[ Harold has conceded to using she/her pronouns with everyone else since that seems to be the convention, and defying it is only going to open him up to a multitude of questions he doesn't want to answer. Sometimes lying really is just the easiest approach. But with John, unique among everyone else, he can espouse his real opinion:

That he's not certain yet Aurora merits the anthropomorphization. ]

Perhaps. Either it puts in requests to be approved by some other authority, or it has direct oversight over resource expenditures within Etraya. I'm inclined to think the latter, though.

It would be quite tedious for some administrator to be approving each individual request we make. The scale of a building versus, say, Bear, is not really so consequential once we get past the initial hurdle of interdimensional travel in the first place.