"I can't teleport on my own but I can, y'know, stop time, I could get somewhere he wouldn't know where to find me and call Lúthien for a bailout."

"If he teleports you to another dimension?"

"I guess I don't know if married osanwë respects adjacency... but, like, if he wanted to nefariously teleport us anywhere he could have just done that, couldn't he?"

"With the caveat that I'm almost certainly being too paranoid but that that's my job, no, Lúthien has a teleport of her own, if he grabs us without her she can certainly follow if she reacts fast enough. 'wait several hours for my friends' is a reasonable ask given what we've been told, but it's also a good way to respond to strangers with unknown powers that include a teleport, if you don't think they'll like you once they know more."

"Guess it depends how his teleport works. For whatever it's worth the read I got off him operating under the assumption that he's a me is that he's not positive he can trust us and is hoping to get second opinions on that? Not any of us in particular exactly..."

"Hmm, okay. ...if they've dealt with Ardas before they should know I can swear to things -"

"Yeah. What are you thinking you'd swear to?"

"Operating on the assumption he's a you but in doubt about whether he can trust us, what'd reassure him, do you think?"

"Depends on why he isn't sure of that. If he's not sure we are actually alts of the people we look like, or if we vary a lot, or if we can't always cooperate in spite of not varying that much, or what. ...If he's broadly telling the truth he could have just gone and gotten whoever he's waiting for, he was waiting for the mail system, he isn't that worried."

"So if he's broadly telling the truth and an alternate universe version of you, telling the whole history of our war to him and his friends will probably be enough to reassure them. If he's - not broadly telling the truth, or if the reason he might not be able to trust us is because the versions of us on the Question Mark Planet reacted badly to the interdimensional slave trade or something..."

"If he's not broadly telling the truth I don't know what he's doing. At all. We did talk briefly to a neighbor of his, they didn't say anything particularly worrying-sounding or inconsistent..."

"Okay. Lúthien, can you drop me by Maedhros for about ten minutes, I don't think I'll ask him to come with if it's likely to stress him but I want to show him the conversation and see if he has the same impression as Bella..."

Pop. And she returns to Bella. "I still want to figure out something to do about the demons. I know there's probably a priority list, assuming that everything's true and all, but I told that girl we'd fix it and I want to."

"Yeah, me too. It's probably worth following up on the whole multiverse of alts thing first in case we can pick up extra resources to make it trivial, though."

"I was sort of wondering if they had magic on offer, like if they'd landed on us you'd have been happy to let them make wishes right away. But maybe they're not telling us about that sort of thing until they trust us."

"Well, the wishes I get to vet what they wish for, first, and I do ask for extra assurances if it seems like it'll give the person extra powers and they want to be a rock. If they don't have a vetting mechanism for whatever they hand out built in maybe they have to do that separately and Kib's not the one who does it."

"Makes sense."

"I think the likeliest explanation is they have a good reason to be nervous and will like us just fine when they've put us through whatever their vetting mechanism is but the paranoia's probably not a bad idea regardless."

"I'm not even sure that Fingon doesn't think that's likeliest, he just has a grasp of how bad the bad outcomes are."

"Yeah. ...Kib didn't even ask for a lot of detail on our magic, he took a very cursory summary..."

"What does that mean, assuming he's one of you..."

"More evidence towards 'he's not all that worried about us being terrible'."

"Which we aren't." She kisses her. "We're going to get so much extra magic to solve problems with - and we can stay local to Earth, now that we know -"

Kiss! "Yup. Fortuitous series of pre-honeymoon explorations this seems to have turned out to be."

"They're going to come to our wedding!!"