Yeah, I think you're right.

What's that saying, 'time flies when you're having fun'...

He giggles to himself, and sends a few hundred fragments of his sensory power out to check on the planet's computing infrastructure. Everything looks good. He gets dressed and puts on his necklace and pops over to a network hub to fix a minor problem. The obvious complement to this sensory power would be ranged telekinesis, maybe a different angle on the same set of abilities that Elaneth-imire branched from his landshaping... conjuring things, moving them, altering them. And maybe the ability to fragment his healing aura the same way, send it directly where it's needed instead of being bound to a single location. That seems like a good all-purpose direction for his power to start heading in.

While you've got the spying capacity for it, yeah. What're the genocide aliens up to, and how is replacing the populations they genocided going to go?

He pops over to find out.

The genocide aliens are still adjusting. The first shock has passed, and the new consensus is taking hold; they haven't had any cases of the wing contagion yet, but they're phasing out the quarantine procedures on Tseiza-3 and dismantling all the infrastructure in the portal maze, and the level of unease in the population about these things is low.

I think the resurrections are going to go well, but I also definitely think I want to wait until they've had to actually deal with somebody growing wings at least a few times, and probably also wait for Dalvor to make diplomatic overtures and see how they handle that, he says. Seems very much the kind of thing better done right than fast.

Definitely. And resurrecting their dead?

I'm going to wait on that a little too, because I think Sikyal would appreciate more time to get everything settled before being faced with the decision of when and how to bring back the rioters.

On the one hand they died recently and in a way that is fresh in everyone's minds and a lot of people are going to prefer to get them back; on the other hand, they're likely to be a disruptive influence at a fragile time.

Sounds good. Is there some way to check our current dimension for impeding disasters -

I'll see what I can do.

He pops back to Independence's current location and tries to figure out if he can use his spying-inclined infinite-range osanwe to just directly locate all of the other minds in the galaxy.

Yes! He can do that! There they are.

...and they're really weird...

After some investigation with his sensory power, he figures out that it's the stars that are doing the thinking. And they're really, really, really, really slow about it. He can't even tell what scale they're thinking on, except that it doesn't involve any discernible changes to anyone's mental state over the few minutes he's been observing them.

...I think we are safe from the locals, he says. At least for the forseeable future.

Oh, good.

Yeah. Wow, star-people, I would not have predicted that.

There's a lot out there.

Yeah.

Raika-seren thinks he likes living in a multiverse filled with so many astonishing and unexpected things. Although he definitely prefers to be familiar with all the nearby ones so they don't have the chance to unpleasantly surprise anyone.

Yeah, I also want to check all our neighbors but I realize I'm being paranoid.

We can check all our neighbours anyway, if we can figure out how to find them all...

We aren't even totally sure they're finite.

If they were infinite I'd expect more traffic!

...that's a really good point. All right. Go for it.

This is a good project to have. Raika-seren likes having a project, and this one is particularly difficult and enormous and interesting and useful.

Love you, he says happily, and - let's see - now would be a good time for him to have a conjuration power of his very own but in the meantime he can chase down Elaneth-imire... on the other hand he should probably wait for those other powers to come in before he starts making a lot of random jumps... he can start by practicing world-spying on all the found-but-unexplored worlds in this corner of the map. All right.

It doesn't occur to him to go back for his soul until he's already several hops away in one of the worlds not bridged by anybody's Sphere, and... yet all his powers still work? He'd been under the impression that being worlds away from your soul made it impossible to use its active powers. Maybe it's the godlike power that's doing it, or maybe it's having a Sphere - you can open a portal into your Sphere from anywhere, so in a sense it's always adjacent to you, and if your soul counts as 'you' in a similar way then the Sphere could bridge the two. On consideration, that's really really useful. If his soul stays with Maitimo while he goes around poking new worlds, then if he finds anything dangerous he'll end up self-resurrecting safe at home with Maitimo instead of right in front of whatever killed him.

Wouldn't count on it working that way, but that'd be useful if it does.

Well, I definitely trust my resurrection power to work, and I'm pretty sure I'd resurrect where my soul is instead of where my body was. I guess it's always possible I'd hit some kind of really weird edge case. I'm not planning to be careless, but if I didn't trust my immortality I'd pass the project to Liran-alore or something. He doesn't care if he gets killed because Elaneth-imire can just make another one.

He can't resurrect you?

He could, but if I was already not trusting my immortality - I'm pretty sure there's no way to completely prevent Elaneth-imire from resurrecting me, but anything that could prevent my own soul from resurrecting me might be able to prevent him from retrieving my last several days of memories, or something like that, and I care more about losing several days of memories than Liran-alore does.

Alright. Be careful. Take occasional breaks and everything.

I will.

Okay, so where are all the minds in these previously-found universes and what can his sensory power tell about their locations? (It's not urgent, so he doesn't spy on anyone's mind directly; that would seem unnecessarily hostile.)

A bunch on the 'single inhabited planet, preindustrial, nothing obviously useful or threatening going on at a glance' theme, it turns out. Plus a handful with multiple inhabited planets, same pattern. And one world where the single inhabited planet is actually a huge cloud of gas looped around its star, full of floating plants and flying animals. It's really pretty. He pauses to admire it.

Yeah, the peal also found that most planets are 'boring'. We should involve ourselves anyway, at least once we've checked everyone.

Yeah. I wonder if the Zaranyes will start forking - they're going to want to accept interdimensional immigrants, but they're also going to feel personally responsible for the well-being of all their subjects, and Nuime is already close to having too high a population for Esarkan to be as closely involved in running it as he prefers - he has solutions to that but I bet they're going to prefer forking as soon as one of them thinks of it. Fork, give the fork their own planet to run their own empire on, repeat as necessary.