"Worth it, I - prefer knowing who I am, and it made it harder for her to pull the hallucinations -"

"Okay, then I won't indulge pointless guilt about that."

"Please don't indulge pointless guilt over anything, none of it was your fault."

"Insofar as I can identify the pointlessness of any looming guilt I will decline to indulge."

"We just heard from the literal omnipotent god that he makes these things happen. There isn't anything you could have done."

"Depends on whether other things I could've done would make a beautiful story, doesn't it?"

Sigh. Hug. "I'm okay."

Hug. "Good."

"Thanks to you."

"Boots, mostly."

"You kept me until we found a way."

"Yeah." Squeeze.

"...should we talk more about -"

"I am still curious about the alternate ending to Julius Caesar but do not require further gory details."

She can totally recount the alternate ending to Julius Caesar.

And Isabella can snuggle her while she does it.

That's good.

Isabella has not received any planets as a gift yet. She goes to Stork and finds Kib and offers to save him some time if he can think of something for her to do. Spends half of it reading up on a city-state's history of religious conflict and turning it into notes for him, the other half feeding him precognition of a meeting he's going to have via the network from Eclipse.

And then she calls in the time she saved and he recommends her some Stork food and they sit in the restaurant and she murmurs into her sandwich at him.

When he is done cataloguing tubeworm species at the bottom of the ocean he will drop by Stork with some neighborly trade deals for Kib.

Kib's not home but Aydanci can direct Island to the restaurant where Kib is advising a pensive Sibyl on desserts.

Hey. Should I drop by later?

Is it time-sensitive? She could probably use another fifteen minutes.

No problem.

Fifteen minutes later Sibyl has eaten a slice of cake and two pots de cremes and hugged Kib and gone home.

A couple notes on portal infrastructure and a slight refinement to the extradition agreements to avoid future cases like that awkward one last month with the human couple from Endorë whose kid had run off to Stork and - "is she okay?"