"I'll put the last one in just before bed, that way we get the biggest head-start with it still on the branch."

"That's a good plan.  ...We should also keep an eye on the tree to see if it produces its daily fruits all at once."

"Ooh, good question. Maybe stay up late to check."

"I can probably get to sleep early and take over watching the tree while you sleep, or vice versa, if we want to do something like that."

"That'd work! I wonder if our early-rising sleep trouble followed us. Probably the habit of it did, but not the biology? I think we'll have an easier time with the morning shift than the night, in either case. Probably we should think about scheduling in light of the portal, too. It opens at midnight every week."

"We do want to get every hour we can out of our time.  There is that one ...desynchronized sleep schedule where you wake for twenty hours and sleep for eight..."

"Hm. I think we need to be really sure not to burn ourselves out doing things like that. The resource that's the hardest to replace or restock is our sanity, not even our time, because there are aging solutions out in the multiverse."

"True, though if it works like it's supposed to we shouldn't have that particular problem?  I'm not actually remotely sure of that; I've not done it before.  It's just come up once."

"I suppose we should see if they're going to be using the portal opening at midnight against us in some way before we start putting on contingencies."

"Yeah, no way to know just yet. The simplest model is just to move toward waking up early in general, and then make portal days extra long, waking even earlier and staying up late, and recover the day after? But I dunno how sustainable or good for us that is. I know some worlds are gonna be time-sensitive, so we probably do wanna be up at midnight to see where and when the other side is, but depending on what we get we might be able to get a little more sleep."

"I can make a quartz clock, at least.  Hook that up to an alarm.  And, realistically, how often do we think we're going to need to work both morning and evening hours?"

"Not often unless it's really a mess in the mission world. And speaking of mission worlds, there's one thing that's guaranteed to work on All for One, but it's a method we really don't wanna use."

"...I think I'd like to know."

Ruby takes a soft breath.

"If we stamp him, then in three days we can guaranteed sell him, and he vanishes from the mission world. No saving throws, no using a Quirk nobody knew he had to dodge it, guaranteed gone."

"...I'm not sure that's better for the rest of the multiverse.  ...I'm not sure it's worse, either, but I'm not sure it's better.  Can you see if he's already in the catalogue?"

Tap, tap tap, search...

And there he is. "All for One, Tier Seven, one hundred credits."

"...If there's someone like that, who's already in the catalogue, and who we don't have the means to render no longer a large-scale threat any other way...

"...We should figure out why the Company even wants duplicates, if we can.  But if we can't find out anything about that either way, and we don't have any other way to render someone unable or unwilling to continue being a nation-scale or larger threat, then...

"We wouldn't have any better options, right now."

"But we do not do that with anyone the Company doesn't already have in their...  Whatever it is that they have, nor do we do this to anyone that could present a significant power escalation - or other enticement - over their 'default' version."

"...I can't believe I'm considering doing that at all, if I'm honest, but...

"Short of somehow completely rewriting his personality, our All for One wasn't going to be turned aside from his...  Everything he was doing.  And that last fight..."

"Kiyuko could have lost it.

"I can't say that, given the same choice during the cat-and-mouse games we were playing against him - to let the timeline continue in uncertainty or to add another All for One to someone's collection - that the math adds up to not Stamping and selling him."

"...But to contrast that case against Salem, who is...  Honestly a worse threat by the numbers... we absolutely mustn't Stamp her.  Because if the Grimm were left without her sitting on them I'm pretty sure things would only get worse."

"They would, without her control. It would be so much worse. Well. What we absolutely can't do is sell her. Just Stamping her doesn't take her off the board, though, it just makes her loyal.

"The worst thing is that we'd even get paid for it. I wonder if we can get an answer out of the Opposition about why they want more copies."

She pokes at the Smart Device, looking for a chat or help desk system. Okay, that one is the Company help desk, is there one for the Opposition?

"...What would loyalty even look like in that context?"

...There's the same chat widget hidden on the new device as there was on the tablet.

She taps the Opposition chat open.

"Dunno. If we're lucky, willingness to hear out our arguments more? And we could arrange something to be delivered in three days and obviously from us?"

"...I suppose that would certainly be something we could try."