Solvei's sister/substrate glances from the newcomer to Mark, and asks, "Am I—?"

"Yeah, no, me too," he says. "It's not."

"Mark. English," says Miles.

"I am nearly positive that this is a new individual," he explains.

"Elarron Kevarsin," says the new individual, looking somewhat warily at the Miles-and-Mark alt congregation. (His canine teeth are sharp and elongated.)

"Aluvai," he says, turning his gaze on Ivan with a hint of a scornful glare.

"Well, if Bar hadn't told us he wasn't a - a Mark, for lack of a way to refer to my instance - that reaction to Ivan would clinch it."

"Doesn't look like he recognizes us either. So, Elarron, are there more of you back home?"

"'More of me'?"

"I don't think we have actually encountered any cases of a single world having several of someone. Perhaps Jann meant to ask if there are people who look like you. Who might be alts of Miles or Mark. For that matter, if you have met anyone who looks like us over here we'd love to add to the party."

"And I'd love to answer your questions, just as soon as someone deigns to let me know what in the wastes is going on here."

"Interdimensional bar. Steals doors. Temporarily. It's on a your-face kick, witness how many of your face there are. That's, let me see if I remember you all - that's Miles, other Mileses, meaning people with the same personality from other places, include -" She's pointing. "Stalas, Mial, Milo, and Solvei when she's being Solvei. Miles's clone Mark, who is an alt of Solvei-when-she's-not-being-Solvei. Some of the Mileses have Ivans. Those are them. Ivan is Miles's and Aurin is Mial's and Jann is Milo's. Wave, Ivans." Ivans wave agreeably. "And over here I'm Solvei's fake girlfriend and Linyabel is Miles's real wife. Questions?"

He absorbs this information, thinks for a few seconds, then asks: "How temporary is temporary? Could I, if I felt like it, add more people to the party?"

"As long as you can get ahold of them while the door is open, held by you or someone else from your world, yes," says Linya. "The door stops being stolen when everybody from your world is out of the bar and it shuts."

"Well, I guess that's workable." He looks from Linyabel back to Bella. "But I object to the description of a bunch of shortears as having 'my face'."

"Be flexible. Aurin and Mial are actually magically shapeshifted reptiles."

"Magically shapeshifted into - fine, I'll be polite - Ceirene, for some reason."

"Would you rather I turned into a bird? I can turn into a bird."

"Stalas is a dwarf!" volunteers Jann.

Elarron eyes Stalas. "Is he."

"Yes," says Stalas. "Yes I am."

"Whatever."

"Why do you ask?"

"General vibe of something-being-wrong-ness?"

"Welcome to Milliways, an interdimensional bar. It is in a certain mood and thought you'd be thematically appropriate. First drink is free and I'm considering buying nametags."

"I'm Ashras and that's Inlaith," says the more Milesish of the betailed triplets, indicating the more Markish one. "You've met Elarron already."

"Miles, Stalas, Mial, Milo, Solvei, Mark, Ivan, Jann, Aurin, Linyabel, didn't give her name," says Elarron, indicating each of the not-currently-betailed occupants of the room.

"Bella," says Bella.

"You know what, count me in favor of nametags."

"If you don't mind, Bar." Bar produces a stack of nametags and a marker. Linya writes Linyabel Miriat Vorkosigan on hers and sticks it to her sleeve, then writes one for Bella too and passes the stack and marker over to the Mileses.

Occupants of the Miles table end up with Miles Naismith Vorkosigan, Stalas Aeducan, Mialavaraaninnah, Milo of Raxwell, Solvei Koskin, and Mark Pierre Vorkosigan.

Mark passes the stack and marker on to Ivan.

"Why do Miles and Mark get to be the ones everyone else is instances of?" wonders Elarron.

"Miles's name allows a pun and Mark's only full alt besides the one who just arrived doesn't have her own name."

"A pun?"

"'League of Mileses'," says Stalas. "It works in English and the common tongue of Thedas, but judging from the blank looks I guess it doesn't work in whatever language you're speaking."

"...I mean, I'll not argue with anyone who describes a group of you as being in league, but I don't see the connection with the specific name."

"'League' and 'mile' are also related units of distance, with the former being reckoned as a multiple of the latter by some definitions."

"I think Linyabel and her various alts are more thoroughly in league with each other," volunteers Ivan. "The Mileses have been playing board games and insulting each other while the wosscalleds over there exchange fantastic magical prizes."

"Yes, but the pun doesn't work. If anything we're 'Bells'."

"You mean to tell me this unprecedented gathering of extradimensional Kevarsins hasn't been gearing up to do something monumental and terrifying? Crash the sun, are we sure you're really versions of my brothers?"

"We can do something monumental and terrifying anytime we like. Might as well take the time to relax," says Miles.

"There was that thing with Draconic," says Aurin. "That was a little monumental and terrifying."

"See?" says Elarron. "Don't tell me Ashras isn't in league with himself."

"I can always count on you for slightly insulting recognition of my achievements," Ashras says fondly.

"So what's your world like?" Bella asks the tailed people.

"...How are we supposed to answer that?"

"It seems like they don't have Aluvai in theirs," says Elarron.

"My world has only one intelligent species, of which I am a modified example, living on many different planets. We have no magic of any kind but do have advanced technology -" She picks up her pen, does her signature stroke of light through the air. "Like that. Bella's world has the same species on the planet ours evolved on, much too early to have colonized other planets or developed such technology, but it also has fuzzy magical aliens who distribute powers to teenage girls to allow them to fight horrifying despair monsters. Mial and Aurin are from a world with dragons and elves and more in addition to humans, and many kinds of magic to the point where I'm not sure it's meaningful to even comment on their technology level. Stalas's world has a handful of intelligent species and his lives underground and routinely fights horrifying ichorous monsters which are probably not metaphysically related to despair. Your turn."

"...Hang on," Inlaith says slowly. "Why don't your worlds have Aluvai?"

"They're hardly going to know that, are they?" says Ashras. "Um, Aluvai and Ceirene are the same species, we're all humans, it's just some of us live on the inside of the planet and some live... on... the outside... oh, I see what you mean, Inlaith."

"So the reason why the extradimensional Kevarsins are a bunch of shortears is because they come from planets without interiors?"

Ashras makes a facial expression as of someone who wishes his brother hadn't used that word but isn't going to tell him off in front of all these people.

"Planets of the sort I am familiar with are solid - or liquid under a lot of pressure and heat - all the way through. ...The answer is probably 'no', but will anything about this apparently weighty ethnic tension be improved if I show you a picture of another alt of ours who had pointy ears?"

"Almost certainly not," sighs Ashras. "Okay. I guess we need to clarify a few things. First, our planet is a hollow shell shaped sort of like a thick, round-edged coin, with two flat sides and a broad round rim. There are chasms here and there that pierce the shell, and around the rim the chasms are so frequent that there's almost more air than earth. Since the sun orbits outside the shell, the outer surface gets a lot of sunlight; it's a good place to grow food, and the wild animals mostly aren't bothersome there. The inner surface, and the floating jungle in the middle, get less light and have more bothersome animals, where by 'bothersome' I mean 'tending to eat anyone who strays too far from civilization'. As you can probably imagine, the Ceirene and Aluvai have historically not been all that fond of each other. I'd rather not recount all the stereotypes going in both directions, but many an unsubtle political cartoon has involved a Ceirene and an Aluvai standing at opposite ends of a chasm, looking down at each other."

"Then the Enemy showed up and we all discovered we had bigger problems," says Inlaith.

"Yeah, I guess those are our monsters," says Ashras. "They come from somewhere far away from the planet, they want to kill everyone for unclear reasons, and we had to ally with the Ceirene to have a hope of fighting them off."

"What a bizarre sort of planet. What does the jungle live on, if there's so little light?"

"It gets the most sunlight in the whole interior, when the sun passes the edges."

"It's not that bizarre," says Mial. "A little overelaborate, maybe."

"It's bizarre in the sense that physics doesn't work like that."

"Physics doesn't work like 'ten mile thick square floating in infinite air', either, but tell that to Elcenia," says Ivan.

"Perhaps the shape of one's planet should be an item in the list of important world characteristics," says Stalas. "Actually, maybe we should all have written the names of our worlds on our nametags when those were going around."

"Solvei, what do you think of 'Wish' for ours?"

"Two votes in favour," says Solvei.

Bells write "Wish" and "Nexus" on each other's nametags.

Solvei takes it upon herself to add world names to the Miles table. Wish for her, Nexus for Miles and Mark, Thedas for Stalas, Chronicle for Milo, Elcenia for Mial, and then she shrugs and hands the marker to Ashras.

Triplets get "Suranse". Ashras passes the marker to the Ivans.

Who all also write their worlds on each other's name tags, corresponding to the choices of the relevant Mileses.

"Yeah, that's helpful. Thank you, Stalas," says Ashras.

"Happy to help," says Stalas. "So at this point it's definitely a bad idea for us all to sit down and play a strategy game, right?"

"Tell me you're joking," says Elarron.

"I will physically stop anyone who tries to get this number of Mileses and their siblings competing in a free-for-all of any kind," says Mark.

"Put them on teams."

"No," says Elarron. "No. Noooooo. No." Pause. "No."

Inlaith laughs. "Yeah, I'm with Elarron. As much fun as it would be. Especially if I got to play."

"So what is the state of the art in handling your alien invasion?"

"Send the winged ones, hope for the best?"

"The who?"

"The...? Oh," he says. "Of course. You don't have winged ones on your weird solid planets. I don't know what I expected."

"In our world," says Ashras, "when a human reaches some vague, heavily individualized, hard-to-predict threshold of personal achievement, they sprout wings and become immortal-unless-killed and much more difficult to kill. The Ceirene call them Unfading; the Aluvai just call them winged. In addition to the wings and immortality they also get Spheres, which are like little personal universes that grow slowly over time. A winged person can make a portal to their personal Sphere from wherever they happen to be standing, except that if they're standing in the Sphere of another living person they need that person's help. And I guess we all just assumed this went without saying."

"It did not go without saying. We have not encountered anything even analogous."

"And by that, you mean...?"

"Does everyone just get old and die?"

"Well, I'm working on it, and some things I have collected here are pretty promising, but by and large, yes."

"Dragons don't get old and die anymore, but that's because some people came through to fix all of the everything to do with dragons having inconvenient properties. And Mial."

"...So. Mileses," says Elarron. "Is it time to get your wings, or what?"

...Ashras starts laughing.

"Should I be scared?"

"When me and Solvei make our wishes and get our magic powers we will no longer get old and die. We will however need despair monster byproduct to live. And we don't get wings. Unless we wish for them, I guess, but I'm sure I can think of something better."

"And our pointy-eared alt's husband was apparently immortal, because somehow a genetic engineering project from more than a thousand years prior to my own managed what my designers couldn't, and I have a sample from him to try to reverse-engineer."

"Well, I'm all for it," says Solvei. "Let's do science."

"Most recent set of arrivals before you has a science project they wanna do? Or at least their you wants to do? How is this the sticking point, have you already met a dozen of yourself?"

"I just want to register that I'd rather not sprout wings it sounds awkward and cosmetically troubling."

Mark and Inlaith exchange a glance. "That's not confusion, that's fear," says Mark as spokesMark. "Why is science frightening on a level sufficient to override the many other questions I'm sure you have?"

"Oh, I don't know," says the new Miles sarcastically, "how about because it gets people fucking killed?"

"Not that this doesn't sound better than having to have them all the time, because it does, but I don't really want to grow wings even to begin with, I don't need to identify with my firebird alt in quite that way."

"Okay - new Miles, please fill out your nametag - this does not happen in any other worlds we have met, and we have met a lot of worlds today. By being nosy about the habits and intricacies of the world around us we have tended to learn what they are, and they continue to exist quite invariantly, although they may differ world to world in some ways, allowing people to exploit them. Although there are senses in which science kills people by, for example, discovering that one of the laws of physics is 'if you do that, it will explode', or by inventing weapons, nothing like you are describing is a feature of any worlds we are from."

"Even the one with the square planet."

"Yep. You can name your own. Evil Death World has a nice ring to it."

"She means that sympathetically."

"I mean that sympathetically!"

Elarron bursts out laughing.

Mark and Inlaith start giggling too.

The rest of the Miles table peers at Milan to find out what is so funny, and each break out in a grin when they see it.

"Do you definitely not recognize us?" sighs Bella. "Because if there's an us in your world we probably need to hug her or something."

"Can't say that I do, no," says Milan. "But it's a big world, is there some guarantee that I'd have met her already?"

"Not at all, but if you haven't met you you'd have a hard time getting her through the door while continuously holding it open, so it's functionally similar."

"Yeah, that's true. Is 'Hubris' that hilarious?" he asks the giggle contingent.

"The fact that you wrote it down right after mentioning that you were thinking of world names in terms of what you would and would not like to have written on you," says Inlaith.

"Okay, that's fair," says Milan. "...I now feel compelled to issue a general warning, in case the fact that I named my world after it is misleading: hubris gets you killed, indulge with caution."

"This is again not true of our worlds. All hubris gets me is a 'sorry, no can do, try again' from the fluffy wish-granting alien."

"I mean, things as they are now he wouldn't have to keep it, but he's a you so I guess he would," says Aurin.

"I assume you won't touch science painkillers with a thirty-foot pole."

"...You're doing this deliberately, aren't you," says Mial. "Playing a game in which people try to fake cut your head off with a fake axe, to raise the ceiling. I don't know whether I'm impressed or appalled."

"Impressed," say Mark and Inlaith in precise unison. They look at each other and grin.

"So we shouldn't have Mial teleport away and get a light? Lights are not a science thing," says Aurin.

"What is the function of a light?" asks Milan.

"Healers. They're just born that way, they drink a lot of water and absorb sunshine and if they do this," he cups his hands together, "they get a little ball of light and if anybody who isn't a light touches it they are healed. Doesn't actually fix scars, those they have to dig out first."

Milan blinks. "...I mean, having somebody dig out my scars and apply healing would certainly be an interesting way to bump the ceiling up a little - nice phrasing, unusually short me - but I doubt it would fix anything, and it might just add a bunch more scars."

"You probably couldn't get them to do it if you weren't knocked out or at least dosed on painkilling potions - I don't know if potions count as a science thing."

"Yeah, I'm not keen to try any potion brewed in Science Fantasy Land. And painkillers do shit for me anyway - they work on current pain, not past or future. So if I'm not presently injured they're completely useless, and even when I am, as soon as the painkillers wear off the echoes are just like I'd never taken any."

"You know, I'd never thought of my world as a Science Fantasy Land before but when I go home I'm going to have a new appreciation for gravity and microwaves."

"Happy to help," Milan says cheerfully.

"Unfortunately it sounds like you'll be very inhibited in your ability to bring home useful souvenirs. Pens are obviously out of the question, I'm not sure if you even want runecasting books."

"I don't hate my life enough to bring home any useful objects from Science Fantasy Land," says Milan. "The responsible thing to do with a portal to Science Fantasy Land is to run and never look back. But, alas, my family's in another country. So I will just have an amusing chat with you all and then go back to school. Maybe lightly taunt the next interplanar studies student I see."

"What do you study?" asks Ivan. "It seems like it would be hard to study things if nobody can do any science. Maybe 'political science' and so on don't count."

"History and lore, with a minor in martial combat. I wanted to go into thaumatology, but Mother convinced me that I would almost certainly die."

"...Does thaumatology skirt close to science or something?"

"It's the study of magical theory. You might call it the closest you can get to science and survive. Normal thaumatologists don't tend to die of it, but I would not be a normal thaumatologist. And back before people learned better, when they did attempt an outright scientific study of magic, they died of it very frequently."

"Will do," says Milan.

"Whether you pass this sentiment on less verbally depends on you and her," adds Bella, winking at Linyabel.

"...uh..." says Milan.

"I'm married to Miles. Bella, meanwhile, is pretending to date hers."

"It was really awkward when we met the pair of them who are being raised as adoptive siblings. And nearly as bad when one of them was married to Mark's half-alt."

"Well, I'll still tell your hypothetical alt you would've hugged her, but now I'll be awkward and self-conscious about it," says Milan.

"Sorry."

"Am I included in this poll? Because: in a fucking heartbeat," says Solvei.

"Count me out, thanks," says Elarron. "You can all be manic and agonized together."

"I do not understand the appeal."

"I mean, extra brain space in a pinch is nice but it sounds like it's all things considered better to avoid being pinched."

"So the thing with Mileses is that they're already in pain quite a lot of the time," says Solvei, "and among other things the curse-blessing would let them turn it off, right, Milan?"

"Not off off," he says. "But, you know, down to an ignorable level. Witness me ignoring it."

"And then you get to decide where you want to be on that tradeoff at any given moment. And, well. I'm going to guess Sis is not alone among Marks in her... nonstandard reaction to pain?"

"Indeed she is not," says Mark.

"So for Marks the fact that you have to turn up the pain to turn up the brain is barely even a downside."

"If you say so."

"What interesting conversations this crowd has."

"Oh, I've got one for the newcomers," says Solvei. "Where do you rate on the Miles Bisexuality Scale?"

"We all match too. Mostly girls, circumstantially flexible. The wosscalleds don't though."

"Bells. Much prettier than 'wosscalleds'. And until Bella came along I didn't know if we actually didn't match or if I was a genetically engineered one-off anomaly, because the haut are fifty percent bisexual quite deliberately."

"But as far as I know I'm just naturally gay."

Are you saying you want me to kiss her?

"You should not be asking why he abstained," says Mark.

Milan blinks at Mark, but nods agreement.

And she would be thrilled, but she is single while we have been being monogamous. Are you suggesting a single exception or a class of them?

"Should we not guess either?"

If you don't object I'd just as soon continue to keep you to myself, but if you likewise don't mind if I do kiss her I very well might. Significantly because her massive egotistical crush on me is adorable.

"Uh...?" says Solvei, glancing at Miles.

Miles half-shrugs.

"Huh, a little bit," says Solvei. "—Uh, earlier Sis kept getting pissed off at Mark for being able to half read our damn mind, and the phrase she used as shorthand for this was 'outside view', because that's sort of the relevant factor from her perspective, the fact that Mark sees his Miles from the outside so he knows what it looks like when various things are happening in a Miles's brain so he has a well-developed ability to guess what we're thinking. Sis is starting to pick up the skill."

"I hate to have to ask," says Milan, "but, 'Sis'...?"

"I am both a Miles and a Mark!" says Solvei. "Currently a Miles, but Sis - who has no name, if you were wondering - is in here listening. And wow I just realized these nametags don't show who you're an instance of. We are all fools. Somebody pass me a bunch more nametags and a marker."

Aurin gets some from Bar and tosses them to Solvei.

Name: Miles Vorkosigan
Instance Of: Miles
World: Nexus

Name: Mark Vorkosigan
Instance Of: Mark
World: Nexus

Name: Stalas Aeducan
Instance Of: Miles
World: Thedas

Name: Mialavaraaninah
Instance Of: Miles
World: Elcenia

Name: Milo of Raxwell
Instance Of: Miles
World: Chronicle

Name: Solvei Koskin
Instance Of: Miles, Mark (ask me how!)
World: Wish

Name: Ashras Kevarsin
Instance Of: Miles
World: Suranse

Name: Inlaith Kevarsin
Instance Of: Mark
World: Suranse

Name: Elarron Kevarsin
Instance Of: Elarron
World: Suranse

Name: Milan Kosorin
Instance Of: Miles
World: Hubris

"Sure, go for it," says Ivan.

"We don't have a pun reason to use 'Ivan' as our collective name," Jann muses.

"There was another one also named that, though, and I was here first."

"And it's reasonably tidy that instances of Miles and Mark are named after their Nexus incarnations. You have an opportunity to continue this pattern and no especially good reason not to, as far as I can see," says Solvei.

"If there was a Nexus version of me, I wouldn't mind ceding the collective to him," says Elarron. "...There isn't, right?"

"It surely isn't that easy to misplace a triplet...?"

"Theirs is not a situation of a multiple birth."

"What the fuck's it a situation of, then?"

"Cloning," says Miles.

"In," Mark glances at Milan, "some Science Fantasy Lands, it's possible to produce an identical twin of someone if you have a little piece of them to copy from. Someone stole a little piece of Miles and made me, intending that I would kill and impersonate him and then murder his family. I decided I would rather not do that."

"Waaaaaait," says Solvei, staring at Inlaith.

Not-Solvei continues the thought. "You escaped the horrible Mark suffering?"

"Yeah, same," says not-Solvei. "Like. I. How?"

"I mean, hopefully it doesn't mean he's due?"

"...Maybe if I had a Mark I would already know the answer to this question," says Milan, "but why is 'perhaps I would be better off if I had been tortured more in my childhood' even something that occurs to you?"

Inlaith shrugs helplessly.

"Marks are weird," says Ivan helpfully.

"Happened with the half-alt fellow too. Him and his Bell are gone now, leaving only a magic blood sample in Miles as evidence."

"Technically the blood is not magic," says Miles. "...Probably."

"My bones belong to Sis and are therefore fine, but it would be them if they weren't," says Solvei.

"...No fucking wonder you want my curse-blessing so bad," says Milan to Mial.

Mial grins. "Right?"

"It'd be bloody terrifying, that would," Aurin says.

"I don't deny it," says Mial.

"That's... I am frequently tempted to misuse the word 'epic' but this seems to qualify better than most other candidates I've ever considered," says Milan. "Pity there's no way to make it happen."

"Please unpack 'epic'," says Mark.

"How does anybody get there in your anti-hubris world in the first place?" asks Jann.

"It would literally be dangerous to tell us stories of epic people? Hell, that's a lot of self-policing for a you, I'm impressed too."

"Hear, hear," says Miles.

Elarron makes a complicated little nod/shrug gesture and stands with Ashras.

"The fuck is that?" say Aurin and Ivan at the same time. Jann is nervously holding the hilt of his sword.

"Sounded destructive. We're going to go see what it was," says Mark, indicating the party of standing Miles-and-siblings. "You coming?"

"I'll go," Aurin decides. The others stay behind, sword or no sword.

Mark takes the lead. Out the door they go.

"Sable Arrowsmith!"

"Sounds like a Miles to me," says Mark.

"...We're wearing nametags," Aurin points out.

"...We seem to have landed another paranoid one," says Mark. "Joy."

"Excuse me?"

"Is that by any chance the weapon that produced that ungodly sound just now?" he inquires, gesturing in her direction to indicate the staff she is holding pointed away from the group.

"...Yes," she says. "This is my Celestial Staff. It's overkill for any monster smaller than a house. I was in the middle of fighting a monster larger than a house, and... then I was here. I am confused. And not paranoid, thank you very much."

"Oh, that's good, then, not paranoid."

"I didn't mean to imply you were unreasonably paranoid, just that you are noticeably warier than standard. The house-sized monsters go a considerable distance toward explaining that."

"Okay..."

"This place is a kind of crossroads between universes. It is having a theme day today. The theme is alternate universe duplicates of my brother Miles. I strongly suspect that you are one. Most of them have not fought any house-sized monsters recently and were therefore somewhat calmer about unexpectedly arriving in a strange place full of bizarrely similar people. Would you like to come inside?"

"...Sure," she says. The staff shrinks abruptly to an inch-long version of itself in her hand, and she tucks it into a pocket and descends to ground level, folding her wings when her boots hit dirt. There is a white-and-silver crown on her head, inexplicably perfectly steady there despite all the flying. "Do I need to wear a nametag too?"

"I don't remind you of your favorite cousin, do I?" Aurin asks. "Some of you don't have one of me."

"I don't actually have any cousins," says Sable. "Or didn't last I checked."

"It wasn't completely random," she says. "I was flying really close to the fog between islands, and I think I dipped in a little too far. But usually this results in entering the fog between islands, not being abruptly transported to a weird... place. What is this weird place."

"It's called Milliways," says Jann.

"The bar spontaneously appears good drinks and polite napkins."

"How... nice," she says dubiously. "Sorry, I'm just. Having trouble with the adjustment from 'chased by house-sized monster' to 'strange bar full of real live people with souls and everything'."

"...That does seem like it would take some adjusting," says Miles. "House-sized? Approximately how big of a house?"

"Also, plese fill out a nametag," says Solvei.

"Maybe not quite mansion, but large. Give me a nametag and I'll fill it out."

"It's a long story, but the reason I was fighting this mansion-sized monster today was to test how well my new weapon works against it," she says. "Answer: really well, but I forgot to account for how fast my new wings are and accidentally flew out of the universe."

We'll be down presently as time dilation allows to say hi.

"The noise was sort of alarming but it's that sort of day," says Ivan.

"I'm moderately surprised you didn't do any harm to the landscape," says Mark.

"It's a non-landscape-harming weapon."

"...Does it have 'non-landscape-harming' as a magical property?" wonders Miles. "Because given the sound, and the fact that you said it was effective against a mansion-sized monster..."

"Terraria," she sighs, as though that's a complete explanation.

"..."

"Are you okay, uh, Sable?"

"Oh. Yes. Perhaps I should've warned you that my wife is very pretty," says Miles. "No one else seems to have been struck speechless over it, though."

"...oh," says Mark. "Extended social isolation."

"...I can go away again if that would help."

"Miles Bisexuality Index?" murmurs Ashras.

"...Okay, nobody else has asked yet so I guess it's up to me: where'd you get the wings?" says Elarron.

"Terraria," she says. "I made them. Why?"

"Cultural thing," says Inlaith. "Those don't look quite right - is that metal? - but in Suranse, generally speaking, you can assume certain things about a person you see walking around with wings, and those things don't seem to hold in the wider multiverse."

"Why've you been extendedly socially isolated? Or is Mark making things up?"

"...When I was twelve I was suddenly and inexplicably transported from the world I grew up in to a different one. The new world is called Terraria and there's some indication that other people have existed in it but I haven't actually found any who were still alive. It, um. It hasn't been great."

"Milliways shenanigans like what?"

"Sometimes it will not let you have a front door for a period of time, and I don't know what spending many years in a universe that isn't your own or coming in from the back yard might do to the door's accuracy. But the normal course of things it would lead to your original world."

"...Um, we came in from the back yard."

"...I hate to say this," says Miles, "but if the front door doesn't lead to her world, is one of the other options 'under attack by mansion-sized monster'?"

"...I was kicking the mansion-sized monster's ass, but uh, yeah, I'd rather not be expecting my hometown and get the Moon Lord instead."

"So go in expecting the monster - why is it named that? - and then if it's your hometown be pleasantly surprised?"

"I don't know why it's called the Moon Lord. That's just what the soulless un-people call it."

"They look like people but they don't have minds and they can only do really specific things. They can talk, but it's not like talking to a person, it's like talking to a - a book that reads itself out loud."

"...And you survived ten years with that as your only company?" says Miles, looking very disturbed.

"Believe me, I'm surprised too when I think about it."

"I can tell," says Sable.

"You can tell how many souls Marks have? Check Solvei."

She snorts. "Souls don't come in multiples like that. Although for some reason you and you," she points at Mial and then Aurin, "seem to have a lot of extra aliveness, what's with that?"

Aurin looks at Mial, then says, "Well, we're not humans? ...Stalas isn't either but perhaps not in an aliveness-relevant way."

Sable squints at some nametags and then says, "Oh, his weird stuff goes way beyond extra aliveness."

"I took a medical scan of him and it thought his bones were exotic ceramic, but I slightly doubt that's what you mean?"

"...It belatedly occurs to me that this might not be polite to talk about...?"

"I am pretty curious about what you mean by my weird stuff," says Stalas.

"Well, your blood is... ...sparky?" she says. "And sort of—a little bit almost like the Corruption but not quite? And yeah, your bones are way not human, they're more like rock than bone, but it's mostly the blood that's glaringly obvious. What kind of not human are you?"

"Dwarf, which is why the bones. The weird blood stuff is a separate issue," he says.

"I'm very curious now exactly what strange things you can tell about each of us," says Mark.

"I mean, I can tell you. Does anyone not want told?" says Sable.

"I am nothing but fascinated."

"Same here."

"I'm all right too. Maybe you can figure out why Milo smells of princess."

"...thanks, I think," snorts Milan.

"I'm genetically engineered for, among other things, unnatural health. Unlike Milo's case this does not involve magic."

"I wouldn't know, I'm just a Lakewalker," says Sable. "...Um, which is the kind of human I am that means I have groundsense and can tell whose bones are weird. But groundsense doesn't really have little Magic and Not Magic labels for things."

"What... is groundsense? Besides a sense that you have? Why is it called that, you can clearly sense things other than the ground."

"'Ground' is the word we use for the thing we can sense. It's like... I don't really know how to explain it. It's sort of but not really like being able to see the insides of things as clearly as their outsides? But instead of being outrageously gross when applied to living things like it sounds like that would be, living things are mostly really pretty?"

"So Lakewalkers are - whoever happens to have this trait?"

"Yes," she says. "And Lakewalkers call everyone who isn't a Lakewalker 'farmers' for some reason even though most of them don't farm. I'm only half Lakewalker - Father is, Mother isn't - but I got lucky and my groundsense is pretty strong."

"This is a thing that runs in families, then?"

"Yeah."

"Calling everybody who isn't a Lakewalker a 'farmer' is weird. Has anybody in this room ever farmed anything?"

"...I've gardened?" says Aurin. "A little?"

"Are you hunter-gatherers...? Or do you just trade for food?"

"Yes, and yes, and we grow some things, but it's—Lakewalker camps have to be built so that—nothing sessile, nothing you'd need a wagon to move, everything you're desperate to save can be packed up on a horse. No permanent buildings, either, if it's got four solid walls it gets burned down in the ten-year rededication."

"...You burn everything down once a decade? Uh, why?"

"I mean, no, we don't, that's the whole point, if solid buildings are going to be burned down in ten years then people are much less tempted to build solid buildings," she says. "And my family doesn't, I live—lived—in Tripoint, it's a city, we have a house and everything. ...Malices. Malices are why. I should explain malices."

"Please do."

"Um. So nobody's really sure where malices came from but they make more sense if I tell the story anyway even if I'm not sure it's true," she says. "The story goes, there used to be people who could do real magic, not just little groundwork tricks like Lakewalkers can. And one of the mage-kings was trying to do something even more impressive than the impressive magic he could already do, and he screwed it up, and made or became the first malice, and either way it shattered into millions of pieces and they went all over and sank way deep underground. We're pretty sure the mage-kings existed, we've seen the ruins of their cities; the rest we're not sure about. But what malices are now, is creatures made just out of ground - they have bodies, but only because they make them. This is important because if you kill a malice's physical body, and don't do anything about the malice itself, it runs away as a kind of ground-ghost and makes a new body and goes back to doing malice things. And malice things are bad."

"The name does kind of suggest it. What about the cities looks mage-king-y?"

"I haven't ever seen one and I last heard about them when I was twelve, so I really couldn't tell you."

"...Hard to explain, some of them," she says. "They steal the ground out of things, either slowly just by being near them or fast by tearing it out on purpose. Ground-ripped alive stuff dies. Ground-ripped dead stuff loses colour and structure and crumbles into grey dust. Somewhere that a malice has been, if they stayed long enough, we call it 'blighted' - things have had so much ground pulled out of them that nothing's alive anymore, and just standing in the middle of a bad blight patch can make you sick. There's a place called the Western Levels that's blighted so bad, if you throw a rock in and wait, it'll fall apart."

Stalas looks even more troubled now!