ROSE: But Skaia is a very passive entity. It only “knows” and “sees,” but it never quite “acts.”
[…] it has control over exactly one thing. The defense portals.
ROSE: It can decide to send important meteors to different points in time than originally planned, thus creating alternate realities.

occurs to me that choosing to lay a descendant’s egg thousands of years after their ancestor died is also pretty much the extent of the mother grub’s influence on Alternia, too. up until now I’ve been putting that on the Condesce and her obsession with separating her subjects from their forebears, but it could also feasibly have been a deliberate act of protection? (or maybe the Condesce just made her do it.)