...well, seems possible there's one of them present anyway, right?

A Feanáro can be spared to go along anyway.

And they're off to Literally Random Location! And now they have air and a ship.

"I'm going to check for alts first," Cam says, "suspect they'll be better tour guides than an uninformed corpus grab, sound like a plan?"

He's smiling delightedly. "Yes."

Conjure conjure conjure conjure -

"We both have alts here! ...Mine does not seem to have a stable address, yours will be easier to find."

"Does not seem to have a stable address?"

"He or she has produced recent writing in forty alphabets in as many sections of the universe! I do not know what's up with that."

He looks desperately envious. 

"Nice."

"Well, if we're lucky yours is acquainted and can get us in touch so we can find out how mine is doing that. You're thataway." Cam lines up a course for thataway.

"Much more crowded universe, I take it," he says when they're off.

Conjure conjure - "Ohhhh yeah. This place is up to its ears in sapience."

"Good. I was going to be really disappointed if it was a-handful-of-humanoids-per-universe or something. Can I have my complete works?"

"Cross your fingers that they won't rupture the ship, but -" Yeah, here they are.

"...they're in Quenya."

"What, really?"

"Yup. This is all notes on -" he scrolls through it -

"okay, different magic system - he can stop time in an arbitrary radius, cool!

...less cool than it sounds, it's not like he can move around freely in the stopped area, everything's just - stopped -

- the kids are all all right -

...Melkor had an alt in their universe, too."

"- in their universe? Do they have interdimensional transit too? Also, past tense?"

"Not sure about the interdimensional transit, very sure about the past tense."

"We will have to find how that came about."

"And borrow it," he says fervently. "Want to read through it as well, the content's not particularly private..."

"Sure, if you say so." Peek.

Mostly experimental notes. Logistics. Linguistics papers. Diagrams and so forth. 

The diagrams that aren't obviously related to the local magic system are for low-tech stuff. Swords. Improved bookbinding. A very rough prototype of a printing press.

"He's into swords!" says Cam. "How the fuck do you kill a Vala with swords?"

"Really excellent question! There's a speech, calling for war with Melkor, similar to one I gave, and there's a line in it - 'travel light, but take with you your swords!' - if that's not a metaphor -

- maybe 'swords' are a very sophisticated magical weapon that happens to be a cognate with, like, pointy metal sticks."

Cam displays a diagram of a literal sword.

"...maybe their Melkor was different."

"Plausible."

"I am going to be very disappointed if the answer to 'how'd you take down your Vala' is 'we rushed him with sharp pointy sticks'."

"Well, if it works."

"Yeah, but it doesn't get me anywhere on ours. 

...summon a scale model of the ships my alt is referencing in all this writing about transit from Valinor to Endore?"

"It's a very pretty sailboat?"

Feanáro looks at it and makes a strangled noise.

"Well, on the bright side, we'll have a nice tech boost for them?"

"We will give your alt presents and accept same from mine," nods Cam.

"Yes, yours hops galaxies. I wonder how she does that, I put a lot of thought into lightleapers and there's really no way without the five day loss of time, unless we eventually figure out non-random universe hopping and then do it by changing dimensions and back. Maybe they've got that."

"Or something. We don't know it's a she, sample size of two I split fifty-fifty."

"This note references a history of the war between the Noldor and Melkor, with which I apparently had some complaints about accuracy - can you conjure it -"

Sure thing here it is.

Then he'll spend a few hours quietly reading. 

"Okay. Uh, did you glance through it too?"

"I decided to check if my alt wrote anything in Quenya, actually. She has - it is a she - but it doesn't cohere very informatively, though it does suggest they may have met."

"The war started with swords, didn't stay there. My alt invented some kind of magic that let them pull from neighboring dimensions' physics textbooks, got them up to nuclear weaponry sixteen years after they invented electricity, and then when that failed to kill him time-stopped a huge chunk of Endore to protect the civilian population while someone else invented interdimensional transit, grabbed the biggest guns the neighboring dimension had to offer, and made sure that no two particles of Melkor shared a cubic parsec."

"Electricity to nukes in sixteen years, Christ."

"My alt's notes are great. What's impressive is that they pulled together the industrial base for it, there were barely a hundred thousand of them and they were also, like, growing their own food with mule-drawn plows and so forth." He shakes his head. "And someone invented interdimensional travel in a couple of decades. It took me that long with eight copies to work with and I had far more resources."

"This person is also of interest," Cam nods.

"She killed Melkor. Maybe she'll want to do it again. 

She also apparently killed Thauron in single combat. I'm trying to imagine in what kind of context that makes any sense at all but apparently it is a thing that happened."

"More of him too oh joy. On what axis are you thinking that fails to make sense?"

"Single combat implies, you know, they showed up at the same place and used local-effect magic powers and handheld weapons, which I get the impression is in actual fact what they did, which - I guess I don't know enough about the magic system, but I wouldn't have guessed you could kill a Maia that way, and the Enemy was also fucking around with swords? Why?" 

"I mean, ours was fucking around with rockets and being comparatively restrained with the prion diseases? Maybe 'not going all out' is a - thing?"

"I would not have expected it to be a principle he held strongly enough to die for it. Good for him, though."

"Yeah I'm confused. We can ask."

"I have so many questions," he agrees eagerly. "Want to pull things up on anyone else in the galaxy, if the translation tech's gotten anywhere? Oh, and we should check if this is a world where summoning works -"

Here is a circle for Fëanáro to try. "There are so many languages here and I don't know which ones will be useful. A lot of my alt's notes in Quenya make it look like she was practicing it, so it's not her native language, but she's been writing in a bunch of alphabets for what seems to have been a very long time."

Fëanáro tries it. An angel conspicuously fails to appear. "Oh, my alt invented eidetic memory necklaces. That can't explain your alt's language proficiency, but it'll at least make learning new ones trivial for you."

"It's hard to get more trivial than inviting people to Endorë and asking them to draw on the floor," Cam points out. "But I do want one of those."

"Think it's magic, but you can try conjuring it in case I'm wrong."

"Yep, magic."

"Ah, well. I wonder if it's learnable or local. Also, whereas our Noldor stuck together very effectively through the war and then split afterwards, these Noldor nearly had a civil war and spent a few decades not speaking to each other and are now, if I'm reading the epilogue correctly, a happily reunited kingdom."

"I wonder what governs which things are the same or parallel and which are just different like that."

 "Once we have enough data points we can start theorizing."

And they spend a few days reading and - in Fëanáro's case, since he can't pick up the languages by having circles drawn - learning a few of them chosen nearly at random.

And they find the correct planet and shuttle down. They speak Quenya, it'll be fine!

There's a spaceship landing! That's odd! They don't get a lot of unannounced visitors and they've yet to really figure out economically efficient tourism that they can use to fund the end-scarcity-and-give-the-galaxy-freedom-of-movement long term project. 

Maitimo's on Jotunheim helping Loki end an ancient war or conquer a kingdom or whatever they're doing. So he watches from a few miles off while the ship lands and then pops over to greet the people disembarking.

And out pops a guy with wings and a tail. "Hi!" he says in what, if Findekáno checks, is actually Quenya - accented - and not Allspeak rendering something else as such. "We are the most interesting visitors you have had all forever probably, bet you arbitrary material objects."

"I bet you a Silmaril that you are only the second most interesting visitor I have had in all forever," he says. He does check. Actually Quenya. Huh. Still a safe bet, Loki once dropped on his head.

"Who're we competing with?" Cam says, getting out of the way so Fëanáro can emerge.

"Loki," he says. And then blinks at Fëanáro, and adds, "...what are you doing here?"

"We haven't met," he says. "I am a version of the person known to you from an alternate dimension."

"Well, you're pulling a solid second in the most interesting people I've met department," he says. "Welcome to Vanda Nosseo, headquarters of Project End Material Scarcity and Give The Whole Galaxy Freedom of Movement, I hope in your dimension we're doing something comparably interesting."

"Ooh, ending material scarcity, good stuff, my go-to solution for that won't scale here but I approve in principle!" Wag wag. "I'm not terribly up to date on what our yous have been up to, sorry, although I can drop a letter if you're urgently curious."

"...our yous? There are several?"

"They forked. I forget how many of you there are. Four? Something like that. One of 'em came along the last time I went scouting for strange universes but this time they stayed home."

"...okay. Want me to pop you to some guest rooms in the palace and we can compare notes? Forking is not a thing that exists here and if you've done a lot of scouting for strange universes than you're ahead of us, we've stuck to the two."

"Universes we're aware of are the one I was born in, four associated worlds, the one he's from, and the one we found last time we went universe-hunting. This is universe-hunting result the second. I would be delighted to compare notes."

And now they're in a guest room in the palace, exceptionally pretty. "We grew up in Arda, eventually left Valinor to go kill a Vala - we didn't have any idea how to do that but I think - " he nods at Fëanáro - "his plan was to drag out the fighting for three hundred years while he invented his way up to something that'd do it - only then he had a fit of paranoia about my father usurping him and lit the boats we'd been using to cross the ocean on fire, all familiar so far?"

"Ooh, teleportation," Cam says. "And, uh, no, we were very surprised to learn that there were boats involved. With sails. That presumably, like, float. Also nothing was on fire."

"At the time we did not have the teleportation. I can now pick up like a million people at will and singlehandedly and put them in another dimension, it's lovely, I'll teach you this afternoon but it takes five hours to learn and is excruciatingly boring.

...no ships? Nothing on fire? Want to give your version?"

"There were ships. Space ships. Faster than light ones! They're cool! I dropped in after some of the politics had already politicked though, maybe I'm not the best source of backstory."

"We also wanted to leave Valinor to go fight a Vala," Fëanáro says, "though I was pretty sure I didn't need three hundred years to jump high enough on the tech tree to do it - I might have been underestimating him - but Valinor and Endore are twenty-five lightyears apart and it would have been hard for ships to be involved. Yours were on the same planet?"

"Not even a planet. It was flat. The Valar held it that way with magic, they hadn't thought of doing a round one. This offended Loki's sensibilities and it's round now. Valinor and Endore were separate continents, though, and you had invented writing fairly recently and we were a long ways from spaceships."

"This Loki person sounds really interesting."

"There's a reason I bet you a Silmaril you weren't the most interesting person I'd met. And I don't know if I'm Fëanáro's kin enough to be offering the damned things - did you also swear a really stupid oath -"

"I also swore an oath."

"Anyhow, after our Fëanáro'd burned the boats and stranded us all in terrible conditions with few supplies in the freezing arctic, we decided to walk across it. It was ugly. About twelve thousand people died. And when we were nearing the edge of our march, a woman appears out of nowhere in the snow, and we establish in short order that she is from a different dimension, did not mean to be there, has healing powers which could rapidly save a lot of our lives, had illusion and invisibility powers with a range of 'as she pleased', and could touch people and turn them into birds."

"That is a sorta weird power set."

"Her powers let her do anything she wants! Those happened to be the first spells she'd used them to design, because the design process takes decades and she was from a planet where women face serious social sanction for using magic, and she was a princess and would have lost her chance at the throne, and had in fact just been banished for using her healing spells to save her father's life."

"...wow, okay. Maybe we are not the most interesting visitors you have had in all forever. Depends on how much interestingness bonus you assign to the alts thing. I have one here too but his was easier to triangulate so we're here first."

"The alts thing is pretty exciting. I want to meet all, ah, four of me, it'd be nice to be able to get more done." He's surprised Maitimo hasn't convinced his alternate self to make more than four but he's not going to accidentally out the other Maitimo to his father if they didn't meet a Loki and get encouraged to get married. 

"But Loki's more exciting. So, at this point we aren't sure if the other host bona fide wants us dead or just wanted us out of the way, and therefore how they'd react to our arrival alive. We were sort of expecting it to come to a fight, honestly. I tell Loki to go find my cousin Maitimo - you have him? - and see if he could be leveraged to get his family to not try to murder us all. So she turns into a bird and goes off to meet you -" to Fëanáro. "And apparently become fast friends.

Maitimo wasn't there. He'd been taken prisoner by the Enemy."

"Five, there's one of you in the other world we found too," Cam mentions. "They're all humans there, you guys are more closely matched. Congratulations on eventually getting your Enemy dead, by the by."

"Thank you. ...I'm assuming you also did that?"

"You finish your story first."

"Loki meets Fëanáro, goes 'I don't remember much of my science lessons but I think electricity somehow involves magnets,' three days later he has a generator. By then she's swooped around Beleriand meeting people and learning about the situation and has decided the Enemy really fucking needs to be dead, so she asks him if he can do retroactive eidetic memory, so she can remember her science lessons better and teach us the galaxy's best weaponry. He says that's the most ridiculously impossible thing he's ever heard of, give him a decade. 

Loki sneaks invisibly into Angband and stages a prison break."

"Probably a more satisfying activity in your version."

"...why's that?"

"Ours didn't keep prisoners in a rescuable form so much, he did destructive uploads, spun off copies, had offplanet backups, ran 'em all real fast..."

"I shall have to tell Maitimo that it could've been worse.

It was pretty bad as it stood. He could still do the altered subjective time, and he did hallucinations of being rescued, over and over, until they didn't trust it when it came true."

"Telling him it could've been worse seems insensitive. Besides, the, however many, six or something, of him are all forked off from an instance that doesn't remember it."

Why would there be more of Maitimo? He is pretty sure he can't cover one and a half of Maitimo.

"Well, ours remembers it. It took him twenty-five years to believe that it was really over, though he managed to make himself one hell of a wartime asset while in constant psychological torment. 

Loki talks to some orcs, learned that they're all under oaths to Melkor, works with Fëanáro on some clever oath-reinterpretation so they're safe, bargains with Ulmo to get them an island of their own, a free independent orc colony. She learns that Men have started existing, goes over to meet them, and runs into Sauron."

"Sauron is such a creep."

"Sauron offers her a deal. Orcs, he says, outnumber Elves several thousand to one, and all orcs everywhere are in constant physical pain - she'd earlier verified that. He offers to make it stop."

"He wants her help killing the Valar, in the long run, and as a show of good faith he wants her to give him Maitimo back. He'd gotten attached, see."

"Such a creep."

"Loki goes to Maitimo and asks him if he'd volunteer."

Nod.

He's watching him intently. 

"Maitimo thinks it's a ploy to capture or kill Loki, or possibly merely to make sure Fëanáro's unwilling to work with her. They talk it through for a couple of days, decide they can't verify enough to make the deal, set up an ambush for Sauron at the meeting site instead. Sauron either underestimated her or was trying to take her alive, or he'd have killed her right there. Instead she made it out and he limped back to Angband the Maia equivalent of badly damaged. 

She took over raising the new species of Men from him. We built fortifications and cities. A couple of years passed."

"Speaking as an ex-human good on her taking an interest."

"Sauron spends those years personally fucking with her. Sending her pregnant orcs and orcs holding their infant children for her to murder, stuff like that. Kidnapped a personal friend of hers, tortured the friend until there was nothing left to do, and then sent her home with orders to get Loki to kill her..."

"Okay, 'creep' is apparently an understatement."

"Yeah, people who've met Maitimo don't tend to joke about it. It's okay. Anyway, Loki gets word that the Enemy's going to shatter her little kingdom of Men, and Maitimo's built himself one hell of a defensive bastion of a city, so she moves her Men in there and then some of the Noldor move in there and then Sauron comes in to assail it.

And she murders him. Someone has got to show you the memories. She'd just gotten short-range tactical teleportation and her ice powers worked out and they leave craters in a solid square mile of earth and I think it was the most satisfying moment of any of our lives, up to date. 

And then Fëanáro gets retroactive eidetic memory up and working and they bear down on nukes."

"That explains electricity to nukes in sixteen years! That seemed really ridiculous!"

"They had the help of physics textbooks! It was still pretty ridiculous, they worked their people to exhaustion. But they did it. Tested it in the desert and then Loki teleported it over Angband.

Didn't work. Well, it destroyed the place, but not the Enemy."

Nod.

"So we retrieve the Silmarils, which were weaponizable and usable as radiation shielding, and consolidate population centers so the Silmarils could shield everyone while the Enemy rampaged around destroying most of the world. Except Doriath grabs one Silmaril and refuses to give it back, and Maitimo ends up going in there as their prisoner to try to talk them around to letting us use it.

And we worked. For a decade. Loki and Fëanáro had figured out a ridiculous magic hack so they could think at three or four times normal pace, and they spent all their time in acceleration, barely speaking to anyone else. And when the continent began to crumble to pieces, Loki'd secured permission to take everyone but the Noldor to Valinor where they'd be safe and Maitimo'd secured the third Silmaril and Fëanáro'd worked out how to use all three of them to freeze us all in time so the Enemy couldn't slaughter us and the continent couldn't crumble around us.

And then - well, we spent the next few years in stasis, but in Valinor they begged and pleaded and delayed the Valar's judgment about having mortals stinking up their precious paradise, and Loki finished interdimensional teleportation.

She came here. She found the most powerful weapon this universe had to offer, and she took it up, and she took it back to Arda and smeared Morgoth across the cosmos and then kindly suggested to the other Valar that they reconsider their behavior. Made the planet round. Erased oaths, so all the orcs were free, and got a nice planet for them. Picked out a planet for us, too. 

And now she and Maitimo are off ending some kind of intractable centuries-old war. I guess that's how some people heal."

"I mean, having centuries-old wars around is just tacky."

"Like flat planets. Just itching for someone to apply phenomenal power and a lack of respect for the way the world is.

Now you've got to tell us how you did it."

"It's not a very nice story."

"It was not a very fair fight. We got very lucky."

"So, I'm a demon. Demons are one of three summonable species - doesn't work in this world, checked - we make things, there's also angels who change things and fairies who move things. Random kid in the Noldor host summoned me by accident, doodling on the floor, I figured I'd help as long as I was there, filled out the fleet of lightleaper ships and filled them up with food and stuff. Got the Valar to quarantine the scope of their fucking Doom so it wouldn't apply in other worlds because they hadn't been accounting for that. They also decided to interdict further summoning, so I was it for daeva backup and if anybody killed Random Kid I would've been back home in Hell just like that. So the host went to Endorë and I went off to intergalactic space to make a planet and put Random Kid and some other families there to be out of the way of the action and then met up with everybody at Endorë and made 'em a bunker under the ocean."

".....I have so many things for you to do if you're amenable, I assure you they have a very good lives-saved to time-spent ratio unless you make things very slowly. But do go on."

"Planet takes a few weeks if I start with nothing but a design. I will be happy to make some stuff for you but it can't be magic, smarter than a snail, or antimatter. Anyway. There's a war on. It's - a surprisingly primitive war, considering that while Endorë's incarnates don't have spaceflight mastered the incarnates weren't running the Enemy's side of it. Seems very restrained - it's hell on everyone going through it, to be clear, but the actual weapons deployed are guns and stuff, not nukes. I'm really hesitant to start throwing nukes around first because I have no idea what's holding him back. Later transpires that he thinks the Valar will hold off interfering in anything that looks like a fair fight."

"...or that they figured if it escalates it's an extinction event. All right."

"Elves and orcs are all natural born cyborgs, which is bizarre, they've got chips in their heads that literally develop in the womb that do telepathy and oaths of varying stupidnesses and all sorts of tempting little upgrades and also mental backups - on the chips themselves, if they survive bio-death, and also by instantaneous relay to Mandos. Those are what the Enemy destructively uploads from, is the chips. He's got a lot of people. Offers parley if me and Maitimo show up to it. We figure out a way to leverage my making stuff into verifying that an oath is actually spoken and not illusioned - I can sort of sort by genre, when I'm being an infosec hazard, and Melian helped test that I could use that to distinguish as long as the oath's spoken into a recorder. So we get a nice snug oath out of him, we show up, Sauron shows up, he's a total creep, he makes us offers.

Wants me to suck Valinor into a black hole."

"I am not surprised. Same offer - orcs don't suffer -"

"Evac privileges," says Cam, shaking his head. "Could've had a year to herd everybody onto ships and gotten them somewhere he'd never find them... Didn't take it. Maitimo was offered a cessation of upload torture in exchange for his," incline of head to Fëanáro, "help figuring out how to redirect backups from Mandos, which, I do not say this out of any fondness for Mandos but no."

"Oh, Eru, that'd be bad."

"Yeah. So we don't take the deals, we leave, I run around installing fancy suicide thingies in everybody who'll take one so they can melt their chips at will -

- doesn't help when a whole city dies in their sleep of one of the fucking custom bioweapons, that's when he got Maitimo, he was there."

He flinches.

"Then the you, there was only the one at the time, figures out resurrection. Demons can't make minds. I can make bodies, live as you please, and they have insect-level cognition. Same limit applied to chips. But on the chips - the data was all there when I made one, it just didn't work for inscrutable magic reasons if I tried to build a body around it - your alt figured out under extremely restrictive demon-safe information handling protocols how to read and write to chips. So if I made a copy of a chip at a time and a blank, the data could come off the one and print nonmagically onto the other - put a body around that - good as new. Had a Maitimo again for various Maitimo-related functions.

"And had several million fewer reasons not to destroy Valinor."

"Pregnant people. The Maiar."

"I can actually do really early-term fetuses, but yes, pregnant people, Maiar, animals, the lovely nothing-decays environmental effect.

"So I held out for more than a year of evac. I held out for fucking everything - Morgoth's still alive being passively evil, Sauron's still being a creep, but they are never, ever going to hurt anyone again -

"But I did it.

"And then I spent the better part of a year putting a replica up and resurrecting everybody I could and I said this was not a nice story."

He buries his head in his hands.

He waits a while. 

"I am sorry," he says. "For - everyone involved."

"Yeah.

"Anyway then Fëanáro invented worldleapers and a small party flung ourselves into a random destination and landed in hard vacuum which is a demon's favorite canvas and we found a planetful of magic humans with an exact copy of your family tree and also a me, who's a girl and a queen and stuff."

"Okay. So now the hypothesis is that certain people repeat across the universes? There's an instance of you who is my alt's grandmother? Or are we not royalty there?"

"We're not blood related in any universes discovered extant," Cam says. "You're still royalty there, cute little country full of canals called Marlatia, place has got talking animals. The me, whose name is Iobel, is in a marriage of political convenience with the Marlatian Maitimo and they are monarching it up."

He shakes his head. "Probably quite competently. Alright. I am having our representatives on every planet where we've got one draw up a list of distribution sites and items and expected lives saved, and they'll have it for me by tomorrow and then I can teleport you over to as many of those as you don't mind doing and we can save a hundred million people before breakfast and it'll be lovely. While those are being compiled, what else can I offer you? Local magic? Local geopolitics? Audience with Loki Godslayer?"

"Those things all sound very interesting. Especially the hundred million before breakfast. These things don't actually work out by math and if they did I'd be in the black for escapades before I turned twenty but it'd still make me feel better."

"You sort of look like you could use a hug but imagining how I'd feel about discovering a means of resurrection and then having that be the impetus for a genocide on the orders of the Enemy, it is possible I am the wrong person to offer it. A hundred million before breakfast I can do."

He starts shuffling in his drawers for magic items. "Eidetic memory necklace?"

"Yes please! Do these do working memory or just long-term? If it does working the Marlatians will do six impossible things before breakfast and then gripe about their magic system until midnight."

"Think they're long term, think Fëanáro could have one for working memory in a few months if that's something that'd be of tremendous value to the Marlatians." He hands it to him. "And something to eat? I have the menus of some of the galaxy's most desirable high-end vacation destinations, can you steal their food?"

"Yes I can! Menu me."

He kept everything acquired on their honeymoon. He hands Cam some menus. "I've also got invisible goggles that give Elven vision, if you've ever been sad about not being able to see heat and ultraviolet and things happening fifty miles away."

"I would also like these." Wag wag. Delicious menu items.

Goggles! Fëanáro presumably doesn't need them. Fëanáro has been talking with himself over osanwe the whole time; Findekáno still feels no impulse to be more than vaguely polite to alternate universe versions of his father-in-law.

The food is delicious. 

"This is lovely. I will have to make sure the other demons know about it, they will be delighted."

"Loki and Maitimo became close friends during the war and I think it bothered her tremendously that he was not properly rescued yet. So she paid for very expensive therapists and then a very lovely honeymoon. I would not otherwise have been able to justify spending this much at galactic-class restaurants."

"- ah, congratulations."

"Thank you," he says cheerfully. Fëanáro does not react but might not have been paying attention. "It'll set us back on becoming emperors of this sector of the galaxy by a few years - Arda's yet to catch up with the times - but it was worth it."

"Yeah, similar social norm in my version, it caught me very much by surprise - and I offended the you very badly in the process of finding out, too - but now sometimes when I feel like having a despairing laugh over something trivial I read horrified censors' arguments about the contents of the Library of Hell. Although nothing about homosexuality is quite as funny as how scandalized they get over shampoo commercials."

He laughs. "I can imagine any version of Valinor having a bumpy ride making contact with the galaxy. Or Hell, for the same reasons. We'd seen too much of war to be very shockable - I actually don't think it is possible to shock Maitimo anymore - but everyone who'd ridden out the war in Valinor found it a change of pace." He shrugs. "It's good for them. If Eru actually wanted all Elves to be straight he could have, you know, done that."

"Did your Eru ever show up and do... anything?"

"Yeah, he scolded the Valar about making the world flat and making Dwarves and moving the Elves into Valinor and doing such a slapdash job of the stars. He didn't do anything about the war, of course, that'd have been useful. 

Loki accidentally started an orc cult and ended up having to explain to them that the disproof of an omniscient benevolent deity is two words long: 'look around'."

Cam laughs, a little. "Are your Dwarves not awesome? The ones I met were pretty neat. After they stopped shooting at me."

"They're fantastic! And Aule, the Vala who made them, made them a fantastic afterlife, too, we were all tremendously relieved. Maitimo spent several years in Tumunzahar recovering and convincing them to fund his cities and he has a lot of Dwarf friends. Can't restrain themselves from casual comment about how poorly designed Elves are, but it's not as if I disagree, there..."

"Well, the eyesight is really nothing to sneeze at," Cam says, blinking through his invisible goggles.

"True! We've been selling those for a fortune on the galactic market in order to pay the salaries of the people we need to sort low-tech planets - disease and agricultural yields, that's usually most of it, but it's a different problem everywhere..."

"Yeah, I noticed almost none of my medical training applied to Elves, and this world seems really crowded by comparison, it's probably not even all humanoids."

"It is not. Loki's a frost giant - those are humanoid, but just barely, twelve feet tall and blue and only exist in terrifyingly cold temperatures. At first all our nice healing spells were humanoid only." 

"Wow, I had only a very vague mental image of this person but it was not a twelve foot tall mental image."

"She usually looks more humanoid. She only goes blue when she's fighting fire things and she was raised Asgardian and enspelled to look conventional for that."

"I will resume imagining she is not twelve feet tall, then! When do I get my audience?"

"Want to head over now?"

"Oh, I didn't realize she was interruptible."

"She's with Maitimo and I have special Maitimo-interrupting privileges. And I expect they'll both be very excited to meet you and in a good mood about saving a hundred million people tomorrow morning."

"Awesome. Fëanáro, you okay to be stranded here?"

"I'm picking up the local magic," he says, "and then I won't be. Good skill."

"Thanks! All right, all set to go interrupt."

Pop. 

They're in a meeting room on Jotunheim. It's very very cold. Both of the other people in the room look up at them. 

"This is Cam," Findekáno says. "He is visiting from another dimension which had its own Melkor who is still around to be murdered if anyone's so inclined, though he did swear an oath not to hurt any more people. In exchange for Valinor being fed to a black hole. Cam, these are Loki and Maitimo."

"- ah," says Cam, snapping his fingers and pointing at Loki, "ah-hah -"

"...yes?"

Cam pulls up a photo on his computer. "And this is Queen Iobel of Marlatia! Who is an alt of me!"

"Oh," Findekáno says. "Then I guess you are the most interesting person I've ever met after all, on a technicality. Do I owe you a Silmaril?"

"That won't be necessary."

"When you say 'an alt of you' -"

"I mean Iobel's Maitimo took like, what, fiiiive minutes of conversation to determine that apparently physical resemblance is not the end-all be-all of Being An Alternate Universe Version Of Somebody and then my and Iobel's parents matched and three questions etcetera etcetera."

This Maitimo is watching Cam a little warily. Findekáno comes over and sits next to him and starts explaining the rest over osanwe.

"- the parents match?"

"Mine and Iobel's do but if yours are twelve feet tall and blue..."

"Depends on whether you mean birth parents or adoptive." Illusions.

"No match, but if if the three questions and your face are hits and the exciting story of your adventure on your Arda is true I am inclined to round that to a minor matter of 'well, the families can't always match or it would imply especially extra implausible things about genealogy'."

"You're different versions of the same person," Maitimo says softly.

"Thank you for your scarily good at people confirmation," Cam says. "So when I showed up I looked for you with my scary information security hazard powers - would've averted my eyes if I ran into clearly personal notes but I did not, at least not legible - you've been bopping around a lot writing in a ridiculous number of alphabets so me and the Fëanáro I brought with me found his alt first, he's more staying put."

"My personal notes are ciphered. I can get you an Allspeak installation if you too would like to write in ridiculous numbers of alphabets."

"I already can, just different ones," Cam says, swishing his tail.

Findekáno is almost done filling him on everything. He clutches him and watches Cam. "Welcome to the universe," he says after a moment. "We scraped through with one of you but would have been delighted to have two. And what's this I hear about a Thauron who still requires murdering?"

"Loki, uh, has better aim than me."

"Do tell."

"I just told your Findekáno, I hate this story..."

Loki glances at Findekáno.

"Their Endore and Valinor were separate planets. Cam has a way of verifying and remotely requesting and hearing oaths from the Enemy. When the Enemy offered him a deal, he took it. Deal was that the war ends and the Enemy never hurts anyone again, and Cam feeds Valinor into a black hole with everyone living on it. Which he did. Brought back the ones he could, afterwards."

"- well, I can probably fix that."

"I get along best with the Tesseract but I can handle the time stone for short periods."

"Oh, I should have thought of that. Good idea."

"Although I've got mixed feelings about the Valar. Maybe I should ask our set to plead their alts' cases, see if they have anything to say. If I only bring back, say, Aulë, he might just fetch the rest of them back too..."

"None of their failings strike me as worthy of death but if they were going to start throwing their weight around again that'd be concerning. The Maiar will all want the Valar back. The population of Valinor will overwhelmingly want the Valar back. The population of our Endore'd vote them back too, unless we give orcs votes..."

"Well, I have excellent aim and didn't kill any of ours but inflicting them on the world actively seems... nondefault. Especially Mandos."

"I have not lost any sleep over Mandos in particular."

"They have resurrection all set without him, Cam can do it because of an eccentricity of the local biology. He can't do us. Can you send them somewhere there are no sapients for them to bother?"

"Very very far away or uninhabited universe?"

"This Mandos collects personality backups via instantaneous information transmission, far away won't cut it."

Loki brushes her thumb over the Tesseract; she crackles. "- uninhabited no can do, not inhabited by people on that backup system can."

"Let's do that, then. They can make as many pretty planets as they like - with no one to hurt when they're careless or evil -"

"Still inclined to go mention this to our Aulë first in case he'd like to warn me that actually Valar can dimension-hop or something."

"Yes, definitely check that."

"Will do. Is this urgent, Cam?"

Headshake. "They're, uh, not going anywhere and nobody's waiting on them or anything. The surviving Maiar would be spared some grief but it'd be a stretch to call it urgent, we can explain more stuff to each other first."

"We could also go somewhere warmer for that," he offers, because Findekáno crossed the Helcaraxe and hates the cold.

"Of course - sorry, Findekáno -" And here they are on the Noldor planet, empty conference room.

Findekáno shakes his head. "Not a problem. Alright. I gave Cam the summary of our war and he gave me the summary of his; there's another dimension with all of us running around - Maitimo's King, Iobel is his Queen - and no Enemy in sight there, that we know of. Cam's arbitrary matter capabilities are going to be ridiculously valuable but I have enough people on that and they'll have everything compiled for me in the morning. Space Elves have better tech than us but no magic, the Fëanáros are comparing notes and will doubtless have people at work on everything valuable shortly."

"Multiple Fëanors, what fun!"

"And I only brought one! They fork."

"So Iobel and her Maitimo..."

"He had to get married to a woman to be King and he is an excellent judge of character, there was drama, there is no longer drama, they are friends." She gets him excellent birthday presents if Cam does say so himself.

Maitimo laughs. "That explains a great deal."

"You and yours seem to match much more rigidly than we do, we're two genders and three species for three people and have a nonmatching parent set and whatnot," snorts Cam, "but yes, it does. Iobel calls her world Hex and it's got flexible but slow and sharply use-limited magic. Plus talking animals; Iobel has a rude cat, Mitros has a magpie, etcetera."

"Perhaps we'll drop by and go meet them. Unless I am inconveniently going to out all of my alts by being married - I gather that we're not, in your world -"

"Ah," says Cam, "no, not in mine. There was drama, there is no longer exactly drama, they are... not so much friends? They're cordial? Uh, anyway, Mitros is hush-hush but nobody in Marlatia can tell if you're married by gazing into your eyes or anything so it would only come up if you told people and they speculated of their own accord that you're uniform in this respect."

"That's good, then, we can visit. Findekáno I do not like us being cordial, will you go bail me out of whatever irretrievable stupidity -"

"Yes, of course. That's even less urgent than the Valinor rescue, though."

"I know." He leans into him. He does not quite relax when he does this but something about his affect changes. 

He leans back into him. "Could have been my irretrievable stupidity."

"It wouldn't have been. If you were irretrievably stupid I wouldn't be dramatic, but if I were irretrievably stupid and there was a war on so you still had to take orders from me then you'd be dramatic so I didn't try fixing it. It is a failure mode I am conscious of. But they were Doomed and if the Doom was like ours it could have forced it, made it worse, caused them to miss it..."

"Mitros already gave him a talking to, I'm not sure how much progress there is to be made via altly intervention."

"I'm sure Mitros is lovely but they did not have the war," he says, "they're not going to understand. Is anything on Space Arda going to shoot at me if I just head over and drag one of each over here?"

"...probably not? Is that what we're calling it, Space Arda, we could call yours Ex-Flat Arda."

"I need a location to go kidnap my alts from and point it out to them and then drop them off on a nice vacation planet without a teleport back."

"...less sure I want to enable this now."

"If after thirty seconds they don't agree with me I'll take them home instead, promise."

"...okay, what kind of location description do you need?"

"Does osanwë not work on you?"

"...I'm the wrong kind of cyborg?"

"...okay, Flat Arda Elves aren't cyborgs, it's just telepathy-telepathy, I'm sure these ones have been politely not reading you but you will need to get in the habit of dividing private and communicative thoughts. Pick a metaphor, I went with my cipher but you may not have picked one up."

"Oh. Uh." Chiplocked and not-chiplocked? That will probably do. "...how do I know if it's working?"

"Can't hear you, can tell you're there. The standard fix for that is to put your existence on the private side. Our alts' telepathy only works on each other?"

"Yeah. I could have tried installing one of their chips but as tempting as some of the things they can load up are... no. I guess you guys work more like Maiar, Space Maiar aren't chipped." He fixes the location of his existence.

"All set. I was astonished by how quickly Loki picked it up when I first explained it to her; maybe that's a 'you' thing. Now if you'd like you can send me a location and I can go acquire some space Elves to convince in thirty seconds that they should stop making my Maitimo sad."

"They're probably not going to be in the same place, they're usually on opposite sides of the planet."

He sighs. "Then you can send me two locations."

"Can you wait five minutes for me to send a letter back via demonic courier and let them know to expect teleporting visitors, because I am only mostly sure you would not be shot at."

"By all means. It's not urgent, I just sincerely expect it'll be quick and want it out of the way."

So Cam writes Attn: Noldor grander-higher-muckety-mucks: new world has interdimensional teleportation, expect nosy alts as soon as you confirm receipt and titles it for the demon who monitors correspondence. "I have to check for replies manually, poke me if I neglect that."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome."

"So every world you've jumped to so far has had all of the same people in it?"

"Not exactly. My and Iobel's grandparents do not match. And except for Hex, mes and your family do not seem to come native to the same universe - unless there are native, whatever we call ourselveses, in the Ardas that we've just failed to notice."

"It seems like they might have been hard to miss, but it's worth checking -" Brush of tesseract. "Nope, no uses in Flat or Space Arda."

"I think we might be less separable from our family."

"Possibly. I want a name for uses, it will be inconvenient to just keep referring to myself in the plural like that. But there's no name similarity between 'Loki' and 'Cam' and 'Iobel'."

"Cam's a nickname for Campbell, me and Iobel have 'bel' overlapping in there."

"- oh, that explains it, it's my birth name that matches. Beldri."

"....that's even more bizarre. What would prompt different sets of parents to settle on different names that happen to share a syllable?"

"I could not begin to tell you and I am eager to find out."

"Any other overlap? Both my and Iobel's surnames translate as Swan and her middle name's Maryah and mine's Mark."

"Nope, Jötunheim doesn't do middle names nor surnames proper, I was Beldri Laufeysdottir until Odin scooped me up and made off with me."

"And shared history? Past events? Aside from running into us at some point?"

So Loki and Cam run through abridged versions of their life story, with Cam providing Iobel's part, and there's very little parallel except features like the clumsiness and the notebooking and the interest in magic - she taps him with her grace spell in case it's better than Iobel's. "I am again less like the two of them than they are like each other. Huh."

"There's the mannerisms. The way of presenting yourself, the style of speaking..."

"Yes, but Iobel has that too, I presume, we form a rather inequilateral triangle."

"Maybe it was the getting kidnapped at birth."

"But I don't seem to have been kidnapped from copies of their parents, Laufey and Fárbauti seem to be some unrelated variety of person."

"Fair enough. I suppose we can go get more data - does the Tesseract let you find all your alts, actually -"

"It is in a grouchy mood for reasons it declines to explain and will not help me with that unless I specify what world I want to look for them in. It gets less animate when it is having a bad day and I can't look for novel worlds without it actively assisting."

"Huh. Okay. Have our space alts been informed of our existence?"

"Let's see -" Letters for Cam?

They're pleased to hear that they have alts and that the alts have a teleport; can it be shared?

"You are clear to teleport in, people are gonna want copies of the teleport spell."

"Like I said, it's really boring to learn," he says, and pops out.

"What's so boring about it, anyway?"

"All of my spells are many books' worth of symbols that are not inherently meaningful to anyone but me. You can use them if you memorize the entire sequence of symbols and the underlying concepts, but you do have to sit around reading or being osanwëd the whole damn thing and without, again, unique-to-me advantages, you have to have the eidetic memory necklace for it."

Pop. With a space Maitimo and a space Findekáno. "Not this again," says the latter the minute he sees Loki.

"I told Cam thirty seconds," Findekáno says. "He said you had a Doom."

"...yes," space Maitimo says. 

"Wording."

"The wrath of the Valar lies on the house of Fëanáro to the farthest reaches of the universe. To evil ends will turn all things that they begin well, and by treasons of kin unto kin, and the fear of such treasons-"

"So, same wording. Cam also said he got confirmation your Doom was a literal curse the terms of which the Valar could alter, not just a prophecy or something."

"...yes."

"So, absent any other information, all I've got is that you were happy for a thousand years and then within two months of being literally cursed to have anything good you'd begun together driven apart by paranoia and betrayal -"

"...I can do another Aethering, does this call for another Aethering."

"I was sort of hoping feeding their Valar into a black hole would have done it and that creepy stuff would not be required to eat your arm again, but feeding their Valar into a black hole wouldn't have undone damage done in the meantime..."

"Aether's not gonna fix that," she sighs.

"Yeah, and it shouldn't need to. When not under any curses we are responsible adults with communication skills that can survive, well, a hell of a lot.

I think you two owe it to yourselves to figure out where you'd be without the Doom. Okay? I'll pick you up in a month."

Pop.

He comes back alone and sits down next to Maitimo. Maitimo leans in towards him and makes a pleased sound. 

"...I didn't see anything there that looked like unambiguous agreement from them but I guess if they want me to bail them out they can write me a note."

"They seem a bit slow on the uptake," he says solemnly, "and I was at twenty-nine seconds. Sorry. Back to more important topics?"

"Sure. So how exactly are you planning on solving all my problems, Loki?"

"This blue cubical object on my stick is the Tesseract, which contains the space stone, a sapient artifact of immense power which for most purposes may be thought of as an accessory you should not touch. It taught me my sorcerous alphabet when I was a child, it shoved me to Flat Arda when it thought I was being boring and it had convenient cover for it, and now I haul it around and exploit its arbitrary control over the locations of things. Depending on whether the Maiar in the black hole are dead or just inconveniently located, I will either use the Tesseract directly to conveniently locate them, or the time stone, which I don't carry around because it probably belongs to somebody and also it doesn't like me as much and it's kind of uncomfortable to use but which thanks to the Tesseract I can reach out and grab at whim from anywhere, to jump them from before they died into somewhere conveniently located in the present."

"This is how Loki fixed our Arda once nukes couldn't do it."

"Saying I have good aim is sort of an understatement now I have the Tesseract."

"...nice. You're going to interview your Valar about whether to include them?"

"Yeah, I'll see if Aulë will have a word with me, I would sort of like to be convinced but I am currently in a state of requiring it. Aulë is the Vala I have interacted with who seems least personally obnoxious. Ulmo was technically more helpful during the war but... personally obnoxious."

"Do you want me to ask my mother if he'll have a word?"

"If you think it'd be better coming from her, although he was downright friendly for a Vala when I was mopping things up..."

"I wouldn't expect any of them to react well to being asked if they're worth leaving dead but I suppose it's possible no amount of formality in advance'd make it go particularly better."

"Yeah, that's my thinking. Although I was planning to phrase it as, like, worrying that the Space ones suddenly trying to resume their jobs after what will seem like little time to them but is a substantial discontinuity for incarnates will result in disharmony, how can they be encouraged to sit back and not try to do anything a little more emphatically than they usually don't do anything. Critique my diplomacy."

"And you'd do it at once but it seems wiser to wait until our Valar have pardoned Cam, so the other ones don't reawaken and immediately, amidst their grief, need to decide how to retaliate -"

"And the peoples of Arda are using summoning! Peacefully and productively! And they should not go back to forbidding that!"

"All of these things. The Valar have no idea how much bullshit manipulation they incentivize, do they."

"I sincerely think they don't understand incentives. Why does summoning work in Arda if it doesn't work here?"

"No idea. It seems like it probably usually didn't, and I was a fluke of some kind - that can't have been the first kid to produce something that would have worked doodling on the floor ever - and then the Valar said it wouldn't work anymore and it didn't, and then they got holed and it works just fine. It doesn't work in Hex either."

"And conjuring all of the summoning circles not from your home dimension and space Arda gets you..."

"I can't filter for practical validity. I will if I try to make that get kids' drawings that should have worked and didn't."

"But if it works at all, surely it becomes known and the majority from that world will be professionally done?"

"Not so surely. I had to make it common knowledge in my original world."

"Congratulations."

"Thank you, I'm very proud." Wag.

Awww. He's so cute. They're going to be so cute together once Loki makes up her mind.

"It's still not urgent but I and the nicer of the surviving Maiar will feel a lot better when the problem is solved, if there's no reason not to go talk to Aulë right now..."

"I can do it now," she says. "I'll do a colocation thing, I'll be here too to ask clarifying questions or whatever as necessary."

And she touches the Tesseract and she's slightly wherever Aulë is.

And he looks up at her and does a convincing imitation of 'troubled'. Loki.

"Hello. I'd like a word with you, is this a good time?"

I remember you as impatient. I can speak now.

"Thank you. I have recently learned of the existence of yet another Arda, different in many respects but parallel in most, complete with its own set of Valar. However, they are presently in a black hole. I can extract them from it, but in the time since the black hole incident their universe has moved on and I fear problems if they try to resume their usual activities as though uninterrupted."

How much time has passed?

Loki checks quickly with Cam, then says, "A few years, not long as Ainur count it but more than long enough for incarnates to learn to do without them." At further word from Cam - "In particular, the Dwarves there were not supplied with an afterlife by your alt, but a substitute has been devised - which relies on permitting magic that they'd banned before the black hole."

A brief time even as Elves count it, and I do not meddle in the daily affairs of the Dwarves, and doubt my counterpart would. If the world has changed in the absence of their laws, that is interesting and potentially concerning. What were the laws, why were they put in place?

"They forbade the summoning of certain summonable beings from yet another world, the summoning of which enables the summoner to turn into one of those beings upon their death - and then to be summoned themselves and resume their lives if their bereaved wish, with some useful powers. The ban was a reaction to what seems likely to have been the first successful summoning of such a being, who was alarmed to learn of the Doom and asked that it be quarantined to the one universe alone. They assented only on the condition that it be prohibitively difficult for the quarantine to become necessary."

...the summoner would only have been subject to the Doom if they followed the House of Fëanor into their fated atrocities.

"He was concerned that there was no opportunity to warn people of other worlds that this would be an unwise course," Loki explains. "At any rate, the Valar prohibited summoning and limited the Doom by blood and not allegiance, but the interdict lost force when the black hole happened."

...it seems perhaps that it would be wise for some of us to travel to this world, learn which of its laws ceased to function when my counterparts were attacked, and understand the situation better.

"Is that an ability of the Valar?"

I would ask Eru both whether this course is wise and how to achieve it.

"This seems like it will leave the incarnates of the other Arda with even more time to become accustomed to life without Valar, if your advice waits for Eru's reply."

Eru is outside time; I will have his reply before either world perceives any as having passed.

Loki becomes slightly less here, but nods.

And a second later, Eru says that world had 'quite a satisfying story arc' and that its dead ought to remain so, so its living can grieve them.

"...I was definitely planning to bring the dead Maiar back, it's the Valar I wasn't sure of."

....he says that works, because it is the Maiar who would be most grieved by our deaths, so the total amount of grief may be increased by restoring them.

"Is he always like that?"

Thinks in terms of narratives? Yes. Callous? Not usually. He - I don't think he scripted this situation, and he's electing to treat it with amusement rather than anger, but there is something that ought to provoke anger in it, to him.

"Should I assume that the Valar of the other Arda would accept this Arda's Eru's judgment on whether they should live even though it is for... this... reason, and that I would not be doing them a particular favor by neglecting his opinion?"

...no, I'm sure they'd prefer their world have less grief in it. You might notice that grief isn't something we've particularly aspired to in our world. Particularly not grief at the senseless death of innocents.

...in fact she had not noticed that. At all.

"I also considered putting the other set of Valar in a different universe," she volunteers.

I doubt that would lessen anyone's grief. 

Eru explained how some of us can go over and learn the whole situation. He says that if you're breaking the ending anyway that's for the best.

"How would you go?"

He cannot take me directly, it is not adjacent, but he can take me to the world full of stories and there there are means to travel again-adjacent to the other Arda.

Interesting. "The world full of stories?"

You are of it, I think.

"I would feel better about this trip if I knew that interdimensonally traveling Valar would not create the very problems I am concerned about with the ones local to the other Arda."

I thought that problem was that they might restore some prohibitions relaxed in their absence which you disapprove of?

"That they might generally pick up the habit of interfering with incarnate affairs again," Loki says. "Assuming you don't plan to take up permanent residence or visit regularly it's not an enormous concern as long as you don't revise the laws of nature or resurrect them yourself or anything. Oh, and I haven't killed the Enemy there, yet, I came here first. He might react in some way to foreign Vala arrival."

We are the rulers of Arda. We would not rule elsewhere. Perhaps you should go destroy Melkor first, if he is beyond rehabilitation; that sounds more urgent.

"He's actually not urgent, he's sworn to behave himself, but the swearing does not extend to behaving himself with respect to Valar in particular and I do plan to kill him anyway just to be really sure."

All loss of life grieves me but I think that is for the good. I would like to travel to this other Arda anyway to see why the Dwarves don't have an afterlife, if indeed it's so, and will from there be better positioned to smooth the restoration to life of the Valar. 

"Okay," she says after a thoughtful delay. "I'll go on ahead to get Melkor out of the way."

You do all worlds good service, Loki.

"Thanks."

And she slips back into her own world. "Aulë's going to go visit Space Arda and poke around. Also, Eru is kind of a dork?"

"...a dork?"

"I didn't talk to him directly but Aulë asked for his advice on Space Arda and he said it had a good story arc."

"...so let's go do whatever we were planning before that conversation?"

"I'm going to go ahead and kill Space Melkor so nothing blows up when Flat Aulë visits and then, yeah, I don't care if it's a good story arc."

"And Thauron?"

"I am trying to think if there is some way to let you kill this one since I already bagged one, but the Tesseract is way too grouchy to entertain questions like 'will you kindly not explode somebody else if they pick you up for a one-time thing'."

"And my alt is apparently trivially replaceable if he picks up a Tesseract and it explodes him but also has - less reason."

"Yep. I assume you don't want to just let the Thauron live until you find something suitably Maia-killing in the grand multiverse or the Tesseract cheers up?"

"Dead today. Apparently there are lots of them; I'll get to one eventually."

"You got it. Cam, you want to come?"

"Yes please. Since you are not telepathic what kind of location description do you need."

"Tesseract's not too grouchy to let me shortcut it, verbal descriptions don't really work that well with the spell version. Do you have a house or something?"

"Space station. Feel free to land in it." Cam bounces images to the Elves.

Who bounce it over to Loki, just in case that's more helpful, and then go there.

"Is it going to look like anything?"

"'Fraid not. Very underwhelming. One dead Morgoth coming right up."

She lays hands on the Tesseract.

"That was fast."

"Yup."

(It occurs to Cam that he was going to check to see if the vacation-stranded Space Elves wanted to be bailed out - he checks -)

Hello, Cam! Clever! Not that you did it yourself, but you found someone who would do it for you, I guess that's partial credit.

If I die, so does Endore. I set it up long before I made your oath. It might even be contagious enough to catch another dimension, wouldn't that be funny? I almost thought dying would be worth it for the thought of you waking up in Hell like that but I like being alive. Enough to give you fair warning, at least. 

- Sauron :)

"- uh - hang on -" Cam hands the letter to Loki.

"Oh he thinks he's very clever doesn't he."

"Contagious enough to catch another dimension?"

"I think I am curious enough to see if he wants to brag."

"Going to go say hello?"

"Yup. Who wants to join me?"

"I'm in."