...There's kind of a crowd. It's a lot easier to just hang back than to deal with trying to compete with the other versions of herself for El time.

It's up to her.

She'll wait. 

Then maybe they can continue their discussion of the mechanics of time?

Yesss. (She traded her limbs not just for the others to be able to contact one another through Truth, but also for rather extreme amounts of knowledge about the functioning of time - she's nowhere near Zera's experience, and it's evident that what she knows hasn't fully sunk in, but she's worlds ahead of the other two so they can zoom off straight into the most esoteric elements.)

(If she's having fun, okay.)

She's mostly waiting for a gap in the others - and Bellona Three gets squirrely about split attention soon enough, turning to focus on talking to Eliana - then Bellona One steps back to pepper Zera with her own questions, allowing Bellona Two to step in for a proper El hug. 

Big hug. "Hi."

Hug! "Hi yourself."

"Are you okay?"

"...Dunno."

"Yeah."

"Anything I can do?"

She shrugs - glances at the others, but there's no point saying this privately since they're all thinking it (Bellona Final even has been totally avoiding splitting El attention, and is now mostly interacting with Bellona One plus Zera) - "Clone yourself?" she says, half wistfully and half sarcastically. 

"I mean, you're the biomedical engineer. We could do it. Or put me in a time loop, I bet Eliana could figure something out."

She pauses, then shakes her head. "Time loop wouldn't be stable, and creating a time loop just to rescue enough versions of you from it would require solving interdimensional travel first and then finding an empty dimension with friendly laws and then still be risky - and the cost for cloning you with memories intact would be astronomical - there's also the question of the Gate. I and the other Bellonas share a Gate, but we'd need to clone your soul as well as your body and memories to produce versions of you with alchemy - there's honestly also no guarantee that we'll keep access to alchemy if me and the other Bellonas hang out in the same world, without some form of intrinsic separation multiple connections to one Gate would be innately unstable - stuff like one person's attempt at alchemy having a three in four chance of catastrophic backlash in the vicinity of one of the other three, or a chance of our souls spontaneously collapsing into the one soul they're supposed to be - could route around by intentionally cutting our access to the Gate, but I don't want to - we'd also probably need Zera's cooperation for most stuff involving time loops, I honestly wasn't expecting to be rescued since the maths don't work out for any magic system we currently have access to and using alchemy would be stupidly dangerous - the reasons are complicated and involve science Amestris doesn't have yet, I had to trade the Gate for them."

"Oh, so you've thought about it already."

"...It was pretty easy to guess that we'd get jealous of each other even if we did get rescued, and I figured out the issues with multiple connections to the Gate while setting up our ability to talk through it. And I was motivated to find some way to extract myself from the timeloop - extracting someone else's just an extension of that." (Also she kind of feels like the sheer volume of information she traded for has made her smarter - she got that the first time when she traded her entire body, but she was a lot more specific this time - and it feels like her mind needed to expand for all the new information to fit into it. It's also so far been impossible for her to forget or struggle with anything she's traded the Gate for, which is a massive advantage over studying things the hard way.)

"Sorry, Lion. I'm just trying to catch up."

Hug! "'s okay."

Many hug.

"Are you- thinking about leaving, then?"

"...At some point."

"The Gate connection issues will be stable so long as we don't use alchemy, but - that'd suck, and I dunno how long it'll take to get too jealous."

"Yeah."

"I'll always love you. All of you. No matter where you go."

So much hug. "We can visit, still, especially once we get interworld travel stable. Be more like we're just - traveling. And we could trade whatever we've discovered when we meet." Bellona Two thinks she'd like to travel, actually - everything she saw through the Gate revealed so many more possibilities.

"That would be nice."

"I've got a lot of stuff to teach you guys already."