"As far as I can tell," says Aelise, unruffled, "either people from my world just have a higher inclination to go to war with each other than people from yours, or throwing Gifts into the mix changes the game significantly. When I let Chelsa loose on the world, I was trying to avoid it being nuked down to a population of one. As far as I can tell from what Harley said to Tab about ten years ago, your world has never faced down a crisis of that magnitude, or at least not from such a short distance. Now that I've finally got her back in the box, I am not going to let the last three hundred years go to waste by ripping the band-aid off six billion minds."