Well, blankets help.

Trevor comes by. He needs friends. You are guys are good but... he feels the power imbalance is incompatible with proper friendship. He might get used to that. Pause. Honestly, if you have any ideas on how to get him a [gender]friend...

We could take a trip out to the city sometime.

Maybe? I think I would rather have everything more secure at here first...

She nods. Not immediately, yeah. But I think Dusk will have everything basically set up in a few days.

Nod nod. Thank you.

Why are we signing?

I thought Felix might want the privacy.

Ah. Thank you. I just don't want to upset other people.

Nod. "Okay."

"Thank you for all the help. All of you."

"You're welcome," she grins.

"You're welcome."

Grin.

And as promised, a few days later Dusk announces that they can move to the new location. It's not subtle - she has plans for disguising it as a butte, but that's not the highest priority at the moment. But the droids have a station for surveillance of the shard and the surrounding area, and Nine has a rooftop walkway to patrol, and there's a war room with a top-of-the-line holoprojector and enough comfy seating for the entire crew and then some, and a bay for the shuttle and obvious places for portals to both pocket dimensions.

Oooh, nice crib. Trevor feels like he is living in Star Trek.

Yup.

And now she can focus on trying to communicate with the source of all their problems.

The source of her problem tentatively, shyly, weirdly-reluctantly proposes that more pocket dimensions would be awesome. Please?

She's not opposed, exactly. But if they hand pocket dimensions out wrong, a lot of people will die, and she doesn't want that.

That sounds like a weird set of priorities.

Yup. But it's what they have to work with.

She is willing to put in the work to figure out how to safely make more dreamshapers - her dimension will help, she's very pleased with her dimension - but she wants a couple concessions. She wants to know why it wants more dimensions, she wants a way for droids to be dreamshapers, and she wants a way for Felix to go home - ideally one that lets him go back and forth and bring people with him.

If she is willing to put in the time then eventually some of the concepts are going to come across, like "concessions".

Of course the dreamshard wants to make more dimensions they are [awesome|great|pretty|tasty|aesthetically-pleasing-fractal-of-laws-of-physics]. Dusk's dimension is really [awesome|pretty|tasty|aesthetically-pleasing-fractal-of-laws-of-physics] that is why the dreamshard wanted to land on her! Dreamshaper droids is a really confusing concept. The dreamshard does something like telling Dusk [you're giving me an error message|you want to divide by zero|you just strung a bunch of concepts together and they made no sense]. Moving between universes is kiiiinda hard and the dreamshard doesn't understand why those requirements are necessary and why would [anyone|anything] want to spend all that energy instead of just creating more [awesome|pretty|tasty|aesthetically-pleasing-fractal-of-laws-of-physics] dimensions. It's really insistent that pocket dimensions are [awesome|pretty|tasty|aesthetically-pleasing-fractal-of-laws-of-physics]. Why can't she get that?

She gets it! Her dimension is definitely [awesome|pretty|tasty|aesthetically-pleasing-fractal-of-laws-of-physics]! She just wants these other things too.

The minimum she needs is an assurance that it's doing it just because dimensions are [awesome|pretty|tasty|aesthetically-pleasing-fractal-of-laws-of-physics] - and not that, say, there being more dimensions makes it more powerful and once it gets powerful enough it's going to do some other thing that she might not approve of - and for Felix to have a way to go home, once, at a time of his choosing or with at least a week's warning, preferably the former. (And she really wants the droid thing, too, if there's any way to do that. They don't have to get dimensions that work the same way as the usual ones, even, just something if there's going to be a bunch of dreamshapers around.)

...It does get more powerful when it makes more dimensions. But it isn't doing it to get more powerful. It's doing it to get more dimensions! They are [awesome|pretty|tasty|aesthetically-pleasing-fractal-of-laws-of-physics] and therefore a goal unto itself. It could do other things with the power. Like jumping between universes to get to make more [awesome|pretty|tasty|aesthetically-pleasing-fractal-of-laws-of-physics]-ness.

The dreamshard miiiight be able to do the thing for Felix, maybe. It really doesn't get why the weird requirements. It has acquired enough familiarity with the concept of "consistent preferences" that it volunteers that the other people that traveled between universes didn't want those things.

The droid thing is still very like [you're giving me an error message|you want to divide by zero|you just strung a bunch of concepts together, and they made no sense]. Does she understand that [the system can't do that|math does not work that way|these concepts don't go together like that]? Maybe she could get non-droids dreamshapers? Or no-longer-droids droids? Does that count?

Yeah, see, that's worrisome. People have all kinds of weird preferences - she's been keeping that simple for it, only talking about the ones of hers that are very immediately relevant - and if it goes around doing stuff without knowing about those and how its actions are going to affect people, it's going to end up hurting people, which is bad. (One thing it could do that would help with this would be picking people who would have less interesting dimensions. It's still risky, especially if the dreamshard lets itself be found, but it's at least less likely to get people who will do things to a lot of other people, that way, and that means less chance of someone having something happen that they don't want.)

The reason for the requirement is that while Felix definitely wants to go home - if the only way to send him home was to do it right now, that would be the right thing, but she expects the shard can do better than that - there are people and things he cares about here, too, and it would hurt him to move him again without giving him a chance to do the most important things with the things he cares about.

Making the droids no longer be droids might be good, if the only thing that changed was whatever the dreamshard needs to be able to make them dreamshapers - what is that?