"Yeah, I dunno. Some people have souls and do age! Lotta variety."

"There is probably already any literature on the subject and interrogating you is not the best way to get answers," she decides.

"Yeah, probably."

"Alright. Uh, Dwarves sound good, I would like my wife back as soon as possible and don't really have the social context to know what any other criteria I might like to have would be, here, I don't think."

Glir takes them back to the Dwarf office building with Asger's in it and finds them an office labeled "Wayfinders" with print in several hundred languages below about what they do.

"Hi!" says the Dwarf in this office. "Welcome to Wayfinders, we'll make sure you're glad you came. Who's looking for help today, folks, all of you?"

"Not me," says Glir.

"Mostly me."

"I've already been helped, we're just--sticking together."

"We could mostly go our separate ways at this point," Yttren admits, "but, uh, instead we are not doing that."

"I have an unusual service to provide and no idea how one goes about exchanging services for goods and money here."

"That's exactly the kind of thing we can help you with. Can you give me a summary and I'll match you with a coach?"

"Designer babies, including hybrids between species that can't safely or naturally reproduce."

"Ooh, all right, let me get you an appointment with Gull, he's our Warp specialist and that sounds like a Warp career to me. He's available after his lunch in thirty minutes, how's that by you?"

"I have absolutely no schedule constraints! That's fine."

"Help yourself to anything in the waiting room."

There's water and a vending machine that takes no payment for its assorted snacks.

Novel snacks, nice. She will drink water and investigate the snacks while her daughters and their friends catch her up in more detail.

Her coach comes back from lunch and ducks his head into the room. "Hello! Are you my next appointment?"

"Yes, hello! My name is Saerltes."

"Gull, pleased to meet you, my office is this way. Bring your friends if you like." Down a hall, door on the right - "Have a seat, I think there's enough space on that couch back there - so. There's two ways to structure the coaching fees. One is, we have arrangements with several planets that they'll pay us a finder's fee for sending them workers with useful skills and having them arrive well-oriented and ready to contribute to the economy. This costs you nothing but limits you to those planets - still hundreds of options - and does mean our incentives are not perfectly aligned with yours if you'd benefit from a particularly outré strategy. Another is you pay a fee for everything I recommend to you that you ultimately make use of - places to live, classes to take, meetings to schedule, licenses to apply for, so on and so forth. This runs a typical customer not more than their first six months' income, high-earning customers can pay much faster, and you may pay this cost over as long as a decade. I will warn you if it begins to look like you will not be readily able to pay for the service. What's your preference?"

She considers this.

"...The latter," she decides after a moment.

"All right then!" says Gull. "So, designer babies. That's a potentially thorny one, culturally, I'm going to need more details to know where exactly you'll be best placed. Describe the process as it would appear to a client."

"So, my species," she taps her engloved hand, "has an extra reproductive organ in our left arms, with an aperture in the palm of the hand. The client, and any other genetic donors, give me either a pre-harvested biological sample, blood or cheek swabs or what have you, or I can harvest dead skin with tendrils that extend through the aperture. Then we hold a consulting session about what traits they want the resulting child to have. Then I spend some amount of time, anywhere from an hour to a week depending on complexity, assembling the zygote and transfer tissues. Then the zygote is deposited in someone's uterus--generally one of the parents, but it's not strictly necessary. A month or so later, this person lays an egg. How long the egg takes to hatch depends on the gestation time of the species in question. The egg is somewhat more resilient than most birds' eggs are, but still should be handled with all the care you'd give to an astonishingly low-maintenance infant--I can come up with a set of standard care instructions."

"...huh. You believe the egg-laying process to be safe in full generality for anyone with a uterus who'd normally do either of lay eggs or give live birth? Is there a size limitation? Body temperature? Atypical requirements about the incubating party's diet, medical regimen, or lifestyle?"

"If the parents are of species with a big enough size difference it may be unsafe for the smaller parent to carry the egg, but otherwise yes; it's not a solely biological process, my species has magic for it. Body temperature likewise; if the infant's body temperature is unsafe for the gestator or vice-versa problems may occur, although both that and size are factors that can be taken into account at the customization stage. The incubating party may cause harm to the egg through unhealthy behaviors but a carnivore won't cause harm to an herbivorous baby by eating meat, for example. The magic isn't foolproof but will filter out some harms that would befall a non-magical baby such as moderate levels of alcohol or other contraindicated drugs; it is however unwise to rely on this."

"Does this alleviate other complaints about pregnancy besides its duration?"

"Morning sickness is eliminated except in cases of nocebo effect, stretch marks still occur, fatigue is alleviated but not eliminated, I don't know if lactation is classed as a complaint but it occurs, complications during birth having to do with shoving a large object through one's pelvis still occur but complications having to do with the existence of the placenta are eliminated, increases in urination due to hormones are eliminated, increases in urination due to space being taken up by the uterus that the bladder was using are unchanged, swollen extremities are eliminated--in general complaints due to hormones are absent but complaints due to the basic fact of the presence of a large heavy object in one's abdomen remain present."