"Hmm," says Cricket, "hello."

"My mother adapted some of her alt's papers on the chemistry behind the vat meat, to make the rollout more credibly. Liz wants internet. Billionaire wants the Ents to name a price to get his son back, died six years ago in a motorbike accident."

"At some point we may have to explain to those Ents we've been using them as cover. Do Wish's Lórien clones not provide Internet on demand, seems like a defect, I'll ping Kib about a protocol to get her internet from only selected worlds invisibly - how much do you suppose we should say the Ents want? -"

"Lórien can get her local internet, which is not exactly what we want, can't do interdimensional. - I don't know, how fast are we inclined to roll out resurrection, and are there still any things for which we actually need money -"

"Money remains useful to hire eclipsed who already have skills we don't want to wait for somebody to pick up. And it smooths out various projects if they need to go fast or involve people we're not personally in cahoots with or whatever - it would be one of the stupider things to be suddenly bottlenecked on - and it's a useful delegation shortcut for anything not super delicate, like, 'hey, so-and-so, here is seed capital and vat meat plans, go nuts' will accelerate vat meat by the amount of time it normally takes to find seed capital."

"Well, then we can charge this guy a billion dollars."

"Poor Ents will have such a mercenary reputation."

"I am sure in a few years they will give me a real scolding over it. You okay?"

Snuggly kitty is snuggly. "Doing fine."

"I will tell my mother to publish her papers."

"Thanks."

She has something of an ethical dilemma about publishing papers taking credit for things she didn't do, so she actually had Maitimë just give her the tech and let her reverse-engineer the work behind it. Now she can publish in good faith! She does so.

Animal rights activists across all of Eclipse rejoice!

Yep, and the environmentalists, and people concerned with food prices! Convenient, isn't it.

(She announces that she is expecting a son.)

Well, that's... new.

"...yeah. Huh. I should ask them why, it doesn't happen in standard timelines but maybe that's for - reasons related to the war -"

"...it's actually prophecies about the younger twin dying in a fire that is the Fëanor's fault, which, uh, they usually do in standard timeline. Possibly also usually Nerdanels are sick of being pregnant but that wouldn't be operative here."

"...one of my sisters usually dies in a fire that is my mom's fault? I missed that."

"Standard timeline Fëanors steal a bunch of boats from the Teleri because they're in a hurry to get to Endorë, and sail off with them, and were going to make several trips to pick up more people but then decide not to do that, Telva's alts stow away on a boat to try to sail it back, the Fëanors set all the boats on fire without knowing they're there. Kib turned this up when he was prophecy-hunting, nobody who landed post-boats-being-on-fire hears word one about it."

"I can - see why we wouldn't talk about it much. Wow."

"Your dad never mentioned it to me when I was prophecy-hunting, I'm not sure why."

"You could ask him, I couldn't say."

- hm what happens if she asks.

- that's a prophecy? I'd had a nightmare about it, but not all nightmares are prophetic and there wasn't much striking about it - aside from that it was horrible -

"Your dad didn't know it was a prophecy, maybe it needs to go by more than however many times he's had it so far before that sinks in, but he did have the nightmare."