Nine days passed between the first stabilized junction and the second attempt.
Rodriguez insisted on the delay despite the operation's evident momentum, and Timeline 48 agreed with him once he explained his reasoning plainly: four minutes and thirty-seven seconds of controlled dimensional contact represented an achievement significant enough that rushing the follow-up risked squandering it through insufficient preparation. Dr. Chen's team spent the intervening days refining the translation equipment specifically for humanoid communication rather than the more general biometric monitoring the original protocol had emphasized—working from the Jakarta market footage, cross-referencing vocal patterns against every linguistic database Coalition possessed, building contingency frameworks for a conversation none of them could fully anticipate.
