New lore regarding High Hearthkeeper Lucy. Recall that I wasn't sure how to portray her, as a traditionalist or a modernist. I've decided that generally she leans traditional, but she considered temporarily suspending interstellar mission work. Prior to her accession to the high perch, she was a research monk on Yih working on the mass router project. She was confident that the mass router would be ready for general use very soon, and saw the suppression of womb ships not as a rejection of tradition but as embracing new technology that couldn't be abused like neurogel had been.

It's possible this was also High Hearthkeeper Brightsun's motive for suppressing interstellar mission work, but she was unable to control the narrative in the face of secular media who painted it as a rejection of “useless and antiquated busy work” that only served to create gel-heads. Brightsun reversed course precisely because she saw the scandal it was causing. This would make Pascal's lapse rather tragic, since he assumed the move was a compromise to make the faith more palatable to a modern secular audience.