"I don't think I've ever had a crush on someone as much as I have a crush on her. I think if we go the guiding without a relationship route I'm going to have an incredibly bad time for a while and both my parents and Lia will try to argue me out of doing it for my own good but they won't succeed, and maybe after a year or something it will stop feeling like I've fucked up so badly at my only chance at a relationship with someone as cool as her."

"Okay, I advise you to lean into how cool she is and away from the possibility that somebody'd talk you into evacuating fewer people from her sinking ship to protect you from having a nonromantic partnership."

"They wouldn't succeed - honestly, I'm probably giving them too little credit and they'll in fact agree with me once we talk - sorry that's a tangent. I can definitely talk about how cool she is - she's probably literally the most positively impactful person on at least one Earth... Well on at least like a dozen Earths but at least one otherwise inhabited Earth, which is more impressive than the ones she's the only person to have ever visited."

"Yeah, say stuff like that, she'll eat it up."

"Does it help or hurt my case if I mention I have done math to confirm this?"

"Oh my god, that's so cute, I wonder if Vallis has done math about me, that helps, absolutely tell her that."

"Okay, I can do that." Presumably Vallis hasn't done the same math about May because probably May isn't going to be generating a greater increase in wealth each year than any other individual or company in history, but maybe he did other math.

"Anything else?"

"I'm confused about whether she would appreciate comments about her appearance given the circumstances under which she acquired it. She's shown more sense in using her powers than almost anyone I've ever met, and she also has a degree of self-knowledge that's really cool and impressive and I've never seen anyone else have before. If I had to choose one person best suited to ruling the world, it would be her."

"Oh, also she can manage being on Twitter without going insane, which I don't think anyone else has yet managed."

"Probably don't dwell on her appearance, yeah. She looked nice before too but - yeah. The ruling the world compliment is better than the Twitter compliment but it would be hard to overdo this."

"I can provide both then."

"Oh good."

"Oh, I'm pretty sure she's revolutionized at least two fields of science and is set to revolutionize more over time, which is really cool. She's cited in Nature a bunch already."

"It's very cute that that's the kind of thing that comes to mind."

Man, it really is emotionally confusing when May smiles like that and compliments him.

"Well, I can mention it too."

"I think you probably have compliments down, any other stuff you wanna talk about?"

"I can't think of anything else, though I'm sure that's at least in part because I don't know the things I don't know."

Nod nod. "Well, I wish you luck."

"Thanks."

"I would like to phone my folks at somewhat more length than the I'm-alive texts, before I go back to Bet."

Then she can have a phone to do that with while Lucien.... flops on a couch and stares at the ceiling.

She calls her parents. She tells them about Bet and that she was very well taken care of during her awakening and about her powers and the project to handle dungeons emerging in the world. She'd like to give them Turnaround's email as a point of contact who will reliably be in the universe, can she?

Sure.

So she does that. Fortunately she doesn't have a lot of people to update. Her parents are it.

Then she wants to tap somebody in the pattern that means "bring me home". Someone other than Turnaround, because an error in corresponding code to action on Vallis's part would be irrecoverable if he brought Turnaround to Bet.

Yoink.

"Welcome back."