Om nom nom food.

And more world-hunting and -

"Wow, moons are not very popular, are they."

"We're looking for life, could be most worlds with eclipses have extinction events."

"Yeah, that's possible. If they don't figure out the food thing fast enough, if they have a very concentrated population around when they achieve sapience, if they have a higher rate of eclipsing than one in a thousand, if they have short lifespans or rare eclipses and lots of them have the key eclipse at once..."

"Both here and Ithil had one in a thousand?"

"Dwarves were one in two thousand, they didn't throw psions. Maybe there is some third possible sort of eclipsed or something. It's also still possible that Ithil, Eclipse, and Patalon all happen to be adjacent to some fourth world which is actually the middle of the magic system neighborhood and so these are all red herrings."

"Wonder if I can target for that. ...not super likely, though, worlds don't usually have many shared adjacencies -"

"The daeva worlds do, the Materia cluster does, Materia and Warp and Telperion form a triangle..."

"What happens if I try for the origin of the eclipsed magic system -"

"Doesn't work but might not have anyway - if you try it from Ithil still doesn't work, so, no information."

"Huh. Well, if you think of anything else to try, ping me."

"Will do, thank you very much."

"Sure!" And off.

"Okay, next on the to-do list is figure out how quickly it's plausible for your mom to have invented otherworldly tech so we can drop it on Earth dressed up like it was in fact invented in an Eclipse-influenced Arda by an Elf."

"Yep. What'll make the biggest difference - vat meat, probably, we could get the Elf aesthetic by looking how Space does it -"

"Does Space do vat meat? Do they do it without daeva?"

"Doubt they bother any more but it'd surprise me if they never developed it, the way humans do it is - Elves wouldn't, Tyelcormë'd get really seriously angry with me -"

"Okay, Space vat meat tech, hopefully it's not too infrastructurally complicated. That'll upset the major farm corporations... and the mages who do ethical meat..."

"If you have something else in mind to start with we can do other things before we create a coalition against us, but it'll also drop food prices by a lot to roll out and help the environment, it's clearly the biggest lever we have available..."

"I'd consider morph tech a strong contender if we were in the neighborhood for it but alas. And vat meat's probably more plausible as a step before space travel..."

"Yeah, and space travel invites the 'what will happen to people living on the Moon' question again - though I guess we can now totally intend to do it and ask a long-range psion -"

"If we can get a few thousand volunteer kids together from somewhere and intend to put them on the Moon next time an eclipse happens, I can check it then."

"I will get to work on that! ...resurrecting the last kids who came to work for us should help."

"Did Matirin say when he'd be by? We can ask for a magic rock, too..."

"He was off the grid, let me check -"

- "back, can come by any time."

"Do you think I should be there when they wake up?"