"Looks lovely. You should save some work for the jump, or can the flat Valar portal us a workaround to that too?"

"I'm pacing myself. I don't think they're currently planning to portalize the trip but maybe they are and I just haven't heard."

"Nope! I don't want Valinor or Endorë to be invaded, or very unwise children to go wandering into other worlds - also don't want the portal places to invade each other but we've only got one for the moment and can revise as appropriate..."

"Five day jumps it is. I will have to somehow occupy myself."

"I am sure you'll be dying of boredom. Maybe Mars can get a folder full of previous terraforming projects of yours, and then they'll be all impressed and clamor to hire you."

"You have a lot of confidence in me considering that my resume so far consists of having made a planet I copied whole."

"I am an endless font of confidence in you. And I'm always right about people."

Wag. Kiss.

Kiss. And he snuggles and watches terraforming until - "I signed up to go interact with Kib a little."

"I'm not sure why you're doing the timeslots thing, but okay."

"Unless he has a preference not to be interacted with we'd feel terrible about just ignoring him until he's satisfactorily graceful company but being around people who think you are Melkor is hard."

"We are not extroverts, he will legit be okay with much less company than you're assigning him, but knock yourself out I guess."

"Yeah, there's definitely a bit of 'if it were me' going on, but it's been a couple days." Upstairs!

Accompanied!

Kib is reading a book. "Hi."

"Hi! Should we shoo?"

"I don't care. I wonder if this is what my Maitimo meant about not having preferences any more."

"Did he say that?"

"Pretty much. I mean, I can still pick what to have for dessert in a nonrandom fashion, lucky me."

"That's sad."

"Maitimo's indifference to chocolate, my continued ability to prefer raspberries to blueberries, or my indifference to company?"

"The me not wanting things. The indifference to company doesn't make any sense but I shouldn't say people wanting things that aren't what I want are sad."

"Yeah."

"I really want the me to be okay but I don't know how to do it. He won't believe us like you don't believe us and it'll be sad."

"Crossed my mind too. We're really pretty unbelievable."