XI

"Taras! No need for formalities, how have you been?" Gaiya got excited at seeing a familiar person.

Taras stood up, chocolate giant greeted her with gentle golden eyes.

"Thank you for your concern my Lady, I am well. I hope you are adjusting comfortably." Gentle giant extruded aura of calm and confidence, unlike his prickly sister Nyx.

"I'm doing well enough, thank you for keeping watch over my project for all this time. Couldn't have been easy." While Gaiya was diving deep into the nether, Taras was responsible for resolving any issues and he was one of few who had trust and authority of waking Gaiya up in case of emergencies.

"Not at all, Orion did all the micro managing, all I had to do is check in every few decades." He laughed at her silly concern.

"You did well, I'm sure Nyx wanted to wake me up at some point, couldn't have been easy. It seems like she got over it so all is well that ends well I guess."

Taras exchanged a meaningful look with Erot, who shook his head ever so slightly. The whole exchange went over Gaiya's head, as she kept on eagerly talking.

"Anyway, I'm ready to dig into the reports." She said sitting down at a control desk with large interface showing various reading.

"First of all, did the Gate arrive yet? I know it was supposed to take a while to make & deliver."

"It arrived six months ago, it became operational a bit less than five months ago. It is safely located between fifth rocky planet and the first gas Giant that is shielding it from comets." Taras informed.

"Good, good, so only around a month to power it on from scratch using sol. How about artificial satellites for the first, second, and fifth planets?" She followed up.

"The satellites are in place for about a Thai now, they are effective against solar wind on second and fifth planets, where atmosphere is stable, however there is difficulty maintaining stability on the first planet." Taras replied.

"That's to be expected, first planet is too close to sol, we could just use A. I. to mine resources there if needed, perhaps we can make it second planet's moon since it is so small to begin with? Oh my! Third and fourth planets both have green! Look Erot! GREEEN!" She got all excited seeing some images.

"Yes, yes, I know, not only plants and algae, but third planet also sprouted lizards, everything grew giant so you have grown a bunch of giant lizards on Terra from the seeds you've sent. Tellus only sprouted greens, I guess the giant moon was stirring the pot a bit with gravitational pulls." Erot was enjoying her excitement. "So both planets that already had moons and plenty of water now have almost acceptable atmosphere for us."

"Awesome! We got animals, soon there will be native sentient life..." She said with dreamy eyes.

"About that, I guess you are ready for my gift." Devilish smile appeared on his face. "So, when animal life stirred on Terra we sent a multiple adamu and mammal starters to three and four, and Terra didn't disappoint, several humanoid life forms evolved there."

"Now way! How did it happen so fast? And how are they even surviving with all the giant lizards?" Gaiya had so many questions running through her mind.

"Where to begin? The fast track mammal evolution was possible to expedite with technology from Gard, so that is kind of all thanks to them, we supplied varied DNA samples to see what sticks. As for the lizards we set up safe zones with drones, to be honest they were pretty helpful as a food source since we couldn't deliver much of anything organic before the gate arrived." Erot was talking like it was not a big deal, while Gaiya was speechless hanging on his every work.

"This is not a gift," she said quietly, "this is a miracle..."

"We didn't know it would work out so well, glad you like it."

"Like it? I love it, this is amazing! You are amazing! Thank you!" She got up, reached for him and gave him a big kiss. After a while she peeled back from his lips, slightly dizzy of course, and reached for the interface to snoop through the images.

She looked through slightly grainy still images of the Terra humanoids on file. Quiet a few of them were average sized, close to Gard & Olympus citizens, few were dwarf sized, and one settlement had relative giants to other groups, that must have been Kronos DNA descendants. Something about that thought stirred her memory. She turned around, visually found Erot and Taras, braced herself and asked:

"So what was that about the Council getting involved? Am I right to guess Kronos involved? Since it was brought up yesterday. At this point I think I need to know more." She didn't want to deal with it, but she had to.

"About that..."