"Might be useful to have an empty dimension for something and feels really valuable to know how many worlds do wipe themselves out -"

"If we can only find uninhabited worlds by looking for them we can only turn that into a ratio when we're sure we've found all worlds adjacent to somewhere."

"Tesseract not in a mood to give us a count on Loki's neighbors?"

"It's been mad since it found out there are non-adjacent worlds."

"And not that kind of mad conducive to 'trust us, we're trying to fix that'?"

"Apparently not. Won't talk to people besides Loki, either."

"Shame. Okay. ...it doesn't actually look like there's anything urgent for us, then, if we want Golden to intend hard enough to look for Eclipse-neighbors and Earth's not in a state that'd justify immediate tech dumping and Arda I assume continues to be entirely fine -"

"Pretty much. I mean, we should do a slow plausibly deniable tech dump for sure, and magic songs and stuff we can claim are from Ithil, but no need to panic or anything."

"I realize 'underdemanded' is a ridiculous way to feel, but -"

And pop there's another Maitimo a short distance off.

"Oh look a you."

"Did you guess the first time you saw one? - I'm Swift, nice to meet you -"

"Haven't picked a nickname - I don't want to steadily ruin all of the words I have positive associations with -"

"Yep, so go with something specific to this scenario - or, most usefully, something that differentiates your timeline from the standard trajectory, which suffices as specific to this scenario and is easier to explain to people who want to be in denial about -"

"Yeah. Dream?"

"Works. Anyway, nice to meet you, welcome to Vanda Nossëo we have a very enviable list of projects ranked by estimated lives-saved-per-hour I'd encourage you to do something but I in fact took a vacation, first, and that has something to recommend it -"

"I think a vacation is the opposite of what I need right now - I made sure everything back home could run without me, and now all of it does, see-"

"So take a vacation from Ardas, if not from doing things. Matirin got himself a lot of Charps with knowledge of the whole tech tree up through the modern Internet and has been hopping around leaving them in little auditoriums to teach endless physics and biology classes to anyone who wants to learn, which natural experiment is of course very interesting but it could stand some followup. Or you could just grab the top priorities off the aforementioned enviable projects list."

"I did guess but mostly based on 'tall, redheaded, pretty, accompanying Kib to come say hi to me' rather than psychic mannerism analysis."

"I think Island was terribly excited to have alt validation of his romantic decisions."

"You're married."

"I am!!! I highly recommend it. Findekáno is the one who set up our current way of handling priorities and he's been corralling the musicians - everyone agrees that what we need them to develop is a better healing song, and deaging, and ideally long-distance communication, and instead they keep coming out with cosmetic deaging and street-sweeping and metal-polishing."

"Laurië too?"

"My brother goes by Cáno. And no, he did stacked perception and a few other things in that vein during the war and is all over the long-distance communication development project. But he's not our only musician -"

"But we've got several of him!"