Sorry.

Will it go very badly if I talk to him -

Quite possibly? ...actually, you know what, you should have your Millenia alt talk to him, he's here working on wizardry rollout stuff at least half the time and will therefore be able to have a technical conversation for long enough my alt-father'll get over his defensiveness -

And extend that to the rest of us?

I can't think of anything more likely to help.

Hooray.

So he looks up his alt.

"Hmm, I could, but I really really really don't want him deciding what I'm doing is of interest and following me back to Shadow - maybe I'll ask Boots."

And he sends a query. Leaf thinks the way to get Ferardrin to soften towards his stepfamily is to talk to him at length about my project, which is the magic rollout. I trust Leaf that that's the way to get a Fëanor to like alts of his half-family, but do you have much sense of - whether it's a bad idea for other reasons? Whether Ferardrin is likely to get particularly involved in Shadow, in particular, and how much he'd change the pace on the research work we're doing -

He is more likely to be interested in research than distribution in general or Shadow in specific but this will be more protective if he has a project or a few of them occupying him already. Might help to make a point of how slowly Elves do things so the entire thing sounds frustrating.

Thanks, I can definitely do that.

And he sends Ferardrin and Epic a lot of research notes and a few tricky technical problems over the ball network!

And gets an answer in a few hours! They raced! (He won.)

Why haven't we taught everyone magic yet, there're still planets where people die and stop existing, all the time, right -

I'm actually working on that! There are, but inconveniently a lot more of them will die if we give them all powerful weapons and wizardry's a powerful weapon when you're not constrained by Materia.

Even when you are, kind of, but it'd be really hard to get development of weapon spells from, like, arcane healing, without accidentally killing yourself along the way.

We don't want that either, though.

I'm going to see how long it takes me, without peeking at any actual weapon spells, so we have an idea of how hard it is.

That's a great idea.

He still doesn't want anything to do with his half-family, though.

They'll be okay.

Because they have you.

I'm not trying to steal your family. They'd rather have you.

Well. They can't.

Okay.

They only named someone after me because I was dead, not because they liked anything about me - they don't do that in the normal worlds -

Well, naming people after living relatives is a little weird.

But the point is they don't like me they like an idea.