Except tonight there is another person flying. She does not bother him; she stares curiously and then hovers for a bit.

...well, there could just be another demon around. Or one of the Maiar who are left, there's probably gradations between "incapacitated with grief" and "literally Thauron".

There are, in fact, gradations. 

She laughed when she felt them die, but it wasn't exactly happy laughter. 

She sort of wings in Cam's direction. She determines that the destroyer of Valinor is in addition to that pretty cute and wings faster.

...okay. "Hi?"

"Hey. I hadn't seen you before and the recordings don't really do the wings justice. Those are some sweet fucking wings."

"Thanks, made 'em myself."

"Likewise, but I cheated with magic, these wouldn't support an Elf in flight. You can't have cheated."

"I did pick the basic design out of a catalog."

She pulls up alongside him. "Then you can pass the compliment on, I guess. You in town for the conference?"

"Yeah. Who are you?"

"Can't tell you. Like, not won't, can't. I think in spoken language they go with Thuringwethil, which is sort of a sweet try."

Bit of a mouthful, but okay. "Here for the conference too or just incidentally?"

"Isn't there an Earth saying - I've done my reading, you know - it'll be a cold day in Hell when anyone invites me to an ethics conference. Though Hell is a vacuum, I guess, and they invited you, and worse than that they invited Sauron, or did he invite himself? Nah, I'm just flying. Haven't touched down in, y'know, seven years.

I thought about stopping you."

"I thought about that too. Well, not about you doing it."

"And you didn't even have the advantage of knowing the script." 

"Script?"

"Back before they built the world, y'know, they scripted it. The war was supposed to last five hundred years and then the Valar'd sweep in as saviors. They had it all down in triplicate. Ah, metaphorically, you won't be able to summon it."

"Five hundred - ugh."

"Yeah."

"How do you script that kind of thing, the Enemy obviously wasn't inclined to cooperate with the plan."

"We don't have oaths through hardware. We have them because it's the kind of thing we are. We play parts. Or did, until a few years ago. I think the rules might be broken now...

...we're reflexively deterministic, see. The kind of mind that, knowing what it'd do, wouldn't do that, won't become a Maia. There is, in the space of all possible minds, the kind of thing who will know exactly what our part is, and how it ends, and do it anyway, and all of us are that. Some more resentfully than others, to be sure. I thought it was a stupid fucking script."

"...so, what, do you just like existing enough that you decided it made sense to be the sort of person who could exist in Maia form...?"

"Yeah. Or, like, Sauron thought he could find a way out of it. By leveraging enough things that weren't reflexively deterministic, giving them enough power that history refused to stay on the rails. He was going to try to make Men the world's technological power, break loose with them, and then you showed up and made it way easier. Trying to find a way off the rails can be your rail. Though it wasn't mine. Mine was more just kind of watching the whole fucking thing play out."

"Oh, he has a shtick that isn't 'be a horrifying creeper'."

"He used to be quite idealistic, for the amount of systemically torturing people he did. He actually used to be idealistic and not torture people and it was kind of appealing even though we both knew that he was in fact going to eventually torture a lot of people."

"I am having a lot of trouble envisioning the appeal."

"If you found out there was a script, and you were stuck on it, and it was inherent to who you were...wouldn't you be, like, at least sympathetic to someone whose script eventually had 'sadistic mass murderer' in it but at the moment just had 'light the fucking script on fire' on the agenda?"

"Sympathetic maybe. Not - appealed to. Probably. I don't know how detailed these scripts are."

She bites her finger. "Fair enough. Anyway, thank you. Doubt you hear it much. Doubt you hear it from us."

"...You're welcome."

"Like I said, I could've stopped you. I didn't. Five hundred fucking years. After he's nibbled the planet's population down to like fifty million he has them all tear themselves apart in civil wars. Doriath kills their entire Dwarf population, the Noldor kill Doriath -"

"Write a tell-all book," Cam suggests, "and wait a long, long time to publish it."

"Worried I'll give people ideas? Melkor knows it all in even more detail than I do, he's probably already shared select details."

"More concerned that it'll foment resentment over things that haven't happened and aren't going to."

"If you say so, honey. Lips are sealed."

"And here I was assuming you knew my name."

"They call you The Destroyer, like Sauron's The Abhorred. Didn't think you'd be super appreciative. And here I was trying to perk you up and everything.'

"My name is Cam."

"Cam, destroyer of worlds?"

"It was only the one."

"Yeah, I know, I was showing off my Earth history references."

"Congratulations. I am unfortunately a bit more oomph than a nuke."

"You put it back, didn't'ya."

Cam sighs. "You're not perking me up, in case it was hard to tell."

"Yeah, sure. Have a sweet ethics conference." She dissolves into fog.

...Cam declines to inhale until he's a ways away from the fog, because yikes.

He flies most of the night and then caffeinates and returns to the conference site and checks his mail.

Interdimensional travel: works. Don't have targeting up yet, so no way to go anywhere in particular. Want to hop into a random dimension, summon enough to figure out who lives there, go say hi/end scarcity? 

- Fëanáro

Blink, blink. Cam texts him: Sounds fun.

Blueprints filename worldleaper. Take an instance of Maitimo, I'd like to establish diplomatic contact with aliens too.

If you don't have targeting up should we expect the place to be habitable?

I expect you to land in deep space somewhere and then make yourselves a lightleaper. Technically a chance you'd land in a sun but it's negligible. If you'd rather make a new Maitimo when you get there you can do that too, I am just very excited about diplomatic contact with aliens and want them to meet the peoples of Endore as well as you. 

If the destination doesn't have itself mapped how am I going to find anybody even if I discover their existence?

Binary search with conjuring.

Why didn't I think of that. Okay. After the conference.

Have a nice conference.

Cam goes and has a nice conference. Including a delicious menu at lunchtime. Who's sitting with him today?

People honestly mostly kind of avoid him. Thauron waves.

Yes well fuck you Thauron. He'll just go looking for Maitimo then.

Maitimo's sitting with a few people from Brithombar who are only slightly awkward when Cam joins them. "Have you checked your mail?" Maitimo says brightly.

"Yeah, did you get the same memo?"

"I did! I want to come along, can I?"

"Come along where?" Findekáno says behind Cam.

Maitimo grins at him, a bit reservedly. "We have interdimensional travel."

"Oh, congratulations. Are you going to Hell?"

"We do not have targeted interdimensional travel. We're going fuck-knows-where and bringing them up to the modern age as fast as we can."

"Or learning from them," Findekáno says, sitting, "it is possible that they'll look at us and go 'you poor souls what kinds of centuries-out-of-date lightleaper even is that". 

"Ooh, that would be fun," Cam opines.

"Wouldn't it? There's a bit of an exploration-exploitation tradeoff," Findekáno continues, "seems like maybe we should be hopping around to higher tech before we start bringing people up to speed - I'm thinking in particular that we've got no chance of curing mortality in aliens with current medical tech -"

"We've got Cam, though, no one else has got Cam. Could be that the high-tech aliens will think we're provincial children but also, hey, provincial children who can prevent the heat death of their universe."

The people from Brithombar are shaking their heads at the two of them. "Noldor," someone mutters.

"Well, absent targeting it's not a tradeoff we get to make purposefully," Cam says, "unless we want to visit a bunch of random places and leave outposts in them and then sort."

"Let's do one place first," Maitimo says. "get a better sense of what we're doing, and then figure out how we might sensibly scale - and scaling's going to be constrained by the number of interested demons anyway, this is a wholly demon-dependent interdimensional travels scheme."

"Yeah, one first sounds good to me."

"Can we come along, though?" Maitimo says. "We shall handle problems where there's no demonic comparative advantage and suggest Valinor tech you don't know about that might help various alien species, and otherwise stay out of the way."

"Yeah, you can come. How many are you each up to now, I don't remember off the top of my head."

"There are six of me," Maitimo says smugly. "Seems to be the size at which we coordinate best but if we're eventually ruling an empire that spans several dimensions I may need a few more."

"Four," Findekáno says. "Why?"

"Just curious. Do you have nicknames or just try to be interchangeable?"

"We all pick names, being interchangeable would mean you couldn't specialize very usefully," Maitimo says. "I should really have extended you an invitation to visit Himring sooner, seeing it thrive is... it helps."

"Sounds nice."

"Shall we go make contact with another dimension?"

"Right now?"

"No, but if we're going soon I want to hand off some post-conference plans."

"I was thinking right after the conference wrapped up if that works for you."

"It will." His eyes flicker. "Yes, all set." And to Findekáno, "are you also coming?"

"Yes."

"I'll see you both tonight, then."

That'll be a fun group to go exploring with. Cam doesn't remark on that. "See you."

They're both there that night, sitting outside the conference at separate tables and desperately delegating the next few weeks' activities. 

Cam can wait while they do that.

And then everyone is ready to go hop dimensions.

So Cam makes a worldleaper and poises himself to produce air and a ship as soon as they land.

And they find themselves in deep space, as was statistically nearly guaranteed.

Air! Ship!

"Are there locals?" both Elves say eagerly in unison, and then fall silent.

"I shall hop outside so I don't burst the ship if the answer is 'lots'," Cam replies, and he lets himself out and starts conjuring up stuff.

Presently he returns. "Humans!" he reports. "Or something that looks a lot like them."

"...huh," Maitimo says.

"That is very surprising," Findekáno says. "Even if we think dimensions have recent points of divergence. Shall we start narrowing them down?"

"Did that," Cam says, "they're that way. I'll narrow it down again when we're close enough to get a look at individual stars in the right galaxy."

"Can we look at what you've got? Do you have translation up and working?"

"Translation needs to chew for a bit, there's a bunch of languages, but feel free to have a look," Cam says, handing them each chip corpuses of recentish recorded output of local humans.

They can't read the writing yet; there are an awful lot of charts and diagrams. This society apparently organizes a significant portion of their written output as flowcharts. 

"Interesting to be in a new place without the advantage of speaking a language," Cam says, laying in a course for the correct galaxy.

"I am surprised my father did not personally insist on coming. Hundreds of languages, huh?"

"...More," Cam says. "But only a few hundred popular ones and a lot of them seem to have very little writing."

"No computers, do they have electricity yet?"

"Can't guarantee they don't but haven't found any evidence of it yet."

"Fastest way to safely tell teach them all summoning is probably going to depend on local government," Maitimo says. "Findekáno, were your people getting anywhere on non-summoning forms of immortality for humans?"

"Getting somewhere, yes, have a serum for Cam to dump on their heads, no."

"That'd be an interesting method of administration."

"More likely in the water supply," he says, "but immortality good enough to spike the water supply with is a much harder problem than immortality as a series of shots administrated annually and we're still in early clinical trials with that."

"These humans might be clinically distinct anyway. Even Earth humans have ethnic variance."

"Well, there's summoning as a stopgap, if it works from here. Mind if I check?"

"Go for it, I'll pay whoever you get for their time."

So he draws a safe summoning circle for an angel. 

An angel completely fails to appear.

"Well, no fallback for these humans," Findekáno sighs. 

"No daeva-based fallback, anyway, could have something else."

"Let's hope. Complete written works of this universe's humans, post-mortem?"

"...nothing."

"Well. We've got a lot of people on the research project. I'm optimistic about a decade from now, even if that's not really soon enough."

Eventually the computer will render translations of some things! Without any known plaintext it's pretty tentative about a lot of it but it's legible.

"I think this world has native magic," Maitimo says after translations arrive.

"Ooh, cool, what have you found about it?" Cam asks, looking up from an attempt to help the computer figure out which labels on a wildlife guide pertain to which specimen drawings.

"The flowcharts? That's how they organize magic, somehow. It requires... some concept the computer's really struggling with but that seems to be adjacent to a lot of words for animals..."

"I've noticed they have a bunch of stuff about animals. Keeping exotic ones as pets."

And a while later, "yeah, every accomplished magic-user seems to have an associated animal. I think maybe you pick one and do something with it to be able to use magic."

"Weird. I'm gonna tell the computer to translate this word as 'familiar', then."

"World's stable," Findekáno says, "a few countries at war but no Enemy to drop down on. We probably want to start in a not-at-war country."

"Agreed. This one has canals everywhere, that's cute."

"What's its government like?" Maitimo says.

"Monarchy," Cam reports.

"Let's drop the Second Age on canal country first. What's it called?"

"You think I know how to pronounce any of this? There's no audio recordkeeping," Cam snorts. "It is called this sequence of letters."

"Alright. In four days that sequence of letters is getting - hmm, what's a good priority ordering here?" 

"A spy drone to pick up some phonemes," says Cam, "and correlate them with things, and then tell us when a good time to visit the royalty and consult them about their needs might be?"

"If local magic's not likely to notice it and decide they're being invaded. I'd like to know more about local magic. But yes."

"I will disguise it as an exotic bird. Should pass unnoticed."

"Fantastic."

And then there are still four days in this lightleaper. Maitimo and Findekáno both separately consider that perhaps they didn't think this through.

Well, there are rooms and all the computer-translated reading material about Canal Country they could want.

That will occupy them!

And eventually here is galaxy, and Cam does more binary search to find the planet, and then they have another five days!

Well, there's plenty of reading material. "Oooh," Findekáno says on the third day. "It's really a shame they aren't chipped. Their magic runs off working memory; if we could give them a necklace they'd have immortality on the spot, I think, and lots of other stuff they have but can't remember."

"Oh damn. Well, that's a reason to look into supplying thought-collectors to people who aren't natural-born cyborgs, I guess..."

"Lots of Men have asked at home," he says, "there's just no way at all to safely experiment even if an instance of Feanáro's figured out how the thought-collection even works."

"I think one has," Maitimo says. "One might be able to get some of the benefits of blessings without the thought-collection use of the chips, too. But it's at least a few years out. That's a hard problem."

"You could somewhat test on daeva. The indestructibility's confounding but when we're trying to let stuff work it works on us like humans. Or, probably 'source species', don't know about daeva Dwarves."

"I'll suggest it," Maitimo says. 

"I wonder if people who aren't from here can learn their magic."

"You probably can't make animals smart enough for us to try to bind them into familiars," Findekáno says, "and I think they're usually assigned at - birth? But maybe they needn't be..."

"Or maybe you can borrow somebody else's or something?"

"Perhaps we can ask the local royals, if they seem generally competent. They probably won't hesitate just because Findekáno and I would be ludicrously powerful in the local system, you exist and are ludicrously powerful with or without the local magic. Wonder if you could make your familiar part of yourself for the purposes of indestructibility, since untranslateable bad thing happens when they're killed..."

"Yeah, that would be a thing I'd want to check, I'd rather not have any untranslateable bad things happen to me. I have no idea how to expect that to work with backups either."

"At a minimum it seems vanishingly unlikely to affect other instances, so I think I'd take the chance."

"It might, we can't know for sure, but it does seem implausible."

"And unless I'm much misunderstanding how this works we'd have human immortality an hour after pulling it off," Findekáno says. "I think the chance is easily worth taking."

"Sure, I wouldn't stop you."

He raises an eyebrow. "On this occasion I did not particularly fear it. if you disagree with the cost-benefit evaluation I'd want to talk it through anyway."

"...that's. Not what I meant. I would not consider it unreasonable for someone to volunteer to take the risk, is what I meant."

He nods. "It might not work anyway. I'm confused by how magical interactions among worlds work in general - ours doesn't seem to have native magic, unless the Ainur themselves were. Summoning as far as you know was initially exclusive to yours, and it worked in Arda only once Valinor was destroyed - were the Valar suppressing it? Did they introduce a loophole when they tried to ban it which unraveled when they were murdered?"

Could you not, Maitimo says to him.

Noted. "I would have expected magic to go by universe, not species, like the law of physics, but that's not what it looks like it's doing."

"Well, daeva magic goes by species. ...I may have completely forgotten to mention parlor tricks to anyone."

"I think you might have," Maitimo says. "Parlor tricks?"

"Humans from my world can do little tiny stupid magic. It is virtually never the best way to accomplish anything, and it can only accomplish very small versions of the things daeva can do - I think the standard use case besides, well, doing a parlor trick to show off that you've mastered one, is to push buttons on assistive devices if you're too paralyzed to do anything else. Sometimes somebody writes a novel where Our Hero is tied up and has to complete a summoning circle by parlor trick or something but it just never comes up in reality like that."

"Huh. Don't think those work in our dimension, if there are books referencing it someone would have tried."

"I mean, they're really frustrating to perform until you have the hang of then and then they are merely somewhat frustrating, but yeah, probably."

And they'll spend a few more days quietly reading the works of the new world.

And: Here is the world!

Cam locates the canal place and makes a drone down there and presently their computers can pronounce Marlese.

Lovely. Drone finding anything else they didn't expect?

"........the animals talk."

"...well. 

We should probably not kill any animals, between them being people and the untranslatable bad thing."

"Yep. I mean, I don't see why we would have done that anyway but yep."

"People who aren't you kill animals to eat sometimes," Maitimo says with a snort. "Does this mean that we could have the drone start chatting and it would just be assumed to be a local talking animal."

"Maybe, unless the computer translation's just not very good."

"Perhaps," Findekáno says, "people will assume it's a foreign bird."

"Possibly. Do you want me to fly this drone to the palace and have it investigate the royalty situation?"

"Sounds reasonable."

So Cam flies the bird (it looks like a small crane) palaceward.

It's not an Elf-pretty palace, but it's perfectly serviceable, very large, surrounded by canals and gardens. 

...a place with talking animals prooooobably won't just let a random bird fly in and look around. What happens if he lands the crane by the gates? Well, what happens is the guard wants to know if the crane speaks Marlese, which Cam answers by saying "tolerably well", and then the guard asks what it wants, and the crane says it is foreign and would like to meet the local royalty if that is at all possible because it thinks they will find what it has to say interesting, and the guard sends a messenger to ask the King if he wants to entertain a random familiar today.

The King (!) and his wife got through most of the items on their seven-page list not within a day of their coronation but within a month, at least, and he's still busy but Iobel's going to be delighted that there's some country using crane familiar ambassadors and he can clear an hour, certainly, please extend him our welcome.

So in goes the crane drone!

"Um!" says Cam to the Elves when he gets a clear look at the King.

The Elves look up and come over to see.

Cam turns the display around.

Maitimo blinks. At someone who looks exactly like him, albeit human and with shorter hair. "...well. 

Could you pull up a royal family tree or something?"

"Maybe -" He fishes around for anything matching that description that he can identify specifically enough. "You want to do the talking in case the resemblance is not superficial? And, like, you were supposed to be along for diplomatic purposes anyway... ah -" He produces a family tree.

"If the resemblance isn't superficial he won't be easy to offend or hard to work with," Maitimo says, but he commandeers the console. "Hello," he says. "Thank you for your time. We said we're from another country; it is a country in another world. We'd like to share the magic and technology of our civilization with yours, and learn about you. Where would you have us land the starship?"

Findekáno looks at the family tree. "You're married," he says to Maitimo. "And I think the rest of us exist - look at the names, that's uncannny..."

"Let us come up with terminology that doesn't involve referring to people we're not talking to in the second person, that's bewildering enough when it's only forks and not whatever this is," Cam says.

"Mitros, the King, is the eldest of seven, his next brother's name is Makarial," Findekáno says. "He has a cousin Finankar. Can you do models of everyone's faces in plastic or something..."

Mitros beams with delight and fascination. He asks an advisor to get the Queen, please. He leans forward and suggests to the crane a location to land a starship. 

...Cam lands the starship.

The Queen appears when summoned.

Mitros summarizes what the familiar said.

"...well. That's certainly interesting whether or not it's true."

"Yep. I gave them a location to land their 'starship', want to go greet it?"

"Sure, why not."

But she charges as she goes, just in case.

He has some guards join them, too. Though when he watches the starship land he is tentatively inclined to conclude that if the newcomers want them dead spells will not help.

...well, they might. Her eyes go on shining as she repeatedly drops and picks up her charge.

The door opens.

Mitros assesses: man who believes himself, correctly or not, to be in absolutely no danger from anything at all this world could offer, who has even more capabilities than his astonishing message suggested, who finds Mitros himself somehow surprising, who's looking through the crowd for other surprises of a similar nature -

- and then two people step out behind him and Mitros guesses the nature of the surprising thing. 

Mitros also notices that this man who looks just like him and this man who looks just like his cousin broke up and not on 'it will be very challenging to win me back' terms.

Mitros smiles neutrally and raises his arms in a welcoming gesture. "Welcome to Marlatia."

"Thank you," says Cam's computer. "I apologize if the automatic translation isn't up to scratch."

"No trouble. My father will probably learn your language over dinner," Mitros says, watching their reactions carefully.

"I am, let's say surprised by how not surprised I am by that," says Cam.

But this man doesn't know Mitros' counterpart that well or he'd have volunteered a name. "I am Mitros, King of Marlatia; this is my wife Iobel, our Queen. Please come inside, unless you require anything in your starship."

"Pleased to meet you both. I'm Cam, that's Maitimo, this is Findekáno, Maitimo you are the diplomat why am I talking," says Cam, heading inside. "We don't need anything in there particularly."

"Shock, maybe," Maitimo says smiling at Mitros and at Iobel. "This came as a complete surprise to us."

"Oh," Mitros says. "I thought you might have sought it out deliberately. There are a lot of countries here and none of the others are ruled by my doppelgangers yet. Is your familiar a magpie?"

"We don't have familiars," Maitimo says. "We had, once we learned they existed, entertained some vague hopes that if we met the right knowledgeable people we could acquire them."

"You've met the right knowledgable people," he says, "but that would be wholly without precedent." He resists the urge to give Findekáno a hug, even though Findekáno obviously needs a hug, and instead points out Finankar, eyes glowing, among the guard. "Of course, so is all of this."

"We're literally here because I thought the canals were cute and we had nothing more substantial to go on," Cam says, "we could have landed the crane anywhere."

Iobel giggles.

Mitros stares at Cam and furrows his brow for half a second before it smooths again. "I promised Iobel once," he says, "that once we ruled this world we would find out what the stars were made of and make her the empress of those, too. Don't fear for the stars, she'll be spectacularly good at it. Can you save us the time on research?"

"I can tell you what the stars are made of and in fact can even confirm that the other stars in this world are unoccupied!" Cam says. "However, I'm not sure that knowing they're mostly hydrogen and helium will help with the project of ruling them all."

"...the crane that's apparently-not-your-familiar said that's where you came from," Finankar says. He's fallen in step with them because his counterpart is here so why shouldn't he be.

"I got the sense he was oversimplifying," Mitros agrees. 

"Dramatically," Maitimo says. "The stars are other suns; around them orbit other planets, which you can definitely colonize, and you're human so your population grows swiftly by our standards and you'll have an empire spanning the galaxy, my lady Queen, if the supply problems that'll invite do not deter you. There are also other dimensions, worlds not accessible from this one by travel in any direction, and we're from one of those. My father invented a way to hop between them and we hopped here."

"The crane's a machine like the spaceship," Cam says. "I just made it look like a crane because you have talking animals here and I figured it would blend in, how'd I do?"

"What exactly are you non-humans?"

"I am impressed by the crane," Mitros says, "it's a very persuasive crane! And I am even more impressed by, if also a little concerned about, the apparent capacity to make machines that speak and explain and oversimplify."

"It doesn't think," Maitimo says reassuringly. "Cam can make people of my species but not yours and he cannot make thinking machines."

Mitros nods. "Immortality?"

"Not yet," Findekáno says, "we're trying, sorry."

"Improved recall and working memory?"

"Our species has metal in our brains, and when we invented those things we invented them to work through the metal in our brains," Maitimo explains. "So we have those ourselves but can't share them, I felt terribly guilty about that even before realizing there was a version of me here. How do you know everyone?"

Mitros grins. "You know, I am actually not sure I would have benefitted if that'd been an achievable ambition. I abandoned it in favor of ruling the world, or are you doing both?"

"I found cause to abandon that ambition too," Maitimo says, "at least temporarily."

"The crane didn't compose its own words, we were talking through it same way we're talking through these things now," says Cam, waving his computer. "It's also loosely possible that you could get the kind of immortality I have if you travel to their world or mine first, it doesn't work here but it might not just fail to work for you."

Mitros glances at Iobel. "We might consider that, then, when we're less needed here. How long would the trip be?"

"No time at all. We took a while to get to you because we landed at a random point in the universe, but the worldleaper we used to get there will act as a beacon."

They file into the palace. Mitros dismisses the guards. The newcomers aren't exactly safe to be around but the guards don't make them any moreso. Several people should keep ranged spells for unconsciousness charging outside the door, just in case. Antir lands on his shoulder. He murmurs to her that she should go meet Maitimo. 

So she lands on Maitimo's shoulder instead. Maitimo's face remains perfectly relaxed but Mitros can tell he's startled. 

"All right," Mitros says. "Can I get you anything to eat or drink?"

"Stop me if I'm treading on a hospitality obligation of some kind but I can make arbitrary matter and that includes food," Cam says, raising a hand. "Can I get you anything?"

"Persimmons."

Cam hands her a persimmon.

Mitros laughs delightedly. "Chocolate fudge cakes from the little store near Iobel's old place, or is that insufficiently specific?"

"If you gave me the name of the place I could probably do those too!"

He names it.

Plate of fudge cakes, enough to go around.

Mitros stares adoringly at his wife and lets Antir do the monitoring of reactions in the room while everyone eats. Finankar has noticed what Mitros is up to and is amused, though keeping a straight face. Maitimo has figured it out and disapproves strongly but is hiding it almost perfectly. Findekáno's also leaning towards disapproval. Cam seems carefree. 

And Iobel is watching everybody thoughtfully and enjoying her persimmon. "So arbitrary matter, but does that get you crane machines all by itself?"

"Oh, no, we've also got more advanced technology on top of that - I'm not sure how to cash it out in terms of years, since it depends what you focus on and with what development resources and also whether you're an Elf, Elves are kinda slow at things - these ones are better than average - but anyway much better tech, you're many prerequisites behind from what I can tell."

"What do those prerequisites look like," Mitros says. "with an eye mainly towards improved quality of living, disaster relief, and life expectancies?"

"First of all you need electricity, which is basically tame lightning," Cam says. "That does all kinds of good stuff. The other intermediate steps between electricity and drones like the crane mostly don't touch on those priorities, though."

"Okay!" Mitros says. "Do you happen to have a standard approach to giving worlds a substantial technological boost or should we spend the next few hours outlining one?"

"We do not yet have such a thing, you may choose to feel slighted that we came unprepared or delighted to have design input as you prefer." Next to the part of his computer display that is producing translations as the Marlatians speak, he produces a notetaking window and starts an outline.

And Mitros sits back in his seat. And frowns. "Okay," he says to Maitimo, "I am actually really disappointed in you, what happened -"

"Later," Maitimo says wearily. 

"Huh?"

Mitros smiles at him apologetically. "Sorry, I should have - introverted? takes a lot of notes to organize your thoughts? very good at being exactly the sort of person you endorse? because you have the mannerisms, you have the priorities, you have the sense of humor -"

"...You have a me somewhere?"

"...Mitros?"

"I think so," he says. 

Maitimo tentatively nods.

"Not to impugn your judgment of character but how do we check?" wonders Iobel.

"...their families looked like they matched," Cam mutters, and he shoos his notes and produces -

"Those are my parents and that is weird."

"How exactly does the dimension-hopping thing pick dimensions to hop to?" Mitros says.

"It, uh, doesn't, supposedly, random," Cam says, glancing between Maitimo and Mitros and Iobel.

"...We'll talk later," Iobel tells him, parsing this with somewhat more alacrity given better background information.

"Supposed to be random, but instead it picked one where the first people you'd meet would be yourselves. That's interesting. 

Anyway," he says, "I was confused for what I assume is the reason you're now confused. Iobel is my greatest asset and closest friend and the inspiration of many of my ambitions and a fantastic spellbinder in her own right who is probably going to invent immortality if my father does not beat her to it. And you two are - civilly acquainted." AND YOU GOT A BOY, YOU GOT IOBEL AS A BOY, YOU GOT IOBEL AS A BOY AND YOU POLITELY TOLERATE EACH OTHER HOW THE FUCK DID THIS HAPPEN. He has communicative telepathy but he doesn't want to charge it and he doesn't need it, Maitimo obviously got the message. 

"...I'm assuming you met under different and pleasanter circumstances," Cam suggests. And possibly yours is less fucked up? he does not say to Iobel.

Loud and clear. "I'm not sure it was the most favorable possible introduction."

Mitros buries his face in his hands. "That's what confuses me so much," he says to Maitimo, "do you realize how much fucking up you had affordance for - with both of them -"

"Yes," Maitimo says. "Later."

"Why later, because I feel like this is going to be really distracting as background fact during a conversation about electricity - or maybe you should all talk about electricity and Cam and I should go discuss our life stories, if this distraction is unique to us or me or something -"

"I think we are all distracted but should maybe do this in different rooms," Mitros says, "it will save time to not phrase things to save feelings. I really want to get the short version before we do that, though -"

"If there is ever a war," says Maitimo, "and hundreds of thousands of people are dying every day and there's endless piles of work and it feels indefensible to spend the effort on communication required to not have an annoying-but-strategically-insignificant level of background hostility with your ex, do the communication work anyway. You failed to factor in the probability that the strategic situation will change fast enough to obviate all your logistics and very much not obviate the benefits of functional communication."

"...it's not even very much communication work!" Mitros says. "You two are startlingly good at that even under extreme pressure! It would have taken you an hour and a half!"

"Yes, and we thought it would be an indefensible use of time to try. And now you're warned against the mistake and will not make it."

"...thanks," he says. "Now long version, separately?"

Iobel gets up and inclines her head to Cam, who follows her. "You walk very briskly," he observes.

"You're keeping up."

"I've got wings and a tail and they help and I would still not usually walk this briskly."

"I've got a spell, I'll charge it for you while we talk."

"Lovely."

Mitros is a King, he can dismiss everyone else. Findekáno and Finankar leave. 

"Please at least tell me you got the chance to fuck him before you did whatever you did."

"There was a war on. That I don't even regret."

"Well then I am going to sit here and regret it on your behalf, good lord, Iobel as a boy..."

"...is there a spell for it, or did you just -"

"Have to get married to be King," he says, "but she also belongs in power so it worked out all around."

"So is yours just less fucked up," Cam says, when he's parked in Iobel's room with her cat sniffing him suspiciously, "or what."

"I suppose he must be, how fucked up is yours?"

"He told me point blank I was his type and I was not even slightly tempted to go for it in any context that actually involved having him in the room at the time, the drama with Findekáno was just that conspicuously toxic - they were on the downlow shortly post-breakup when I arrived and without 'homosexuality is unthinkable' goggles on I still had them figured out the moment I saw them interacting and didn't want to touch it and it didn't get better."

"You're gay?"

"Bi."

"Huh. I'm straight, and Mitros let me think he was too for three dates after he picked me up at a party dropping hints about wanting a queen and then out came the entire fiasco -"

Findekáno and Finankar just look at each other ruefully for a minute.

"Don't talk me back into it," Findekáno says.

"...are you planning to, like, find someone else, or just quietly regret that the only person you want is someone you're better off without..."

"...empirically the latter?"

"...you can probably borrow mine."

"Is he actually any different though."

"I don't know what yours did."

"Well, we initially broke up because on his father's orders he started a stupid fight that ended with thirty thousand people dead, and I came in and saw him under attack and helped. And then he felt  it'd been entirely justified and I didn't agree so we decided to put us aside for the war. But then situations kept repeatedly arising that demanded we work closely together and - you know how the only mood he doesn't try to poke to see where he stands is 'unreasonable hostility'  - so I ended up defaulting to that. And we were functional. But unpleasant for everyone around us. You should have a better fallback."

"Resign?"

"It was legitimately too important to resign."

"Ugh."

(Cam explains his life story up to the part where he turned into a demon; Iobel explains her entire life story and introduces him properly to Cricket and Cricket deigns to be petted; Cam explains the rest of his life story with a hundred and fifty year "nothing much" inserted before he wound up on Araman.)

"So," Maitimo says, "he asked me what I'd have done if Findekáno wouldn't keep it quiet and - well, what would you have done?"

"Hmm, there wasn't time pressure, was there? Sat down for about an hour and tried to come up with options better than the ones popping into my head."

"I said one of the ones popping into my head."

"Knowing presumably that he'd be incredibly upset -"

"I wasn't trying to seduce him! Why is this so hard to get into your head!"

"I - I think you've correctly identified the mistakes you made, I am just losing my mind over how wasteful it is!"

"- I mean, sure, he's pretty, Elves are kind of all pretty actually it got to the point where I had to start ignoring it, they're ridiculous, but that can't compensate for having to be a secret all by itself and he wasn't offering me a monarchy -"

"My only hard power is the Department of Education, although people do listen to me beyond that and he does in particular."

"He wasn't even offering me a Department of Education! He didn't even actually hit on me, tell you the truth, the bit about me being his type came up when he was addressing that Findekáno thought we were fucking, why that would seem plausible."

"I suppose I don't know what it looks like when he's attracted but not trying as opposed to trying but not attracted..."

"I mean," Findekáno says, "what are the odds there are exactly two? There's probably one somewhere who isn't screwed up, and I'll just wait for that one."

"That doesn't sound like a healthy mindset."

"If Endore gets more socially liberal I can maybe even occasionally have casual sex."

"While waiting for your lover from a dimension where he can cut the power games out once you break up."

"I mean, if you want to point me at someone better -"

"Mitros is mine and I think I'd love him even if he locked me in the dungeons to feed my family into a black hole for the greater good. If he brought them back. Which you said he did."

"The ones he could."

"The black hole thing, assuming I'm getting all the significance of it without having the physics -"

"You are, there's not much to get besides 'planet and everything on it gone'."

"Well, I don't know how much it helps but it sounds like you won."

"Pyrrhic victory." The computer fails to translate. "Uh, I won, but it sucked."

"Do you believe the unpronounceable Maia about five hundred years -"

"...Not sure. But it doesn't sound impossible."

"You won."

"It sucked."

"But you won."

"Marrying someone you don't want just - Elves wouldn't do that. It's pretty fucked up."

"Finankar and I broke up and remained very good friends and eventually talked things through and got back together. Y'know. If you're calling me fucked up."

"Yeah, I don't think it's a feature of breakups in general, I think it's a feature of breakups under intense psychological pressure due to constant horrifying atrocities occurring that are by design just barely within my capacity to prevent or mitigate. Those ones are bad for me. I should avoid them."

"I'm sorry."

"I wasn't - that's not the point."

"It kind of is. You won and now there's six of you grinding your teeth to the bone in atonement, and you're all alone, and you're planning on staying alone - because if you won't try for Cam, you aren't going to find anyone worth trying for -"

"I do not stand a chance with Cam."

"Yep, I noticed immediately. I am just saying that's pretty fucking unfortunate."

"Do you want to, like, hug my parents or something...?"

"...I feel like that would be awkward. They won't recognize me and we'll probably have a way into Limbo soon."

"Okay, just thought I should offer. How hard would it be for me to learn to use a computer like you've got?"

"...learning curve would be a bitch, might be worth it, do not want you to be the first test subject on the chip in your brand of human though."

"Fair enough. Magic necklace?"

"You mean like the one you're wearing right now?"

"Yes, like that. And here goes your grace spell -"

"If you actually end up ruling an interdimensional empire and then you asked Cam out he might consider it."

"You are way more invested in this than I am!"

"Yeah, I kind of resent your world just getting, on every possible level, a sad ending..."

"I agree with you about that but you are missing all of the important levels and focusing on one thing that I don't even want that much, besides idly recognizing he has a personality I'd work well with under completely different life circumstances!"

"I sort of feel like you're lying to yourself here."

"Findekáno didn't invent resurrection to win me back but he invented resurrection and brought me back and it didn't fix anything. Some things aren't fixable."

"Bullshit."

"How old are you, seventy-five?"

"...try a third of that. What's your point?"

"I don't want to rule an intergalactic empire very badly anymore and I really hope you never understand why."

"Because you're depressed, yeah, I wouldn't want to be-"

"Not. It."

The three questions match and a lot of little trivialities match and he gives her a non-chiplocked computer to watch Atriama ("the subtitles will be badly translated but I think it'll still work") and other items, he teaches his computer her alphabet more properly and hashes out some translations that it wasn't handling by itself, Cricket sits in his lap, and Cam winds up sending Maitimo and Finekáno each a message that they're all set to talk electricity whenever the others are.

They've all four gathered in the conference room again but take a little while to tell Cam and Iobel they're ready.

"In the interests of honesty," Mitros says, "I spent most of our time haranguing Maitimo on the lost opportunity to court a boy Iobel and mostly just kind of avoided thinking about this, because what happened here makes perfect sense to me and also scares me to death and that didn't seem like as fun a conversation."

"I also assumed Maitimo'd take advantage of the opportunity there," Findekáno says. "It's out of character and a little worrying."

"I think he's dealing with some psychological issues stemming from the war," Mitros says. "If he were healthy he'd be ruling a few planets by now."

"Mitros is overly sure of himself," Maitimo says, "and has ulterior motives because he wants to vicariously have sex with alternate versions of his wife. He is probably right, though."

"I am obviously right," Mitros says. "Also I'm really regretting that I'm not sexually compatible with myself -"

"That occurred to me when we got forking," Maitimo agrees.

"...I am perfectly compatible with myself but don't find that at all tempting," Findekáno says, "wow."

Mitros frowns. "...is there an obvious reason why the two of you haven't just asked Cam for past, less psychologically scarred versions who still like each other?"

"It'd creep Cam out," Findekáno says. "I asked him to roll back Maitimo by three months for pressing strategic reasons and he refused. He might not have trusted my motives, though. And - I wouldn't erase the memories that got me to the point of not desiring to be in a relationship with Maitimo, and it amounts to the same thing."

"I considered it," Maitimo said brightly. "Making younger versions of me and sending them to Findekáno as a present, and hoping he got the hint, and then I'd have explain to my Findekáno at length everything I did to make it the considered opinion of his older self that we shouldn't be dating and he'd blink at me and say 'well, planning to do that again?' and then I'd have him back. But. I was in fact bad for him."

"Is anyone else," says Finankar, "really worried by this bizarre self-abnegation 'I won't take this thing I want, I don't deserve it' thing, I've only ever seen that on Mitros when he was apologizing for something, he sure as hell never steered with it -"

"He also did not feed any planets into black holes, now did he."

Finankar looks up at him, alarmed.  "Dude. If you are really an alternate version of my Mitros I am very worried about you. Why don't you - stop living among people who expect and reward conspicuous displays of shame and self-loathing over something you did, I think that's the operative ingredient here..."

Mitros nods as if in sudden realization. "Yes, definitely. Come live here, maybe."

"It'll be my pleasure to aid you in catching up with modern standards, but in the long term I'm needed at home."

"You're literally redundant there!"

"And I don't like it here particularly, it's ugly."

Findekáno snorts.

"I guess maybe I should give it some time," Mitros says. "But do spend that time becoming emperor of something, when we find another universe with a boy Iobel you can tempt him with power."

"Why don't we teach electricity," Maitimo says.

And then they ask Cam and Iobel to come back.

Cam and Iobel come back in rather chipper moods, her with a magic necklace and him with a bounce in his step. Iobel sporfles when she sees the Elves and that gets Cam going and they both sit down, stifling giggles.

"...told her stories of shampoo commercials and other censorship," Cam explains.

Maitimo laughs.

"...shampoo commercials?" Mitros says.

"You rather have to see them," Maitimo says.

"You really don't, this is an Elf thing," Cam says. "Elves have a hair thing. They're probably politely scandalized that you've ever had a haircut in your life if they haven't mentioned that yet."

"We didn't," Maitimo and Findekáno say in unison. 

Mitros raises an eyebrow and removes the crown and runs a hand through his hair. "We didn't spend much time on cultural exchange, actually, it all rather got shoved aside by the story. Congratulations on winning your war, by the way." 

"...thanks."

"This world has a hundred thousand people dying irretrievably every day. I watched my father torture himself over that for long enough. It didn't give him some brilliant insight. Didn't save a single one of them. We do the best we can with what we've got. And we're about to have a lot more to be doing our best with, right?"

"...yeah. Uh, I will want to do some medical research before actually testing anything but since you seem to be pretty much humans and not pharmaceutically inconvenient Elves you may be able to get some working memory boosts, temporary but that's all you need, with various drugs and so on, and that's if we don't figure out how to cyborg you, and also it may just plain work for you to come to Endorë and perform summonings there, was that explained?"

"That was, yes. We'll send someone with you to try it. Any particular criteria for a first test?"

"Ability to follow simple instructions. And we'll know sooner whether you get the daeva afterlife that way if it's someone who is likely to die soon."

"All right." Mitros starts taking notes. "I asked someone to fetch my father, he'll pick up the engineering content faster than any of us - well, I suppose you'd know."

"He's going to notice how we're not actually speaking Marlese."

"He's been very patient about Iobel refusing to teach him her idiolect. He will probably speak whatever it is you're speaking by the end of the conversation but he won't question you about it in the meantime."

"I'm told that one should not learn her idiolect because then one could understand what her cat is saying and this is inadvisable."

"Her cat is mostly spitting aspersions on my character," Mitros says. "My father can no longer do anything if he learns the whole story but I think Iobel prefers that he doesn't."

"It would be awkward and Cricket is not an ideal source of gossip!"

"Well, he likes me okay but that's probably just because I'm an alternate universe version of her..."

Mitros runs his hand through his hair again. "Of course he likes you, you're Iobel as a boy and he adores her. For the correct reasons, too."

...Iobel looks thoughtfully at her husband.

Mitros is still occasionally giving Cam glances of frustrated anguish.

They get to work planning a tech introduction. Fannar comes in. He blinks at the Elves. Mitros gives him the short version. 

"Excellent," he says. "What language are they speaking-"

"Translation software, you can pick it up as you go -"

"And idiolects -"

"They don't have them."

"You poor souls," Fannar says pityingly. Then he sits down to learn electricity.

Which Cam, if not necessarily his translation software, is well equipped to explain, but he can just introduce Quenya vocabulary as he proceeds through introduction to electrical engineering - "My studies were all aimed at an audience of demons, so you will have to apply to the Elves for information on where to get your materials -"

The Elves have a plan in the works for importing things until there's a setup to acquire them locally. Endore has advanced industry and also summoning, it'll save time over building local industry.

And in the meantime if Fannar would like a computer like the one Cam gave Iobel he can have one.

He very much would. 

He is, being human, not in fact near-fluent in Quenya by the end of the conversation. But he's picked up a lot.

It's really impressive for a human! Cam does not say that part. It takes him a lot longer than that to learn languages, anyway. Computer for Fannar. It comes with a tutorial in its use - "people keep designing things to put stuff in context for new daeva, that's one of them."

What language is the tutorial in?

Well, Cam computer-translated it into Marlese for Iobel but the original is in an angelic language and there's more competent translations available into various other languages from Cam's world.

Could he have one of each of them, please?

Sure why not.

Mitros has some hard-to-push-off meetings in the evening but everyone else can continue working well into the night. He talks with Finankar and with Iobel before he goes, Finankar in his idiolect and Iobel in what he must mistakenly think is a voice too quiet for Elven hearing. "Do you want to take charge of seeing this through?" he says to her. "The less technical aspects, I mean, it makes sense to delegate the engineering to my father."

"Happy to. Do you want me to get you Cam for your birthday?" she murmurs back.

"...he's you as a boy, obviously yes!" Mitros says once he has recovered from sputtering just a little. 

Maitimo and Findekáno both barely manage to keep their facial expressions neutral, though the expression that was warring with neutral is rather different.

Iobel grins and says, "Ninety percent confidence."

He kisses her forehead and leaves.

And Iobel sits back down, unaware of how good Elven hearing is, and Cam cannot alert her because he doesn't know the extent to which she might not have wanted Elves to overhear.

The Elves will look a little dazed for a few minutes, but that's okay. Then everyone can get back into logistics.

Logistics! Whee! It's so convenient that Cam can put all her notes in electronic format so she doesn't have to haul boxes of notebooks in and rummage through them for reference on this and that fact about Marlatia.

They work well into the night and the Elves are perfectly prepared to work right through it.

Iobel, unfortunately, needs sleep - "Lucky bastard," she tells Cam, who does not - and leaves them with a map and budget reports and similar items to keep them occupied while she goes and does that.

And Fannar also needs sleep - the Elves' eyes pop - and Finankar needs sleep, and soon it's just the new arrivals.

Maitimo buries his face in his hands and sighs and Findekáno reaches out and pats his shoulder.

"I'm fine," Maitimo says. "Let's get some work done."

Gosh. Shoulderpats. Is that an improvement? Well. Work to be done.

(It's been seven years; they talked it all out afterwards and are on perfectly civil terms. Shoulder pats are not an improvement because there is nothing to improve upon.)

They get lots of work done.

"At some point I want to get summoned by both of Fëanor just for the cheating at languages."

Maitimo laughs. "That's a good idea. I think my father's picked up a few dozen of Earth's over the last few years. Whenever he gets too gloomy to work - languages.

Was your counterpart also oddly blasé about the whole thing."

"About what, being a me? Or me being a her? It took some adjusting but on reflection we both like having there be more of us and are looking forward to turning up more."

"No, no, it's obviously good for there to be more of you. I meant about the war. Mitros had something to say about every one of my life decisions except what we did, and there he was just like "and that ended it? Thank goodness."

Maybe it's just the benefit of hindsight."

"Ah. I told her about it and she said 'sounds like you won' and I said 'but it sucked' and she said 'but you won'."

Maitimo nods tightly.

"I don't think I'd describe her as blasé so much as supportive?" Cam volunteers after a moment.

"I have been thinking this whole trip - 'well, if we'd known we were seven years from interdimensional travel' - but of course under the relevant conditions we might not have been -"

"I think I actually agree with your counterpart that you're being unhelpfully hard on yourself," Findekáno says. "...my counterpart said 'oh, hell, of course they did' and then gave me a hug and then asked what Maiar were like, which ones I'd known personally..."

Sigh.

He also said he'd definitely still love you, Findekáno says. 

Isn't he, so to speak, definitionally wrong?

I think so. I am a little confused about how that works. 

Cam has a cup of coffee. "Wonder what time they usually wake up."

"Do we have progress on all of the action items we could make progress on without them? We could go for a walk or something while we wait on them."

"I'm unsure of my ability to handle a commotion effectively with computer translation if some innocent morning person makes a fuss, and while you could probably pass for human without cutting off any extremities if nobody was expecting any differently you do bear a strong resemblance to members of the royal family," Cam says.

Maitimo sighs. "Well, we will have no choice but to ask the King's permission to spend some time in the gardens or somewhere at some point, but I suppose it needn't be right now." If you think we self-flagellate too much you could stop making comments like that.

Comments like that my counterpart asked me to tell him about the dead? The problem with you is that all your grief is manipulative so you assume everyone's is.

"You should really have a formalized prettiness dosing schedule, it'd be easier to keep track of. I think this is a perfectly nice palace myself."

"Perhaps we should just tell everyone we sleep in gardens or something, then we can get in our daily prettiness needs without having to say that we find their architecture soul-crushing."

"If you'd like VR sets or something for the immediate moment..."

"We'll be fine," he says, "but thank you. I wasn't anticipating that other-dimensional aliens would build things to conform to our prettiness needs. I could just sing but that seems as likely as walking around to draw attention."

"Probably, yes, although likely only more local attention and we did land a spaceship nearby."

The humans wake up a few hours later, around sunrise, and gather again to keep working on logistics. 

Cam solicits a location in the basement in which to set up unobtrusive medical experiments and goes and sets those up and eventually reports that local humans seem to metabolize everything the same way Earth ones do, who wants to try psychoactive working memory drugs?

Fannar wants to try psychoactive working drugs.

Iobel does too! She runs off and gets her immortality and teleportation spellcharts.

And Cam solicits medically relevant information and rattles off a list of side effects not to worry about, a list to tell him at once if they experience them, and bam.

An hour later he has a familiar-fountain that should work for humans. 

And Iobel manages to squeeze her immortality spell into her head for a split second and goes "WHOOO!"

Fannar claps his hands together and beams at her. Mitros picks her up and swings her around in the air and laughs delightedly. 

She giggles. "I think the teleportation one is still too big but I haven't been working on cramming it down, that can be next."

"We have forever," he says exultantly.

"Yep. Me first." Her eyes go white, her hair fluffs out. "Let's see how long this thing takes to charge."

They wait around, smiling. 

It takes forty-seven minutes - "I think that's a record," she remarks when it's cleared thirty-two - but then it goes off and, presumably to the reduced consternation of the Elves, her hair stops doing the thing.

The Elves have been politely not looking. They are very pleased that Iobel's immortal, though.

"It is a hex, so it won't do the trick by itself unless a lot more people manage to learn it," she says. "We may need to distribute the nice Earth drugs."

"I'll give it a try right now," Fannar says. "The fountain was a priority because it is much more scalable - we can't replace hospitals because people need to at some point have designated a healthy version of themselves and not everyone will, and some aren't born healthy, but we can change quite a lot..."

Iobel passes him the chart.

He doesn't know it as well as her; he starts reading. Mitros is still beaming at his wife. "I'm going to try to learn a spell for better working memory," he says, "but I think it'll take some more pruning even with drugs."

"Bootstrapping!" she chirps.

"Yep. I think the one I have even stacks and I am going to make a dozen people learn it and cast it on me so I can make a better one. You had better make me immortal tomorrow, I don't know how long it'll take to make you empress regnant of the galaxy."

"I will make you immortal tomorrow," she promises.

And Mitros works on pruning. And Fannar gets Iobel's immortality hex, too, and makes himself immortal with a sad smile and then immediately recovers by stealing Mitros's charts from him and peppering him with suggestions.

"- I assume that if someone with your chip blessing things loaded up could be a spellbinder they'd be able to cram like a square mile of chart into their head," Iobel says. "It might just be a species thing, except that we seem to be the same kind of human Cam used to be, so it could be something like being born in this world."

"Let's see, do I know any pregnant Elves. Or for that matter orcs, probably easier to find pregnant orcs."

Maitimo and Findekáno both know some pregnant Elves they'd trust to raise a good absurdly powerful spellbinder child. 

And Marlatia will be delighted to harbor the and have them tutored in spellbinding if they turn out to have spirit animals - "And then we can get really ridiculous. I don't think a resurrection spell would be more than five or six times the size of anything we pulled off today."

"...human resurrection?" Maitimo says.

"Who else needs it?" shrugs Iobel. "I mean, it'll have to include familiars or you might just wind up with an unmade vegetable but yes."

Maitimo raises an eyebrow. "Maybe also have some newlywed couples planning to have children come live here, in case it's conception and not birth that matters."

"We'll be happy to have them."

Resurrection of things far more complicated than humans and not physical at all probably isn't possible even with a mile of spellchart. He doesn't even raise it.

Cam does. Softly.

"Dwarves probably, Maiar I'd need to know more to even guess..."

"What would you need to know," Findekáno says.

"How they - work. Like - have you been reading the charts at all, they have to be specific, really specific..."

"There are still some alive," Maitimo says. "Maybe some in a psychological state conducive to helping you out, even."

"One of them ineptly hit on me the other day, it was weird."

"Are you quite sure? Until I heard of Melian I didn't think they could even take sufficiently physical forms. Though. One in a state to be ineptly hitting on you, whatever it thought it was doing, would be in a state to be helpful, maybe, if it wanted to."

"I was flying around between days of conference and she flew up and varied between calling me 'honey' and 'the Destroyer'."

Maitimo and Findekáno both snort, though they're kind of pained snorts. 

"That might be better than trying to find Tyelcormo and ask him if Huan can be persuaded," Maitimo says.

"I don't exactly have her contact information but yeah maybe."

"Huan has been howling in anguish for seven years, 'track down a Maia with a vague crush on Cam' really looks like the easier problem," Maitimo says. "At least in the short term."

"Yeah. She said in spoken language she's, what was it, Thuringwethil, what a name."

"Never heard of her. I'll put someone on it once I get home, though."

"And then she can explain Iobel Maiar, although it might not matter until we have super-mnemonic spellbinders."

Everyone is very optimistic about this. 

It is a crazed few weeks. Technological development starts being put into place. Mitros gets his improved recall, though it's not going to bootstrap readily up to the kind of memory Elves can achieve. They roll out plans for universal education and literacy, the newcomers having thought that was a good idea, and share healing fountains with all nearby countries that aren't having wars and don't own slaves.

This wouldn't be Iobel's first choice of a thing to withhold from countries that are having wars. Can't they just bribe them to stop having wars with less essential things like electricity?

Well, he can only do one a day, and doesn't really want them propped up in war zones so teenagers can be dipped in them and thrown right back at their enemies. Once there's enough to go around anyway maybe they can be set up in the places with wars, too, with some kind of protection against that. 

Sure, prioritizing by "not having wars" is fine.

He assures her he's not under the impression that the people dying in the wars had it coming or something.

Cam is happy to churn out bribery and infrastructure and such in large quantities. Also there should be a worldleaper around somewhere, where do they want that.

Will people using it to anchor on this dimension appear wherever it is or something? If so, they should probably build a special spacious nicely guarded building for it.

The Elves have aesthetic suggestions.

"We could also put it in space if we ought to worry about vandalism or something from unhappy locals."