"What was supposed to happen-"

"Supposed to fool virtuality into thinking somebody was operating it."

"Oooh, that'll be good once it's not explody."

"Yeah, it's a huge indispensible waste of psion attention."

"And a pretty boring job, probably. ...we should check whether years-long tours out-of-bounds obviates it -"

"Yeah, we should hunt up some kid who's not committed to being a psion right now or likely to get really homesick... I can get that done if you're not so keen on 'filtering eclipsed kids'."

"I want those resurrections right away. Owe it to the families."

"That's a separate thing; as far as I know eclipsed are not nonreductionist in the way that would prevent the existing resurrection solution from working so you just get Matirin and Epic-or-Cam to do it."

"Good. ...Liz?"

"Well, I suppose we could rez her out of neighborhood."

"That might be the best thing to do."

"I don't know what I'd say to her - I talked to her but it was more like trying to find a good path in a dialogue tree in a video game, if I could've come up with anything that'd get her to kill Maira and Melkor before she got reset -"

Hug. "Probably not, most people can't be talked into murdering their girlfriend in under an hour."

"I'm not even sure she couldn't've, if she hadn't been so closely supervised." Hug. "It's not like you have to tell that many lies to make Mandos sound like bad news..."

"Yeah. Wonder why she didn't just leave it at that, not kill or kidnap anyone else, and leave -"

"Liz was at least told that her Elf victims were obstructing departure, but I don't know how they were supposed to have been doing that, and she didn't know that the other eclipsed kids died."

"I guess if she didn't anticipate anyone eclipsing killing the other psions made some sense -"

"Yeah, I don't think anyone, uh, saw that coming. I guess some longrange Earth eclipsed might've caught it incidentally but since the disaster was thoroughly mitigated it would've sounded like - faraway not very important news no one was paying them to mention."

Sigh.

"Or maybe they didn't get it because I was precogging way too much, it'd depend on how they would otherwise have heard about it whether they'd get enough detail for that to fox it."

"It must have been horribly eventful to coordinate."

"I ate myself sick and passed out afterwards, yep."

Hug. "Oh, Isabella -"

Hug. "It's okay, I'm fine."

"But you weren't, and you couldn't tell anyone -"