Why did you decide to combine your two series by letting the Service from the Elana books meet Noren?
The ultimate, subtle aid provided by the Service was necessary because it had been firmly established that the planet hadn’t enough metal to restore technology. If the Founders had known what the Service knew about recovering trace metals (which incidentally, is something that’s already been done with genetically engineered bacteria here on Earth) they would have used that knowledge in the first place. So, to achieve a happy ending, aliens had to help without revealing themselves–and if there was going to be an alien federation with the same policy as the in the Elana books, there’d have been no point in making it a different one. Furthermore, having established the presence of an alien artifact in the previous book, I had to follow it up.
