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.
Eventually Minor, in a better mood and now qualified to handle emergencies if they come up and the binding permits it, swings home for hugs and dragons and a video announcing this achievement. (Michael's been posting regular dragon-updates in his absence.)
He finds Miranda.
Karen is in the room they've been sharing. (Miranda's only complaint about sorting Slytherin was that she did not get to room with Karen.)
There's only one bed in it now.
"Hey! I'm back for a bit - I think I'll probably take random summons some more, even if only one in a hundred is like that it'd be worth it for it not to go to some jerk - but I should take a break first. ...considered suggesting they pause Revelation for my break, decided not to do that."
"I went and talked to Bella's mom and borrowed some more of her monsters and have been doing experiments. And helping with the automated potionmaking trials."
"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, Hazel's all complicated. Godspring's a good practice world, maybe soon."
"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."