The Valar announce that they've done as much as they can in Singularity (they can't bring back peoples' babies in that critical period either, but they can get them earlier versions) and are setting up portals between there and Sanity as soon as they are confident they've cleaned up the plague. A bunch of Elf architects have this wild idea for a fivedimensional city where alternating intersections are interdimensional portals between various Valinors and they get eagerly to setting it up.
"Unfortunately it looks like we can't automate much about potionmaking. Specifically I am currently nearly convinced that a magic person has to do all the steps that sound really stupid, like stirring exactly seven times counterclockwise. Purely mechanical stuff like powdering and chopping, or just mixing till combined or adjusting the heat, can be done by a thing or by a nonmagic person but with a lot of ingredients you run into freshness problems very fast and the rest of them are exactly the easy parts that don't help very much to automate away. I do think it would be possible to come up with an efficient assembly line if we had magic people who wanted to do that."
" - that's obnoxious. We could probably get a magic person assembly line once we open Hazel but dunno when we should open Hazel."
"Yeah! Oh, I'm also paying attention to how getting them to cut it out with the slavery is going, and it's going pretty well, the main problems after the economic incentives go away are, like, 'but I like my slaves personally' or 'but how else do we deal with criminals' or 'I feel low status otherwise' or 'wait, you can just not have slaves, who knew', surprisingly little 'but it's our culture' or anything else that would interfere heavily with affecting the countries at all to try to address. It's not straightforward but it's not just a wall of reasonless obstructionism!"
"Oh, that is good. And are the slaves super mad that we could've done it faster and didn't, I kind of would be -"
"Uh, some of them. Like, 'we weren't allowed to go to the dots and summon and then my kid died', like that."
"Yeah. I get where the demon who went and freed a bunch of them even though Bright told her not to do that was coming from."
"When you're the law it seems like the law's really important but when the law's hurting people and you're just kind of there it seems like the people are more important."
"Timothy threatened to kill those guys on the Moon and I'm sure if it were an alt of us running the Moon - well, it'd be run better but - they'd say 'you can't do that' and it's not exactly that they'd be wrong."
"I mean, I'm not totally sure he should've done that, either, but also I didn't like it when he left you for a week, so probably the entire problem is you got kidnapped in the first place and if a Timothy ran the moon we could go 'hey, Moon Timothy, this thing happened, get your shit together'."
"I know you would have a lot of practical trouble working yourself to death but please be careful with anything that would be characterized that way if you were still a human."