to sunset. So in the winter you can sleep no matter how bad things are, though you get paid less since the days are shorter."

"Oh, huh. We just have schedules set by our houses. This group was on seventeen-hour work days for, uh, longer than it's advisable to work seventeen-hour days for. Probably part of why we didn't notice the pregnancy symptoms sooner."

"That doesn't even sound...like it'd cause more work to get done. I guess maybe it depends on the work."

"We're spaceship mechanics. It's, uh, kind of fiddly technical work. And doing it while you're really tired is pretty dangerous, because if you fasten your tethers incorrectly you just, uh, float off into space.

"I think they were either being stupid or deliberately trying to keep us from noticing the pregnancies."

"I don't understand why they would do that."

"Yeah. I mean, I haven't, like, talked to them about it. I assume it made some kind of sense from their perspective."

"Well, someday they'll - I guess they won't answer for it, actually. Huh."

Shrug. "They've lost the slaves they did it to. Their people are going to lose all the ones they still have. I think this is probably enough comeuppance for my taste."

"Will they have a functional society after that or will it collapse?"

"By default it would at least come near to collapsing, but I think we're going to try to prevent that from happening. It'll at least be very annoying."

Nod. "All right. Good night."

"Night!"

She takes a walk. Heads over to the apple tree near Elizabeth's house. Grabs a notebook and starts working on writing a poem in the phonetic alphabet she's learned.

She waits for Elizabeth to show up.

Eventually Elizabeth shows up! She mostly doesn't work for longer than five hours at a time these days. She feels like she's generating a healthy amount of media coverage but she kind of feels like she has a responsibility to do more healing now that she's healed enough people that not healing more people in more countries would be kind of unfair. Hitting lots of hospitals in India today. But she's still kind of worried about how she's spending her time.

" - hey! Need something?"

"Not urgently."

"Need anything non-urgently? Other than the moving a trillion people. I - could make somewhere to move them to but I don't have a population for them to assimilate into and I think it would probably be kind of a mess. But, like, anything easier, happy to help."

" - uh, well, I guess you could talk to the Valar? You're going to need to do that at some point. And then you'd know what, if anything, you should be working on on your end."

"I guess so. It'd be kind of a pain moving everybody back, but I do need to talk to them pretty soon, I guess. I can - do more healing today before I try other weird things and then maybe get back to you on that? Or maybe ask the elves about what I would do and then get back to you on that after that."

"Yeah. It's really not urgent but I would guess that it's probably the next step for dealing with my universe."