"Sure. I don't think he's in imminent danger of being bored by the library here or anything."

"You mean he hasn't finished it yet?" 

"He has not."

"Perhaps I can join you both when it's time to pry him away and make him eat something? I can bring food."

"Sounds like a good idea." She looks at her watch. "I think it is about time to oblige him to eat in another three, four hours."

"Lovely, I shall get on it then. We can talk in the meantime, though, I'm as curious about your world of origin as his."

"My world of origin is evil but has many fascinating contents. Lots of varieties of sapients, several varieties of magic, a fairly developed culture and standard of living considering we had to pull it all off without science."

"I heard about that. It doesn't really make any sense to me. Can you experiment with composition? With rhymes? With sound?"

"Yeah, that's not the sort of thing it objects to - I guess you could get into trouble if you were trying to figure out acoustics or something too systematically, but you can replace words in a poem until you like it - a reasonable gloss on it is that the universe is lethally shy? It doesn't like people trying to figure out how it works and hold it to that as a standard."

"Huh.

Fun as a story, terrible as Creation."

"I have opined that Eru ought to write novels and my universe ought to direct action movies."

"I think I'd be comfortable with that. And this universe can be the one people just uncomplicatedly live in, once we've fixed it so no one dies or is a prisoner."

"Oh? Nothing's systematically wrong with it?"

"Not that we've noticed yet, though we believed in the promise of Valinor for a very long time. Rumors of gods, but they don't make much appearance. Lots of astonishingly powerful things but they haven't recently committed atrocities and once we're astonishingly powerful we can stop them, and Loki wields one and is therefore currently among the galaxy's scariest things unless we're missing some. And it was a bit of an obsessive first priority."

"Cool. Good universe." Bella pats the nearest surface.

He laughs. "I know! My cousin says that Loki's first reaction on reaching our world and hearing about the gods was assuming we'd invented stories of them - because that happens all the time in this universe, apparently, but there are no true gods at all."

"My universe has gods that haven't been heard of much or recently who may be dead or may have been made up to begin with but there are also very definitely real ones who do stuff. And suck."

"Well, they do call her Loki God-slayer."

"I will want to talk to her about this occupation she has but my universe may still have a leg up on her, since it can fuck with causality if it wants."

"Yes, let's sort the planets that don't bite back first."

"Sounds like a good order of operations to me."

"There are a lot of them. When we got out of Arda we were a bit overwhelmed by how - little the things that'd make this planet safe and good for us corresponded to the things the galaxy needed done. I think people born to it are better at balancing."

"What do you mean balancing?"

"Not just going 'well, people are constantly suffering and dying but I can't care about that, I'd go crazy' or 'I am obviously obliged to consider the galaxy at war until death is ended everywhere, and bear no children of my own'."

"...yeah, are you guys currently in a state of war for that purpose or not? It seems like it might be easier to tackle a galaxy if there are more of you."