During the Titanian phase of the game’s development, when they had been laying down great slabs of world and story from one day to the next, Richard had pushed Pluto, hard, to supply them with material even before it was "ready," which, for Pluto, meant that every cubic millimeter of solid matter in the world had to have a detailed backstory stretching 4.5 billion years. Pluto’s diligence in this and other matters had become a bottleneck delaying millions of dollars’ worth of efforts by other contributors. Richard had demanded that Pluto supply maps stipulating the locations of certain ore veins and gem deposits by fiat. In a thirteen-hour meeting, the memory of which still sent palpable horrors running up and down Pluto’s spine, Richard had stood at a whiteboard drawing out maps of the mineral deposits by hand. Photographs of the whiteboard had then been used to generate the actual maps used in the game. Much of Pluto’s work since then had been in the newly created discipline of Teleological Tectonics, meaning that he started with Richard’s maps and then ran the tectonics and the magma flow simulations backward in time so that everything could be knit together into a lava narrative that made sense by Pluto’s lights. This project had perked along in the background for several years and only recently got to the place where serious computing resources could be thrown at it. That job had fallen to Zula. "The nature of the problem" was Pluto petulantly reminding Richard that Richard had been the originator of said problem.