Flap. "You're welcome."

"Feel free to drop by if you need anything."

"Will do! Once there's a crystal ball here you can write me if you need to."

"We will stay in touch!"

And she goes and checks in with Cam who has determined that the Sauron did in fact land in a disappearance point and comes back to let him know, who should she checklist with.

He is so pleased about that and can assemble part of the distributed council for new-world onboarding.

She goes and does that.

And Minor knocks on his alt's door.

"Yes?"

"Hi! I'm an alternate universe version of you and I have the tech briefing and the great big stack of language notes and we can get your father back, probably inside a week but they're handling the refugee thing first."

"Language notes?"

"Right here but I don't want to sit around while you read them, read enough to verify that I'm not toying with you?"

"That is what I'm doing, yes."

Minor waits.

"Okay. Hi, human alternate universe version of me, thank you for the tech briefing."

"Sure thing. So Cor has an alternate universe version and she is my wife."

"Good for you."

"If Timothy decided to be a lunatic -"

"I told Maitimo that this was clearly a disaster and I thought that we should have a coup. And he said that he was going to let him go after the war, that he was able to work on spell development, and that he still meant to help us. And - I wasn't realistically going to improve on that by having a coup, I'm not good at running countries, so it'd be a - just-on-principle coup and that's moronic. If any of that had changed we'd have gone through with it."

"So the thing you should have done is told Cor this and told him he could decide whether to pull the trigger on the coup, because he'd agree with you about the war and appreciate being in a position to decide even if, as I presume would have happened once you two had the same information, he also decided it wasn't worth it."

" - one of the situations it would have been necessary for was if he couldn't trust Maitimo far enough to keep working with him, if he'd had the information that Maitimo helped me plan the coup it'd be less effective as a resolution of that problem."

"You're not talking about a fake coup, right, you were actually planning to remove Maitimo from power even if it's irregular because he was going to cooperate with that. So Cor would have gotten what he needed from that, if it'd be admittedly less romantic than defying one's brother to save him."

"Romantic isn't what I was going for -"

"Right so you'd have been fine."

"I guess I didn't know him well enough to be confident of that."