The initial wait message is drawn directly under where
the modals would appear, so the message "goes away"
when modals pop up.
There's still a bit of trickiness around the timing of
some of the calls. Attempting to mount the PDDB too early
before all the contexts have been registered leads to
a lot of needless defacing.
Also, the final redraw needs a short delay to allow
the system to foreground shellchat again after closing
the modals.