The person knocking on the palace door has wings and a tail and it is quite possible they are very dangerous, which is hardly a reason not to open the door for them. They send a runner off to tell someone of importance what's going on and they open the door and smile pleasantly and welcome Cam to the kingdom of Nolordel.

"Hello. I really am sorry to drop in unannounced."

That is reassuring. He gets a reassured smile. What can they help him with?

"Do you happen to have a picture of the King around? This may or may not be a mistaken identity thing."

There's a painting on a wall in a gallery across the way. It's of the King over a decade ago; he was sixty-five, then, but a hale sixty-five for a human.

"Nope, he's who I'm looking for. Thank you. I am not in a particularly desperate hurry and am willing to wait for him or a convenient member of his family wherever's easiest for you."

The King is now seventy-eight and doesn't sit audiences very often; his oldest son does, but is occupied. After some handwringing and some rushed and incomplete summaries his son agrees to go meet the eccentric winged person of uncertain provenance who is waiting patiently in one of the reception rooms. 

So he does. "Hello. Ferardrin. If you introduced yourself it somehow escaped my staff."

"My name is Cam and I am extraplanar visitor in pursuit of an evil god and several of my usual abilities are broken since I got here and I know a bunch of versions of you from other planes."

This is actually not the most ridiculous thing that has ever happened. Does mean to step carefully, though, around someone in pursuit of an evil god. "...okay," he says. "Welcome to the prime material plane, I suppose? Is the evil god around, are there precautionary measures it wouldn't be useless to take?"

"My method of detecting things like evil gods is one of the broken powers, it's very annoying, so I don't know if he's here or not. I need an explanation of why this world breaks everything which involves less screaming at me than the people in the city I visited were able to manage, and, depending on what the answer is, a locality-friendly means of acquiring an eidetic memory. Depending on what things do work here there may well be such precautions even if I can't bring in the thing I was going to use to kill him."

"I can manage to not scream at you but please do not actually do things that involve your extraplanar powers, this is an inhabited area and also I think my father'd rather fall apart even if no one died but us. If the world's breaking things you try that's a sign you should stop. 

You could get a headband for intelligence but I do not think even the very highest end of those gives one an eidetic memory."

"Yeah I got the idea that the locals think messing with my extraplanar powers is unwise after about the third or fourth time they screamed at me. Some stuff still works. Translation magic's still going, for instance."

"Things that haven't been a problem you can keep using, though if they start being a problem stop. Maybe your home universe likes you and lets you get away with a lot more, but are you really unfamiliar with the concept that trying to find exploits in the universe is dangerous?"

"No. Not at all. Even slightly. Not in dozens of worlds has this ever come up. I think this is a here thing."

"It's true on every plane we've ever heard of. But it certainly is a here thing, regardless of whether it's only a here thing. The universe does not like people looking for exploits; if you are lucky it will just break things when you try. If you are not lucky you will die, or the physical regularities you were trying to exploit will stop being such. There is a place south of here where some idiot tried to measure whether all objects fall at the same speed, and for a mile around down is up."

"Jeez, no wonder in between all the screaming your uncle was a cautionary tale."

"...sorry?"

"Sorry, I'll back up - uh, remember I mentioned alternate versions of you? Standard procedure when I go to an unfamiliar world is to see if anybody I know has a version there. You're one of the people I check for, but, checking mechanism's broken. When people were screaming at me one of them managed to stop long enough to tell me the story of your tragically deceased uncle as an object lesson in why I should stop performing experiments and so on. In most worlds, performing experiments is perfectly safe and instances of your uncle manage to live past age twelve, but I can totally see why this would not be a good environment for one of him at all."

"He was thirteen, but yeah. ..I actually think thirteen was the third time but it was the time they couldn't resurrect him no matter what they tried. 

If there are planes where he's alive it would be really lovely to get to speak to him. I think the King still grieves him, and I know my father does."

"...there are planes where he's alive yes."

"...problem?"

"You don't usually get along very well."

"No? Well, the other versions of our family wouldn't have grown up seeing what losing him did to the rest of us."

"He actually doesn't get along with any of his half-siblings or any of their kids. Things are typically better between you and your cousins that you usually have though."

"I guess I would. Usually have cousins. 

Okay. We'll want to meet them anyway but I'll try to manage everyone's expectations."

"You're also usually a different species, but there's another world with human instances, you won't be the odd one out."

"What species?"

"Elves, but I think my translation magic's glitching on that and I'm for obvious reasons wary of trying to fix it right now, if you think I'm referring to a local species I'm not."

"Yes, it sounds like you are referring to a local species. Okay. I appreciate the explanation. So, the evil god you're chasing?"

"In addition to there being alternate universe versions of people there are alternate universe versions of universes. One of them plays out along this trajectory that involves an evil god, among other things. He is very evil. We have three ways to kill instances of him that are verified to work - sort of four I guess but effectively three - but two only work in specific universe-neighborhoods; I don't even know if this world is in one of those or not because my stuff is broken and I can't check. The other one's portable. I am a scout and evil-god-detector to find where we need to port it, because one of the evil gods ran away when confronted instead of staying in the neighborhood where he could be easily killed. The nerve."

"And you're trying to determine whether he ran away to here? We have a lot of evil gods, he'll probably fit right in."

"Well, that's a problem in its own right."

"Yes, it is. I had an uncle whose ambition it was to fix it."

"Things haven't gotten noticeably eviler around here lately or anything?"

"No. When would your god have arrived?"

"Couple years back."

"To my knowledge nothing particularly evil started happening a couple years back, and certainly no new gods declared themselves. But I can ask around. What precautionary measures might we be able to take, beyond 'find someone epic and pray'?"

"Ummm - sorry, my eidetic memory is broken and so is my usual notetaking system. He has probably brought some smaller-versions-of-the-kind-of-god-he-is servants. These can be repelled with a symbol I don't remember how to draw inscribed in walls. If he has found a place he likes and parked there he can invest power in it and probably won't budge unless he has a really good reason and is extra powerful there. He's fond of taking prisoners, fiddling with their memories, and dropping them into elaborate hallucinations of varying levels of tortuousness which include escaping or being rescued and then turning out not to be rescued over and over again so when they really get out they think they're still in; there is actually a way to distinguish the hallucinations from reality but only if you're a that-kind-of-world Elf, for you all I've got is that he can read memories but not actually minds per se. Unless he's getting local help or something, I don't know what you've got here in that department. I would seriously worry about him having it in for your family because he usually murders your grandfather but I don't know how interesting he'll find y'all in this circumstance."

He looks not particularly bothered by any of this. "Oh, okay. We'll definitely keep an eye out.

...subtle artists can read minds but that's innate, I don't think even a god would have it if he's from a plane that doesn't have subtle arts to begin with. Why does he usually find my family interesting?"

"We haven't sat any of these guys down and quizzed them about it. Usually you're the royalty of this tribe of Elves called Noldor and have particularly accessible fracture points for him to lean on, I guess? Also his main servant, Sauron or Thauron or way too many other names I can't remember without my eidetic fucking memory, has a particular creepy thing about your oldest cousin-you-don't-have, that won't be in play here..."

"That's good. 

If all he does is settle down somewhere and torture people he can catch I doubt we'll have any luck convincing any other gods to intervene, but that's the perfect setup for some epic adventurer. If we identify his location I can make sure they all at least know the opportunity is available."

"Epic adventurers are your local divine pest control solution?"

"...another difference? So just like the universe objects to people trying to experiment on it, it objects to hubris. If you think too highly of yourself, which includes thinking too loudly that you don't deserve to get squished or tortured or cursed because you ran into the wrong something-powerful, then you will die badly. If I tried to raise an army and go off to fight an evil god the universe would check whether I am thinking myself overly important and then it would drop a brick on me out of the sky, or a dragon, or - 

- epic adventurers are people who the universe likes, and who have done lots of the sort of things that make glorious awesome stories, and if they fight a god the universe will not squish them for having the nerve to try."

"D'you suppose my credits transfer?"

"If you have killed some gods then yes, you are probably epic."

"Okay good because deinstalling hubris from my brain sounds like a pain and a half and would not be good for me long term."

"You still probably want to be cautious with it. Don't go around giving speeches about how no one deserves to be munched on by dragons or anything. ...is it a good idea to make an ethernet post asking for information about the possible operations of a new evil entity, or will that likely provoke him?"

"...is the ethernet a fantastic agglomeration of media, reference material, ephemera, random cruft, anonymous racism, and mediocre design which people can access from personal devices of some kind?"

"Yes. You have one back home?"

"Yes. But the evil god doesn't, I'd be very surprised if he were conversant with it this fast, his kind of god is slow at..." gesture, "things. Sauron might be quicker on the uptake. Go hard on the anonymity just in case, I don't know them to have any means of divination that would get around that except insofar as regular people could do it."

"Anonymous ethernet posts it is, though that'll make it harder to be taken seriously. I'll let you know if anything results. Do you have, or require, a place to stay, local currency, meals..."

Sigh. "Normally, I have no physical needs per se. Here, I'm guessing I probably shouldn't push it and I should eat and sleep on a human schedule, and I assume you'd rather give me food and a place to crash than have me conjure it up. Back before the screaming had sunk in sufficiently I did try to conjure some local currency, it didn't work but pencil and paper did, but I will stop irresponsibly conjuring pencil and paper to write messages back home if you'll provide some."

"...what exactly are your normal powers?"

"As part of being the species I am, I can normally create arbitrary matter and am normally totally indestructible. I was not stupid enough to see how indestructible I still am but I don't, outside this universe, get hurt worse than 'scratched' or more than a little hungry or tired or inclined to inhale or whatever. Arbitrary matter has useful exploits like being able to conjure up things that I don't have to design or know very much about - the way I usually find alts is I try to make the complete works of the local version of whoever I'm looking for, for instance. My translation magic is still working apparently as normal but I haven't fiddled with it in any of the ways I normally can since I landed. I also wear a bunch of doodads which have properties ranging from letting me sense magnetic fields through my much-missed eidetic memory; these are all broken. Via the eidetic memory I can memorize spells of a sort one of my alts who is also my girlfriend composes; without eidetic memory she's the only person who can keep them straight but when they're working they let me turn into a bird and back, correct my balance issues - I've got a redundant balance issues solution cast on me which doesn't seem to have abandoned me so far - do visual and auditory illusions, heal, and teleport, including interdimensionally but that does have to respect adjacency of worlds. And technically not part of my powers but part of my general wherewithal is that I know things about a lot of technology, which I can normally conjure up."

"Technology's definitely not going to be safe here, it wouldn't surprise me if it does things worse than break. I'm sorry. I imagine it'd be deeply unpleasant to lose all of that suddenly.

Your forms of magic do not sound like they work anything like how ours does."

"I'm getting that sense. And yeah, the first thing I noticed was that my equivalent of whatever you go on the ethernet with was not behaving, although I noticed the eidetic memory was gone right after that. Do you have, like, a hazmats procedure for the technology or anything. It didn't catch fire? It just won't turn on?"

"You wouldn't want to leave it lying around lest someone do something absurdly dangerous like try to take it apart and see what it's made of - that's not safe to do even with things that do consistently work in our world - but if it didn't explode at you at once it probably won't do so now. Perhaps we can bury it. 

We use crystal balls to go on the ethernet. I can get you one and teach you how to use it - let me arrange for meals and a place to stay and changes of clothes and local currency and so on first -"

"Thank you very much, normally I would offer you some arbitrary material objects for your trouble, but, um."

"It is very much my pleasure. I am deliberately not considering ways in which, if we find extraplanar studies experts who can send you back home, we could exploit that to get a lot of people clear of here and somewhere safer - I would get squished for that - but I am allowed to consider that helping powerful people often ends up being rewarding in its own right."

Sigh. "We try. Unfortunately even speculating too hard about how to get anything done in this fuckup of a world is apparently dangerous, so. May be a bit of a delay if we come up with anything at all. I would also like pencil and paper. I'm not the only member of my species and conjuring arbitrary material objects makes a good interdimensional communication system and all it involves doing here is writing."

"Those can be acquired. If something happens to them on account of the universe guessing you're using them for interdimensional communication - not likely, but technically possible - then please stop and don't try workarounds."

And paper and pencils are brought, and a crystal ball, and he arranges for everything else.

And Cam writes - on paper - by holding a writing utensil - wow, his handwriting has deteriorated -

Attn: peal c/o mailer demon:

If I do not continue to update you at least once a day please attempt dismissal/resummoning. I do not expect to be able to conjure messages to me. This world is fucked up but I have located a local Findekáno -

"- oh hey what did you say your name was, you're not an Elf so I can't assume you're named the usual."

"Ferardrin."

"Wait, I thought that was your hubristic uncle's name?"

"I am named after him, yeah."

"That's weird. Sorry. Okay." Write write. whose name is Ferardrin, which was also the name of the (died young) local Fëanáro, he's named after him, probably for died young reasons. The Finwë whose name is the same is king of this here country. I couldn't get anything conjuring for alts but I was directed here by the cautionary tale of the Fëanáro, who provoked the universe, which apparently squishes people for a) hubris b) science. Accordingly DO NOT ATTEMPT TO EXTRACT ME VIA ENTERING THIS WORLD. Place broke most of my shit. I have no sorcery, no blessings, no eidetic necklace, and hit-or-miss conjuration I've been warned not to attempt further. Not pushing it on indestructibility. Allspeak's behaving and so is the grace for now (can't tell if that's persistent effect of Loki's grace or if it's Iobel's serving as fallback unless I try something that pushes it on indestructibility...) I have warned the Findekáno about the Melkor who may or may not actually even be here but apparently he'd fit right in with all the other evil gods, isn't that grand. I'm going to fact-find and keep you updated in shortish bursts.

And he shoots Iris a message asking about protocols for very very anonymous anonymity on the ethernet and explaining the whole situation, and then sends a more formal report to his father.

And Cam investigates the crystal ball. He kind of likes the crystal ball but it's not as responsive as his computer. Sigh.

Cam can get a primer on crystal ball use and ethernet access and forums where they might be asking about new evil god activity, and a map of the world so he can point out the places where it's unlikely there's anyone with ethernet and where this evil god might have settled, and some bios of epic adventurers so Cam can decide if he likely fits among their number, and geopolitics (not in much depth, but 'here's this or that kingdom here's the main species living there here's what to expect if you have to fight your evil god there').

And Cam takes notes. On paper. With a writing utensil. UGH. And he writes attn: peal c/o mailer demon on them. And when he gets tired he says "this is the part where normally I drink a cup of coffee and I'm good to go until the next cup but to play it safe here I should probably actually sleep."

"By all means. I will have someone show you to your rooms. We are lucky we do not have to play it safe by catering to needs far more exotic than 'sleep'. See you tomorrow."

"See you."

And Cam goes and sleeps.

And they search message boards for things that might be evil-god-related for a little while longer, and then sleep themselves.

And in the morning is there breakfast? ...which Cam doesn't make, wow, that's almost nostalgic.

There is breakfast! And an intrigued Princess Iris, who introduces herself and is told she also has Elf counterparts though he doesn't know them, particularly.

"We always come as the whole family, from Grandfather all down?"

"I mean, you're missing the cousins you usually have, but yes. I don't actually know off the top of my head if it matches farther back than that. I match parents with those of my alts who have and are brought up by their biological parents, but grandparents diverge some from there. I would be able to tell you if I had my eidetic memory."

"There might be subtle artists who could get somewhere on retrieving memories?"

"Yes but also the world already is probably keeping an eye on him. I'd much rather send him home with however interplanar studies people usually do it then try to help reconstruct any of his magic."

"The standard of memory I need to teleport is 'hold an encyclopedia of gibberish straight without a letter out of place', anyway, can subtle artists do that?"

"A really really excellent one, maybe."

"So if the interplanar studies people can send me back where I came from - it's not where I live, it's where the evil god came from, we're hoping he has to obey adjacency like everything else - then somebody can pick me up from there, that'll be fine."

"And when you're back in a world where your magic functions, you're probably not in a universe that gets upset by hubris and you can plan at your leisure - though he might be able to anyway," he adds to Iris, "he thinks he ought to qualify as epic."

"Kill some gods?"

"I don't really like talking about it but yeah."

"I don't know if achievements in other planes count but they definitely might - I'd expect your evil god is still a god..."

"Should we expect this to confer him any powers he doesn't usually have?"

"He's a god, the universe will favor him. If your universe doesn't pick favorites then I suppose that's a new power. ...he could probably grant his clerics divine magic, can gods not do that where you're from?"

"Not as such, no. - And where I'm from doesn't have gods."

"Good for where you're from, that sounds positively lovely. We'll definitely notice if a lot of people are clerics of a new god who didn't ascend through events on this plane."

"Possibly several. I'm concerned that Sauron and anybody else he toted along will count too."

"What sorts of things could they already do before they got here?"

"The one killed with the portable solution was dug in hard enough to the continent he lived on that it collapsed into the sea when he died. They're really, really hard to kill. They can shapeshift and do illusions - Sauron's very good at illusions. People on their turf in captivity they can time-dilate their experiences for the torture-hallucination nastiness, and keep them alive when they'd normally die. Sauron turned some humans into werewolves, and Melkor bred some Elves into orcs - reminder that there seems to be glitchiness in translations of species names, here - and as evidenced by the one I'm chasing, interplanar travel is not out of the question. Other gods of the same sort whose accomplishments reflect their own specialties but should benchmark the power level can do things like 'create a sun' and 'listen to people trying to get his attention on any seashore on the planet' and 'collect the souls of the dead of a couple species, read and cloud their memories at his leisure, and bring them back to life if he's having a good ethics day' and 'keep trees alive with nothing but starlight for some reason' and 'make a cool garden that does whatever would be comfiest for the people in it'. Maiar - the lesser grade of godlike thing - come in a very wide range; Sauron's up there, there are ones who can barely do anything."

"Hard to predict whether the lesser grade counts, then. Upper grade should. At least if his god credits transfer your epic credits also should."

"Small mercies. Loki's probably even likelier to be epic than I am. What with the literal epics written about her and the more cinematic history. She needs a thing that probably won't work here based on adjacency to kill a Melkor and some stuff that's broken for me to even kill a Sauron, though."

"It's not exactly about current capabilities, whether you'd be punished for trying. Loki's the alternate and girlfriend you mentioned yesterday?"

"Yeah. I have a bunch of alts. We are more varied than you guys, as a group; for one thing we have a gender ratio that isn't 'one', and only sometimes have the same parents - Loki's adopted and neither set of her parents matches mine, and Kib's planet doesn't do the concept of parents even on a biological level."

"I would very much enjoy hearing about all of these worlds and how they work."

"Sure - let's see how good a map I can draw from memory -" Paper. Pencil. Augh. "Is there by any chance any gossip that may match between alts that I might have learned which I should be cautious with mentioning here?"

"...I don't know either what kind of thing matches between alts or what kinds of things my alts get up to. I don't think I'd get in trouble for them being hubristic or generically ambitious..."

"I mean social repercussion kinda things."

"...I cannot imagine there being social repercussions to what my alts get up to even if they are universally terrible people, and I also imagine they're not, since you came here?"

"No, your alts are perfectly nice folks even in the universe where everyone else is evil, actually, they're just usually dating their - male - cousins and in some places this would get them in trouble if it got out."

"...cousin that doesn't exist?"

"One of those, yes."

"I might tease him about that, is that a social repercussion? But we don't follow Khersis here or anything."

"Are the other versions of me going to be like 'you poor thing, no cousin to date' -"

"Not all of them. For example, the one of you from the universe where everyone is evil, you're an exception, he's not. Also I'm not keeping track of the Space ones and even if I were I'd probably have lost the detail when my necklace stopped working," he taps a node he's just added to the map, "- there's a bunch, they can fork, four of you six of cousin, they broke up and only some forks are reconciled?"

"...okay. The universe where everyone is evil?"

"That's where the stray Melkor is from. He's usually evil, it's everybody else that was a surprise. On a population level looking at things like crime rate or whatever this is only about enough to get Elves to 'oddly well behaved if they were humans', but the baseline for Elf populations is 'crime rate: what the fuck is that', so it's startling by comparison and especially alarming when it's alts of people we normally like. Our current suspicion is that the Valar - those being the high-caliber gods including the evil one - are worse than usual and it's all their fault. Like, they usually suck, but in a fumbling well-intentioned how-the-fuck-do-people-work sort of way, and the ones here seem to suck in a flailingly vicious way. It's not a completely satisfactory explanation because there seems to be a lot of ripple effect past the borders of where the Valar themselves intervene very much."

At this point he's willing to call Cam the weirdest thing that's ever happened, if this is all true. Or even half true. "Being humans and not Elves, are we evil by the standard you're concerned with -"

"No. Well, I assume not, your other human alts aren't and you don't seem to be. The odd docility of Elf populations is pretty much only the relevant factor on a larger scale; with alts of individuals, who they're an alt of is a better predictor. Except for Evil Arda."

"So -" he looks at the map - "evil Arda, near us - thus your presence here - space Arda, way over there..."

Draw draw. "Edda in between, that's where Loki's from - here's Golden's world off Evil Arda - here's Hex, it hooks up to - uhhhh - right okay Hex hooks up to Stork hooks up to Shine and snakes world and snakes world hooks up to, the fuck did Gem name her Arda, Luster? Hooks up to Luster, which hooks up to Wish. And off Space Arda are the daeva worlds - when I'm not on summon I'm in Hell, if I go incommunicado they'll try dismissing my summon - and then off the daeva worlds is Limbo and Revelation, Revelation's where I was born."

"And science is safe everywhere but here and all the planes we know of?"

"Yep. Also except for Ardas all these places seem to be void of deities."

An envious sigh. "Okay. Want the local equivalent talk? The planes we know, our magic, how it works -"

"Yeah, sure, before or after I summarize the other worlds?"

"No, go ahead."

"Aurum has a me and no your-family, the me is nicknamed Golden because she shares her actual name with Gem. Golden runs the vampire shadow government. The planet's an Earth, which is a recurring theme - I'm from one, Gem is too - but not as repetitively as Ardas, all the Earths have different magic. Golden is married to a one-off named Edward and they have a daughter named Elspeth, who had an adventure in Evil Arda armed only with the power of telling the truth really hard."

"...okay."

"In addition to vampires and werewolves - not the same kind of werewolves Sauron turned people into - I'm not even sure how this is translating - anyway in addition to that Aurum has individualized, personality-based magic powers some but not all people there get. Elspeth's is telling the truth really hard. If she does it hard enough it kills people, I kid you not, but most of the time she just uses it for communication and being tactlessly informative and these days she also goes around explaining concepts to Valar because they thoroughly cannot absorb information about how incarnates work through normal channels."

"That sounds useful. Are the Valar - nicer once they know what they're doing? I don't think most of the gods here are bad for that reason in particular..."

"Valar are... better conversationalists when they know what they're doing. Well, the non-Melkor ones are, this hasn't been tried on a Melkor and probably will not be. By the time we can send Elspeth to tell a set of Valar things like 'it matters to people when things happen' and 'incentives: exist', those Valar are already a little past being useful except we still don't have the soul-collector one beat on efficiently re-embodying dead Elves. They default low-intervention anyway."

"Explaining how people work to an evil one seems unwise, yes. Okay, so these worlds -" gesturing at the middle links in the map -

"Daeva worlds! There are three kinds of daeva. I'm a demon -"

A moment of absolute horror, and then - 

"Uh. Translation error. Probably."

"Does it go away if I say I'm a 'maker'."

"...yeah, that's fine. Tell people that - please tell people that."

"I will tell people that. Are there similar problems with 'angel' or 'fairy'?"

"Yes, moreso with the second one."

"Okay, so there are three kinds of daeva, makers and changers and movers, each of us gets our own world. Makers make stuff, changers change stuff, movers move stuff. Movers live in a world that is natively an infinite flat plane with cool plants and landscape features on top, it's very pretty. Changers get infinite glowing cloud fluff stuff in three dimensions forever and they live in fluff caves they hollow out by changing the fluff into other things, pretty much. Where I live when I'm at home is natively nothingness forever but we can fill it up with our making stuff powers. All three kinds of daeva can and do appear spontaneously as adults. A minority of daeva are people who, while alive, human, and being from Revelation or Space Arda - data's not in on non-adjacent-natives - performed at least one summoning, then died. I'm an ex-summoner myself."

"Summoner?"

"Daeva can be summoned to adjacent worlds by drawing on the floor in a certain way. Then people can trade with us for stuff."

"Summoning exists here too."

"Is it somehow horrifying, or is that unrelated?"

"Summoning demons is possible and dangerous if you're careless. They do not make arbitrary material objects - though I suppose it is technically possible they'd do that if they were in a science world? I'm not sure - and they will kill a lot of people and perhaps steal their souls if you slip up."

"Makers have an associated myth about stealing souls but we can't actually do it."

"Demons very much can. Also summoning demons is evil, it probably affects your afterlife even if they don't get hold of your soul."

"...noted. Anyway, people from Revelation, but not Space Arda, who die without having summoned any daeva go to Limbo. Limbo is a plane like Fairyland but there's nothing in it, except for Limboites - they get indestructibility but no other powers - and everybody who dies to Limbo gets one thing, which is a non-person thing of some importance to them - usual phrasing is 'whatever they think an afterlife would be most incomplete without'. So they get their dog or something. Limbo things are also indestructible. And Revelation is an Earth, farther forward in the Earth timeline than the others, and summoning is what it's got for magic."

"So there's an Earth with vampires and werewolves and witchcraft, an Earth with summoning - no other magic on either -"

"Yup. And the other earth is Wish, over here. Guess what it's got!"

"Something to do with wishes."

"Right in one. Wish has several species and for some reason humans are the only one with emotions. Also for some reason emotions can be used as a fuel source. The aliens harvesting them were not very responsible about doing this ethically but Gem, my alt there, managed to negotiate them into stopping that and got their wish-granting mechanism in the bargain. It only works adjacent to Wish but it can also kill Melkors if somebody wishes him dead hard enough."

"Everything only works adjacent? As in 'a line in between them on this map', or does it have a more complicated meaning...."

"A line between them on this map. Many things only work adjacent, and all forms of interdimensional travel we've found only take us one hop - Loki can do two hops as long as the middle hop is through Edda. The thing where I can conjure stuff can pull information from farther away as long as I know what worlds I'm scoping over, and Golden has a staffperson who can tell when the best time to do stuff is and that can work on non-adjacent facts too, and most forms of magic - but not the wish thing, and not Loki's godslaying implement - are only found to begin with where they originate but people who have them can go wherever and expect to keep it."

"Unless our world considers it excessively powerful or developed through excessive experimentation and breaks it."

"Yep, unless that." Cam writes Danger! Danger! on the relevant node of the map. "Ideally we'll find a route around and - I should shut up there."

"You're getting the idea. We can pull off a tolerable mortality rate and a good standard of living here, you just have to be - small."

"Man, I hope I don't have an alt here, the poor thing."

"How do we check, should we search for your name on the ethernet -"

"Unless you have a smaller population than I'm expecting that probably won't get you anywhere. Our name consistency is that our first names all have the syllable 'bel' in them, middle names if applicable have an M and an R sound in that order, and surnames if derived from the standard parent set mean 'Swan'; but I can't even show you what the standard girl face looks like - computer's broken illusions are broken I suck at drawing - and it's also not guaranteed to be a face we've seen before - Kib's planet has reincarnation and in his past life he was a girl but didn't look like the other girl ones of us."

"Our population is indeed far too large to go off that. I could tell you that you're not anyone notable in this kingdom but there are many, and besides it'd be really deeply unwise to be notable and it sounds like you'd take that seriously."

"The results I'd expect from a me growing up here are 'unremarkable citizen' and 'dead somewhere between the ages of six and seventeen', yes."

"Let's hope there isn't one. Edda's this world?"

"Yeah. Edda's crowded. All the worlds we've found so far are inhabited but Edda's the one with literally hundreds of sapient species all scattered around and it has a lot of tech and magic variety but it's poorly integrated so there's lots to do bringing it to the random underdeveloped civilizations too backwater for anyone else to have bothered with. Loki's magic is called sorcery, it's the gibberish encyclopedia thing. She is unique among Bells in having parents but not the usual set; her biological parents are the king and queen of a frost giant planet, and then her adoptive mother decided to kidnap and raise the frost giant princess under an illusion to make her look Asgardian instead with a view towards eventually ending the war with a puppet queen inculcated with Asgardian values on the frost giant throne. Loki's, uh, sort of cooperating with the broad strokes of this plan at this time in the sense that she does mean to wind up ruling the frost giants and ending the ancestral war between the two planets. Loki's also coming up on two millennia old, Asgardians - and she was very convincingly passed off as one to everyone including herself for a long time - age really really slowly."

Nod. 

"So far there's this pattern that most Bells - but not this one or this one -" he taps Hex and Aurum, "that one stayed home and this one it was her daughter instead, but most of us somehow wind up in an Arda, and then contribute to ending the war with the local Melkor. Loki's was this one -" He draws in Elentári. "But to finish the job she had to write her teleportation spell to get back to Edda and pick up a thing called the Tesseract, which is one of a family of six artifacts which do scary shit but will totally kill you if you pick one up and it doesn't like you. The Tesseract likes her, so she grabbed it and killed Elentári's Melkor. She also cleaned up the mess I wound up making in Space Arda for me about which I would prefer not to go into further detail it is not a secret I just don't like talking about it and there's no one else here to pass the buck to. Uh, Space Arda is similar in - content - to regular Ardas, complete with Valar and everything, but it's spread out across several planets and they're lower-magic and much higher-tech. I think I mentioned they can duplicate themselves? Do you have like - fictional concepts or possibly actual magic of people being able to be condensed into information and, I don't know, run on crystal balls or anything like that -?"

"No but I can follow the - idea - sounds really dangerous -"

"It is. But a bunch of people there decided they wanted there to be more of them so now there are four of Space You and various numbers of other Space Persons. The yous were going by letters of the alphabet, it was terrible, Loki complained and got her Maitimo that being the name of the eldest cousin-you-don't-have to name them all things that were less terrible. Your name doesn't match your alts so it'll do on its own for the time being, I guess."

"Good, I'd be reluctant to change it. Higher tech meaning - science fantasy stuff -"

"...is science fantasy stuff like 'spaceships and science working right and so on'?"

"Yes."

"You may reasonably summarize Space Arda as Science Fantasy Arda. I mean, science works in the other Ardas too but they get from place to place in boats or on horses or whatever instead, so."

"And in the science fantasy Arda they have - spaceships and non-magic flight and so on-"

"Yes they do. First thing they wanted me to do when I showed up was make spaceships so they could get from one planet to another planet so they could help with the war."

"Cool. 

That leaves this patch of worlds -" gesturing at Stork and its neighbors -

"Yeah! Okay, Stork's weird. Its magic system is called servantmaking and there's five ways to make 'servants' that then do what whoever made them wants; these can be mechanical or magically animated or patches of light or literal animals. People don't reproduce there. Instead babies appear in random wilderness locations. People find them, or, since my alt there invented stork golems, the stork golems find them and bring them to population centers. They don't do parenting, even adoptive parenting - not as a social institution, anyway, now and then smaller numbers of people than 'the entire staff of a creche' will have a few kids in a non-apprenticeship context but by default no. My alt there is currently named Kib; in his past life he was a girl and named Aly. Reincarnation works sort of like alts except when a new incarnation is about fifteen they start getting dreams of their past life - waking memories past age fourish only, a few hours a night - and the dreams slot into place as memories once they wake up. So, when Kib was not yet clear that this was a genuine phenomenon, that Aly had existed and been him and so on, he got eaten by a snake monster from here," tap, "we're not totally sure how it got into Stork, maybe they're cannibals or something, anyway the kind of monster lands you in an adjacent world when it eats you and he landed in Shine, his Arda. He got there earlier than any of us - the Ardas are all on different schedules."

"...yeah, okay, that's weird."

"Yup. What ratio of social gossip to history-of-war-and-stuff do you want here -?"

"...I won't deny I'm curious, but it's entirely 'curious', can't think why it'd be necessary for helping find a you if there is one or getting a sense of the world beyond our planes..."

"I actually find 'how alts work' to be one of the things it's most useful to have a sense of for figuring out the worlds thing but yeah, I'll keep it concise. So Kib shows up and the you is as usual dating the Maitimo and they both crush on him and wind up in an adorable triad and then Kib belatedly dreams that Aly was married. Aly died young, her husband is still alive."

"Oh dear. Okay."

"Yep. Fortunately Kib landed early enough that it was peacetime and the Valar had by the occasion of this dream been prevailed upon to do something actually useful! There were Shine-to-Stork portals! Kib went and found his husband, Aydanci - also a one-off, no alts - and the husband said he could keep his boyfriends and that was fine and they all went back to Valinor and all was well until Melkor murdered Aydanci and destroyed the shiny trees most Ardas use in place of suns and went back to being openly evil. He'd been on parole, see, because the Valar."

"Gods," he agrees.

"Yep. So they found Aydanci reincarnated - most people on Stork don't reincarnate, they're not sure why the two of them, but Aydanci did - and gave him to a nice set of Elf parents and went to war, heavily aided and abetted by servantmaking. It is fairly typical in these wars for Maitimos to get captured by Melkors - that happened - it is not typical for Bells to, but that happened the once and it was here so if you meet Kib and he's a little off that's why. But between Aydanci-grown-up-again and the alt of your uncle they put together something that can kill a Melkor. The continent collapsed, but he's good and dead, and it runs on things that don't stop working out-of-neighborhood. I was planning to find the runaway Melkor, go fetch the items in question, and drop them on him."

"Won't work."

"If he's in your neighborhood yeah I'm getting that sense."

"If he's around here you're probably going to have to do it with local magic and definitely going to have to do it without powerful imported artifacts."

"...okay, maybe I hope there is an alt of me, we can whisk them away and provide them with cocoa and Iobel's cat and a physics textbook and when they've shaken the mothballs out of their brain we can get a good rundown on how things work here. No offense I'm sure you know what you're doing but Bells synergize really well."

"I imagine so but it'd also be deeply unwise of him or her to have gone into wizardry, most of my family took the chance but being royalty gives you a little latitude to think highly of yourself and it's not a career with a great life expectancy."

"Oh, yeah, I don't expect them to be a wizard, I expect them to be able to figure out exactly what the gaps in understanding between a Bell native and a Bell visitor here are, explain wizardry and the necessary margin of safety on the hubris and science things in two paragraphs or less so that we can move confidently within those parameters, guess what imports might or might not work, tell us what to look for to find the wizards we need, etcetera. After some quality time with Iobel's cat and a physics textbook. - I think I skipped Iobel. Iobel's from Hex which is the only world with a native your-family and a Bell both. Magic is called spellbinding, they can do six spells a day or one big one, in order to do any magic you have to turn your imaginary friend who isn't actually imaginary into a real solid critter-person, Iobel has a cat who hates virtually everyone but likes Bells and is very soft."

"Sounds lovely. Okay, until we have an alt of you or a productive avenue to searching for one:

Experimenting isn't safe, trying something and noticing it works and then continuing to do it is safe, most things do work reliably enough for us to have the ethernet and crystal balls but trying to derive regularities about what the universe will break is itself a bad idea. You can experiment more on things with no combat applications, most of our world's defensiveness is about people finding exploits to get more powerful. Likewise most things that'll break will be things that make you powerful, things that were developed using science but that couldn't be used in a fight are probably fine. Hubris isn't generally a thought-crime thing, you'd have to do something like challenge someone unreasonably powerful or go around proclaiming the universe can't touch you. Planning how to break or evacuate or radically alter our world should happen outside our world.

What else would you need to know?"

"I don't know, that's the thing, I would expect another Bell to be able to tell me what you just told me but in a - clickier way? This is good enough to be going on with though. So it'd probably be safe to make my own paper and food and stuff, but not weapons, and definitely not direct interpolation?"

"No weapons. And direct interpolation?"

"I can make stuff inside other stuff. If I do this finely enough..."

"That will certainly be broken as combat-exploitable, yes. Logistics are a gray area - if you make food for yourself you should be okay, if you make food for an army I'd have a hard time predicting what'd happen."

"Loki can hit things with sharp objects - I mean she'd still need the grace spell to work, it's a template feature that we're really clumsy until we get that fixed - but she has hitting things with sharp objects experience, she'd have way better luck than me if dropped into a fight under these conditions. I suppose I will have to avoid being in fights."

"If you stay in public well-lit areas on the paths you are likely to be safe. If you wander off the paths there are things that'll eat you, particularly at night. That's not even considering the evil god problem, obviously. Palace is fine and we can send you out with an escort as needed."

"I flew here and nothing bothered me... and my wings didn't spontaneously stop working..."

"You are unfamiliar and look like you might be frighteningly powerful! Wise people and monsters will not mess with something unfamiliar and possibly extremely powerful."

"Little do they know I am but a vestige of my usual glory?"

"Little can they count on it, anyway. Do you want magic systems next or a rundown of the local powerful things?"

"Let's start with local powerful things."

"Gods! We have dozens, some of them more or less powerful than others, people can ascend to godhood through sufficient combat exploits but the majority of gods are not former people. 'God' is a power level and a way the universe looks at you. They can grant their clerics divine magic, some of them can also do other things, all of them will kill you if you mispronounce their names, to the point where 'can enforce name pronunciation' is a perfectly good heuristic for godhood. Except for your Melkor their names all have the sound 'Kh' - Khersis is the most popular with humans around here -"

"...guesses on how that interacts with translation magic?"

"Probably safe but why risk it, there won't be much need to discuss them by name."

"Well, it'd come up because I don't want to touch my translation magic including by turning it off or fiddling with its settings, so if right now the name of a god is garbled in some way the way it's set up... but I'll just avoid naming them."

"Probably safer. Dragons. They come in two kinds, 'noble' and 'ignoble' - the noble dragons are the metallic ones, gold and silver and bronze - none of them are good, they'll all kill people for petty reasons, but noble ones will keep their word if they give it, so - evil but trustworthy."

"...okay. Oh, uh, Valar and Maiar have that too, if they say they swear something that binds them, but you have to be sure they literally actually say it out loud, if they do it by telepathy or illusion sound or something it doesn't work. - And speaking of the telepathy, they're telepathic, so are the Elves - Space Elf telepathy only works with themselves but the others work with anybody - and by default they can read thoughts unless they're designated private, generally by some kind of metaphor you sort your thoughts into."

"Palace has a subtle artist shielding us right now, but that'll be good to know if we go off-world to meet them."

"No idea how subtle arts will interact with this."

"Let me finish dangerous things and then we'll get to magic systems." Dangerous things! There are a lot of dangerous things! Iris sometimes interjects. 

What a fuck of a lot of dangerous things. "I'm sorry if I scared people by looking like a dangerous thing."

Shrug. "I prefer dangerous things that look it to dangerous things that don't, honestly."

"That is reasonable but I still don't like frightening people."

"If it seems strategic we can vouch for your friendliness. Magic?"

"Do tell."

"Three kinds. Subtle arts technically isn't magic - doesn't show up in magic detection - but I take it it's unique to here. You're born with the aptitude or you aren't, and some species don't have anyone with the aptitude. It permits reading minds or shielding minds against reading, altering memories or affect or associations, it's possible to use it to condition people to do or not to do things, or to make it impossible to form an intention. The latter of those take a long time and subtle artists doing it without consent get identified and shut down fairly quickly. They also sometimes have telekinesis. 

Arcane magic is the basis of wizardry and several other disciplines; you cast spells from scrolls until you learn them and then can cast them at will, though you only have so much mana - it increases with practice, and regenerates when you're resting - and until you've been practicing for a long time you don't have the mana for powerful spells. It's safe to cast spells you learn from someone, it's not safe to experiment with gestures or spell components and see if you can get more powerful. Anyone can learn a very simple spell in a couple of hours but if you're new to it you won't have much mana. You can also work arcane magic through music; I do that.

Divine magic is granted by a god, usually - there are secular druids but not an explanation for how they get their powers without one - and there's some overlap with arcane but it does things like healing and resurrection, the former of which is hard with arcane magic and the latter not possible as far as we know."

"I should not 'just pick up some wizardry while I'm here'," Cam says. "...it's funny you do magic music, Ardas - Flat Ardas, those being the ones that aren't Space Arda - have magic music and Elves sing a lot."

"Learning a cantrip is generally a safe thing to do, but I respect erring on the side of safety."

"I mean, if there's a cantrip that would be intrinsically useful to know for me, I might be able to stop there, but I definitely shouldn't learn some as a curiosity or on general pick-up-stray-magic-one-finds-lying-around principle."

Or so he can go teach everyone in other worlds. "If you find yourself inconvenienced you can mention it and I will let you know if there's a cantrip for that inconvenience."

"Hey, Cam, is 'bunch of people in the Imperium have disappeared' the sort of thing your evil god might pull?"

"Yes. Have a bunch of people in the Imperium disappeared."

"This is, like, not the most reliable source in the world, but let's say rumor has it that a bunch of people in the Imperium have disappeared."

"Any details on how they went?"

"Consensually, it looks like: someone offered to summon them to a nicer place, some people went through and confirmed the niceness of the place, more people went through. Some of them left letters telling their friends not to worry..."

"That's not really his standard modus operandi but it's not beyond, like, Sauron..."

"And if it's Sauron, they are probably not in a nice place one writes home about to convince their friends to come?"

"Oh, they might be, for now. A Sauron was the democratically elected ruler of a country, I don't think he even rigged it - the humans and werewolves in Elentári liked him fine till Loki stepped in and told them what was going on - but if it's Sauron they are not in circumstances conducive to longer-term flourishing."

"That's not enough to take to the emperor of the Imperium."

"No, but we could get travel papers and go investigate - it doesn't sound like the site they're disappearing from is dangerous -"

"Might be worth doing."

"I'll run it by my father. It's a week's travel from here unless it's urgent on that time scale, in which case we can spend half the budget on rings of teleport and have the Imperium annoyed with us for popping in."

"How long have people been disappearing for?"

"Couple months, looks like."

"...I'm not sure how to weigh Imperial annoyance here nor do I know how tight your budget is."

"The budget will not be ripped from the hands of starving orphans or anything, though we'd better not die on this misadventure because three rings of teleport and three resurrections would in fact empty the royal treasury - metaphorical emptying, most of the world uses fiat currency - Imperial annoyance is not going to cause a war but might complicate enlisting Imperial aid against the evil god."

"It's... unlikely to be scale-of-a-week urgent. It may not even be them and if it is they're still Ainur, they still work slowly."

"Then I'll ask my father to authorize some fact-finding by carriage and I'll write to the Imperium and we'll probably have approval by the time we reach the border unless they know what's going on and don't want outsiders near it."

Nod. Sigh.

"Can you think of a way to demonstrate to my father that you know alternate universe versions of us in a world where my uncle lived, that'll make it easier to get approval -"

"...not an obvious way? I don't know what he'd find convincing..."

"Anything you know about our alternate versions that wouldn't be common knowledge to our people, maybe?"

"I mean, you don't have any way to verify any of that. And I'm not sure he's going to be delighted to hear about how estranged he and his half-brother typically are."

"It's not 'delighted' I'm aiming for, it's 'reasons to give this any credence'."

"I can do my best. Harder without the eidetic memory - I'm not close personal friends with any of you..."

"I'll convey what I've been told, it's just that this is - difficult to believe - 'he says he's epic but does not want to talk about it' doesn't generally impress - and while it makes sense that this particular evil god would be your primary priority, there are enough evil gods that we don't habitually turn our resources towards trying to stop them. We would if it could make any difference."

"I can explain the circumstances under which I killed some gods but it's not going to make you more favorably disposed. And yeah, I'm getting that there's a bigger problem here than one Melkor; he's the one I know something about how to fight him, is all, I'd be starting below local baseline trying to figure out the others."

"I think it's utterly reasonable for you to prioritize him, and given the truth of anything you said for us to assist you in any way we can, but - absent that, if we were the sort of people to ride off to fight him we'd also be the sort of people who'd be dead. I know what an annoying constraint that is."

"It's okay."

"If you don't think the circumstances under which you killed some gods will avail us any here, I won't ask, but I am struggling to imagine how I'd end up thinking worse of you - we don't expect any particular altruism from epic-level adventurers..."

"There was - a lot of collateral damage."

"Was it avoidable?"

"If I'd waited longer we would maybe have found Loki anyway and she could've fixed it. But I didn't know that. And waiting would've made it worse."

"A lot of collateral damage on the order of -"

"Fifty-five million people died.

I put most of them back. Loki put the rest of them back later."

"Damn. Let's hope this one goes better. Sorry for bringing up an upsetting subject."

"It's okay. It's, you know, relevant. And they're all alive now."

"I'm very glad. It sounds like it was worth it, and if you're epic that'll help a lot in this world too, so - may as well use that god-fighting license of yours. I'll go explain the whole situation to my father."

"Okay. Anything else you want to know?"

"If you happen to think of anything that'd help demonstrate you know alternate versions of us, that'd be great, but I take it that's not straightforward even if you had the memory necklace."

"Not exactly. Uh, Fëanáros usually invent things? In Flat Ardas that means, like, 'writing', in Space Arda it's more like 'faster than light travel' - spaceshippier spaceships, pretty much - in Hex it's like 'magic healing fountain spell'."

"Yep. Ours famously died trying. Several times."

"And they're good at languages. Elf ones can pick up a new language from exposure in like, a day. I think the human one takes six weeks? Or did before the eidetic memory, he's probably faster now."

"I can ask about that, don't know."

"I probably know more trivia but I don't have it organized in such a way as to prove my credentials, this not being how I usually do that."

"Yes, understood. You can bring it up later if you think of anything. My father'll probably want to talk to you himself anyway."

"Sure thing."

He does, in fact, want to talk to him. Ideally with a spell to confirm he's telling the truth, if Cam's all right with that. Ferardrin conveys this.

If that's all the spell does, okay.

That is all the spell does.

"This is a very welcome complication," Nolan says to him, "and if by learning sooner of this evil god we can do more about him - or more quickly get the attention of someone who can - it is well worth it. Can you tell us that you've been truthful with my son and daughter, or if not, speak to the truth of the claim there are alternate dimension versions..."

"Outside flippancy, summary, misremembering things, and other elisions without deceptive intent I have been truthful with them."

"Okay. Do you want an escort to the Imperium to investigate, and if so who do you want?"

"It seems like having a relatively more native guide would help, especially since I scare people, and either of the two of them would be fine or if they're indispensable someone else will do."

"There are no domestic crises at the moment, I can spare Iris, and she's the one who's learned a sending spell to keep us updated if you can't find a cafe to amail us anyway."

"Ethernet cafés. Wonders never cease. Okay, cool, thank you."

"That is particularly unusual?"

"No, that's what's so weird about it, it's eerily parallel to a thing on Earths."

"Hmmm. Maybe convergent economic incentives in human populations will produce societies that look sort of similar regardless of the source of the technology or magic, or maybe something is fucking with us. In Materia it's usually the latter but Earths I'm told have that problem less."

"Earths do have that problem less, but it's already weird that Earths match so well when they each have different and secret underlying magic systems, I guess."

"I would be fascinated to read a book about all of this, but perhaps some other time. Carriage tomorrow, or would you prefer to leave today?"

"Whichever's convenient for Iris."

"Ask her how she is on mana, go tomorrow if she's not going to be ready for a fight."

"Makes sense."

And how is Iris on mana?

"Set to go. Unless we want to do any more research before we do, ethernet's hard to come by on the road."

"If you can't think of anything in particular to look up, I can probably pick up just as much background information on the world from talking to you as I could from the ethernet."

"Fair enough." A carriage is called. "I'm surprised we don't have a standard summary for extraplanar visitors, actually."

"Do you get many?"

"Concept's not unheard of, though usually they're from worlds that run on the same fundamental principles as ours? I have never heard of anyone who needed an explanation about experimenting. Summoning's sort of different circumstances, there are accidents but mostly within the local set of planes..."

"I wonder why your neighborhood all has this property. ...I hope it's not contagious."

"...yeah.

If practically nothing stretches to adjacent dimensions then I can't see why that would be the exception. ...though you did say we're adjacent to the unusually evil Arda?"

"You are. Science works there as normal. We don't know how adjacency is established or how worlds start, though, it may be that the unscience worlds are all clustering together after... deciding to be anti-science... for some reason..."

"I mean, the reason's pretty clear. The universe is aware when it's being poked and resents it. It's shy. As you like. The accidents that you get if you try sophisticatedly dangerous stuff is consistent with someone pulling the strings who hates it when people do that. So unless universes that aren't sentient or don't mind can become ones that are and do..."

"I guess. The Ardas are all run by this mostly noninterventionist metadeity but he seems okay with what we get up to, so far... no sign of anybody running the show elsewhere."

"Lucky you. ...though tons of worlds turning out weirdly similar suggests someone running the show, no? Maybe people have a more sophisticated way of thinking about this in worlds where you can do science."

"There are limitations on doing science like 'can we fiddle with any of the dials and see what happens' and we don't know how to manufacture worlds, affect adjacency in any way, etcetera, so we haven't gotten anywhere on that."

"Huh. Well, I hope we're not contagious. Any examples of worlds changing adjacency?"

"No - and the Tesseract was extremely disgruntled to learn there were worlds it couldn't reach, which suggests Edda has not had any new neighbors or lost any old ones in its lifetime, which is very long."

"I think that's good news, right? More regularities means more you can count on being able to do."

"Pretty much, yes, we don't have to worry about anybody losing an adjacency and being unable to get to the rest of us, say."

"And this is the first world you've hopped into that broke your stuff?"

"Yeah. I mean, Gem had a bit of a scare when she left the Wish neighborhood and her wish thing didn't work, but nothing else spontaneously failed, this is the worst case of that."

"Our apologies for having such an inconvenient world!"

"I don't think it's your fault."

"I mean no, not personally? Still sucks. 

So what makes a world an Earth or an Arda, same geography? Same people?"

"And same history. Ardas all have the same set of Valar making the same set of stupid decisions, Earths all have the same set of countries and series of wars and so on."

"And we usually show up on Ardas?"

"Except for here and Hex, all instances of your family are Arda natives, yes."

"And same personalities and everything?"

"Modulo different things happening to them, yes. You're usually best friends with Cousin You Don't Have number... three? I think he's three."

"I don't tend to get that depressed over my uncle dying, it was a long time ago, but hearing about all these relationships that should have existed is a little weird. Are they all like my uncle? The sort of people who'd have gotten themselves killed here?"

"The cousins? Uh, not as much? One of them I forget which number he is is basically exactly like his dad only slightly less so, so he'd probably have fared as badly, but the others could perhaps survive the place."

"How many are there?"

"He has seven sons, and in Shine one day he whimsically adopted a random baby girl from Stork and therefore also has a daughter."

"That's kind of a lot. How many surviving?"

"In the unaffected Arda plot the youngest one dies early in the war - and so does their dad - the others all live as far in as we've seen it play out."

"What a nice world."

"It's not how I'd make one. Although I'll give the Valar this, they really know their ecological management, we keep stealing the Valinor ecosystem for terraforming purposes."

"I just mean, like, the odds seven even mildly ambitious kids - sometimes eight - all grow up and there's a war with an evil god and they mostly all make it through -"

"Well, the eldest does routinely get captured and tortured, he just gets rescued. And remember that ambition is not particularly dangerous in itself these places. Recklessness is but that's different."

"By the evil god we're going off to see if we can find?"

"That's the one. Although this instance of Melkor never caught the relevant Maitimo. I'm not planning to confront him like this, just see if it's likely to be him or not on closer inspection."

"I wasn't under the impression this was safe, but having something a scripted feature of wars is more - upsetting somehow - than just having it often happen."

"That one we don't even manage to avert by just showing up. Loki appeared after the capture - Gem appeared after the rescue - but I got there before, Kib did too..."

"Kinda terrifying. Every single time?"

"Evil Arda's skipped it. Being evil screwed with the history enough, I guess. And mine and Kib's got captured in different ways - in Elentári and Luster there was a parley thing that they went to and got captured at, I navigated my parley carefully enough that no captures occurred and Kib omitted it - but then mine was a casualty of a massacre of a city and Kib's was lured into an elaborate trap - we think he's going after the Maitimos in particular for some reason."

"Is there an obvious reason?"

"There is a thousand year period where the Melkors are on parole in Valinor, so they have an opportunity to know everybody personally, and Maitimos are very effective politician types; unclear whether the aim was to take them out of action or subvert them in some way which was interrupted."

"Well, lucky my nonexistent cousin, I guess."

"Loki's very attached to hers. She rescued him before the associated Findekáno got to it and feels responsible for him. And Kib's dating his, of course. Mine was forked from a pre-capture instance so they're not traumatized."

"I am definitely going to tell my brother that if no one else gets around to it he rescues his cousin-who-he's-sleeping-with from the fortress of an evil god, so habitually that this is not even surprising in new Ardas."

"One of the Valar sends him a giant eagle to fly away on! It's like one of the only times Valar do anything useful in the war!"

"That's very much the sort of thing Materian gods would do. Though divine magic is reliable and helpful."

"In Shine's case it was a pterodactyl instead, because thanks to Kib they had domesticated dinosaurs available and he could fly in and out."

"So in the ones without a means of flight he - just walks in? To an evil god's fortress?'

"While singing. I think he intended it to be a suicide mission to perform a mercy kill."

"Khersis. That's the most horrible sort of cute thing I've ever heard."

"Isn't it just. It's only played out quite like that in Luster but we're assuming that any standard Arda left unattended would have wound up the same because Luster looks like it started with the usual initial conditions and wasn't interfered with until recently."

"No standard Ardas left unattended yet?"

"I mean, once we find the place by definition it's not unattended and we're not going to leave a Melkor running amok as an observational case study."

"Found after the war's resolved itself one way or the other without extradimensional intervention?"

"Nope, none found after when Luster was."

"If these disappearances turn out to be him what're you gonna do?"

"The good news is he has no way to identify me. He met Loki, but we don't look alike; he met Elspeth but at the time Elspeth didn't know that her mom had alts, let alone that we come in boy. I will look like a random curious person, not like I'm here to wreck his shit. So I gather the intel I can, I write it down, and at that point maybe they try dismissing me out."

"And we let people continue accepting this lovely emigration offer?"

"If there seems to be a good avenue to warn them off it we can do that, but if he's actually behind it I find it unlikely he's committed to waiting for permission anyway."

"Right, good point. Well, then we'd have enough to take to the Emperor, probably."

"What sorts of things do emperors do about kidnapper evil gods, here?"

"The Imperium has access to some very heavy hitters. This'd be a bad country to start in if you were hoping to swallow a country without anyone noticing, don't know if that's evidence it's not him or just that he has other plans. I expect they'd bribe some noble dragons and some epic adventurers to have a go? That's how we'd handle it, though with less desirable bribes."

"All right."

"If you've got a better idea we're all ears."

"I don't. We don't have any mechanisms for doing stuff to or in worlds without being in them. It has not previously been a problem, but here it means local solutions may actually be it."

"Well, at least we got a little forewarning and have magic that can in principle kill gods."

"Yeah. Sorry I can't just sail in and fix it like I meant to."

"Trust me, we'd have been delighted if you'd taken out all the dragons and half the deities and then landed to say 'want to meet the family you never had'? It's okay. This works."

"Fingers crossed."

"If it doesn't work we're no worse off because of you."

"I mean, we did kind of chase him off in the first place. In Space Arda the Sauron had a deadman switch - so this one, Loki went and said hello first, to see if he'd give her a reason not to kill him - and off he went."

"But, like, he was already doing evil stuff, just somewhere else, right?"

"It was toned down. Elspeth had talked him into a ceasefire. But yes."

"Terms of the ceasefire don't extend here?"

"They extend to a couple kingdoms in Evil Arda. Extending them here would involve Evil Maitimo - or possibly Evil Thingol but he's even less likely to be cooperative - declaring potential victims to be his subjects, which I imagine would have political complications and we're not sure how thin the claim can be to work."

"The countries are still run by the evil versions of people? I think I was kind of imagining a coup."

"It's complicated. On a political, population level, it really isn't worse than the typical human population, they're just disturbing because we know what they're like when they're not evil. Although Thingols suck by default."

"Is my alt evil?"

"Probably? I'm not sure. She did get along with Elspeth, but Elspeth speaks lovingly of multiple serial killers."

"Guess I can imagine being a serial killer if magically evil and sufficiently pissed off."

"I honestly don't know if your alt is evil or not. Not everyone has been checked out individually. Most people there are and the only exception I remember hearing about is the Findekáno but maybe it's a family trait and your alt is also fine."

"How do you know he's not?"

"Nonevil Maitimo investigation. They're very good at people."

"Useful."

It's five days' travel to the border and a day's tedious waiting there - she amails home with updates - and then two more to the site of the disappearances.

Cam faithfully writes updates to the peal twice daily.

And has anybody here been corresponding with the disappearers, since they seem so polite about it? And yes, some people are uncertain about being disappeared and accordingly have not been disappeared yet. They are being invited to travel to a science fantasy plane and join a colony there. Some of them have heard from their friends and family members who have already disappeared. They are advised not to travel back and forth, because being in a science fantasy plane and doing any amount of science fantasy there may make staying in the prime material unsafe.

"...This isn't absolutely out of Sauron's repertoire," Cam tells Iris, "but it's - stylistically off."

"Can you describe what the difference is?"