Pop.

I don't know why that keeps happening!!! It's not like people spend most of their time having gay kisses -

We're not even on the same world are we -

...architecture looks Elfy? Kinda?

She blinks around. It's definitely pretty enough. The kissing men weren't Elves, though - so we can't have landed in Valinor -

Those are Elves over there, though -

I don't think this is my world - she tries to go to Menegroth. Nope.

And then to the Elves, uh, hi?

Hi! 

He looks Noldorin. She's so confused. We're Lúthien and Bella, empresses of Mîr, and where exactly are we right now is this Arda -

No, no, he says, Arda's next world over, this world just had some problems so we decided to help. It's called Stork, and the local Arda's called Shine - there are a lot of Ardas, are you from one -

Lots of Ardas? Like - how many Ardas?

Uh, you'd make five. 

How do people normally get from world to world?

Ordinary people don't. The King and his inner circle have a teleport for it, and the Valar opened portals between Stork and Shine and then closed them during the war and then opened them again after the war and after Elspeth talked with them. There's also worldleapers if you want to explore for new dimensions.

...Is there some place we go to, I don't know, register the existence of another Arda and my world and the one we stopped in on our way here, or anything?

You probably talk to Kib for that, I sort of thought that was why you were standing outside his house. But you could talk to the King of Shine, too - does your Arda still have a Melkor because he's evil, you need to stop him -

Took care of that already, Bella assures him. We actually came here in particular looking for other people who had been eaten by snake demons, we didn't know who we'd find.

Kib got eaten by a snake! It dropped him in Shine from Stork and that's how relations between the worlds were opened up. That was eight Years ago, they've been a very eventful eight Years.

Sounds like it. Do we have to make an appointment or is it okay to just knock, do you know?

Should be okay to just knock, he's rehabilitating and I don't think he's too busy...

...rehabilitating?

He was captured by the Enemy. During the war. 

Oh. ...but it's okay to just knock on his door?

He doesn't startle like our King, no. It's okay to knock. He'll probably be pleased to have something new and interesting to work on.

Okay. Thank you!

Knock knock.

"One moment please," says a smooth genderless voice from just inside the door.

And a minute later the door opens. "Can I he- ah! aha! Hello what are your names?"

"How do you speak English?"

"Don't, it's magic. I'm Kib, who're you?"

"Uh, I'm Bella, this is Lúthien."

"...you're going to have to pick a nickname - come in, come in -"

"You're apparently the person to tell about a fifth Arda and two other worlds?"

"I am one of those people, yes. Is your Melkor good and dead."

"Yeah."

"Lovely. Have a seat - honey! New Bell!"

"Hello, new Bell!" calls a voice from upstairs.

"By which I mean there are alternate universe versions of people in addition to just multiple Ardas and you," he points at Bella, "are a one of me, you're sixth, welcome."

"...I'm a one of you?"

"Yeah, you look just like the girl ones."

"What does it mean for someone to be an alternate universe version - this isn't an Earth -"

"Same personality, same face - mostly - some parallelism in life history. There might be more of you too, especially if you're from a flat Arda, but if there are I haven't met them."

"A flat Arda?"

"There's also a Space Arda, where basically for continent read planet. Spherical planet."

"...I guess we're a flat Arda? My parents are Melian and Elu Thingol, do you know if the other Ardas have them..."

"I think all the Ardas have those, yeah, so there's probably more of you but you don't typically go universe hopping."

"I probably don't usually have Bella. Or a teleport. Though the teleport's sort of broken so if you've got a better one we'd be grateful for help getting home."

"I've got a perfectly good teleport, yeah. What's wrong with yours?"

"Went exploring, couldn't go home."

"When you started exploring, were you home?"

"Visiting her parents. Why?"

"Some worlds are next to each other and some aren't and almost everything requires you to go through adjacent worlds to get anywhere farther away."

"Oh. That'd explain it, we didn't even try going back to our Arda, just freaked out when we couldn't go to my homeworld."

"And I did try going to Menegroth when we landed here but I guess we'd have to go through demon-world and then to Arda..."

"We hear you got eaten by a snake thing?"

"Yeah, weirdest thing. Don't know how it got here."

"Well, one also got to our Arda and it ate Lúthien, that's how we met."

"The snake things are from this world that really needs fixing but our most powerful magic doesn't work there, and I found you by targeting 'other people who got snaked'."

"Yeah, adjacency is really annoying. What's wrong with the snakes world?"

"Infested with things comparable to snakes, most of which just kill you."

"Depending on how infested 'infested' is might be tractable or not. Unfortunately they're almost certainly not near Edda, if we were near Edda Loki could probably take care of it like that -" He snaps his fingers. "But her most powerful magic also does not work far from home."

"I wonder if we can wish worlds adjacent."

"...that'd be handy."

"...I'm going to guess not, this sounds a little above the thing's pay grade if it doesn't work non-adjacently itself, but it seems like it might be worth a shot..."

"We can try it when we get home, maybe bring someone from demonworld to wish demonworld was adjacent to us..."

"Yeah. After we find out what's going on with all these - what's the word for more of us -"

"Alts. If you want to hang around for a few hours I can write up a summary of your existence and when the mail's been around there will be curious visitors."

"We can definitely hang around for a few hours! Also you should tell us if there are any problems here that your magic doesn't solve, we might already have someone with the powerset to fix it and we could hop back and get them."

"What exactly does your magic do?"

"Within, uh, one step, I guess, of my home world, I can grant wishes, one to a customer, and I can simultaneously apply permanent wish-content-themed magical powers on top of a standard package, although this does technically turn the recipient into a magic rock telekinetically operating their normal body."

"...wish examples?"

"Lúthien just straight-up wished for her teleportation powers so she gets more mileage out of them than most people - a wish got Melkor and company - mine was made carelessly under stress but it got me time travel so I could save my Earth, it was in trouble for Melkor-unrelated reasons, Lúthien helped me fix it for good -"

"Bella's world was really awful too, the aliens with the wish-granting were using it to harvest the emotions of teenage girls, but we managed to come to an agreement with them and save the world from being eaten, and then once we had wishes we could just go back to Arda and find someone to wish the Enemy dead..."

"I will definitely want to hear the long version of this story but you might wanna save it until more of us are here." He pulls a device off his belt, starts writing in it. "Lúthien, if anybody's in contact with any of your alts do you want to invite them to say hi?"

"Definitely! Maybe they'll want to come to the wedding!"

"Oh?"

"We're having a wedding - or a wedding party in the Elf idiom - in a couple weeks!"

"Well, I hope you have room for more people, then, that'll be popular." Write write write.

And Kib sends the Stork mailbox a summary of who just knocked on his door. "Adjacency being annoying, we handle communication by someone teleporting around to electronic mailbox things a few times a day, picking up what's there and dropping off what they've picked up. I think we're due a visit next in an hour and a half, delivery's pretty quick, then we wait for people to open their mail."

"You said I'd need to pick a nickname?"

"Yeah, most of us come with sufficiently different names but you and the vampire one are both Bella. She's registered an intention to go by Golden if it ever comes up."

"Huh. Gem?"

"Gem it is."

"All of the mes are probably going to be named Lúthien."

"Yeah, probably. D'you have a nickname you like that'd be uniquely identifying?"

She looks at Bella.

"Or get your Bell to name you, that's also an option."

"Um. ...well, I already took 'Gem' so being a magic rock can't be your distinguishing feature..."

"Song. But I don't know if that's a distinguishing feature yet, I don't know my other ones..."

"You already sang things when we met, so I'm assuming that that's probably typical... people have titled the happiness song a bunch of things to conveniently talk about it, I think the best title is 'Joy'? D'you want to be Joy? They might all have the song but you've probably run with it more than average."

"Seems like a safe bet."

"All right. We are Gem and Joy."

"Cool." He updates the summary. "Uh, other templates we like to look in on particularly are mostly Noldor, how are your Noldor doing."

"One of 'em was the one who made the wish to kill the Enemy. Maedhros."

"Ah, damn, one of those was using that as his identifying nickname, they will both have to pick something else - uh - how is he -"

"Do they usually go in and out of Angband..."

"Yeah. How's his Findekáno - what year are you in anyway, all the Ardas are different times -"

"Four hundred third year of the Sun - do you mean Fingon - he's the crown prince but they're Noldor so their politics are really complicated, he's got mind-control powers but he swore not to use them without consent - I guess he's all right, I think the war was really hard on the Noldor..."

"Wow, that's the chronologically latest Arda yet. And yeah, Fingon's the Thindarin. He made a wish too?"

"Got me and him and Maedhros all eidetic memory and stuff."

"You on terms with Fingon such that you could drop in and tell him this crazy story and maybe get him to show up to the gathering?"

"Probably, should we? Just him?"

"...I'll write him a letter, if he thinks you should bring Maedhros too I won't contradict him."

This is probably about the thing where they're secretly lovers but she shouldn't say it just in case all the other sets are also secretly lovers. Though Kib has a boyfriend himself. "We can bring a letter."

So Kib goes and writes a letter and folds it up and hands it to Gem.

"Should we go back now?"

"Got a while before anybody gets the news unless I go fetch somebody specifically. Might want to osanwë me pictures of reasonable landing places in the worlds between here and there in case you don't show up and need rescuing or something."

So she sends where they landed in the demons world, and then she sends a few places in her Arda, and then she sends some places on Earth and on Mîr.

"Cool, thanks."

"Can we get the stories of how the war ended in all the other Ardas?"

"Yeah - right now?"

"...if we're waiting around a couple hours..."

"Fingon might want to hear the stories too," Kib points out.

"Okay. Back in a bit, hopefully." Pop. Demonsworld! Pop! Arda, outside any rooms with closed doors Fingon might be in.

Knock knock?

"Bella! Lúthien! Can I help you?"

"Uh, we found some more worlds. And we met a guy who says he's an alternate universe version of me and that there are more of us and more of you and he wrote you a letter." Letter!

"Uh. Thank you." He opens the letter.

Not sure what Bella will have told you before you open this, but: lots of universes, several of them Ardas, with mostly matching people and stuff and history at least until interdimensional interference, mostly. Yours is chronologically latest.

- Kib

"...okay," he says. "You two decided not to wait for the honeymoon to go honeymooning?"

"...sorta? We found out where the snake monster that ate Lúthien came from, too."

"That sounds valuable! Where?"

"'Nother world. Still not sure how it got here, but then we looked for other people who had been snaked and Kib - letter guy, not sure if he signed it - had been snaked."

"He did sign it. And he says he's an alternate universe version of you?"

"Yeah. I didn't extensively quiz him on the exact details of that yet, he seemed - vaguely worried about you? And Maedhros?"

He says in the letter that contact with the multiverse is upsetting to Maedhros's who have been through Angband. Didn't say why, I have some guesses but could be way off. Also his phrasing on this was unclear but I think most instances of the two of us are involved so anyone who makes contact with the multiverse will figure that out, if they don't already know. The King'll be upset, I should think how to break it to him. 

He didn't say anything about reasons to be worried for me, but maybe there are some of those too.

I can reshuffle some things and spend this afternoon making contact with the multiverse, if that's what you have planned.

Seems to be what Kib has planned but I can tell him you're busy if you're busy.

I am not busier than on a typical day. Do you want to come on in and have some water or something while I reschedule appointments -

Sure, thanks.

There's water. There's chocolates. He reschedules appointments or hands them off to someone else and then gives his father a briefing and then - I'm ready to head over whenever convenient for you two.

Cool. Oh, and for interdimensional clarity purposes I'm 'Gem' and she's 'Joy', since there's another Bella and more Lúthiens.

Oh, we should probably do that too. Hmmm. I'll wait until I've met the others, I think. 

Hop! Hop! To outside Kib's house.

A sculpture - or what looks like a sculpture when it's not moving - opens the door to show them in. "Hi," Kib says, "I'm Kib, good to meet you."

Wow. Presumably the local magic. "Good to meet you too," he says.

Bella, until we have more information - did you tell them you reset if you die -

Didn't come up.

My recommendation would be to wait to bring it up until we have more to go off than someone who says he's an alternate universe version of you. 

Yeah, I do plan to check his story there. "So how do you identify alts when they don't look alike?"

"One of Maedhros's alts, Mitros, figured it out the first time - he was well acquainted with a girl one, Iobel, and then Cam, the other boy one besides me, showed up and Mitros had him figured out inside of a few minutes' conversation, they confirmed it from there - three questions et al."

"And someone has interdimensional travel and found everybody else?"

"There's several forms of interdimensional travel around. One's in common use to go to known places and one's more useful to go to unfamiliar places and check them out. We've only been checking out unfamiliar places within one step of a world called Edda, though, because there's a particularly useful magic object that only works in that neighborhood."

"I am assuming you want to wait for our stories until everyone interested has assembled, but can we hear all of yours?"

"Sure, although my cunning visual aids aren't going to be as good as Loki's would be. Uh, welcome to Stork! It's my native world. Few decades ago a snake monster ate me and I landed in an Arda now distinguishingly nicknamed Shine. It's a few centuries earlier there than in yours, I showed up while the Trees were still standing and we also had our Darkening fifty Years earlier than standard. I introduced the Stork magic system, it's called servantmaking, and got the Valar to open portals between Shine and Stork so that the altruistically-minded people of Valinor could lend their efforts to miscellaneous Stork problems. Discovered I was a reincarnation and the weird dreams I'd been having were memories of my past life, in which I was a girl but did not actually look like Gem et al, different face, haven't found any Bells still wearing it. Discovered I'd been married in my past life and went and found my husband, Aydanci - love you, honey!"

"Love you too!" calls a distracted voice from upstairs.

"- brought him back to Valinor with me, Valar compared their homophobia to their opinions on marriage and the latter won. Melkor was on parole at the time; we discovered he'd been taking children from Stork for their ability to servantmake which people from other worlds can't do; and when we noticed that he stopped pretending to be reformed and killed the Trees. And Aydanci. Who reincarnated. Found his reincarnation, my instance of Maedhros whose nickname is Island found him some nice parents to bring him up second time around, and then a bunch of people moved to Beleriand to have our war and the Valar closed the portals. Our war was - mostly shorter and cleaner than other people's? Servantmaking was a big edge. But Island got captured, and my you, who is called Pterodactyl for reasons momentarily to become obvious, flew into Angband on a pterodactyl and got him out, once the pterodactyls we had were grown up.

"I got captured after that. Was likewise extracted.

"Uh, Aydanci really doesn't like it when things harm me. He and Fëanáro came up with an off-model variant on Silmarils and had them controlling a ridiculously huge fleet of servants and killed the Enemy.

"The snake that ate me ate several people, and one of them had landed in a world adjacent to Stork, called Hex. Hex has a Bell and a human version of your extended family and they were in contact with some other universes via -" He calls up a map of worlds. "Via here, the Fëanáro from which had invented the exploratory interdimensional transit I mentioned. The guy who landed in Hex heard that the royalty of a Hex country called Marlatia had weird magical otherworldly powers, wanted to see if they could let him visit here. They sent a scout and the scout found the Little Valinor that sprung up near one of the ex-portal sites - the Valar had given people time to decide which side they wanted to be on, some Elves stayed in Stork - and from there found Shine, and found me and mine."

He nods slowly. "There are Fëanors who survived the war?"

"Yeah? This one didn't," he highlights a spot on the map, "but this one did and this one and mine. I suppose you could chalk up all three cases to sufficiently timely Bell intervention..."

"And one of them invented interdimensional travel? That's - even given Fëanor and four hundred years..."

"Oh, that one's Space Arda, you're from a Flat Arda. Space Arda has all the tech ramped way up. Valinor and Endorë are separate planets, for one thing."

"...okay. So three other flat Ardas, one space Arda, in all cases an interdimensional visitor somewhere along the line - for all we know the war in fact drags out at a stalemate until an interdimensional visitor comes..."

"Yeah. And the interdimensional visitor has been a Bell in all cases except this one," map highlight, "in which case it was a Bell's kid. Bells don't come natively in Ardas so far that we've seen."

"And the current multiverse political setup -"

"High-latency communications and lots of special-case magic and stuff, so it's a little scattered. Over in Edda is a planet full of the Noldor from this Arda, Elentári, they're doing a sorta federated thing with whoever wants to meet their shortlist of criteria. We're setting up something similar but a little smaller scale here, this planet is mostly city-state sized political units and they're being gradually coaxed into coalescing. Hex's bunch started out with a country and they're building on that. This world," Aurum lights up, "has a shadow government for supernatural persons about which regular people typically are not informed, its Bell already ran that by the time anybody met her or her daughter. Oh, and Loki's a princess of two different historically warring planets on Edda for reasons - Loki's another Bell."

"And Shine, and Space, and that one -"

"Uh, on Shine Island's King of the Noldor and Doriath is an island now because Beleriand disintegrated when the Enemy died and the Dwarves are Dwarfing it up and Valinor continues to Valinor. Space has a bunch of countries on Endorë, the Noldor are divided, it's way more populous than Flat Ardas are. This one is complicated and I would rather not explain it personally right this minute."

"...okay. Is there magic anywhere that does - I'm trying to think what we haven't wished into place already - are any of the Maedhros's sure that they're not hallucinating?"

"Yeah. Human alt from Hex and the one from here were never captured, Space ones are all forked from a time pre-capture, and Island and the Elentári ones received free will and found it unmistakeable but in both cases the leadup seems to have been important."

"And Bella showing up with her magic rock and letting him wish the Enemy dead wasn't exceptionally plausible." He sighs. "All right. Thank you. Ardas all have the same magic - the engineering kind and the songs?"

"Space Arda mostly doesn't have magic-magic, just sufficiently advanced technology - the Valar and Maiar are pretty magic but most everything else is physicalist under the cosmetics. Flat Ardas all have the same magic. Magic songs have to be composed in a flat Arda but work outside them, it's weird."

"The sculpture is an example of servantmaking?"

"Yeah, it's a golem. The model is named Charp. Hi, Charp."

"Hello, sir," says Charp.

"Most of them don't talk. Even Charps are not sapient."

"That seems wholly for the good. Is servantmaking one of those that only works locally?"

"Servants can be made anywhere but only by people from Stork."

"Bella, have you checked whether people who aren't from an adjacent world can make wishes if they're doing so in an adjacent world?"

"No, not yet, I'd need to bring somebody home or to our Arda."

He nods. "Is there a - summary packet, or something like that, on what the galaxy's doing and what projects are open until you find a magic system better suited to them, there has to be a priority list..."

"Yeah, although I'm not immediately sure where to get a copy on paper; do you know how to use computers?"

"I have heard of them; Earth has them. I think we sent diplomatic envoys who could probably help me through it."

"Earth is going to need a unique name too, there's two others of those. Uh, format compatibility's an issue but whenever Cam gets here he can make something that works for whatever you've got."

"Thank you.

...may I ask why me?"

"Why you what? Why I invited you here? Why not you? Yous are involved in multiverse stuff and your Maedhros is in a bad way and Bella indicated that she'd be able to fetch you."

"How are mes typically involved in multiverse stuff, we did not come up when you talked politics."

"Less summarizably, obviously." Are we not telling Gem and Joy that you and your Maedhros are an item, or are you in fact not for some reason, or what?

They already know; Lúthien's teleport bounced them in on us, at one point. Are Bells also all gay?

No, just me and apparently Gem. And I was straight when I was a girl if you want to get technical, it'd probably make more sense to call me androphilic. But we're all cool with it.

He nods levelly. "Lúthien, do you mind bouncing me home while we wait for the news to spread? I want to report to my King and perhaps grab Maedhros after all."

"Your dad's king?" inquires Kib. "She said you were the crown prince."

"Yes, he is. Is that new?"

"Not unprecedented; Noldor politics is a thing of considerable variety."

"That surprises me not in the slightest. It's among the things I'm finding myself underequipped to navigate, here, which is why I am tempted to go get my cousin."

Nod. "If you like."

Pop. Pop. She takes Bella too, just to be safe. They land back in Fingon's castle and she raises an eyebrow at him. "You don't trust him?"

So, he says to his father, this is interesting...and he sends the whole interaction -

"I...am not sure. He's eliding a lot. He might have good reasons. Bella, were you satisfied by that explanation of how he knows he's an alternate universe version of you -"

"It's believable... I didn't prompt him for the 'three questions' thing and I do find him - very easy to follow along with when he talks? I can probably get him to tell me whatever he's skipping, if he's on the up and up. ...He's in very good condition for somebody out of Angband, isn't he?"

"Yes, he is. I'd say 'implausibly so' but I don't know how long it's been or what magic they've got but - it was several centuries before Maedhros was comfortable being touched, and Maedhros came out of it significantly more functional than the median.

- the problem is that if we leave you with him to get whatever's being elided and he's not on the up-and-up you don't have a teleport out, and he said he has one himself and can presumably hop over to wherever's in the vicinity of his powerful friends -

-I want to show the interaction to Maedhros and see if he can give me a guess on trustworthiness, but it's the kind of thing he might refuse to do..."

"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!!"

Giggle. "Yep!"

And after a couple more minutes of kissing she will go get Fingon, pop, pop.

"Maedhros says that Kib is an alternate universe version of you and declined to comment on anything else, I think he's having to recalculate how the Enemy could benefit as the plot gets more and more absurd. Ready to head back?"

"Yeah."

Pop, pop. Knock on the door.

The golem opens it again. "Hey. What'd he say?"

"Confirms we're alts."

"Yeah, they're kind of approaching psychic on that sort of thing."

"He did not want to visit, sorry. The King extends his regards and etcetera etcetera, too."

"Regards and etcetera accepted. And not visiting is quite reasonable."

"So how'd you come out of Angband so functional?"

"If you got caught," says Kib, "and you were under the impression he could read minds, which I was, what would you do."

"Oh."

"Enlighten us?"

"I'd... stop... thinking."

"Yeah. It also helps that as a side effect of the reincarnation thing whenever he erased something - like my expectation that he could read minds - it'd go into the pool of things I could dream back as memories. So I had a very unpleasant time but was not for most of it mentally present enough to develop - phobias, twitchiness, whatever - things that happened did not constitute information - I've got damage but it mostly doesn't manifest day to day -

"- but then I was still like that when I got rescued and to drag me out of it a few of our alts stood near me and narrated my counterfactual thought process until I concluded I was not successfully preventing the Enemy from having my thoughts by not thinking them. Took a little while to kind of de-rust my brain. I still don't do any servantmaking, just - in case."

He nods.

"Got dragged to Lórien and rolled back to just before Aydanci died once, was fine for a day, had nightmares... they let it be after that. Probably would have started me over if they could be sure I would start over and reincarnations aren't one to a customer or something."

"The reincarnations are specific to this world? We've got humans - Bella's world has humans -"

"Stork humans are weird as humans go. We do not reproduce, we just appear in random locations as babies. Most people aren't reincarnations - I'm intermittently working on a work of fiction that includes reincarnation the way me and Aydanci did it to see if anybody recognizes the concept but it's definitely not commonplace - and we seem to be the only place that has even rare reincarnation."

"Well, we got death cleared up anyway." He nods at Lúthien. 

"Congratulations. Everyone will be very excited if that ports and scales."

"I'm guessing 'scales but doesn't port'. Unless the effects of wishes can reach past adjacency even though they have to be made near my world."

"It took the wishing mechanism, so it probably doesn't - though didn't you have a six-wish sequence worked out to solve it, that'll work at least everywhere wishing works..."

"Yeah, so we might want to go on a world-finding spree of places adjacent to us."

"Yeah, especially if you can kill Melkors that way, may have more advantages to confer on found worlds than Edda-adjacency does."

"Wishes only go through if the person who wants it really really wants it. Maedhros might have been the only person on our world who wanted the Enemy dead badly enough. But yes, in principle you can kill Melkors this way."

"So far there aren't any Ardas that don't have a him. And Loki's been looking for a way for her one to kill an Enemy for a while now - she could in principle share her shiny object but the shiny object kills people it doesn't like if they touch it and it's in a bad mood and won't say whether it likes people, so - anyway, you could import an alt to make the wish if there wasn't a native."

"When did each of your Ardas get their extradimensional visitor-"

"Loki landed on the Nolofinwëan host while they were crossing the Ice. Cam landed on Space Arda shortly post-Alqualondë. I appeared fifty Years and change before the Darkening normally happens, but seem to have spooked Melkor or something in so doing. Elspeth landed in this one in 355."

"And aside from the space one being higher-tech, that's the point of divergence, the worlds are the same before someone interferes?"

"Mostly."

"I am mostly trying to figure out if I can start my story, once everyone arrives, with 'so Loki did not land on us while we crossed the Ice and from there...' or if I need to start sooner."

"That'll probably do the trick just fine."

Then they can make small talk about Kib's husband and little Valinor's architecture and the weather while they wait for the magical backup to arrive. 

They land outside. Kib?

Hey, come in. Gem and Joy and New Findekáno are here. Suspect nonevil. Haven't told them we're involved or Evil Arda details.

Suspect nonevil on what grounds? 

They come in. "Hi!" he says to Gem and Joy and New Findekáno. "I go by Island because there are now six of me and it would otherwise have gotten confusing."

"Pterodactyl, for the same reason - there's actually even more than six, the space ones fork -"

"I am really looking forward to finding another space Arda and getting to tell them that they're resurrectable at will and can fork, but also I don't think I want to know how bad things would have gotten in space Arda without Cam."

Grounds that the you went through Angband, not picking up any weirdness or unpleasantness from the Bell and she's on decent albeit not close terms with the both of them, and I left it up to New Findekáno's discretion whether he wanted to invite New You over too and suspect in a similar-evil situation the you would've wanted to check things out himself; feel free to second-guess me. "I did mention both your nicknames," he says aloud.

"Hi, nice to meet you, I'm apparently Gem and this is Joy."

"But there's inconveniently no way to tell us apart, so we'll have to introduce ourselves no matter how generously you did it. Hi, Gem! Hi, Joy!" Yeah, I can't imagine the evil one not coming over - though I have no idea what an evil me who went through Angband comes out as - 

"You're married. Or is that not a distinguishing feature either."

"Maedhros and Fingon who will have to pick new names are married, but they have free will, you can't see it. The space Elves are not, the human alts are not."

"And Question Mark Planet -"

"Question Mark Planet?"

"The one Kib doesn't have a name for."

"We aren't married there, no."

Charp lets Cam in. "Hey new Bell. Earthlings!" He holds up a hand for a high-five.

"Earthlings!" giggles Gem, and she slaps his hand.

"Is it the same as with Bella - identical up to moving to Forks -"

"Uh, born in Forks parents divorced moved with Renée to Phoenix lived there till she married Phil and moved to Jacksonville so I moved in with Charlie - that was when I got hit by the van, did you get hit by a van?"

"...I almost got hit by a van," says Golden, as Charp opens the door for her. "My precognitive sister-in-law saved me."

"I didn't even have a close call with a van."

"You're taller. Maybe he saw you."

"I am still confounded by the idea that three worlds with three different secret magic systems could avoid diverging near-immediately."

"Did you find your secret magic system in the big mansion outside town?"

"No, the magic system found me dying in the hospital and patched me up. And I was like 'hey, a magic system'. And then the world ended and I had to fix that."

"Congratulations on the fixing that."

"Lúthien showing up was enormously helpful, I'd probably still be working on it and not much closer to a solution without her."

"Arda's magic system showing up was the helpful bit, all I actually did was accidentally scare an airplane and cling to Bella rather a lot."

"Because anybody at all from Arda would have wanted to help me and would've landed with a happiness song already composed?"

"Scare an airplane?"

"...most of them would probably have helped, I don't think anyone else has got as good of a happiness song. And we were hiding away in the cargo bay and the airplane was really loud so I told it to be quiet and it turns out that stopped the engines and then it was freaked out and wouldn't get in the air for another couple hours..."

"Awww. ...Where'd the happiness song come in, exactly...?"

"Emotion powered magic. It's an infinite energy hack. Broke an evil artificial ecology."

"Before me they were getting the energy from granting people wishes and then making them fight horrible despair monsters and driving them into becoming horrible despair monsters. Now they can just play the songs to people and keep their weird civilization running."

Another knock on the door.

"Hi!"

"More alts? More flat alts - gosh, Eru's a lot eviller than he is creative - nice to meet you, I go by Delight -"

"Gem. How'd you pick yours? Mine is because I am technically a rock."

"We can have arbitrarily many copies of us made and the postwar reconstruction was looking insurmountable so I had four made, and we went by tinco, parma, calma, and quesse, which being a Bell you'll either find objectionable right away or find objectionable as soon as someone tells you those are the first four letters of the Noldorin alphabet -"

"...letters of the alphabet - I mean maybe as placeholders until you'd diverged more or something but -"

He laughs. "Yep, it's a Bell! Well, Cam wasn't in a mood to lodge his complaint but Loki went straight to hers and demanded improvement and so my ex-boyfriend's alt named us all."

"Okay, but why Delight, or did he not say."

"At the time I was in a mood with Maitimos as a category and I assumed he did it just to annoy me but I've been handling the branch of our empire's operations which he finds most personally interesting - and which has saved the most lives so far by an order of magnitude, we're a little internally competitive about that - so I decided eventually that he meant it well."

"Well, congratulations on the lifesaving."

"Multiverse makes it really easy! We had the highest starting tech level and now thanks to Cam we have really straightforward synthesis and distribution for vaccines so it's just nonstop xenobiology and then a little bit of summoning."

"Being a demon is pretty cool."

"Do tell."

"I'm indestructible and I can make arbitrary material objects."

"Convenient doesn't even begin to describe it. ...indestructible's doable without dying in Cam's home universe, but the 'make arbitrary material objects' bit is not."

And one more knock at the door.

Charp gets the door. "Welcome. That's Gem, her Lúthien Joy, and their Fingon as yet unnicknamed," says Kib.

"Oh, congratulations!"  he says. "Joy, I had the pleasure of spending a decade with your alt in my world during our war, and she struck me as the person with the most wasted potential of anyone I'd ever met, and you've got a Bell, they do not tend to squander anyone's potential. I hope my alt got you a really lovely wedding present."

"Our wedding party is in fact in the future," specifies Gem, "on the grounds that I wanted to be able to explain it to my parents without anyone melting. But we have been assured that we will get a lovely present."

"...wait a second, was this an accident?"

"Canada is an information hazard!"

"...oh, that would do it - you know, if you find it objectionable, we can give people free will, it unmarries you -"

"I like being married to Bella! I want to be married to Bella!"

"And it doesn't do anything weird and soul-y to me so we're rolling with it," says Bella, squeezing Lúthien's hand.

"...the phrase 'Canada is an information hazard' is hilarious," observes Cam.

"Elf soulbonding is controlled by expectations; I assume Canada is a political jurisdiction where gay marriages can happen, therefore Lúthien knew gay marriages could happen, therefore she got gay married."

"Ayep. ...But yes, the sentence is kinda funny."

"What a bizarrely fragile enforcement of heterosexuality."

"Sometime I want to ask Eru why. But he obviously thinks hurting lots of people very badly is good fun, as evidenced by the existence of any Ardas, so I'm not sure I could get anywhere with him on the topic."

"Anybody gotten to the point where they could in fact take anything up with him?"

"Loki had a secondhand exchange with him through Elentári's Aulë about something else without planning to once, that's as far as it's gone."

"We're rather steadily accumulating power but Eru seems to be functionally omniscient within his dimensions, that may be a hard problem, and we're also a little worried that the Valar and the Maiar and the magic music and so forth will break if we kill God. Not that we don't have plans in the drawer for it, of course."

"Wish-granting will be a neat thing to add to the arsenal, although the one to a customer thing is harsh - wonder if space forks count separately -"

"We can hop over to her place and test it as soon as - or has everyone already decided to their satisfaction -"

"They're fine."

"Are we now. Why exactly might we not have been fine...?"

"And how are you sure -"

"The Bell's fine and there's no way a Bell misses an evil Lúthien and she could have ended up mind-controlled by her but I'd have noticed by now and so would you, I think. And Findekáno's fine though that could technically slip in under whatever political system left him the crown prince -"

"Okay. So. Elephant in the room. We found an Arda that is evil for mysterious maybe-it's-all-the-Ainur's-fault reasons."

"...the Arda. Is evil."

"Well, its occupants. Most of them. The Findekáno isn't, there may be other exceptions."

"And this is compared to other Ardas, by most objective measures it's not worse than your typical authoritarian human population, but it's Elves, and Elves are supposed to be adorable and cooperative and harmless."

"Lúthien's not an exception, I'm not an exception. It wasn't really a problem that had occurred to us to worry about until we found it, and now we have to be careful. Congratulations on not being from an evil Arda."

"What is an evil me like or do I not want to know."

"...I have no idea if you want to know," says Golden.

"...also the Noldor explained themselves very persuasively but I wouldn't characterize them as adorable and cooperative and harmless? Did your versions not have the oath and Alqualondë and the burning the ships and the taking human vassals and being very dubious about that -"

"...the human vassals thing not so much? In Space and Shine the orcs got to the humans first, in Elentári Loki adopted them, in Evil Arda things are, y'know, evil... Kib and I showed up in time to avert ship-burning but Elentári had that... I think Evil Arda actually skipped it... oath was present in Space and Elentári and Evil Arda... anyway by adorable and cooperative and harmless we mean that a typical human population under pressure ranging from 'scarcity' to 'boredom' to 'charismatic jerk with a religion' looks awfully evil in an awful hurry, whereas Elves normally require pressure like 'people are dying and we can't help because these assholes are being precious about their fucking boats' to stop being adorable and cooperative and harmless."

"Okay. Then I think your assessment is right - also your alt has terrifying exploding-things powers and could probably explode a lot of things if he was evil -"

"I don't know that that's what he'd do if he were evil, but thank you, good to know. Perhaps you can tell the story from the start for us now?"

"You want Arda context because we're chronologically latest or should I start with Lúthien landing on me?"

"I guess I am also curious how undisrupted Ardas play out over the next four hundred years..."

"Loki landed on the Nolofinwean host on the ice, right? No one landed on us on the Ice. We crossed it. Sun rose. Elenwë didn't make it, Arakáno was killed in an ambush by orcs the first day off, we were pretty furious with you all. We marched on Lake Mithrim.

The Feanorian host left. Left the walls and the houses and some of the supplies and vanished into the surrounding foothills. We weren't quite sure if it was an apology or a trap or sheer cowardice. Woke up the next day to find that they'd started rebuilding walls for themselves on the south side of the lake. I went over to talk with them. Maglor met me. I asked if the King was ashamed to face us. 

Fëanor was dead. Maedhros was "hopefully dead", he said. 

They rebuilt their walls and we healed ourselves from the ice and it took me five years to have a song I was confident would get me into Angband."

"...didn't have a way out?"

"No.

I found him. He was three hundred feet up, chained by one arm to a sheer cliff face. I couldn't fly. He asked me to kill him so I drew my bow and asked Manwë to forgive me and instead he stopped me. Sent a Great Eagle, the ones from Taniquetil, to give me a ride up to him on the cliff face. And I cut him down and I flew back to Mithrim with him."

"Wow, a Vala did a thing. A Vala other than Ulmo, even."

"He could have done it at any point in the preceding fifty years -"

"Elspeth will be able to turn your Valar into something more closely resembling reasonable people."

"I look forward to it. Anyway, Maedhros wasn't okay but it didn't take him very long to get okay enough to fake it. And when he did he threw himself at my father's feet and apologized for the burning of the ships and ordered returned to us everything that had been stolen and named my father the rightful ruler of the Noldor and relinquished forever his family's claim to the crown.

His brothers, uh, disagreed. With the decision, that Maedhros was in a state to make it - he wasn't, not exactly. He didn't believe that this was real, any of it. And I can't even say with any confidence that he was doing what he would have been doing if he'd been confident this was reality - his not believing this was reality was one of the things that, to his mind, disqualified him from the Kingship - but he knew how he wanted this scenario to play out, and he knew what he was doing, and there was a coronation and then the reunited Noldor started building the fortresses to fight our war."

...Kib glances at Island.

I had you and Findekáno to offload the things I shouldn't be looking at and to catch me if I was subtly damaged. Without that, yeah, wouldn't have chanced it. Must have hurt, though. 

Yeah.

"My cousins on the Telerin side hit it off with Elwë -" he nods to Lúthien - "and he gave them permission to settle in inhabited parts of the continent. The rest of us had no such permission, so we settled far north. Maedhros moved his cousins and their host across the continent east, to minimize, mmm, interpersonal friction. 

The Enemy didn't start striking back in earnest - real force, Balrogs and his Maiar all deployed - for several decades. When he did we were ready, we won, we surrounded and besieged Angband. They called it the Dagor Aglareb, the Glorious Battle. 

We built a hidden civilian city in the mountains, with Ulmo helping. We encountered Men, fleeing wars that the Enemy'd been provoking farther east. There were more battles. We won them. There was a dragon - did he have dragons in time for any of your wars -"

"No dragons."

He sends the memory -

"Dragon. Lovely, isn't he? I drove him back to Angband but we didn't know how to kill him."

"Lovely," agrees Cam dryly.

"...I'm immune to osanwë by default and will be missing anything delivered that way, so please don't rely on it too heavily."

Cam hands her a little figurine. "Not actual size."

"If he did an Elf next to it for scale you probably wouldn't be able to see the Elf, unless whatever makes you the temperature and texture of stone also improves your visual acuity."

"It does. You've got slightly longer distance vision than me and I can't see infrared but close up it's the same. And my peripheral vision's better."

"Then you would be able to see the Elf-for-scale; it would be very tiny. It was an ugly fight. 

The Enemy was getting stronger. We knew it, and knew we should attack sooner rather than later, but we didn't have anything that could kill him - didn't even have anything that could set him back dramatically - so we just held on, and waited, and hoped the Dwarves or my cousins would invent a miracle in time. And they were inventive, but no miracles. Nothing to kill a god with.

And that's where we hand the story over to Bella, I think."

"So, I got hit by a van and I was very nearly dead and somebody with magic powers came along and saved me at the behest of a fluffy alien. They're adorable - Lúthien, bounce 'em the fluffy alien? - and they granted wishes to teenage girls with magical potential. Anything you want, within certain power limits if you're the sort to try to maximally exploit the system but the average teenage girl can get the first thing she asks for. You get your wish, legit, you get magic powers, also legit - something themed around your wish plus a standard package of teekay and transmutation and conjuring a signature weapon and healing and stuff - and in exchange you turn into a magic rock," she taps the jewel on her hand, "operating your body by remote control, and you have to recharge your magic by fighting these horrible despair monsters that drive people to violent crime and suicide if left unchecked. Sounds like a good deal, right?"

"Are the horrible despair monsters not legit in some way?"

"They're exactly what they sound like, except the explanation of where they come from is incomplete. Yes, if you charge up your magic off a witch byproduct and then leave the byproduct lying around, it may hatch into a witch; yes, witches bud off smaller monsters that can turn into full-blown witches if left alone -

- no, they have not just kind of always existed, they're what happens if a magi runs out of charge. By using too much magic - or by getting too upset - charge level is a ratchet on mood, it's very easy for most people to fall into a spiral -"

"So the people they're recruiting to fight these monsters turn into them, if they slip up. And they're - teenage means 'human under the age of twenty', right? - very likely to slip up..."

"It means thirteen through nineteen, and sometimes it was even younger, eleven or twelve - they filtered for a certain volatility of emotion that they found most often in teenage girls, occasionally boys but they decided they could get more marginal girls signing up by advertising it as a girl thing than they could get boys by letting them participate. In my world there's plenty of alien life but humans are it for species with emotions. They're a power source. So the aliens grant you a wish, and how strongly you feel about your wish defines your soul gem capacity, and then they run you around managing the witch ecology and helping recruit other girls and occasionally defending other fluff interests, and eventually you screw up your dosing your magic use, or have a run of bad luck witch-hunting and run out of fuel or a witch kills you, or something you can't fix with magic upsets you a little too badly and you witch - or another girl kills you outright over the right to hunt in a certain neighborhood because we can't even just stop using magic, using our bodies is using magic, we need witches and witches need prey and prey is people and people mean territory - or you just live for hundreds of years, being a good example of a happy fulfilled magi for the fluffs to introduce to anybody on the fence about whether to wish - and every time you recharge you give the used-up witch byproduct to the fluffs and they use it to fuel their civilization."

"How long did it take you to figure all this out?"

"Embarrassingly long, considering - the fluffs don't lie, they don't even refuse to answer questions, but they give answers that are designed to close off curiosity without telling you the gory details, at least until they decide it's time to drive you into a depression spiral so you can contribute to the ecology from the other end!"

"Why don't they lie, do they have some sort of oddly orthogonal ethics..."

"It's not exactly ethics - and it's not that they don't understand the concept, either - it's just - not a thing they do? I don't really have a satisfactory explanation for that." Sigh. "Anyway. So one of the good-example magi swings through Forks, her fluff tells her that I'm magically potentiated, she comes and heals me, I think this whole receive-wish-and-magic-powers-and-fight-evil setup sounds great and the alien is so cute and fluffy - fuck, I was a moron - and I dither for a month about what to wish for, I don't have the oomph to eliminate any of the major diseases, resurrection's one to a wisher, fluffs have a policy against giving suggestions or telling you what anyone else has wished for -

- and I dither long enough that a witch gets big, really big, usually people who aren't magically potentiated can't see fluffs or witches but this one doesn't hide, she looks like a huge fuckoff storm to regular people and like the most watched-a-horror-movie-marathon-nightmare scene of torture and mayhem ever to anybody who can get a look at her actual moving parts -

- and I blurt out a wish to the fluff that was calmly watching her destroy the Pacific Northwest as an appetizer -

-and I wake up in the hospital in perfect health a month prior."

"...if you reset across dimensions that's big and if you don't it's even more exploitable..."

"I know it rolls back time within one step of my homeworld; I would be surprised based on what I have learned today if it affects things past that, especially since a snake demon managed to get into our Arda. I have substantial qualms about unnecessary use of the reset even now that I have a floating reset point and Lúthien looped in with me, but maybe you've got a compelling reason to use it anyway. Well. So I was in a time loop; I could reset back to the hospital at any time, which didn't recharge my gem - cost some magic to do, in fact - but did restore me to health and get me a fresh start.

"So I had as many Februaries as I needed to figure out how to kill the biggest witch of all time and then bootstrap from there into breaking the emotion-harvesting ecology. The big witch was such an efficient source they were going to call the extraction project a wrap after she ate everything, they didn't care even instrumentally... I reset deliberately, I found out accidentally I reset if I die, I did not find out what happened if I witched.

"So I was working on that and then one loop I wake up in the hospital and Lúthien turns up out of nowhere!"

"A snake thing like the one Kib apparently met showed up in Doriath and it - I guess you could say it ate me -"

"And it was really confusing and I wanted to get her home because if I reset while she was uncharacteristically in the loop I thought she might cease to exist or something, but then it turned out her song could recharge me, and it even works on recordings, and she wanted to stay and help. So I went and got a potential magi I knew of who by default made a stupid wish and sadded into witching before loop's end, and got her to wish Lúthien into the loop with me instead.

"And it turned out she worked on witches, fling a recording of the song into a witch and get out and you wind up with a crying magi who's been through hell but is not a despair monster anymore -

"- we de-witched the big world-eater, found out where she'd come from, I'd been trying to track her to find where she was earlier in the month and hadn't got very far but she told me Toronto -

"- and then I managed to negotiate with the fluffs, they could have the infinite energy hack if they would use it ethically and give me their wish thing. And Lúthien read their minds to make sure they weren't planning to cheat me. And they paid up. They now run mood disorder clinics."

"And along the way I'd been telling Bella about the war and the Enemy and now we had the wish-granting thing so after we'd cured all the easily curable stuff in her world I wished myself teleportation powers and we went back home and started looking for someone who wanted the Enemy dead badly enough for a big wish like that to go through."

"And it seemed like it'd be a big wish so we needed someone who felt really really strongly about it so we poked around and wound up having Maedhros wish it. The wish granty thing comes with an emotion reader that can give me a solid guess on how much oomph somebody has for a certain wish. Since I'm not optimizing for long-term harvesting I don't wind up needing to get teenage girls to wish for everything."

"And all I'd heard about the Noldor was what filtered through to Doriath, which was mostly all the questionable behavior and Alqualondë and the ship burning and that oath to kill anyone who stole their jewelry but when we actually met them they were pretty reasonable."

"Oh, and we got her dad to wish us a new reset point so if something went wrong with Project: Kill Melkor we wouldn't have to re-run the pattern back in my world too. He insisted on putting it in Doriath and not under our control but it was better than nothing even though we had to get that re-done when we had a more flexible wisher later. So. Wish goes through fine, Lúthien finds the orcs a planet and put them on it, somebody wishes up a duplicate Lórien garden to put Angband victims in after I go through the entire place physically healing them all, etcetera etcetera, and since then we have been doing various constructive things and colonizing a planet and stuff."

"Nicely done."

"Thanks!"

"And planning our wedding party! Which you're invited to!"

"You may expect a full complement of Bells unless some kind of emergency has very bad timing!"

"And the rest of us, if we're not going to provoke a political crisis back home by showing up with shiny eyes - are we -"

"Possibly."

"Perhaps we can show up illusioned to look like strangers."

"Loki can pin something convincing on visually but can't fix your voices like that, are you good enough with the spell to do your own?"

"We have a few weeks' notice? Right, do we?"

"Yes, three more weeks!"

"Bet we can figure it out."

"How did you manage -"

"It turns out that if I have a little space to maneuver in my people will happily remain loyal to me no matter how immorally they believe me to be conducting my personal life."

"That's good."