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stranded
lost Epic in Nexus
Permalink Mark Unread

The new worldleapers can do targeted dimensional travel, which leaves them strictly worse than the teleport but slightly safer to distribute and, more urgently, is the step before stable dimensional portals. It's a significant breakthrough. He reads the report while flying and he is so excited and he conjures the latest worldleaper prototype and then remembers he's not supposed to leap at random, in case of Materias and so forth, and he still wants to test it so he checks if he has mana for the wizardly dimensional transit spell instead, and jumps.

Check for written works - yep. Not much, so low-tech. Checks for humans - nope, so it can't cheaply be fixed up by going over and dropping vaccines and germ theory - or, at least, it'd have to be a different kind of vaccines and some checking to figure out the relevant germ theory - 

Now he wants to test the new worldleapers, have them target for Warp. He sets up the parameters. 

It drops him somewhere that isn't Warp.

 

He scowls at his worldleaper, makes a rock in vacuum that he can leap back to, and heads back to the previous dimension, from where he can presumably get to Warp with a standard teleport. 

 

Except he can't. 

It takes him about half an hour to determine what happened, because he wants to be very very careful with his experimentation. 

Half an hour later he conjures a piece of paper that says letter to Cam: don't make a wizardry teleport with the new experimental worldleaper in hand; I think I leapt two dimensions at once. Can't return to any mapped worlds, I checked. I'm going to leave flags in the worlds I've found. 

 

Then he throws a tantrum. He's a demon in vacuum very far from any inhabited worlds so it can be a very very elaborate tantrum. He builds entire cities but on fire; he builds other entire cities and then sets them on fire; he feeds all the flaming cities to a sun which he makes on the brink of going supernova; he sits there waiting for it to do that, but gets impatient before it's done and starts messing with its core to destabilize it faster. The sun goes supernova. It hurts. He doesn't heal himself instantly. He teleports clear and curls up and cries.

 

And then he goes, world to world, leaving flags so if they find any of these worlds they know how to find him, conjuring for the complete works of a Bell.

 

Permalink Mark Unread

 

 

Here's one. There's not that much of it, for a Bell, and it's all encrypted, but he gets a result.

Permalink Mark Unread

He is so relieved. He is so relieved. He starts crying and then he realizes that is ridiculous and he makes himself stop and then he realizes that is ridiculous and lets himself start again. He doesn't even notice it's encrypted, he's not going to read it, that would make the Bell sad. He is going to go and find her. He checks first that she is in a galaxy and then he relentlessly conjure-searches for which one. 

And eventually he finds a galaxy, and conjure-searches for a planet. 

Permalink Mark Unread

She is on a planet!

Permalink Mark Unread

It's going to take him a while to narrow down enough that he can make a model of her surroundings and find somewhere deserted to appear into. He doesn't sleep. He finds her. He conjures for her surroundings.

Permalink Mark Unread

She is in an extremely pretty location full of gardens and gorgeous architecture. Maybe she's an Elf.

Permalink Mark Unread

Alts of him? No. 

 

Well, he needs somewhere pretty almost as badly as he needs a hug from a Bell. He goes invisible and teleports in and soaks up the pretty and says hello?

Permalink Mark Unread

 

 

 

Hello?

Permalink Mark Unread

There are alternate dimensions, they have alternate universe versions of some of the same people, you are an alternate universe version of some people I really trust and really miss and I need a hug can I come teleport to you?

Permalink Mark Unread

...you can teleport?

Permalink Mark Unread

I can do so so many things you're also a really good person to come to because I can totally change your whole dimension and you'll know where to start.

Permalink Mark Unread

How precisely can you teleport? Nobody can see me right now but if you were off by a few feet they could see you.

Permalink Mark Unread

Well, I'm invisible, but I can teleport that precisely if you send me a clear picture of where you are? This thing - osanwë - can send pictures and ideas just like words -

Permalink Mark Unread

I'm in a force field bubble, you'd have to land right in my lap, she explains. Or you could wait until I get back to my apartment. And she sends a picture of the lap in question and the translucent-sheened surroundings beyond.

Permalink Mark Unread

And now there is a demon in her lap and he is crying and he hugs her. He at some point in the crying and hugging will notice that she is not much older than he is but it will take him a little while.

Permalink Mark Unread

She doesn't really know what to do about the crying part. ...pat pat?

She looks prettier than most of the Bells, but not in a scary way like Golden, more like if you pointed her ears she'd be an Elf. Complete with elaborately done very long hair. And assuming she is in fact just a pretty human and not a round-eared elf she is about, uh, nine.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

 

Eventually he'll stop the crying. He will keep clinging (though he is careful not to touch her hair.) Hi, he says. What species are you, Bells are usually human but you look like an Elf but you're not, I checked, and also we don't think Bells come in Elf. 

Permalink Mark Unread

I'm a human. ...I'm a haut though, we're different.

Permalink Mark Unread

You're pretty. This is the first sufficiently pretty place I've seen since I got lost, it's really nice. You're also the first Bell we found while she's still little, the other ones are all grownups - Loki's nearly two thousand and Cam's around two hundred and most of the rest are in their twenties but humans grow up fast so they're grown up....

Permalink Mark Unread

Yeah, haut are made to be pretty. I need to sit through the rest of this poetry reading and then we can go back to my apartment and you can explain stuff, okay?

There is indeed poetry being read. It's a dialect of English, actually.

Permalink Mark Unread

That's weird. He has so many language questions but if she doesn't want stuff explained she also probably doesn't want to explain stuff. He snuggles and listens to the poetry and conjures marbles in his hand - local Earth? Yes, there is one, but it's not this planet. All calendars sold on the Earth this year?

Permalink Mark Unread

Even scaled down that's a lot of calendars. It's 2986.

What are you doing? Don't drop any of that, it'll make the bubble make noise.

Permalink Mark Unread

He teleports it a thousand miles into space. Making stuff to learn about this world.

Permalink Mark Unread

We can talk about the world after the poems, I might have to have something to say about them later so I need to pay some attention.

Permalink Mark Unread

I could probably give you a written copy of them and then you could read them, that'd be faster?

Permalink Mark Unread

Do you think I didn't try that?

Permalink Mark Unread

I didn't know if you could get written copies.

Permalink Mark Unread

I can autotranscribe it onto my chair, but then somebody wants to know what I thought about something to do with the reading aloud part and if I sound like I wasn't paying artistically discerning attention that's bad.

Permalink Mark Unread

That sounds really frustrating and dumb. Snuggle. I didn't know humans cared about artistically discerning attention.

Permalink Mark Unread

We're haut. Now shhh. It's just another ten minutes.

Permalink Mark Unread

He snuggles and shushes and makes a note that says letter to Cam, I found a Bell, she's nine and human but the place is pretty, I'll have her write the peal once we've explained everything to each other, tell everyone I miss them.

Permalink Mark Unread

Ten minutes later the poetry reading is over and the Bell's voice - just as pretty as the rest of her - joins a chorus of others thanking the poetry reader for his time, and she starts piloting her bubble away from the garden.

So who are you?

Permalink Mark Unread

My name is Fëanáro and I'm almost fourteen - uh, sort of Earth years once you account for the time dilation - Elves age slower than humans and everything in Valinor ages ten times as slow - and I'm an Elf who has been wished into a demon. Demons make stuff. 

Permalink Mark Unread

 

Does that pass for a good explanation where you're from?

Permalink Mark Unread

I should just get you the standard Bell explanation but it's mostly chiplocked - okay. There are a lot of dimensions. There are a few magic ways and a few nonmagic ways to travel between dimensions. Dimensions are next to other ones, and the society I'm from is a consortium that spans a few hundred dimensions. I accidentally made two leaps away from it, and it's impossible by any means we've yet discovered to travel to a dimension you aren't adjacent to, so I have no way to get back home until I happen to stumble on a world that's next to one of the ones I'm from and I don't know how likely that is because the multiverse might be infinite. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Okay. And you know a lot of me? The bubble is now ascending in an empty column in the architecture that makes them weightless; the Bell neatly pilots them onto a landing.

Permalink Mark Unread

Yes, some people show up in lots of different universes. Bells - all of the names have 'Bell' in there somewhere, and the middle name are Maryah or Marie or Mariel or Mark, and the last name usually means 'Swan', as applicable because not all Bells have all three - Bells show up in lots of universes. You write lots of things to make sense of your brain and you hate being mind-read and you want to live forever if you're not already of a race where you will and lots of you are rulers of planets. 

Permalink Mark Unread

...My name's Linyabel Miriat.

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Yes, and you look like the girl Bells except prettier and younger, and also when I arrived in the dimension I made stuff to find you so I'd know it was you anyway. Nice to meet you. 

Permalink Mark Unread

And here's her apartment. She lets the forcefield down once the door has slid shut behind her and picks him up and puts him off her chair. She gets up and crosses the room to what looks like an unreasonably large computer in a decorative, stationary casing. "Okay, now I can take notes -" She enters a lot of text, which is in the same dialect of English as the poetry, then - "go on?"

Permalink Mark Unread

Different dimensions have different magic - some don't have any - and one of the things our multidimensional collective does is find all the cool magic and combine it to cheat at things - we have a mortality cure that doesn't scale very well on its own but you can get the ability to make magic items faster and so now it scales pretty well, we can resurrect people, the teleport I used to find you could also be used to move this whole planet, we're working on dimensional portals because we kinda don't want to trust just anyone with the teleport. Without a way to get back I don't have all their stuff or I'd prioritize telling you about it but I have some - I can teleport, I can heal humanoids, I can do illusions, I can turn into a bird or turn other people into birds, I can resurrect Space Elves but no one else, and I can make stuff. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Please don't move the whole planet.

Permalink Mark Unread

I made a supernova when I was freaking out about being lost from home maybe forever but I made it in a galaxy without any people in it, I'm really careful about my powers. Promise.

Permalink Mark Unread

How'd you get lost exactly?

Permalink Mark Unread

Uh I had a prototype worldleaper and I did a wizardry dimension-jump and my best guess without testing it is that I activated the worldleaper and went two dimensions at once. I documented everything and they've probably figured out what happened by now but I can't get messages from them, just send them messages, because my making stuff has an adjacency limit. 

Permalink Mark Unread

So - if you started in A and accidentally hopped through B to get to C - if you found your way to B again you could tell if it was next to A, right? Why aren't you staying in C and hopping around trying to find B?

Permalink Mark Unread

That's what I've been doing but we've hopped from Edda trying to find new worlds eighty or ninety times and we've only landed on a world we'd previously found once or twice, let alone landing on one world in particular, so I hopped from C fifty-six times and left beacons so if any of those places are adjacent to anywhere we've been before it'll be possible to find them and then I was kind of falling apart because of being scared and alone so I decided to start checking for Bells when I hopped so I could get a hug and advice and stuff. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Oh.

Well, what do you want to know about here?

Permalink Mark Unread

Does it have any horrible things that can be fixed by making arbitrary matter and/or teleporting? Or any magic I could use to get back home? 

Permalink Mark Unread

There's no magic here, or world-hopping technology, sorry, but there's lots of things that could be better with teleporting and arbitrary matter. This is kind of the wrong place to be to do them, though.

Permalink Mark Unread

I like it here, it's pretty enough. Otherwise I was going to have to make my own planetoid. If I can stay here I can teleport to the places that need arbitrary matter and fix stuff there, it's not like there's any advantage to being close by.

Permalink Mark Unread

Why does it matter if it's pretty?

Permalink Mark Unread

I think the metaphor everyone agreed on is that Elves need ambient prettiness like humans need more than two hours of sleep an Earth day. You could probably get by without it for a while, getting more and more impaired, but you'd be miserable and not thinking very clearly.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

 


Did you bring somebody with you?

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...no?

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Somebody else is talking in my head.

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Bounce bounce bounce maybe they found me -

Permalink Mark Unread

Wouldn't they be talking to you if that was it? Also I don't know why anybody would pick this person for first contact, she doesn't talk very well.

Permalink Mark Unread

Can she send you a picture of where she is? Then you can send it to me and I can go grab whoever it is...

Permalink Mark Unread

Yeah, I'll ask -

And presently a picture is bounced.

Permalink Mark Unread

Okay - uh, should I grab her and bring her back or should I check if she's safe first, I'm indestructible but you're presumably not...

Permalink Mark Unread

How are you going to check?

Permalink Mark Unread

I can check whether people are lying by conjuring, unless they knew to expect demons. 

Permalink Mark Unread

...how?

Permalink Mark Unread

...depends? Like, the last time we found a new Bell she was ruling a radioactive dented Earth where she'd detonated hundreds of nuclear weapons and she said it was to defeat these parasitic aliens so we checked that the parasitic aliens existed and worked like she said and that the timeline matched what she said and then we decided that she was telling the truth.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

Okay, I guess you can check her. She thinks I'm her mom - or maybe she means I'm an alt of her mom, she's hard to understand but now I know there's more of me that might be it -

Permalink Mark Unread

That's easy to check, I can make a scale model of her mother and if she looks like a Bell that'd settle it - though there might be other faces, we don't know why they all look the same...

Permalink Mark Unread

Well, I don't know either. Is the picture good enough?

Permalink Mark Unread

Yeah. Back once I check -

Pop.

Permalink Mark Unread

Here is another young winged person. She is in a town, but it is night here and nobody's around. She blinks at him. "You teleport person?" she asks.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah. Is your mom a Bell?"

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"Yeah! Is Angela. Am Pen, who you?"

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"Fëanáro." Scale model of this person's mother?

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Winged Bell!

"...what you doing?"

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"My magic! I was checking that you are who you say. Should I take you to this world's Bell now? She's a kid just like us."

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"Whoa, only ever finding grownup ones before!"

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"Yeah, us too! How many have you found?"

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"Ummmm." She starts counting on her fingers. She runs out. "Would maybe need writing them down and maybe forget some."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Wow. We found nine. Well, and this one who's little." Pop back to Linyabel.

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"Hi small one Mommy!"

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"My name is Linyabel. Is there going to be an entire convention of winged people who know versions of me from other universes - do you two know each other -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"No we don't!!! It looks like a different multiverse consortium, and they have even more Bells than we do!! Also none of ours have any kids except Golden and this isn't an Elspeth alt. Also none of the Bells I know have wings except Cam because he's a demon like me."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You having Elspeth? Is a more Elspeth? And Golden having change nicknames!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, we have an Elspeth and a Golden, you have those too? Do you have a Loki? Cam? Kib? Iobel? Gem? Boots? T'Mir? Butterfly?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Have a Cam! Not others. Shell Bell? Juliet? One with owl? Glass? Mean world one? Stella? Can't pronounce world one - Thilsh- Theel- Thilling- that world one, have pointy ears like you?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Nope! Is your Cam a demon?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"No he a wizard. With notebook bird."

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"Maybe just Golden, then...what's the mean world? Materia?"

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"That maybe its name? It breaking Jane."

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"There could be lots of mean worlds but Materia's our mean world - if you have a Materia you'd have a Boots though, unless she picked a different name...I hope you have a Boots, she kind of adopted me."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I forgetting mean world one nickname but isn't Boots. A one Mommy adopt you?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"So what happened was that in a magic accident she landed in my world, and my mother was dying and she's a therapist, and she fixed that and then she started teaching my world magic and writing and the wheel and glass and stuff like that so everyone liked her, and then the stupid Valar sent her away so I invented interdimensional teleportation and went and rescued her and then we fled to a different universe with no gods at all because we were really tired of gods and then I couldn't go back home because the Valar might make me stay."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Valar are gods?" clarifies Linyabel, who has been furiously notetaking this entire conversation.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah. There are recurring worlds - like Aurum, I guess, and Earths in general, and also Ardas, which is the kind of world I'm from, and it has Elves and gods and a horrible war unless someone gets there in time. Most Ardas are exactly the same up to the point of multiverse contact. Ardas have the Valar, who are gods, and Elspeth can make them good at their jobs but without her they're kind of terrible at it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Elspeth do it? They need things truthed at?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, they don't understand what being not a god is like and Elspeth is the only one who can explain it to them hard enough."

Permalink Mark Unread

The angel giggles. "So if a one Mommy adopt you we cousinoids."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I guess! I came here because I really wanted a hug from a Bell and Linyabel's great but she's not like a mom because she's little like us. Maybe I can take you home and get hugs from your mom and maybe you'll have magic that can help me get to my home and then the peal'll be twice as big."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We not having ways finding more worlds purposely, is all Milliways."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, we look for more worlds on purpose all the time, we've got nearly two hundred. What's Milliways?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Is Bar with door eating other doors. Except door breaking and put me place you finding me not home! Is supposed go home!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...huh?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sometimes a door someplace be a door Milliways instead. You go in and that's where you be. Then you go out and it put you back where before, and when. I going in a door that go Milliways, and have cake, and come out, but not putting me home, putting where you finding me. Somebody break door. And is no Jane here so Jane can't putting me home or telling anybody where am."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Huh. Okay. Well, if your world's adjacent to this one I can take you home, I bet I can't make Milliways, sounds like magic - " he tries making a scale model anyway -

Permalink Mark Unread

Milliways is super magic.

"Dunno about adjacent."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Can you send me a picture of a place in your home dimension it'd be safe to teleport to?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah-huh -" Here is the interior of the starship Jehovah.

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He tries to teleport there.

Permalink Mark Unread

Nope.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not adjacent. Sorry. Milliways?"

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Milliways! Bar area, Belltower.

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Teleport?

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Nope.

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Hug. "I guess you're stuck too, at least for now. And if you don't have any demons I can't tell your peal that you're okay, either."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Can't try other worlds? Home or Downside or something?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sure, I can try as many worlds as you want, just send me pictures."

Permalink Mark Unread

Home! Downside! Rêverie! Space plant! Atlantis! Mars! Titan! Alethia's afterlife! Aurum! Miscellaneous Jarvises! The Enchanted Forest! Tab's orbital ring! Rainbow sand planet! Peace!

Permalink Mark Unread

He tries them!

 

Nope.

 

"I'm sorry."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Am not supposed going Syntropy or mean world... are more worlds not having interesting people but having Jane nodes but not knowing what look like."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do you know what a Jane node looks like? I could try for that."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Are mostly all same in boring worlds -" Like so.

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He tries. 


Nope.

 

"...I can make you a retroactive eidetic memory necklace in case you've been any other ones you're forgetting? It'll take me weeks, though, even on perception songs and without sleeping."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Think am remembering all have seen."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay." Hug. "Well, if there are any things you want from home, I can make you those?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Maybe want sheet music something like that later." She turns expectantly to Linyabel. "So what we do?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Good question. This is the wrong planet to do anything interesting on. Fëanáro, how fast can you make big stuff?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"A planet would take me weeks if I started from scratch."

Permalink Mark Unread

"But you could maybe do a dome? How much do you need to know to make a complicated thing like an atmosphere dome?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"One to copy - doesn't have to be an exact copy - or a blueprint or a model."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay. So I will look up an unterraformed planet nobody is looking at, and you can put the Solstice dome on it, and then we can go there instead of here and get comm access on Escobar or something and go from there." Typety-typety-type.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do they speak English everywhere? I have Allspeak but dunno if Pen does."

Permalink Mark Unread

"English is popular but not universal."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Am know English and Samarian and Edori and Callian."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oooh, you've got to teach me the other three! ...maybe while I'm flying to make the atmosphere dome? We could fly around together and you could sing in them and I'll pick them up."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Um, how fly without atmosphere?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can make air around us fast enough we stay up."

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"Ooh!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"And you're sure you can do this fast enough that neither of you suffocates or anything."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Can't suffocate, Mommy safed us."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm indestructible too."

Permalink Mark Unread

"And you also won't pass out and not be able to teleport, or anything?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Indestructible means nothing can more than mildly inconvenience you. If you stab me it'll hurt but the supernova didn't hurt much more than stabbing would've, and I definitely didn't pass out... shredders and phasers work fine on indestructible people, though we wake up faster than normal people do..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay. Well, I found this planet that was surveyed and too expensive to terraform and in a cul-de-sac, nobody's going to be keeping an eye on it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"In a cul-de-sac? Also, are we doing the 'pay people to do nice things' sort of fixing the world or the 'make a nice place, let people immigrate' sort or the 'found a consortium, make it really profitable to be a member' sort."

Permalink Mark Unread

"There's only one wormhole in the system to get in or out, it doesn't link up anywhere else," she explains. "And I haven't decided yet."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay. ...I can make us some grownups if we need them, it's just sort of unethical so I'd rather not unless we need them really badly. Also they'd probably take over because grownups."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You can make grownups?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can make Space Elves. I can't make people who aren't Space Elves and there aren't Bell Space Elves so I can't make a you but I can make grownups, yeah."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Are any of them any good?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Space Elves? Yeah, they're smart and competent and want everything to be nice for everyone, what kind of good do you mean?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I just mean would it be very annoying if they took over."

Permalink Mark Unread

"No not especially."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay, if we need some maybe, but I don't think we definitely need them so you shouldn't make any yet. Unless it takes a long time and you'd better start now if we'll want them in a year?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Cam did like ten a second after he had to repopulate a planet he fed into a black hole."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...what?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Huh?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"A black hole is a thing that is made out of lots of stuff compressed really tightly together," he says to Pen. "I can make them, because they're stuff, but it'd be really really bad to make one anywhere near other stuff, because they have a lot of gravity and the other stuff will fall into it." And to Linyabel, "I'm guessing you knew that."

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"I know what a black hole is!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"So Ardas have Valar, like I said, and one of the Valar is evil. And what he does is he goes off and starts a horrible campaign of murder and torture and - okay, the reason why I can make Space Elves when I can't make any other kind of people is that Space Elves have chips that back up their brains. And Melkors - that's the evil Vala - always torture a lot of people but in Space he got hundreds of millions of them, using biological weapons and various other stuff, and he uploaded them and ran them in sped-up torture simulations on server farms that covered a whole continent."

Permalink Mark Unread

(Pen wraps her wings around herself unhappily.)

Permalink Mark Unread

"...so he put a black hole under the continent and then put everybody else back?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"No. There were backups in other star systems and you can't kill a Vala that way though you can trap them in the time dilation if they're not on guard.

 

Another thing about Valar is that their word is binding. So's mine, actually, if I swear something I have to keep my word. And the evil Vala promised Cam he'd never hurt a person ever again if Cam holed the planet where his enemies lived."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"Hm."

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"Cam got a really carefully worded promise and demons can verify that it was actually sworn by the evil god and all his lieutenants. And he holed the planet. And then he put all the Space Elves back. And then my alt invented interdimensional travel and they went and they found magic and they put everybody else who wasn't a Space Elf back. And Cam is really sad all the time but it was the right thing to do."

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"Okay."

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"That was the worst war. All the other ones went better than that. My Arda didn't have a war at all because our Bell got there in time that Melkor never even got paroled in the first place."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"Anyway, I have a while when nobody's going to be looking for me but if we want to be out of here before anyone notices you exist and I have to say you're illegal genetic engineering projects you should probably go make the dome now."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay. Picture of the world?"

Permalink Mark Unread

She gestures at her screen.

Permalink Mark Unread

"You're not indestructible, so I guess we'll be back when we're done." 

 

Pop with Pen. He starts making air immediately.

Permalink Mark Unread

Pen attempts takeoff.

Permalink Mark Unread

He can make air fast enough for Pen to successfully take off! He will do the same! And then he will start making an exact replica of the Solstice atmosphere dome. It goes a little slower because he's also continually making air for them but flying is so much more fun.

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And Pen starts singing songs in Samarian.

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Pen's a really good singer! Good even for a Quendi! He is delighted and asks after a while if she'll osanwë a translation so he can pick up Samarian faster.

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"Um, can try. Am not so good grammar, is maybe problem for learning language - song lyrics all there for me already and not have problem."

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"Okay. I can just ask you for particular words. Boots might be able to help you with the languages thing? She's a subtle artist, they have brains magic."

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"Oh, subtle artist same kind of thing mean world one is."

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"Oh?"

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"Yeah. So maybe is just different nickname."

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"I hope so. If I never see Boots again but there's another mostly-Boots that'd be - well, she won't know me, but I'll think how to not make it weird."

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"How come her instead any other one?"

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"Because she's the one who's most like mine?"

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"If I having be stranded with a different one Mommy probably would want Rose because Rose having ones my sisters."

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"...oh, template children do match? Mitros and Iobel were trying to figure that out."

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"Yeah. Well, at least if is a Mommy and Daddy. Nobody else trying it twice. Is only one Pen though because am fourth."

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"Angela and Rose both married alts of the same person?"

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"Yeah! And are more of those too most not have any kids. Are three Dars two Keziah two Ariel one me."

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"Huh. None of our Bells married the same person."

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"Are any ones Daddies? Daddies looking like -" Male version, female version. As an afterthought, red horned demon version, dragon version, cat monster version.

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"Nope, none of those. We mostly just have alts of Bells and my family, except all Ardas having the same people and Earths having lots of the same."

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"Samaria having an Earth but nobody on it any more, long long long time ago anybody was on it."

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"If you want any records of that Earth I can get them, demons can do that. But I'd probably have to be adjacent."

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"Don't need," shrugs Pen.

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"Okay." Singing! Samarian! A completed Solstice dome. 

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All good things!

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He makes a model of Linyabel's room to check no one's there and then bounces back to Linyabel's.

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Here she is! "I suppose you could just make more of whatever but I would like to bring some things." Piano keyboard, comconsole, wardrobe, floatchair.

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"No problem! It's a big dome, I could actually make a pretty city in there if we're going to want a pretty city. Which, well, I will." Pop back to inside the dome with Linyabel and Linyabel's things. 

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"Solstice is a city! There are probably smaller domes but I would have had to look them up. I don't see what use we'd have for all of Solstice so I just said the dome."

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"If it's a human city it won't do. Well, if it's haut it might. For now though I think I'll just make a bungalow like Boots' back home." He does that. "So I should probably make eidetic memory necklaces for you so you can have the spells, but that's a big project, what do we need first?"

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"Solstice is on Komarr and it's not haut or even ghem there it's just regular people. We need water and food - I eat more than a regular human, I don't know about you and Pen - and I could suggest gardens or stuff to be pretty for you but they're all very high maintenance and we don't have servants for that here so things you know that will be pretty enough would probably be better, and me and Pen will also need places to live in."

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He makes a couple pretty buildings from back home and some crates of nonperishable food and water - "though if we're all eating together I can just make something fresh-cooked, it's tastier - I don't technically need any food, though I'd be unhappy without it. Indestructible."

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"Yeah I get hungry but don't stay it, is just to be growing up more normal even when all safed."

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"Well, then if we have a supply problem dibs on the food."

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"It would be a weird sort of supply problem, I am not going to stop being a demon. But yeah. ...if I'm going to work on the necklaces in full acceleration I actually shouldn't be interrupted, it gives you a hangover to come out of."

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"Okay, then give me a little longer to think of things in case... can you do stuff with data on it okay or is that different? Are there things you can't make?"

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"I probably shouldn't start right away anyway, it's been weeks and I was lonely and I should sleep and fly and sing a bit first. Data sticks are no problem, I can do format conversions too, I can't decrypt things but it's unusual if people didn't know to be careful of data that things were never in an unencrypted format, can't do antimatter can't do something in motion can't do vacuum can't do anything smarter than a snail."

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"Is there a written up explanation of all the multiverse stuff?"

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"Yes but we do know to be careful of demons so that one is mostly chip-locked - demon security is done by putting a chip in your head and training a computer to be responsive to it, so even if someone duplicates it they can't access anything on it - I'm sure there's a mostly complete non-chip-locked version, Andalites can't have chips, I just need to think how to grab it."

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"You have to let new people read it somehow, right?"

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"Well, I'm not giving you a chip-locked computer in case you're a strange kind of human because of the haut thing, and usually we'd have a Bell on hand to give you Bell permissions. I can make my own computer and put it in a different format and give you that, you won't get to see anything added since I left or anything I don't get to see but I don't think there's very much of that."

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"Haut are mostly anatomically normal... I guess I might be weird because I'm a psych experiment."

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"Psych experiment?"

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"The haut are a genetic engineering project. That's why we're pretty and smart and stuff. My designer was experimenting with some psychologically relevant genetics which is also why I wasn't allowed to have an eidetic memory, we can do that but it's new enough they worry it'll counfound results on psych projects."

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"Am also genetically engineered! Lots generations ago though. Angel stuff. Wings and be warm and not get sick and stronger and singing pretty."

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"Makes sense. You need an eidetic memory for Loki's spells and you don't strictly need Loki's spells but they're the only magic I have which I can hand out so I was expecting you'd want them. ...well, Pen, you might like Arda music magic."

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"Why wouldn't I like magic music?"

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"It's fine, but it's most useful to just hand out recordings that have the songs sped up to the maximum tempo within tolerances that let it work and then it's just 'mediocre magic effect accompanied by annoying buzzing sound', it's not really fun unless you happen to like singing them."

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"I like singing. And if I didn't have the recordings on me it'd be useful to know the songs."

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"Okay, then name a kind of computer you have here and I'll make it with the multiverse stuff I have access to on it and it'll also have recorded versions of all the songs we've got and then I can teach you both to sing them."

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"Is having my actual computer," she points, "over there not enough? It's custom, it's not a kind."

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"I can't make files on an actual already-present computer, if you name a file transferring format that works with your computer I can make you the files on one of those."

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"I could splice in another spinner if you make one, and it could go on a disc -" She goes around back of her computer and opens it up and pulls out a disc. "Like this one. If that will have enough room? It's forty petabytes."

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"Yeah, that'd be enough -" he makes a disc with the content and a spinner -

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Which she nimbly installs.

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Then she will have as much of a multiverse report as he can give her!

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It'll keep her occupied for a while.

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Pen can sing more Samarian songs in the meanwhile.

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He occasionally clarifies vocabulary words and starts to piece together the language and then joins her in singing.

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"Do you wanting alto harmony for song? I remembering it."

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"Sure!"

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So she teaches him the alto harmony and then they can harmonize! [At home is always always harmony singing all day long,] she informs him by brainphone without missing a beat.

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Elves'll sing all the time too, but usually only all day if we're sad or worried or something. You're a good singer.

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[Am aaaaaangel. Is not same people singing at home all day, is sign with somebody up and do for hour.]

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Huh. I think I'd like to see your home. They're good at genetic engineering, if nothing else.

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[Not any more. Long time ago. Now is just angels have more angels and not even always.]

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People forgot how? That's horrible.

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[They forget on purpose! There being huge terrible wars all everywhere where people knowing how do any technology, so some people go on new planets then not have technology on them. Samaria one those. Nobody left in world who knowing how do things, have to find all out from pastwatching and stuff.]

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Conjuring all your old science might be faster for your peal than pastwatching. Huge wars everywhere? Do you know what they'd invented that caused that?

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[Weapons and stuff? Dunno.]

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Lots of dimensions have lots of weapons but not lots of wars. Has anyone written anything about it?

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[Probably but is no Jane to asking here.]

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...think I could make a Jane point?

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[...don't think so? Ansibles are, start with one thing then split it and it still talk to itself, not, make one thing it know how to talk to other thing.]

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Then no. Ugh. I might still make us some ansibles, sounds useful and I can't make crystal balls here.

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[Ansibles are good.]

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And when Linyabel is done reading he makes them all a delicious dinner and is only a bit sad.

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Linyabel eats a lot and compliments him on the food and, having read all the things, starts quizzing Pen about her peal.

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Pen can't remember all the Bells' nicknames, let alone all their significant others' nicknames and other attached persons, but she can produce what she otherwise believes to be a complete list of Bells and important worlds by such monikers as "can't pronounce world" and "one with owl". She has learned most of the relevant peal facts in the form of bedtime stories which she only later was informed were real, because the peal was cut off for years of her childhood when Jane went down because some Bells brought a Janegem into the mean world which might be named Materia. There are many magical powers flying around, most of which she doesn't have - she has wards, she has the brainphone and can add people to it, that's pretty much it, on Samaria some songs work like magic songs but they won't do that here absent spaceship-god; she is not old enough to be allowed coins or enchanting; they're not handing out Syntropy wizardry because it may attract evil god attention; she doesn't have a Janegem because what if she'd gotten lost into a Jane-breaking world.

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And he diligently writes all of this up for his peal, trying to get enough detail for each world that proper demons without adjacency limits can conjure from them. Their peal hasn't even dealt with adjacency as far as Pen knows, which could be because they're all adjacent to Milliways but then this one'd be adjacent to Milliways too. Though it could be that this world's adjacent to Milliways but Milliways doesn't let you teleport into it.

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"Milliways weird," Pen says. "It not very much like other worlds. Downside too. Is adjacency like sheafs?"

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"Adjecency means some magics only work in the worlds next to their native ones - like the Tesseract - and you can't teleport between worlds that aren't next to each other. What are sheafs?"

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"Sheafs when a bunch of worlds all together. Like Sunshine. Worlds in a sheaf just like other worlds but can get one to another without Milliways. Or Jane, but she go through Milliways."

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"Yeah - I think the way we'd describe it is that the worlds in a sheaf are adjacent to each other, and the reason you can't get from one sheaf to another, or to a world not in a sheaf, is that they're not adjacent, and Milliways - lets you bypass adjacency, somehow, or it's adjacent to everything, or something like that."

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"Except sheafs all having same magic, usually, or close."

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"So, like, if you found the daeva worlds and Revelation you'd call it a sheaf, but it'd be weird if Space Arda and Warp were hanging off the ends? That might just be a consequence of not finding worldleapers, you only find sheafs that have internal means of travel..."

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"Maybe! Rainbow a sheaf and Alethia a sheaf and Sunshine a sheaf and mean world a sheaf and maybe forgetting some."

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"Our Materia has subworlds, too. I can't believe Materia's a type, that's even worse than Ardas." Sticky chocolatey desserts for everyone?

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Chocolate!!!!!

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"It did sound very bad." (Mmmm chocolate.)

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"When Boots landed on us she was so confused and scared at the idea you could do experiments to see what worked. And there's an alt of me in Materia who died three times before he was fourteen because he couldn't stop wondering how things worked."

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"...I guess he found out how wondering how things worked works."

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"Yeah. And we can't resurrect him because we can't do anything around Materia and we can't do anything for people who aren't reductionist."

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"What does it mean exactly if a person isn't reductionist?"

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"Like flat Elves? We have souls and make oaths and have marriage and have fates and there are reliable prophecies about us unless the multiverse gets involved. Or Materians, they have souls too, though less of the other stuff - it means you can't resurrect them just by making an atom-for-atom copy of them and then having a workaround for the demons-can't-make-minds thing, because there's something to them that won't be present in an atom-for-atom copy."

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"That's weird."

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"Well, this is a science world, like Warp and Cube and Space Arda, everyone here should be reductionist but I can't resurrect them until I get home, I don't think any Space Elves'd wished the ability and I don't know if it'd carry through if I forked them anyway."

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"Well, there's nobody specific I really need to resurrect so I guess it can wait until we find a peal of me. How long exactly will you want uninterrupted to make necklaces?"

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"The slow way - which is the only way we've got - a necklace is two and a half months without sleeping, so I can do it in three weeks straight on perception songs. You can write me notes and I can write back, we just won't be able to talk live because you'll be too slow."

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"You can go that long without sleeping?"

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"Indestructible. I don't technically need to sleep at all but sometimes at home I do so my mana will recharge but here my mana won't recharge either way."

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"Are you sure? What if here is adjacent to one of the Materias, you didn't try going there, did you?"

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"No, I didn't, that'd be dangerous...I can try teaching you a cantrip, if this world's adjacent to Materia you'll be able to cast it, that's a better way to check than using the last of my mana and sleeping and seeing whether it comes back."

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"Okay!"

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Prestidigitation spell scroll! Here is how to read it! Here is how to cast it! Pen can try too but it's possible she won't have mana either way, having not rested since she got here.

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Pen has no mana!

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Linyabel doesn't either!

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"Figures. So there's no good reason for me to sleep. I could do things with you during the day and just work on the necklaces while you're sleeping. It'll take about five months that way though because you can't go into and out of top acceleration that often. What are we planning to do if we don't find either peal anytime soon?"

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"The three strategies you mentioned, making a lot of money to do things with or founding a consortium or making a nice place for people to immigrate to, do they all work pretty okay when people try them and we should go with whichever is easy here?"

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"Yeah, they all go okay, or combinations of all three."

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"Okay. It would be pretty hard to do the immigration one because traveling around takes a very long time and most people can't afford it and there are so many billions of people that it's not realistic to teleport them even if we teach a bunch of people to teleport, since it takes you so long to make necklaces that let you teleport and there are so many people. And it would be pretty hard to get taken seriously if we did the consortium thing because we are all children. But if you can make ansibles we can be richer than any six planets in a year."

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"Ooooh. Okay, let's test the ansibles thing. ...also lightleapers can get anywhere in five days, they work by" - handwave - "pinching the universe and distance doesn't matter."

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"Those work in all the universes?"

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"All the ones that run on physics. So do warp engines but those require antimatter, I can't reproduce them, z-space doesn't because it's a dimension adjacent to Cube, no one else independently invented FTL."

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"Well, I think we'd want to be kind of careful about that because sometimes places get into wars and being able to get anywhere in five days would be a huge deal there - ansibles would be too but I think it would do more good than harm."

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"Okay." He tries to make an ansible as Pen described them.

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Oh look an ansible.

"You might have to make them different to plugging them in to stuff here."

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"Yeah probably, no worlds that independently invented computers have compatible ones. Linyabel, where's somewhere far from here I could teleport so we could check that they're faster than light communications..."

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"It doesn't have to have air or anything?"

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"Nope, probably better that it doesn't so there's no chance of running into people..."

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She pulls up a picture of a neighboring galaxy.

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"Okay...Pen, how do we use these to actually communicate -"

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"...um, Jane do it. Is a way doing it without Jane but dunno computers so well. Jarvises do it too? And computers having them on Peace... Peace where they invented."

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...he tries for the kinds of ansibles they have on Peace.

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Peace is not adjacent.

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Sigh. All the ansibles Pen recalls having seen?

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Mostly she's seen Janegems, which pretty much look like, uh, gems, they just have ansible bits and sensors in them very small and enough computer for Jane to eat up in the crystal structure. Pen's never been to Peace. Jarvis ansibles look like this?

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He tries one of those.

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Linya takes it and investigates the connectors coming off it and calls up an electrical engineering book on her computer and starts asking for stuff. It takes her hours and what winds up being quite a heap of stuff, but after that she has a way to get data through it.

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So he pops to the adjacent galaxy and sends data through it to check whether it's all instantaneous communications.

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It is!

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They're going to be rich! ...Linyabel can invent a less kludgy setup while he makes necklaces, both Linyabel and Pen are clear on how to get him letters (just write them and add 'letter to Fëanáro'), unimaginable wealth here they come!

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Linaybel has a list of more things she and Pen might want to have around if they're going to be not-interrupting-Fëanáro for this long (in particular she needs a power supply for her computer and her keyboard and Pen is apparently the kind of child who enjoys playing with, like, actual toys) but when this shopping list is taken care of yep!

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They can request things in letters, too, they should just keep some area clear so he can fill requests. Power supply! Furnishing for their houses! Media from his peal, actual toys, a giant shimmery fountain visible from the window of his bungalow so things are sufficiently pretty.

 

And then he makes some recordings of the stacked perception song and starts enchanting an eidetic memory necklace.

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And Linya gets to work, and sings with Pen - Linya's got a great voice herself - and plays piano and reads and researches and tinkers.

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He only actually did this once, to get the idea, and it's hard and boring compared to all the other kinds of magic, but he's the only person who can do it and when he needs breaks he can teleport around without dropping out of accelerated perception - he spends some time invisible back on Linyabel's home world -

- when they have request he fills them -

- and finally he's got all the characters in place in the metal and he does the finishing sequence to seal it and slips off his own necklace and puts on the new one and it works -

"Done!! How long was that objective time?"

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"Three weeks. I have a pretty good ansible handler but I might not want to sell actual devices, just route data through ones we own, charge per bandwidth, I can't get it quite black-boxy enough to be sure nobody would just take it apart. And I'm halfway fluent in Samarian now between Pen and books."

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"Cool! I'm going to fly around for a little while and maybe make a couple of the streets in Ambaróna, it's probably not a good idea for me to secretly hang out on your home world. Should we speak Samarian all the time until we have it down?"

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"Sure!"

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Samarian! "I could fly you with what's left of my mana but I'm saving it for emergencies. Where are we going to start selling ansible bandwidth? I wish morph worked here, then we could be grownups..."

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"It turns out Pen can carry me, she's engineered to be strong enough for that. I think a channel between Tau Ceti and Escobar would be a good start but I need a little longer to design a good comm satellite designed around an ansible bank, and then we'll have to find out the laws around that sort of thing."

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"Okay!" He takes to the air and makes a few particularly pretty cross streets of Ambaróna and dive-bombs the fountain. "Any of that I can help with?"

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"Maybe, I don't know, do you know electronics?"

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"Our kind, a bit, I don't know how much they're the same."

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"Probably not very. I mean, you can at least help me make prototypes so I don't have to do everything in virtual model and I can explain what I'm doing and maybe you'll pick up enough to have ideas."

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"I can definitely do that." He conjures a lot of hot air to dry himself off and flaps on over to where she's working.

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And she describes what he should make so she can test stuff and her designs are rather pretty themselves and she explains what all the stuff is for - encryption and signal boosters and fidelity checking and power allocation and load balancing and -

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It takes him a little while to get up to speed, but once he is following along he can totally be helpful at more than prototyping, and when she goes to sleep he will stay up reading technical manuals and have more good ideas when she wakes up.

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Well, she is haut and only sleeps for four hours a day, but that she does do, so he has some time to read stuff. They can make faster progress this way!

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"Haut are a lot like Elves. Like, weirdly so."

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"We don't have the magic stuff. And we don't need things to be pretty, that's just how talented people with nothing to do impress each other."

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"Why not fix up the rest of the universe or something? That's more impressive. And I guess lots of it is just that improvements you make to humans will make them more Elfy because except for the magic stuff Elves are kind of just better-planned humans. ...I don't know why Eru made humans second. 

 

....oh, I totally forgot to say because I'm the only Elf here and it doesn't matter - I don't use osanwë for mindreading, that'd be evil, but Elves can, and if you want us to not be able to do that you just have to internally designate thoughts  - except ones you're communicating over osanwë - as private, and get in the habit of doing that."

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"I got a mind ward," Pen says. "Bet you can't read my mind."

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"Do you mind if I try?"

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"Try!"

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So he tries to read her mind!

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No luck!

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"Yep, you're protected! Linyabel'll pick it up really fast, Bells always do."

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"It did mention it in the things I read," she says. "You may check if I have it yet."

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He checks.

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Yep she's all set.

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"You got it! You can read Loki's spells out of the things I gave you too, right?"

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"Yeah, but you have to osanwë the alphabet still."

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"Want that now?"

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"Yes please!"

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So he sends her the symbolic alphabet.

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"Thanks!" And she starts reading spells.

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And he meddles more with their budding ansible satellite station.

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When she's between spells Linyabel says, "In the long run we might want to move somewhere other than here. Nobody's looking for it exactly, but between teleportation and the ansible we might as well be somewhere nobody could get to even if they really really wanted to find us."

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"There are probably lots of planets that aren't near any wormholes, right?"

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"Yeah. Is there a good way to find where they are?"

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"I could conjure models of all the roughly-one-gee-and-right-temperature planets in some sector of the galaxy, you could check which ones are on wormhole maps if there are comprehensive ones - I can't conjure for 'all the habitable planets without a wormhole nearby', that wouldn't go..."

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"There's near-enough-comprehensive nexus maps. Can you filter by systems with comm drones in them?"

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"Dunno about filter but I can conjure for those for each world and discard it if there are any nearby."

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"Okay, that'll get rid of any world where somebody's got an actual outpost."

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"Okay. Dunno what would happen if I made a scale model of a wormhole but l'll try it in space just in case it's something dangerous, and if I can do that at all then I'll be able to find planets not near any wormholes too."

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"You should probably be actually very careful with that because I don't know if indestructibility would handle the thing that happens if somebody gets lost going through a wormhole."

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"What happens?"

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"Nobody knows exactly, they just don't come back ever."

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"...do you have names?"

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"No... we could look some up but it wouldn't be in what I downloaded before we moved here."

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"I can make news articles if you know what to look for, I don't even need names if you have other sufficiently identifying details..."

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"Jump accidents aren't common. Um, any major news source would have it but I don't know much about galactic news..."

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"Demons in Revelation usually trade people for media recommendations, since there's no good way to filter on your own. Do you know a history book that might have it?"

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"Might have, like, the first person to ever die in a jump accident or something, will that do - what are you going to try?"

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"Scale models of them at various points in time, to see what kills them."

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"Oh, if you can do it points-in-time then the first people would do okay -" She goes and manages to dig up a history of wormhole travel.

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And what did the first person to die ina wormhole accident look like at the moment of death, and at various intervals before that? And what about the first person to just vanish, any created works from after they vanished?

Permalink Mark Unread

No works. No body, either, actually.

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That's worrying. Just - stopped existing? He narrows it down to the second.

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"- uh, time might be funny in wormholes, it's longer for the jump pilots than for the passengers who can't be pilots."

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"Huh-" to the nanosecond, then -

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There is the captain for a while and then no conjurations go at all.

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....yeah, he will not mess around with wormholes.

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Luckily they can teleport! They don't need to mess around with wormholes! They can just find a completely uninteresting-to-anyone away-from-everything planet suitable to be domed and then inhabited by three children and an ansible relay.

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Yep! He starts conjuring.

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And they can all move to their nice new planet and then Linyabel can start soliciting texts relevant to interstellar communications law and various planets' satellite rules.

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Which he will provide in between slightly more careful planning of the interior of their dome so it doesn't look haphazard.

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Pen is fairly extraneous to these proceedings but seems content as long as they will sometimes sing or fly with her.

Permalink Mark Unread

It is a good thing that they both think singing and flying are great ways to pass the time!

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After a while it occurs to Pen to ask if Fëanáro has tried getting to any of her peal's worlds from the places he's been through on his way here.

Permalink Mark Unread

"No, it hasn't, good catch, there's fifty five of them so it'll be a while but I'll go check them."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Wow, that a lot."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Leaping at random is a really bad idea so I'm not going to find any more, but I was panicked."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Why a bad idea?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, we know there are two Materias, right? Could be three. Or - I don't know, a science world that feels really strongly about the laws of physics and breaks everything magic or everything nonreductionist, or a world where a thousand years pass before I get back..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh. Yeah. Well, no bad ones you went through going here, yeah?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Right, which is why I'll go check those fifty-five for adjacencies to your peal. But now that you two'd be in trouble if I got vanished, I'm not going to hop for more."

Permalink Mark Unread

Nod. "Am expecting be found, just, time not matching, so, could be long."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Time not matching?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, when worlds not synced they do different amounts time. Be like a few minutes Rainbow sixty years Alethia whatever."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...huh. I guess our peal put worldleaper anchors when they started even before we had teleports? Or maybe adjacent worlds are usually really close and it's just non-adjacent ones that can get really far? How do you sync a world?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Jane do it. Or anything other talking between them always."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...huh. Do worlds within a sheaf have this problem?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not mostly. Or, not same? Can dilate time with wishes, or other stuff. But is always same, if not is always matching."

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"Huh. ...I've been assuming time's passing like normal back home, but I can't check - if I were a real demon I could conjure past adjacency - if I were a real demon I could've been dismissed and resummoned..."

Permalink Mark Unread

Hug?

Permalink Mark Unread

Hug. Big hug. 

 

 

And then he goes off and checks from every single world whether he can leap to Pen's.

Permalink Mark Unread

Nope.

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Home. Hug. "I'm sorry. I tried. I could try to figure out why the new model of worldleaper malfunctioned, if it was only because I was jumping with wizardry at the same time then it'd be safe to use it and it can parameterize, but I wasn't on that project, I don't know how long it'd take me to figure out what went wrong..."

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"Soon as time going Jane notice I gone, because she eat the spaceship that finds Kisses," says Pen, tapping the opal in her arm, "and she tell everybody and Shell Bell try and Daddy try and they find me."

Permalink Mark Unread

"So you think time's stopped? Completely?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"It stop when going in Milliways. Leave same time coming out. Could still finding a door though."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay. ...I can ask my peal to look harder for me, time's not stopped for them and they probably aren't spending all their time exploring off from Warp because they get my notes every day, they know I'm fine..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"But is whole other peal, is exciting!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, but finding us won't find your peal, your peal clearly has better tools for working across adjacencies. I expect they've conjured up as much as they can about all of your worlds and checked if any of them are adjacent to us - but I'm guessing they won't be - our part of the multiverse is stuffed to bursting with Ardas, and you haven't encountered any, and yours has lots of your Daddy and we haven't got one - and we'd never heard of Milliways -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes but if find us find me, my peal find me, then, bam, other peal... dunno."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Once your peal finds us they'll go find my peal because like you said, a whole other peal, that's exciting. Even if my peal hasn't managed to find us yet." Hug. "D'you want toys? Ice cream? Where I'm from angels can change stuff into other stuff, everyone who sees you will know you're an angel but guess the wrong kind..."

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"Am singing kind of angel not magic kind of angel. Ice cream good... I think blocks, want blocks."

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"You can have so many blocks." She can. And he'll flop on the ground next to her with his wings helping prop him up and pull up his computer and start reading the notes from the worldleaper project.

Permalink Mark Unread

Pen assembles things with blocks.

Permalink Mark Unread

He'll be able to figure these out but it'll take him a while. 

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And:

"How many mindless people bodies could you reasonably make in a day if you had to keep doing it?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"More than a hundred thousand, less than four million? Probably? In theory since it's wished on and wishes are powered by emotions if I got really bored I'd stop being able to do that many but if I could sing and fly and if people were super impressed with me for being a demon who was doing that then I bet I could do that many."

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"Does it help if most or all of them save a person's life?"

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"...yeah, that'd help a lot - how -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"There's people who do brain transplants."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Brain - yeah, that'd work -

 

 

- wait, how do they do that without demons?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"They don't do it very much, there's only one planet where it's legal, but clones."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well. Let's head over there and trade them. Now."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We can't do it now we are small children with unverified powers. We do the ansibles thing first and then when we can pay people to take us seriously and represent us to everybody else I have an idea."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We could steal all their clones now."

Permalink Mark Unread

"And do what with them?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...bring them back here? Or wherever they want to go?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"They bring the clones up to have their brains transplanted when they're like ten - and look eighteen, they rapid-grow them - not to go lead independent lives."

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"I could make us some grownups. To represent us to everybody."

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"Do you want to hear my idea or not? Because it won't work if anybody sees it coming and it's way more people than the clones."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm listening."

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"The people who get brain transplanted are old rich evil people from Jackson's Whole and it's like a few dozen a year, that might sound like a lot but it's not. People other places besides Jackson's Whole when they're going to die sometimes get cryopreserved to wait until whatever was killing them can be fixed. There's a planet where everybody does this, so there's millions and millions of frozen people who can be thawed out and saved, but the rights to control their medical care belong to some companies who get to use them to vote - like if you're the corporation for five million frozen people you get five million votes. So they don't try all that hard to get them woken up. But we could buy the rights off them as long as we didn't want the votes, buy all of them at once, and then wake them all - we'd need surgeons for the transplants though."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...we'd still need surgeons but I could make a new body around a brain just fine, they probably wouldn't have to be incredibly specialized -"

 

Sigh. "A few dozen a year isn't a lot, I do know how many people there are in the multiverse, but it's hard when I could give the old evil rich people exactly what they want even more efficiently -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, yes, you do that too, you just wait until there are millions of people walking around Kibou-Daini making it incredibly obvious that the thing is real."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...and eventually we find the peals and get them all back." Wing-flomp. "Okay. How're we doing on the ansibles?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Pretty good! It's all definitely legal on Escobar and Tau Ceti and they're two of the biggest hubs. Once they can talk to each other fast people will be very excited to make it easier for us to offer the service to more planets and also we will have enough money to hire a lawyer."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Excellent. I'm trying to interpret my alts' notes on worldleapers with persistent targeting, so I can keep looking for more worlds to check for adjacency to either peal without worrying about running into a Materia and leaving you two - well, not stranded, you have the teleport, but without arbitrary matter."

Permalink Mark Unread

"The arbitrary matter is very good especially if you can do the brain transplants thing, so please don't get lost, but if you do we will be okay."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I will not get lost. ....I could ask Pen if she wants to be the one to do the worldleaping but I dunno how she'd feel about that -" Pen?

Permalink Mark Unread

Yeah?

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Linyabel and I were talking about how to look for the peals more. I don't want to jump somewhere bad and get stuck, and I think I can make it safer but I could still make a mistake. And then I thought, if you wanted to jump worlds, then I still have a little mana for emergencies and I could summon you back if you were stuck. But it'd be a lot of responsibility, you'd need the teleport and you'd probably just land in space but it wouldn't be comfy space, it wouldn't have air, and you could land somewhere scary. Do you want to do it?

Permalink Mark Unread

I can go in space. How long it take summoning?

Permalink Mark Unread

Not long at all, a minute? We could go together and have you jump back to me right away if it's not a mean world, and then if you're not back within ten seconds I'll know right away it's a mean world and I should grab you back.

Permalink Mark Unread

And can summon okay from mean world?

Permalink Mark Unread

Yeah, Boots is stealing everybody who wants to come from Materia to Warp and Materia hasn't done anything at all about it.

Permalink Mark Unread

Okay, can go then.

Permalink Mark Unread

Okay! I'll make another eidetic memory necklace!

Permalink Mark Unread

Cool!

Permalink Mark Unread

Yeah!

 

 

And to Linyabel, "Pen says she'll do it, so I'm gonna make her another necklace, are we starting operations on Escobar and Tau Ceti in less than three weeks?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can get you a list of things I'll need for that time, I'm going to want to be actually there more to double check stuff and file plans but the satellite wouldn't go up that quick."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay! And do feel free to write notes, I like getting notes, it's not very long for an Elf but it's still long enough to be a bit lonely." 

 

And he makes her her list's worth of things and goes flying and singing with Pen and then starts the acceleration up again.

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Linyabel writes him notes.

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Pen finds writing more frustrating than talking because it seems like she ought to be able to make it all lined up, is sometimes tempted into trying, and then finds it a total disaster every time. She tells Linyabel about her days instead and Linyabel writes that in.

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He writes notes back! Well, he makes notes that say what he wants them to say appear with regular tasty hot meals in a courtyard he can see from where he's studying. Sometimes he sees Pen, even more rarely Pen-carrying-Linyabel, fly by in slow motion.

 

And then he has an eidetic memory necklace! He sort of stumbles outside because of the acceleration-induced dizziness and headache. "Hey, Pen, got it!!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"You okay?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, I'm fine, the reason I do it all at once is because it takes hours to wear off. But now I can give you the spells!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay!"

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"Do you want to read them off a computer or do you want me to send them to you?" He loses his balance and makes a sudden shrubbery to break his fall.

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Pen giggles at the shrubbery and picks him up and sets him on his feet. "Which way less boring? Linyabel say it boring."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, it is. It's probably least boring if we sing and fly while I send them to you? But it's still boring. And I can't fly just yet."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Can carry you."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay, that works."

Permalink Mark Unread

Scoop! Flap flap flap flying.

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Characters! And then an interdimensional teleport and the healing spell and the invisibility.

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It's very boring but flying makes it better. When he has his equilibrium back she can drop him and he can fly himself.

Permalink Mark Unread

Yep! It is very boring and it takes most of the rest of the day but then Pen has a teleport! "We'll go out tomorrow," he says, landing.

Permalink Mark Unread

"'Kay. Will checking for Jane in wherever going, in case is a boring world but have a Jane. Lots Downsided worlds like that."

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"Okay."

And the next day they go out to the world he's started all his leaps from, and - "worldleap out, check for Jane with the brainphone, if there's no Jane teleport right back, right? That way if it's a mean world I'll know right away and I can start summoning you right away. Then we can go back to the new world together and check if it's adjacent to anywhere we know."

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"Yeah 'kay."

And out she goes and back she comes, no Jane no teleport-breaking meanness.

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Hug. "Okay, this time take me with you with the teleport and we'll check for adjacencies."

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She does that.

No such luck.

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"It's okay. We'll find one eventually. We can do, say, five every day, and if nothing else after a while we'll start getting duplicates -" he's been leaving beacons - "and we'll be able to guess how many neighbors this world has."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Is a math thing?"

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"Yeah! Want me to try to explain how to do it?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Does your world have, hmm, deer? Horses?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah."

Permalink Mark Unread

"So imagine we wanted to know how many deer there were, but we couldn't catch them all. So instead we go catch, say, a hundred-forty-four deer, and we leave little marks on them so we'll know if we see those deer again. And then some other time, we come back, and we grab another hundred-forty-four deer. And to make it easy we'll say twelve deer have our marks. So now we can say that the first time, we caught one twelfth of the deer population, and that means a hundred forty four is one twelfth of the deer population, and that means there's probably around seventeen hundred twenty-eight deer."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Why a hundred forty four?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"..Samaria use base ten?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Um," she wouldn't actually remember what bases are but she is wearing an eidetic memory necklace, "yes."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay, you catch a hundred deer, then you go catch another hundred deer, and ten have marks, so you know one tenth of deer have marks, so you can guess there are a thousand deer."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What if next time you catching deer is half of them or none, not always ten?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"If it's half then you know a hundred was half the deer population, so there are probably around two hundred deer. ..incidentally, all of this assumes the deer population mixes thoroughly enough, but I think that's a correct assumption for leaps with a worldleaper even if it plausibly isn't correct in the analogy - and if no deer are marked then you catch more deer, and if after a thousand no deer are marked then you know there are lots of deer. Or your markings washed off, but I don't think anyone's going to go destroy my beacons and if they did I could conjure 'beacons I've put in this world'."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I mean if you catch deer more days."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Are you keeping on marking or are you just looking for ones you marked the very first time?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Just first marking."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Then your population estimate should be based on the average of all of your later samples, unless you've got worries like that some deer died or that the deer mixed more thoroughly over time."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Why assuming worlds mix?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"We're assuming that the worldleaper's actually random, that does the same thing as worlds mixing. Which it might not be - it found alts the very first trip out - but it's supposed to be and it usually behaves pretty much like you'd expect if it were random. Once we've got all Edda's neighbors mapped if none of them are dangerous I guess we can make a lot of worldleaps and check if it's truly random."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Why is same as mixing if is random?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, the reason it's important if the deer mix is that you're assuming that your second sample of deer is independent of your first sample. If deer tend to live in the same area or something, then your second sample isn't independent of your first one. If you had a way to choose deer completely at random, then you'd know you could assume the samples were independent like that."

Permalink Mark Unread

Pen chews on this concept for a while, then nods.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Want to do a couple more tries?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Kay."

She does a couple more tries. No Jane no meanness no adjacency.

Permalink Mark Unread

That's okay. They leave beacons. They go home. He confesses to Linyabel that he's actually not sure how to adjust the population-estimation procedure for a series of discrete world-visits, each of which might be to a previously visited world or a new one, does she happen to know the correct statistical procedure for that?

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She hasn't made a focus of statistics (after she got through general education math last year her focus has been cryptography) but she's probably got it in a book somewhere in her stolen library of useful educational material! She does remember that the phrase they want is "sampling with replacement".

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And here are a bunch of statistical models and the formula for the variance of their estimate and there's a Bayesian version if he has priors about how many neighbors worlds have which he does not (yes, technically one always does, but he doesn't have any he'd like to be building nice steady math on top of) and he draws up a more sophisticated version of the equation he told Pen and once they land somewhere they've been before he is all prepared to hazard a guess about how many neighbors that world has. 

 

Escobar and Tau Ceti?

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Escobar and Tau Ceti! Linyabel has managed to incoporate them out of Escobar (Jackson's Whole would be easier in many ways, but, y'know, fuck Jackson's Whole) and acquire necessary permits without having to talk to anyone in person. They are allowed to have satellites around each world. Linyabel thinks it unlikely that anyone is watching closely enough to notice if they just appear. They will need to be like so and then propelled in this way to fall into their prescribed flight paths.

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He can totally do that. Satellites are propelled into their prescribed flight paths. When he's done he comes home and swoops around the dome giggling gleefully.

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He has company! Well, not with the swooping, but with the giggling.

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"We're so great!" he says when he lands next to her. "You're going to be the first Bell to own a planet by the time you're ten."

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"I mean, I'm pretty sure we could get recognition of owning this planet we are on right now if we needed that," she says.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sure but that's no fun. Enough money to save all the frozen people, that'll be fun."

 

 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah!"

Permalink Mark Unread

He writes a letter home telling Boots all about it. He makes them a delicious celebratory feast and a big monitor displaying how much money they've made off the ansibles (none, yet, but soon...)

Permalink Mark Unread

Soon lots. The rate is extravagant but the first standard-size message is free, proof of concept. No bites, no bites - one bite - six of them - headline news on both planets.

Permalink Mark Unread

This calls for more whooping and singing and flying. He is very tempted to add fireworks but they'd be a pain to clean up - if only Pen were the other kind of angel - if only he were a magic rock, except he'd totally have despair-spiralred right out of magic when he got lost - 

 

- well, whooping and singing and flying and using ansibles to watch the news on faraway planets is more than enough.

Permalink Mark Unread

Jackson's Whole wants one! Earth wants one! Vervain wants one! Hegen Hub wants one! Linyabel hires a law firm and lets Fëanáro know when and where to put more satellites.

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Fëanáro is the only demon in the accessible multiverse and he is having the time of his life and wherever Linyabel wants a satellite there will be a satellite.

Permalink Mark Unread

Marvelous.

She starts probing the cryocorps on Kibou-Daini; it's slow going.

Permalink Mark Unread

And every day if there's not lots else going on he takes Pen out to do three jumps and checks for adjacency.

Permalink Mark Unread

Once she lands right in a star. It's toasty.

Permalink Mark Unread

If she likes hanging out in stars she can totally do it on purpose sometime, he did it once - admittedly because he was really upset - and it was in fact pretty cathartic.

 

 

No adjacencies. 

Permalink Mark Unread

She doesn't really like being in stars. Toasty isn't an angel's favorite thing, she likes nippy. Also it's too bright.

Permalink Mark Unread

Vacuum, which is where they usually land, has none of these drawbacks.

Permalink Mark Unread

This is the case! And starlight feels pretty.

Permalink Mark Unread

...can she send that? He definitely can't feel starlight, that is kind of cool. How can the sense distinguish starlight from other kinds?

Permalink Mark Unread

Well, actually, angels can't normally feel starlight, there is just a sensation associated with flying around at night that gets called "feeling starlight". Witches like the one Bell with the owl can in fact feel starlight (and moonlight) by magic, and when one-with-owl and Pen's mommy compared notes on this phenomenon Pen's mommy copied it and gave it to her kids too since unlike most cool magic things she could theoretically give her kids talking about feeling starlight on their wings would not lead anyone around them to suspect anything was up. Anyway it's like this!

Permalink Mark Unread

That is awesome. He wants Pen's peal's cool magic things. 

 

 

They go home and look at their Very Big Number.

Permalink Mark Unread

The very big number of money is very big. The lives saved is still a future projection thing but Linyabel has firmly decided that she's going to beat T'Mir one way or another.

Permalink Mark Unread

"That's gonna be hard, hers was like thirty five billion last I looked."

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"That's why it will be so satisfying when I win!"

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Hug. She's not Boots but she is very clearly a Boots alt and it helps with the loneliness a lot. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Pat pat.

She seals a deal with a Kibou-Daini cryocorp. She has to vote on her patients' behalf, can't just let them actually retain the votes, but they verify to their satisfaction that she was obedient to their ticket of choice and oblige her with referrals for some other corporations; the rest come faster.

Permalink Mark Unread

He makes basement-dwellers of the Kibou-Daini cryo patients and tries to see if he can get it without a surgeon - just bring the brain up to functional temperature and make a body around it. Most of the basement-dwellers die but he has time. He reads about cryo and keeps working at it. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"Remember, we want to be able to do them all almost at once. We can hire some actual surgeons, too, not ones with transplant experience but ones who can pick it up okay."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah. The more I can get systematically the less the surgeons have to do and the more I can do at once."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah."

Permalink Mark Unread

So he practices. His basement-dweller mortality rate falls to almost nothing but of course he can hardly check if he's giving them brain damage.

Permalink Mark Unread

Fortunately all the patients have specified wills for how to deal with their frozennesses and these include tolerances for experimental procedures!

Permalink Mark Unread

Okay. ...actually, he can sort of check if he's giving them brain damage, a basement dweller made of them at the moment of death will have a perfect brain except for the not being a mind. He can check cryo-transplanted basement dwellers against moment-of-death basement dwellers and figure out how much damage his thawing and transplant-by-conjuration procedure is doing.

Permalink Mark Unread

This is a reasonable step. Everyone would prefer to be subjected only to flawless well-tested processes.

Permalink Mark Unread

They might also be imagining a capable team of Betan research scientists instead of a lonely neurotic fourteen year old demon whose world hadn't even invented the wheel four years ago, but the brain scans are coming out a closer and closer match and that's what matters.

Permalink Mark Unread

They have pretty good brain scanners in this world, too. (Linyabel has named it Nexus.)

Permalink Mark Unread

That's a good name for it. Nexus, three hops from Warp if only we knew what the intervening hops were. He tries more and more cryonic and surgical procedures. He gets about as far as he can without some actual surgeons to assist him.

Permalink Mark Unread

He can get some actual surgeons. They can be told he's a genetic engineering project and older than he looks. This is even almost sort of true a little bit.

Permalink Mark Unread

Well, Eru made the Quendi and he's chronologically a hundred twenty three. That's bona fide truth. ...he can hardly hide from the surgeons the 'I can make a body around a brain out of thin air if the brain is extracted neatly' part.

Permalink Mark Unread

They can pay them a whole fuckton of hush money.

Permalink Mark Unread

Yep. They have so much money. 

 

Okay. He can make a body around a brain, he's been trying different mechanisms for retrieval of a cryopreserved brain and what sort of substance it should be immersed in when he makes a body around it and here's the progress made so far, and here are the places where, on scans, he's identifying brain damage.

Permalink Mark Unread

The very-hush-monied doctors take this in with something almost vaguely resembling equanimity and get to work fine-tuning the process.

Permalink Mark Unread

Good.

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Meanwhile, the ansible network expands. Linyabel comes up with some upgrades to the system for Fëanáro to emplace at his convenience, and works on reverse-engineering the gem versions.

Permalink Mark Unread

He does that. He makes practice cryopreserved brain surgery patients. He deals with the buildup of stuff in their dome by teleporting it to really far away where it'll eventually spiral into the Sun; it's not the most responsible thing but he loves having an approximation of a vanishing-stuff power. 

 

He sings and flies and takes Pen out to do three tries a day. 

Permalink Mark Unread

And one day on try #2, Pen comes back and says, "Jane, Jane, Jane!" and teleports him into a Janepoint.

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[Hello,] says Jane.

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[Hi! Pen walked out of Milliways into Nexus and found me and Linyabel, how do we put Nexus in touch with the rest of your peal and can I teleport from here to anywhere else in your peal, how does that work?]

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An ansible-half appears. [Put this somewhere in Nexus and I'll have it synced and then I'll drop you both in Milliways and you can talk to some Bells.]

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[Thanks!] And to Pen, "let's go home and hook up Nexus!"

Permalink Mark Unread

[You don't both have to go to drop it in Nexus. I don't think they'd like me to lose track of Pen now she's come back.]

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"D'you want to stay here instead?" he asks Pen.

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Nod.

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"Okay! See you in a bit!" Hop hop he puts the half-ansible in their dome. Linyabel! Found Pen's peal!

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Ooh! Are we time synced to them now?

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We are! And Jane said she'd bring us to Milliways, whatever that entails.

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Awesome. Where'd you put the ansible?

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He sends her the location.

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Out she comes. "Hi," she says to the ansible.

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[Hi! Wow, a little Bell. You all set to go?]

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"Yep!"

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Oh look! It's Milliways!

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"...cool! Is there someone I can ask about all of the adjacency and time-syncing stuff - actually, do you mind if I just make a little video camera so my peal can watch -"

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"You can ask me if you like," Jane says; apparently she's got speakers in the Belltower. "You can record if you want."

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A Bell appears! "Hello there."

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He makes a little video camera and a little note informing his peal of proceedings. "Okay. We've got about two hundred worlds and have never noticed loss of synchronization between them; when I took Pen out to hunt for worlds we were always gone for as long as Linyabel expected from Nexus. One theory is that somehow adjacent worlds are sort of like the worldsheafs you're used to, another is that the time slippage happens between worlds that are very distant and all of yours are farther-flung than any of ours, another is that we somehow sync with worldleaping anchors even though they don't involve a person constantly talking between parts, are there other explanations and how do I test them?"

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"...Well, it's possible I could tell by looking, if you want to open a door to your world for me," suggests Glass.

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"I can just - do that?"

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"Milliways should open to your homeworld."

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He bounds over to the door and opens it.

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The Bell follows him out of the Belltower and through the backyard and into the bar.

Oh look it's Valinor.

"Huh," says the Bell.

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"I don't live here, they kicked out Boots so I invented an interdimensional teleport and found us a world with no gods -" it's your prince Fëanáro, can someone please come hold this door, it's urgent -

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"If you moved out you might be able to get your new world, too, some people can do that. Or Shell Bell can try it."

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"I mean, it's only one hop, but okay -" he closes the door, tells it that he wants to see Boots, opens it again -

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- and it opens onto her office and she startles halfway out of her chair - "Fëanáro!"

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"Hey! Were you getting all my updates? We found the other peal, they're nice, I'm gonna stay in Nexus for a bit to fix all the cryopreserved people - unless Cam wants to help -"

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"Cam was sending installments every day, the last was hours ago - is that a Milliways door - hi, I'm Boots," she adds belatedly to the Bell behind Fëanáro.

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"Glass," says, apparently, Glass. "This is a Milliways door, yes. Have a Janegem." Toss.

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"And come here so I can hug you without losing the door!"

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"It'd be better to get someone native to the world to hold the door just to be sure," Glass says quickly.

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And T'Mir appears presently to hold the door -

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- and Boots scoops Fëanáro right up and hugs him.

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Hugs. Hugs. Sobbing. Wing-hugs. "I missed you so so so much."

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"I missed you too." Squeeze. "Thank you for writing."

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"If I were a real demon I could've gotten letters back - oh, I haven't explained anything to the new peal yet, they don't have demons so Pen couldn't write them letters..."

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"I can - interact with their onboarding protocol and report back," suggests T'Mir.

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"Thanks."

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Hugs hugs hugs. "I'm sorry - were you mad at me -"

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"Of course not -"

(T'Mir is ushered into Milliways; the ansible glints on Boots's desk.)

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And he will take a full ten seconds more of hugs before - "okay so I think we can figure out lots more multiverse stuff now, the other peal has more transferrable magic -"

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[Tons,] says Jane. [T'Mir's collecting it all now and giving us the executive summary of your peal. We've got a fork-match for Boots and one for Golden, everybody else is new-new.]

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"Yeah, Pen and I figured that out. Also Pen's Daddy, apparently there are lots of him and we don't have any?"

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[Can't be sure you don't have any without a full sweep, we'll do that once I've got gems all through your worlds.]

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"There are almost two hundred."

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[Can't scare me.]

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"I want to check if you can wish dimensions adjacent."

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[Definitely on the to-do list. Everybody's very hopeful about a method of staying in touch that's robust against various bad things happening to me.]

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"And I want to wish to be an actual demon without adjacency limits."

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[I think I'll leave the actualness of your demonhood to the philosophers but we can give the adjacency limits thing a try, sure.]

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"Thank you!!!" He is still clinging to Boots.

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A bit later (and after T'Mir has opened the door just long enough to smile and wave and teleport) Jane announces that the Bells are throwing a party, Loki and Cam are hosting, and peal-related sorts are all invited.

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Peal related sorts will all attend unless time isn't stopped in Nexus? He's unclear on how that works but if it's not then they were in the middle of raising the dead.

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Time in Nexus is now Jane-synced. Just having a Jane-connected ansible there does it. Their raising the dead solution is very clever but a wish-based solution is probably better than doing it with brain transplants.

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As long as it's now taken care of.

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Well, also it's Downsideable. Most of the worlds are Downsideable.

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...Ardas? Because there are some people in Ardas with seriously mixed feelings about mandatory continuing to exist even if they wouldn't have to be conscious.

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Ardas are not Downsideable. It's the native afterlives.

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Okay. It's not like they can't resurrect the people who want it.  He goes to Cam and Loki's party. 

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It's so particular! Cam's conjured up a place to have it and there are bowls of triangles around with little signs saying that unbraided hair discomfits Elves and if you'd prefer not to discomfit Elves a triangle will braid your hair for you and there is food and there are nametags that gently needle anyone without a nickname to pick something and there are two Elspeths hanging out over there grinning at each other ready to explain things to anyone who wants the quick-and-Elspethed version of one peal or the other.

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Here is a Sherlock whom you can call Minus, chatting with a Joker whom you can call War.

"I mean, far be it from me to suggest murder was not the answer. They get astonishingly passive-aggressive about that sort of thing at the monthly meetings of the dread soulless vampire club. It's just one among many examples of why I hate politics and never want to go near it in my tragically eternal life."

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"No, it's cool," he says. "I get what you're saying. I wouldn't have gone near politics either, but the job needed doing and I was there. And it's kinda grown on me, to be honest."

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"Scandalous."

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"What was murder the answer to?" asks a Bell you can call Loki.

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"The short answer is 'politics'," says War. "I can give you the long answer and will happily do so but it's a little involved and I don't know how well the details will translate."

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"Lot of world-specific stuff?"

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"A little? The context is 'campaigning to be elected world ruler of a high-tech Earth' - the really world-specific details don't come into this particular story much."

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"We do have Earths in our peal. Some of them are even high-tech."

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"Then you'll probably be fine. So, early on in my campaign, one of my biggest public supporters decided to leak information about my schedule and security procedures to one of my opponents. I caught the assassination attempt before it could get as far as failing to kill me because I'm immortal, and I decided the most efficient response would be to arrange matters so it looked like the guy who'd tried to assassinate me had succeeded in assassinating my so-called friend. Worked like a charm."

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"Well, that's tidy, I suppose..."

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"It solved the problem, and they'll get resurrected eventually anyway," he shrugs. "It's not what I would've done if I'd had the whole multiverse at my back, but if we'd had the whole multiverse at our backs it would've been Aegis running for Hegemon, she was going to before she got stranded and the worlds were cut off."

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"Makes sense. The stranding thing sounds unbearably inconvenient. We should nail down the Warp-Nexus connection so we're all on an adjacency map together and figure out the time problem you lot have."

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"Yes, we definitely should. Oh, I wonder if anyone's checked how freecasting handles adjacency..." He looks abstracted for a moment, then says, "A handful of us are trying it, we'll see in a minute."

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"Freecasting?"

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"My template has our very own personal teleportation mechanism. Can't take passengers but it's otherwise pretty robust. New Jokers can usually learn it pretty fast; nobody else has managed to pick it up so far. And we can get from any of our own worlds to any of the rest, or to Milliways, and Milliways can apparently get to your worlds, so it seems plausible that freecasting can get to your worlds too." Barely a pause, and - "Apparently we can't go directly between nonadjacent worlds, but we can go Milliways to anywhere and anywhere to Milliways, which is almost as good. Sue and Harley are seeing if they can find the missing worlds on the Warp-Nexus route now."

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"Nice. Does no-passengers extend to Janegems or can you drop those?"

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"We can drop those!"

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"Marvelous."

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"Yes, we templates unheard-of in your worldmap are surprisingly useful to have around," says Minus. "Is it true you're missing the entire purple moiety? I'm not keeping on top of the template sweep news, but I overheard something to that effect."

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"That's what I hear, yes. Or at least, purple moiety who are on the list of to-be-swept-for. Your sweep method is a lot tider and faster than ours."

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"True. Can't help thinking there might be edge cases, though," he says. "I just wouldn't want to be the person assigned to check whether 'conjure all written works by members of this template from that world' - is that something your charming demons can do? I'm unclear on the parameters - functions identically to the brainphone method in all situations. Actually, I can already tell it doesn't, if it works at all it'll hit template members who aren't currently in that world, which the brainphone won't. Top marks on that assignment, well done Sherlock."

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"The charming demons can in fact do that - well, actually, it would not work on people who've left a world if they produced all their writing after that. And it doesn't have to be written works, although the little scaled-down mindless bodies if they check that way are kind of disturbing."

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"Tiny zombies! Adorable!"

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War chuckles.

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"The term of art is 'basement dweller'." She pauses and glances between them. And says, "I really shouldn't have him tracked down over just this but I think you'd get along with my friend Sigyn, the both of you."

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"Oh?" he says inquiringly. "Who's Sigyn?"

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"And why do they dwell in - on second thought, I think I can guess," snorts Minus.

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"Sigyn's a friend of mine from home - Asgard - but he's not here because when we found Shadow there was a Findekáno in it who needed somebody a few steps removed from all the crap that went on with him in Shadow to take him somewhere we couldn't find him, so Sigyn did that."

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"Nice of him."

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"Yep. Anyway, you both sort of remind me of him."

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"Jokers are justly reputed to be fairly inimitable and I am not only a Sherlock but an outlier among Sherlocks. This Sigyn must be quite a character."

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"...well," says War, "not that it's ever occurred to me before, but if I were to ask myself who the most Joker-like Sherlock was..."

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"Huh, I think I see what you mean. Maybe your Sigyn's a Joker. An unusually Sherlock-like Joker."

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"I will ask Cam to check."

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Cam meanders over. "Brainphone, I love it," he remarks. "Anyway, nope, demonic check for an Edda Joker or for that matter an Edda Sherlock blanks."

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"Well, maybe it's just a coincidence, then."

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...Cam gets the reference. He raises an eyebrow.

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"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains is probably some unfathomable cosmic force's idea of a joke. See also: there's a Bell out there who, for no detectable metacausal reason, happened to be cursed to turn into a swan."

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"I have not met that one in person yet."

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"She's the one in the feather dress."

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"My template is universally convinced that someone somewhere thinks they're very funny for arranging that. Others remain skeptical."

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"I mean, I turn into a bird occasionally, but it isn't a swan. There are other Bells associated in various ways with birds who are not swans. It doesn't seem ridiculous that there are just a lot of birds flying around, so to speak, and one of them matches the surname we have when we have surnames."

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"I'm a Sherlock. I don't believe in coincidences."

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"I kind of get where he's coming from," says War. "A lot of things about our lives look a little bit like there's a person running the show, and only most of those things are explained by the metacausality we know about. Maybe the rest is the Milliways landlord, or something."

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"We managed to get quite a long way without any Milliways interaction at all."

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"Or maybe they're actually coincidences. I'm not a Sherlock."

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"Nor am I. I don't find the swan curse a particularly intriguing mystery."

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"It's evidence but it's only a very small amount of evidence."

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"Yes, yes, I know all about sorting the signal from the noise. Leave me my charmingly eccentric superstitions."

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"They're all yours."

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"Thanks ever so." He sweeps a theatrical bow.

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"The resemblance just keeps hitting me."

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"The allegedly coincidental resemblance?"

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"I think the swan curse is probably a coincidence, I have no idea about your resemblance to Sigyn."

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"There's supposed to be such a thing as a 'template cousin', maybe Sigyn's a cousin to both of them on different sides of the family or something."

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"Hell of a family."

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"Yeah, wow."

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"I don't suppose either of you know what to do with a sword or something? It's probably nothing or a cousin thing or something but I'm so curious now..."

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"I can't say I've ever personally picked up a sword as such but I'm not bad at unarmed melee combat and I could bring in an alt who has..."

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"I would be thrilled to fence with you in the pursuit of knowledge."

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Loki elbows Cam.

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"Foil, epee, or saber?"

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"Oh, as you like. I could go for a proper longsword too if you've got one on offer."

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Cam hands him a proper longsword.

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Loki's magic stick shapeshifts to match.

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He -

- well, he wasn't trained on Asgard, that's for sure. But there's a certain... thematic similarity. He's too predictable, though, which ironically makes him less predictable at first, because he keeps actually following through on things that would with Sigyn have been a clever feint, and making use of long-term strategies where Sigyn would have improvised. He does his share of improvisation and clever feinting, it's just not a Sigyn-sized share.

Also he is having lots of fun, in a not quite entirely Sigyn-like way but definitely one that's... reminiscent.

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War seems to find this an entertaining spectacle.

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Eventually Loki is satisfied with her results and taps his sword out of his hand and catches it. "You have an alt who wants to try?" she asks War.

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"Yeah, he'll be here in a second."

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Another Joker appears. He is naked, but has his hair neatly braided, not a strand out of place, and there is a magical censor bar with an intuitive intent-based interface to accomodate viewers with nudity taboos. His nametag declares him to be a Joker whose name is {dreamlike sensory impression of a field of grain on a warm summer's day, colourful in the sunlight}, but whom you can call Celosia if you have trouble pronouncing that.

"Hi! I hear somebell wants to fight me?"

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"That'd be me." She tosses him the sword. "Are you an object lesson in how Elves must feel all the time, because nicely done, I feel enlightened."

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He laughs, catches the sword, vanishes it, reappears it in his other hand, swings it lightly. "I mean, I wasn't planning to be, but y'know, happy to be of service."

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"How'd you disappear the sword?"

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"I'm a nymph, it's a thing we can do."

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"Neat." Swordfight!

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And here we have the other half of Sigyn's fighting style. Celosia wasn't trained on Asgard either, but he has all the unpredictability and improvisation and oddball flair that was missing from Minus.

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"If somehow the two of you were able to jointly collaborate on a swordfight in real time... and you had centuries more practice... you would fence like Sigyn," Loki ultimately concludes.

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"Well now I want to meet him," remarks Celosia. "Does anyone want this sword back or can I keep it? I like it, it's a good sword."

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"Thanks. It's all yours."

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He vanishes it with a grin. "Cool. Thanks for the fight, it was fun. Anybody want anything else before I go back?"

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"That was all, unless you want to speculate about whether Sigyn would appreciate a visit or something."

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"I mean, depends where he is and what he's up to, I guess." (He glances at War and apparently receives a summary.) "Huh - I'll bet he'd rather be left alone for anything short of 'only you can stop the nameless horrors outside reality from crawling in the sky and raining death and destruction on the world', then."

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"Vivid," comments Minus.

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"That was my guess too. You're from the Boots-fork's world?"

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"Yep!"

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"At least the Bells themselves have different nicknames. They're going to have to rename their worlds now that 'Materia' is apparently a fucking category."

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"Yeah, that is not my favourite fact," says Celo. "One was enough. Maybe we'll finally get the traction to make them suck less, though."

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"Boots has taken wizardry much farther than Aether has and has been gradually evacuating hers."

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"That works too! But there might be people who don't wanna go, and they still don't deserve - that," he says with a vague wave of his hand.

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"Yeah. Aether's aura would be key to being able to base any operations from within Materias."

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"Yeah. Anyway, duty calls," he says, and disappears with a smile.

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"Thanks for indulging me," Loki tells the remaining Joker and Minus, and then she follows the sounds of thunder to see how her sister is doing.

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Her sister is having a fantastic time sparring with the Yggdrasil Thor! Apparently they have gotten over their respective Asgardian sexisms far enough to give each other a real fight.

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Well that's adorable. (The existence of Yggdrasil was a surprise, since apparently there is a Loki there but he's not a Bell, but at least Thor is having fun.)

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They knock each other out of the sky a few more times and then land together, clasp arms amicably, and head directly for Loki. (It seems they have both braided their hair in deference to Elven sensibilities, but then disarrayed it rather badly while they were trading hammer-blows and lightning bolts.)

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The boy Thor waves. "Loki!" he says. "My alt has been telling me many tales! I would count myself blessed indeed to have a sister such as you!"

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"I'm flattered! To hear thirdhand reports tell it I should be embarrassed by the fellow going around with my name."

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"He is... troubled," says Boy Thor with a frown. "And troublesome. But he is still my brother."

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"I find it nothing but reassuring to have this evidence that my sister's loyalty could have tolerated worse."

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He chuckles. "That is well."

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"Your embarrassing namesake has done some awful things," says Thor. "But my alt is magnificent! I nearly fear you'll want to trade me in! Tell her about the battle with the Destroyer, Odinson!"

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He laughs. "If Loki wishes to hear it."

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"Regale me."

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So he tells the story of how frost giants raided Asgard on the day of his coronation as the Allfather's heir, and he rashly and impulsively ran off to Jotunheim to crack a few heads, and Odin banished him to Midgard reduced to the form of a mortal, and Mjolnir landed nearby but rejected him when he went to reclaim it, and his brother found out about his heritage and went mad with rage and pain and sent the Destroyer to Midgard to kill Thor, and Thor found a mortal girl who was worthy of Mjolnir and gave her what little instruction in its use he could in so short a time, and she saved the town and together they returned to Asgard to stop his brother from using the Bifrost to scour Jotunheim of all life.

He's... older than his Edda alt. And not just in years. Reading between the lines a little, this seems to in fact be the story of how he acquired enough wisdom and maturity to make Loki's sister joke about Loki preferring him.

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Well, Loki is not going to attempt a trade, that would leave her poor sister with Embarrassing Not-Exactly-An-Alt. "I commend your defense of Jotunheim. I've got to be fond of the Edda version of the place, of late."

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"I was raised on tales of the monstrous frost giants, so that they seemed little different from a wyvern or a landwurm, but... they are a people, as worthy as any other, and it was not right to destroy them."

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"Thank you."

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He smiles. He has a very Thor-ish smile, despite the beard.

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"You see now why I worry," says Girl Thor.

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Loki pats her shoulder. "Worry not. I will not be scouring the multiverse for ways to exchange you."

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She giggles and hugs her sister. "Good! I'd hate to go live in an Asgard where boys are supposed to do the fighting! I'll just have to befriend my alt and learn all his wisdom for myself."

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"By far the best outcome! Although I'm tempted personally to go visit and be a sorceress among sorceresses, for the novelty..."

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"I would welcome you to Asgard, of course, but... you might wish to travel disguised, and under another name, or I fear you would be mistaken for my brother, to no one's benefit."

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"Do we resemble one another that much? Of names I have a spare; it was Beldri on Jötunheim."

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"You resemble one another more closely than my alt and I. And you dress much alike."

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"I'm not so attached to the outfit. You may generally assume when you see a Bell that whatever they are wearing was for some reason the most convenient."

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He laughs. "Well, I think you'd find visiting my Asgard in that outfit very inconvenient indeed."

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"Then it will be something else." She snaps her fingers, illusions up in place of her armor one of the dresses she wore in Doriath.

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Boy Thor is impressed. "A fine illusion!"

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"Is yours not so good at them?"

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"I know little of these things; I cannot guess whether he is better or worse at the magic. But it is very beautiful and I have never seen anything like it."

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"I can take no credit for the design."

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"It will serve very well to make you look less like my brother!"

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"Then I will wear it for real whenever I take it into my head to visit Yggdrasil." She dismisses the illusion.

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"Oh, is it one of your dresses from when you were with the Elves?"

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"Yes it is."

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"Elf things are so pretty."

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"They are very good at what they do, and that is in many ways the principal thing they do."

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(Elsewhere, Elves are singing because this is a party and parties ought to have lots of singing. Epic has stopped clinging to Boots and is instead clinging to Rúmil and talking with Millenial's Fingon about interactions with the new magic system.) 

"Wishing on infinite mana like a Maia's on the list," he says, "and that fixes the major drawback of wizardry, and if it works we should have more people working on reverse-engineering it."

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"I actually think we should have more people on that either way. It has astonishing potential."

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A Bell with a shoulder owl conspicuously radiating DO NOT TOUCH (the owl, not the Bell) sidles up. "What does?"

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"Doing science to wizardry!!"

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"Boots worked on it extensively when she lived in Valinor, and it looks like it has the potential to be extraordinarily powerful. She's got classes on it in Warp but we're probably not pushing the frontiers of knowledge forward as quickly as we could be because there's so much else going on in Warp." His nametag says 'TBD (Findekáno)'. 

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"Huh, Aether's barely gone anywhere with that even though her aura would let her do it actually in her own world. Are there particular ways it's nonredundant?"

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"Parameterized interdimensional transit - we're close to having tech for that, but we don't yet, and I don't think it's redundant for your peal?"

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"Yeah, all our transit is Milliways- or sheaf- or Downside-based."

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"It took me eight years to get it and I was very motivated, I can see why Aether would have thought the opportunity cost was too high."

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"She hasn't been pealed that long, either, I think she's less than half Boots's age."

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"Boots landed in Valinor where there wasn't much to do except reinvent wizardry, and she was there for twenty years."

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"Yep, less than half Boots's age then, that should be fun for them."

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"Boots is the best," he says fervently. Rúmil, whose leg is being clung to, nods in amused agreement.

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"I hear she wound up informally adopting you? Unless there are other bat-winged kids around."

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"No, that was me. My birth parents love me but I was really unhappy and when I got Boots back from Materia we left Valinor for a world without any gods and my parents couldn't come with because they're the King and the Queen and people needed them and - and my mom was sick the whole time when I was little, so even though Boots made her better I didn't really know her and I knew I was supposed to love her and wasn't doing it right and we hurt each other all the time -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"That sounds like it sucked."

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"Yeah. And Boots is a really really good mom. I write my birth parents letters. They're sad but they know I'm happy and I'm not going to be a mass murderer like Fëanáros are if no one saves us so they're okay."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...congratulations on the no mass murder thing. If my kid has any attractors like that going on none of her alts have hit them yet and Glass can't see them coming, so there's that, I guess, she'll probably be fine."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You have a kid? Is she here? Pen said there were three but she didn't say whose."

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"Yeah, she's here. She's the youngest of the three Dominiques; the oldest one is Yseult, Rose's daughter, and has the extra-pretty natural-born-enchantress thing going on and the middle one is Pen's sister Damaris and she has wings and Helen's thirteen and I'd say she's the one with a daemon but she usually doesn't bring Kalavar places, too big."

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"I kinda want a daemon but we don't know how it'd interact with being a flat Elf." He cranes his neck. "I'm the only kid in my peal, it's horrible, yours are lucky..."

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"Well, we're sort of merging peals, so you can hang out with interdimensionally acquainted kids more if that is a need in your life. I don't recommend being casual about getting a daemon."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I will probably hang out with Linyabel a lot, I like Linyabel, she's smart. ...Pen's smart too but Linyabel's more the kind of smart I am, we worked really well together before we found the peals."

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"Yeah, Bells kinda start running at full speed when we're six, Linyabel maybe earlier since she's all fancily engineered."

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"She's all Elfy and she's barely slower than me at languages and she wants to beat T'Mir's world record." He sounds extremely pleased about this. "What's Helen like?"

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"...I'm not actually the best person to ask."

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"...okay."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's complicated."

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Rúmil-snuggle. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"That's perfectly all right," he says, as much to Fëanáro as Amariah.

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm sure she's around somewhere if you want to meet her. Maybe hanging out with her alts - or with Juliet's sister, they bonded over being Spontaneous Teenage Relatives."

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"Spontaneous teenage relatives?"

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"Soph, Juliet's sister, was created from a magical artifact, complete with everyone's memories of her having previously existed, by a weird cult that was trying to keep the artifact safe by putting her in Juliet's protection; what they didn't count on was that Juliet's native mental opacity would hedge out the memories that they tried to implant, so she went home one day and found a stranger and a set of bunk beds in her room and freaked out. Juliet later fork-and-merged to integrate the memories so they're okay now. Helen was conceived and born while I was stranded in another world and when I got back she was already thirteen and there's no counterfactual version of me I can fork and merge to fix it."

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He makes a squeaking sound. Rúmil's hand settles firmly on his shoulder. The adult Elves manage to not make a squeaking sound but they do not manage to hide expressions approximately as appalled as if she'd said that she'd given the child to Angband for a well-rounded upbringing.

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"...wasn't thrilled when I found out," murmurs Amariah.

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That sounds like a cue for abject horror to give way to polite sympathy so they try really hard to do that. They do not entirely succeed. "I can imagine," he murmurs.

Permalink Mark Unread

"In fairness my boyfriend was trying to just have a random kid and was surprised that she turned out to be a Dominique."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"My boyfriend murdered several hundred thousand people and I did not have much trouble forgiving him but that I do not think I could ever forgive."

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"We just wish he'd put her into suspended animation until we got back," says the owl, "but we can't tell her that -"

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Nod. "Did he consult your alts on what you'd likely want him to do -"

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"When Jane is down she is down, he couldn't talk to any other Bells, not that I really think he would've if one of them had been stuck in Alethia while I was stuck in our-Materia. He did involve my parents some in bringing her up so there's that."

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"I am so sorry."

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"Thanks."

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Cling.

 

"I almost did that to Boots, I almost got lost for years and years and years -"

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"And you wrote us letters, every day, we weren't mad at you, I promise, we were worried for you but you thought about how to make sure we knew you were okay -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"But if I'd gotten lost in a Materia and that hadn't worked then what - could have, I was jumping at random -"

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"Epic," he says, kneeling, "we are upset because we think that anyone grown up enough to think about having another person must think very carefully, not because -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Also because anyone who loves a Bell should not hurt them like that."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...also that. But accidents happen, and what matters is how you make things better, and you worked really hard to make things better and we are not mad at you, we're proud of you."

Permalink Mark Unread

"- I'm not even sure that's parallel exactly - most of the problem was that I wasn't expecting to suddenly have a kid, let alone a teenage one I was literally not old enough to have had - none of us who got stuck in Materia had kids at the time but if for some reason Angela had been along she would have left four cherubs and come back to four cherubs, just maybe older."

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"The - Elf cultural thing you've run into - is that everything, even death, is mendable, but missing someone's childhood isn't - so for that, if Angela'd been stuck in Materia it would have been tragic on the same level. I can see why it'd be far, far more devastating to come back and learn you had a child in the first place in addition to that they grew up without you."

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"I would've been annoyed if she hadn't been a Dominique too, but something about knowing she is in fact the kid we would've had if we'd actually decided we wanted kids is - different."

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Nod. "Our peal hadn't guessed that it worked that way - I suppose we should have, since it always did within the House of Finwë and there are no Bell-parents who had a first child that wasn't a Bell, but - yes, I can imagine. I'm very sorry."

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"Thanks."

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He is frowning. 

Permalink Mark Unread

The owl swivels his head to look at Fingon.

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"I don't actually know any Bells personally," he says to the owl. "All I can do is extrapolate from how my alts get along with them, and that, ah, seems to vary, but - it doesn't seem like things get easier over time through drifting values or emotional revelation?"

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"What do you mean?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"There are some people whose - grief, discomfort, disappointment - I would expect to get better with time, even absent reasons, because their initial reaction was colored by unendorsed emotions, or because they change what they want and what they care about to make something work better, or because griefs generally fade, for them. There are people who - more or less endorse their initial reactions to things, or at least their reactions after very brief consideration, and who might make a conscious effort to maintain a relationship but who won't drift into more the sort of person who can, and those people seem less likely to be able to forgive something like this."

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The owl's feathers puff up.

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's come up a lot in my life but nothing that's an especially close analogy."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

Sigh.

Permalink Mark Unread

Yeah.

Permalink Mark Unread

"What should I think about before I get a daemon?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"They're a big vulnerability - if somebody touches somebody else's daemon it hurts - and outside Alethia and Bell parties people won't know what your daemon is and won't know to be careful about that. By default you won't be able to get farther than about across the room from each other. You can separate, but that hurts too, although doing it by teleporting makes it quick - but they don't settle into one shape until approximately puberty and even witches like me who all separate don't do it until then, there's not a lot of information about what it'd do to a kid. And you might not get a cool or convenient shape. Witches all get birds, and a square can tell what an adult would have, but it can't predict you before you get to the right age for settling. And maintaining a good relationship with your daemon has substantial implications for your mental health."

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He nods solemnly. 

Permalink Mark Unread

"I was born with mine, and a few other Bells got them because they have to be instantiated and separated to enter Alethia's original afterlife and we wanted several people on that. A bunch of Jokers have them and theirs can consistently still shapeshift when they're adults. Mostly nobody else non-native has actually gone and gotten one but it's pretty common for people to check what they'd have if they did."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'd wait to check but Elves grow up really slowly."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You will have to wait to find out anyway, but in the one case you're stuck with actually having whatever it is even if it's a herring and in the other you're not. But it's possible your template has a theme, some do. Bells don't, we've got lots of birds but a couple flying squirrels and mini dragons and a tiger and a firefly and stuff. You could ask your alts to check."

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"I'll do that but something might've gotten thrown off by me having a good life. I got found thousands of years earlier than any of them."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah - Glass might be able to tell, but you don't want to count on that a hundred percent."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Which one's Glass?"

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"Robes and pointy hat."

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Bounce bounce bounce over to Glass.

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"Hello there."

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"Hi! I was wondering if not-Arda Fëanáros - that's Hex's over there - have different attractors than Arda ones and also whether I'm different because of getting found earlier and also if Iobel hasn't asked you already are Maitimos in fact doomed to have something horrible happen to them or are they just really unlucky."

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"...this is easier if the whole template lines up."

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So he osanwës all his alts who are present and they all come over. (The Andalites are not present. They can't morph and without morphing human parties are not very much fun. Also it has not yet been widely clarified that Firayar did not feed a bunch of people into a black hole in a fit of pique.)

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And Glass squints. "...No formal metacausal clusters apart from the worlds. No phases, exhibited here. Flat Elf ones of you stick hardest to the attractor set but I don't think it's going to chase Epic around the multiverse; attractor set is the same for all of you but it bows out when it's inconvenient without much fuss, it's kind of - leaning on the fate thing, when that's out of the way it doesn't make a nuisance of itself anyway..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh good. Thank you."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You're welcome. Any other questions?"

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"Do you get a sense of what a template's like, when you do that, or just what rules there are about it..."

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"I get the sense of what it's like as a template - how hard it pulls on approximately what things - but not so much what you are like as people," she says. "Well, very little."

Permalink Mark Unread

Nod. "Cool. Thank you."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You're welcome."

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"And Maitimos?" asks one of the adult Fëanors.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Line 'em up?"

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They come and line up.

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"Augh!"

Permalink Mark Unread

...he starts laughing. A little bitterly.

Permalink Mark Unread

"- sorry, sorry. Uh. ...augh. Um. Again the Flat Elves have attractors bitten in harder than the rest of you but it actually is an inevitable/evitable split here, horrible torments may be expected to invariably visit Flat Elves of you, other species of you are merely at distressingly elevated risk. It is a little agnostic about how long and how horrible the torments have to be but them fucking you up is not optional. Sorry."

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"So even if we find an Arda even earlier than Kib's - is Midnight doomed to some eventual torture, do you know -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'd have to check him. He might do a cluster thing or something. Was his Fëanáro here or did he not attend?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"We don't invite the evil set to parties."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I did stop off in Shadow but only long enough to verify that it wouldn't break Jane. Ardas are rather miserable to look at. But I can go see if he'll let me stare at him and make pronouncements."

Permalink Mark Unread

"He doesn't like Bells much - you could ask his supervisory Findekáno?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sure, which one is that?"

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Gesture.

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Glass meanders over there. "Hi."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hello."

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"So, I have a one-off magic power that lets me see the sort of thing that causes templates to be a thing, we call it metacausality. The Maitimos are curious about Midnight's relation to the rest of the template but apparently he doesn't like Bells much and I should ask you before going and staring at him and making pronouncements."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...yeah. Hmm. You can come by but maybe tomorrow, let me set up the idea first? Did you get the whole story on him?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Very summarized. Lots to take in, usually we only find one new world at a time, you know."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Likewise. He doesn't like Bells because they pattern-match to the Valar and it's a bad match but enough to make him chafe."

Permalink Mark Unread

"The very summary suggests this is an unflattering comparison."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's not a similarity any more sophisticated than 'powerful, willing to throw that power around, disapproves of me and my life choices'."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, all I want to do is look at him for a bit, I don't even have to make the pronouncements to him if he doesn't want."

Permalink Mark Unread

"No, I bet he'll be curious. And I'm curious. And I think the non-evil Maitimos are curious."

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"Yes, I was planning to convey the results to the non-evil Maitimos."

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"So in that case I'm sure he'd rather hear it too."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Fair enough. We can't hook up the crystal ball system to our peal because it relies on adjacency, has anyone put you on the brainphone network and introduced you to Jane?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not yet, no."

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[Well, this is the brainphone, and Jane is our adjacency-independent relay person for interdimensional messages.] She conferences in Jane.

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[Hi.]

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[Hello.] "So I can let you know when it'd be convenient to come squint at the evil Maitimo?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Exactly. Although Jane has approximately infinite attention and is also good to ask questions of about whatever else."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Thank you. I will certainly take advantage of that a lot while we're integrating peals."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do you think your template would also like to line up and be stared at?"

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"I doubt they'll mind, but there are fewer mysteries..." He invites his template to come line up and be stared at.

Permalink Mark Unread

They do that.

Permalink Mark Unread

"...huh, I think you and your respective Maitimos where applicable are always going to have societal reasons to be secrets? It doesn't have to be any specific reason but there has to be one. ...Tentatively but only that in the absence of Shadow Findekáno confirming template immunity to ambient evil."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That's useful, thank you. ...what a bizarre attractor -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I see weirder things. Metacausality is very concerned about matchmaking."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Is there an explanation for your peals' Bells mostly dating the same people and our peals' Bells having no two alike?"

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"Found different people, I guess? Something else might come clear when I've looked at people enough but that's what I've got now. We seem to have run into more of an assortment of recurring themes than you - and those of your recurring themes that wind up interested in Bells do so in ways that are pretty hit-or-miss, like, your peal has two Bells who Maitimos could have snapped up and only one of them managed it, while most of our peal's Bell-partners are always bisexual and that makes it likelier any given set thrown together will work out."

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Nod. "How does templates' sexuality work -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Depends on the template. Bells are usually girls and usually straight but can be anything, I don't think we've even seen all the options yet. I think Maitimos only come in gay - much less confident they only come in male, though, there could be girl ones - I think you will always be matched up with your Maitimos at least until and unless tampered with but could be sort of irrelevantly bi under that? ...Not in a Flat Arda though. Most purples are always-bisexual. Jokers sort of take that to an extreme."

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"Not in a flat Arda because we wouldn't get together," he says, nodding. "There's a bizarre sort of logic to that. I am surprised Maitimos might come in girl. That'd be - interesting."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Our early peal was surprised that Bells came in boy, they didn't get to Cam - well, he's switching to Cooper now - till there were already nine of them. I hear your peal did not have that problem."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Cam and Iobel were the first two to meet. We didn't even notice a marked tendency towards girls for a while."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's pretty marked. We also only ever have daughters so far for some reason - except Epic, but he's not operating by standard rules there."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That he is not. Mitros and Iobel wanted to have an Elspeth-template, will that be possible?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't know. The Elspeths - they're going by Rhyme and Reason, your peal's is Rhyme - are too similar for me to get a picture of what a non-Aurum Elspeth might be like or what you have to do to get one. I am pretty sure that other people who might otherwise have a Carinna will be able to skip her by wishing; she has suggested that she should be skipped."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm sure this is in the reading I haven't gotten to, but - Carinna?"

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"My eldest. She's - I have a very nice world. She's all right. But she's extremely sensitive and has a lot of depressive tendencies that she has to work very hard to keep in check and if she were in a world that were not so nice she doesn't think she'd cope well. And she thinks it's probably worth skipping her if matching pairs want kids; her sisters are more resilient."

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Nod. "And you can't see what sort of template-kid will result from a couple having children, except by one set somewhere trying it?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, no such luck."

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"Thank you anyway."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You're welcome."

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He can't quite tell all the girl Bells apart by mannerism just yet and it's disconcerting. He watches as much as one courteously can and expects he'll have it by the end of the evening. Cooper is very obviously not Kib or Cam, though.

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For one thing he goes around with a hawk on his shoulder, does not apart from that have wings, and doesn't dress like Kib!

The hawk is looking right back at the Maitimo.

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"Hello!" he says to the hawk. "Your name wasn't in the very brief briefing I got to read before I came here."

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"That's Grace but she doesn't talk to people who aren't me," Cooper says. "The briefing did say don't touch people's soul birds, right?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes, it was appropriately emphatic. It also mentioned you can find out what your soul bird is going to be with your ridiculously powerful magic but I haven't had the chance yet."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You're not guaranteed a bird in particular." He produces a square. "Wanna find out?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Love to, do I wish to find out, or for a model of it, or -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Illusion of it, generally. You want to wish it yourself?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Am I likely to instead open a wormhole - we've got a team of scientists trying to figure out what those are and if anyone other than Nexus has 'em - and temporarily kill us all by wording the wish wrong?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Is that a problem a lot of your peal's magic has? A square couldn't do that even if you were trying. It's also not by wording, it's by intent."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Gem shepherds her wishing-device - which also works by intent, but can still have some fairly unexpected results - to make sure no one does that, summoning's the only form of magic native to my world and it totally can do that, though it usually doesn't." He holds out his hand for the square.

Permalink Mark Unread

Cooper hands it over.

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His soul animal is a fairly adorable fruit bat. He smiles at him but has no burning urge to go to Alethia and bring him into existence. "Thank you! So I hear your world has an evil god?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, it's a problem. And the less evil gods suck too, I hear this is is a familiar story. Inconveniently they don't have a clearly defined power level nor do I know what would happen if they died."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That is inconveniently familiar, yep. We didn't know how the world would hold up without them either but didn't have much choice but to find out. We've seriously considered teleporting planets sans the evil gods to a dimension that we know runs just fine without any gods to hold it together but we haven't given it a try yet."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Syntropy is, I think you call it 'crowded'. Like, very crowded, stars are people crowded."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What a fascinating headache. Though getting some people into a divine-interference-free dimension could still be worth it. ...perhaps I'll prod my alts into looking at developing evil god procedures instead of idly speculating about how many wishcoins Sauron could make if one tortured him - not because you don't have it well in hand, mind, just because I think it'd be healthier for them."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...even granting that you decided to torture a Sauron for some reason why would you mint him first, that seems unsafe."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oaths. You could in fact make it a relatively safe terrible idea."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...still a terrible idea, but noted. Anyway, I could totally use evil god procedures. Amariah's turned out to be a pushover, she killed his regent and rounded up his servants but left the god himself in the glass box where she found him."

Permalink Mark Unread

"As I imagine you read by now, we cut a deal with ours and then Loki stepped in and did it for us. She's really proud of her tally there but I bet she'd let you have yours."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Way I understand it she couldn't reach Syntropy anyway."

Permalink Mark Unread

"The part of our network that isn't devoted to silly revenge fantasies is trying to figure out every possible combination of magics that might let us bring dimensions adjacent. We shall have to think quickly to kill any more evil gods before they hack something together and we have to acknowledge godkilling as Loki's comparative advantage for ever after. ....I was super impressed that you used your magic system for genetically engineered crops, that's brilliant and the results of it, once we conjured them, had our geneticists rather sputtering with envy."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Aww, thanks! Feel entirely free to pirate the produce."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We may possibly have done that without permission, we were conjuring off Fëanáro's descriptions a few months before the peals...pealed and we didn't want to wait to import your agricultural revolution. We can shower you in licensing fees in a currency system you don't use? I suppose being a billionaire on a planet you've never visited is fun in its own right."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Won't be necessary. Feel retroactively free to pirate the produce too. I have IP on it, but that's mostly to get in the way of anyone else trying to claim they do and thereby making it harder for people to grow Stupidly Large Potatoes."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I admire your priorities and your potatoes. And your alts thought you'd feel that way so fifty star systems are now admiring the potatoes, if ignorant of the priorities."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Awesome."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If you're in the mood for a pick-me-up sometime I can give you a tour of them."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That could be fun."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Let me know! We've been keeping track of the planets if only because we're anticipating someday there'll be a giant Bell lives-saved leaderboard - Linyabel's ambition is apparently to catch T'Mir - and it would be terrible to lose out due to poor recordkeeping."

Permalink Mark Unread

"T'Mir is winning not just on numbers but on 'give me a lever long enough and a place to stand', she didn't have magic and wasn't a princess and didn't have to first attain high political office, she just found the best loophole and she deserves to be as smug as she is. In that very low-key 'one of my parents' species considers emotions vulgar' way."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I am entirely in favor of T'Mir being smug - of all of you being smug, it's a good look on you -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"And by and large we find ways to earn it!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Perhaps we'll find a Bell whose planet was already perfect and who is really boring and he or she will be terribly embarrassed and go on a tear across the multiverse making up for it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Glass's world is very nice natively. She still did stuff to it, just more gently."

Permalink Mark Unread

Nod. "Valinor was a post-scarcity arts-and-crafts paradise for a couple thousand years in there and there was still a fair bit of nudging to do."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Glass has been known to summarize Chronicle as 'cotton candy'. I'm not sure how to pivot from there to whatever Valinor is. Saccharin?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sounds about right. Did Cam tell you about the time he dumped the entire library of Hell on them?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, he likes that story. They were so grateful and then discovered shampoo commercials!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Shampoo commercials and action movies and homosexuality, their poor little worldview crumbling just like that. He used to take breaks from installing suicide triggers by the thousand and decompress by reading what Valinor'd censored now.

 

 

Shampoo commercials really are a bit much, though."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do Elves not have shampoo, or not have commercials, or do you just have to advertise it really discreetly with, I don't know, euphemistic long grass blowing in the wind or something?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Elves have shampoo, but you wouldn't air commercials for it any more than you'd air commercials for sex toys. I could suggest euphemistic long grass to someone's marketing department. Those commercials do have more downloads than I think anything else on Valinor's internet."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That's adorable. Do they also sneak off to read 'Rapunzel'?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think they'd take quite the wrong conclusions about her character from the bit where she throws down her hair to a stranger. ...among the many hardships in my young life was that the most popular pairing in secret gay hairpetting literature was the King and an old friend of his. Perhaps these days the selection's improved."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Secret. Gay. Hairpetting. Literature."

(The hawk starts laughing.)

Permalink Mark Unread

"With plausible deniability, too, it mostly featured circumstances where through absolutely no fault of their own these poor idiot Elves ended up with their hair all unbraided - humans must just not be very sensitive -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not in the hair, no. I'm a little unclear, does the hair itself have biologically irregular nerves or is it just the scalp and 'hair' is substantially a metonym -?'

Permalink Mark Unread

"We don't have nerves in our hair, no, but touching the scalp directly would be horrible so I think the emphasis is correctly placed."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Makes sense."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...curious?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Maybe."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It would be a terrible failure of hospitality to leave you that way."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...wow, I rate claiming the venue as your own to make a line work, huh?"

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"You rate as many outrageous claims as you like. My alt who's actually dating a Bell gave him a planet."

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"An inhabited one?"

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"...well it'd be kind of trivial otherwise, wouldn't it? He was temporarily indisposed and declined to take it over himself so Island did it for him."

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"Awwwwww. That's even better than when Sue - War, since they forked - got elected Hegemon when Aegis was stranded."

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"He was talking about that earlier! It is widely known at this point that one seduces Bells by handing them magic and political power."

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"...that is not an unfair summary. Widely known?"

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"Well, among mes, those being the members of this peal with a particular interest in the subject."

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"You poor impoverished template having to make do with only a couple boy ones. Convenient none of us happened to also be straight."

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"And inconvenient none of us happen to also be girls. Glass says we don't even come in straight. ...I would probably hit on boy Bells just on principle but my geneticists really were absolutely delighted with you."

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"But if I did not delight geneticists or do something comparable would I truly be a Bell."

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"That seems like a very profound question to attempt to consider when a minute ago we were discussing secret gay hairpetting literature."

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Cam laughs. So does Grace. "So there are actually private rooms around, we warned Loki and Cam that parties which invite a lot of Jokers have to have them or the Jokers would just kind of gradually disappear and possibly forget to come back but they will not all be occupied."

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"How terribly considerate of our hosts. Should one more of those rooms be occupied?"

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Teleportation!

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He laughs. "Grace, I apologize for my lack of a soul animal, I hear they are supposed to distract each other."

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"Ah, Grace in particular doesn't mind, she is also secretly a magic notebook and she was that first," Cam says, pulling her from his shoulder and setting her on a convenient furnishing, where she turns into a notebook.

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"...something new every day, in this multiverse." Kiss?

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Kiss!

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And curiosity about Elven hair can be satisfied.

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Elven hair is fascinating and it may take a while before it can be said to have been a sufficient investigation.

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Well, it would be terrible to leave any questions uninvestigated.

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Some kind of failure of hospitality, he hears. (Pet pet pet pet pet.)

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Does he want an incoherent distracted Elf because this is how one gets an incoherent distracted Elf.

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Yes that sounds like tremendous fun.

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And while they are having tremendous fun he watches the new peal and frowns and participates idly in a conversation about recurring features of Earths.

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Something the matter?

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It's very much none of my business.

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So whose business has something the matter with it?

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Most of the new Bells? I could be misreading them.

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Most? Really?

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Enough to strike me as a 'new Bell pattern' rather than one or two in rocky places?

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Pattern's the one by the chocolate fountain. D'you want me to guess or what?

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I'm curious if you've noticed - you're about as good at reading your template as I am -

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I've noticed a lot of things - more of them have kids, they average younger, Shell Bell could give me a run for my money in a trauma contest and so could Sarion and if they were allowed to compete as a team they'd win, Aurora and Butterfly have matchy stuff going on which presumably has to do with being twins - what are you picking up?

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They practically do it all themselves.

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Libbies seem to be the closest thing they have to yous.

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I don't just mean the people stuff, I also mean the administrative stuff, and the 'double check me this is complicated and I might have failed to think of a moving piece' stuff, and the 'can you make this problem cease to be one I have too much on my plate' stuff.

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...yeah, they delegate less, less division of labor. It's not across the board, the Goldens are nearly identical...

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...it's vaguely like they grew faster than everyone around them.

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- expand on that?

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Hmmm - if I had to describe to someone what I thought they should do to become a close friend or partner of a Bell, I'd list 'reliability' and 'compatibility of grand ambitions' right up there with 'visible unadulterated adoration', and now I'm thinking my peal's Bells valued that highly because we in general met under such high-stakes circumstances, not that it's a general criterion, but the multiverse sort of steadily raises and raises the stakes - in terms of the magnitude of the effects of our choices, not the personal risk we're bearing - and that's hard on interpersonal dynamics formed when selecting for the adoration and not the reliability.

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...yeah. Executive summary of Jokers suggests not so much of the reliability. They're sort of magically indispensable, which must be a confound...

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....that'd do it, yeah. And they're very good company, but it makes sense that you'd get a whole peal - doing it alone and under a sort of strain I haven't seen any of our Bells under.

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Yeah. Did you spot one of your Space alts disappearing with Cooper -

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Yep. Part of what got me thinking -

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Like... I am not doing monogamy, Cam-who-needs-to-pick-a-new-nickname-now and Loki are not doing monogamy, but this is a different extent to which apparently Cooper is not doing monogamy, he isn't single, he just...

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Is running on inertia. 

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His boyfriend wouldn't care, I bet you that's what he'd say is 'wouldn't care' and not 'wouldn't mind'.

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Should I have some kind of talk with my alt. Not now, but. 

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No, he's not the problem here, I'm sure Cooper's having a marvelous time.

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But there is a problem here.

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I don't think it's actively bothering them on a day to day basis. There is a suboptimality here. - Isn't actively bothering most of them. Amariah maybe. Did you hear that one.

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I heard that one. I keep reminding myself that being dramatically horrified won't help anyone involved.

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...I think Amariah has decided that dumping him wouldn't help anyone involved. So she hasn't.

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...he would probably take it badly.

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Yep. And then, you know, among other things, what does she tell her thirteen year old daughter who she has scarcely met and what does she run her entire gigantic special-needs worldsheaf on especially if Jane goes down and her alts can't funnel her coins.

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But that's not - no, it's not that it's not incentive enough to fix it - is she, not capable of modifying herself to not mind, or does she just not want to do that even if it'd sustain the relationship that gives her access to magic -

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...she could probably do it. It's probably pretty unpalatable? I am at a disadvantage figuring out how even my own alts feel about the whole 'having children' thing. Also - I have no idea what would happen if he found out that she'd done it. I can barely understand how Bells with Jokers model the Jokers, I definitely do not understand how the Jokers model them back or what they expect from them or anything.

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Well. Personnel resources we're equipped to offer them, advice on that I don't think I can. None of my business, and all. 

 

 

I love you.

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I love you too.

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If you happen to think of a genius way I can make all your alts' lives and relationships better then by all means interrupt me at whatever I'm doing.

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Invent nonperson coin source, mass produce Aydancis.

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I bet we could work out most of the kinks in a torture-a-Thauron plan with enough dedication and effort. ...we could also mass-produce Aydancis but it's not clear he has a burning desire to be forked.

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He doesn't, no. Torturing a Thauron is not technically a solution to the proposed constraint.

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No, see, it's how we get a really really big coin with which to wish the constraint out of the way.

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You make a compelling argument, although I'm not sure whether to expect Maiar in general or him in particular to be standouts in productive capacity compared to the existing frontrunner.

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I'm hoping the several-hundred-fold attentional capacity translates but I haven't been able to convince Huan to give it a try for me. 

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You tried to convince Huan?

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I asked Tyelcormo what my odds of convincing Huan to test it for science were, and he asked, and the answer was 'maybe if you had a Thauron on hand and were debating whether it was worth trying'.

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It's possible it wouldn't work at all. Jane can't mint, which is a terrible pity because her attentional capacity is 'I feel like quintupling today'.

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Omnipotence is barely outside our grasp - and I'm sure 'wish Jane a mint' is already on the list of interactions to check - I bet Huan wouldn't mind checking if it works at all.

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And discovering one's coin color is fun! Mine look like etched iron, kinda like an extreme closeup of a Charp.

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Ooooh. I haven't seen anyone's but Epic's, he raced around showing everybody. Looks like if you got a cutting off a Silmaril.

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Nifty. He hasn't even made a set.

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And probably never will, we hardly need more of the damned things.

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But they're so very very pretty.

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Oh, well, in that case perhaps we should get hundreds more and swear all kinds of things about them.

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Let's not, say we did.

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You're such a spoilsport. 

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Ruining fun since the year 807!

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Hey, if we're standardizing time systems it should definitely be on an Arda, since there are more of us. Or an Earth, I suppose, there are even more of those.

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But apparently there are now all these out-of-sync worlds.

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Which is weird. They could be really far from each other, but - there's no noticeable slippage between, say, Cube and Wish, and that's nine hops between them.

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Maybe Milliways does it, it pauses things in some worlds while others proceed.

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Could be. If we start experiencing it that's going to be distressing.

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It's definitely not caused by Jane, at least, so placing the ansibles can only help.

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And I suppose since our transit method doesn't break down, if time is moving at different rates we'll notice we haven't heard from someone and go check in, we won't - be cut off -

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And the crystal balls might constitute enough connection to avoid desyncing in the first place.

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I wish we could give the other peal some redundancies on that front.

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Yeah, me too.

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(The Fëanors are in a corner talking magic applications over osanwë because words aren't fast enough.)

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This is intriguing. Matilda is intrigued. She drifts over and tries to figure out what they're talking about by looking at the visual aids. (She's doing a pretty good job, and keeping all those thoughts in her public sphere.)

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Then they will include her in the loop of the very fast-paced osanwë conversation! They've had Epic conjure a lot of content on the development of magic systems in the Effulgence peal, in case any of them have an interesting origin and history, they're systemically pairing all magic things to see if they can come up with useful interactions - of most interest is whether any magic system can alter the rules of other magic systems -

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Matilda retrieves and displays all her own template's notes on intra-peal magic interactions to date. Wellspring magic (her very own magic system!) is a potentially promising avenue for nudging at otherwise unnudgeable systems because it's so extremely freeform, but it's underexplored because of a combination of convenience barriers and safety concerns - it's less uniformly distributable than enchantment or wishcoins, people get the amount of it that they get and there's no known mechanism for altering that, and it might be contagious to new universes if someone started throwing large amounts of it around, and you really have to keep on top of the usage patterns or you end up with Sunshine worlds and no one wants that.

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There are inconveniently no empty dimensions in which they could test things like contagiousness to new dimensions. Which is odd, if you think about it, one wouldn't expect that all dimensions would contain life - if nothing else, some would be expected to have accidentally killed themselves off, or to be before the development of life in their geological timelines -

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Yes - she brainphones Jellybean to ask if the Jokers have tried to look for empty worlds with freecasting, and gets a [no but I'll give it a shot] - it makes a certain amount of sense that you would not find empty dimensions through Milliways given its mechanism for connecting to worlds, but worldleapers have no such excuse, maybe there's an underlying quirk of the adjacency system where it only connects to new worlds once they have any life in them? You'd still need an explanation for why no one has killed themselves off, but that could be related to the age of the worlds in question, maybe the worlds in the adjacency network have a span of ages such that none of them have been around long enough to have a high chance of all sapient life having wiped itself out by now - is there a way to check how old a world is, the world itself and not any local species or cultural institution, has someone done it for all the worlds yet -

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Demons can conjurefor scale models of universes, no one's done it, someone should - they start refining what you'd conjure for to get the answer they're interested in - maybe it's harder than it appears to wipe out all sapient life in a world? It looks like just one nuclear war in a mid-tech universe would do it but they haven't found any such yet, maybe that's suggestive -

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Could be metacausal, but Glass hasn't turned up anything - she doesn't see all possible metacausal things, though, Earths are clearly some sort of template but she doesn't get a metacausal read on them - for more evidence on this point consider the remarkable tendency of Sunshine worlds not to end despite regular active attempts on the part of residents - Jellybean says [no dice so far but a Joker might not be the best person to go looking for uninhabited universes anyway, giving up for now] - if they really badly need an empty world to experiment on at some point, how tractable would it be to consolidate a few of the lightly-inhabited ones? - should she call her alts into this conversation -

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They would love to meet her alts but on general principles not because they expect the problem here is lack of any world-specific knowledge. Joy can check for uninhabited worlds, they don't know if Joy's been asked to check. How far has a Sunshine world ever gotten towards the brink of extinction?

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She calls her alts into the conversation because she expects they would also love to meet the Fëanors and this discussion is likely to benefit from the inclusion of more brains. This is Tilly, this is Agent Honey, the identical moonstone-like pendants they're all wearing are Adularia who doesn't want to participate openly in the conversation but is taking notes in the background - Tilly brainphones a few people asking about Sunshine worlds and hears back that it's come down to 'if the Slayer had swung that axe half a second slower' at least a couple of times -

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Okay, so there's probably a metacausal mechanism making worlds not end in extinction and that's interesting, and there'd have to be something separate for worlds not being discovered before evolving their own life because they just did a count and current worlds spent more years not-having-multicellular-life than having it, let alone intelligent. ...they haven't found an Arda before Elves yet either.

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Yes, this definitely seems to point to some possibly-causal possibly-metacausal effect ensuring that newfound worlds are inhabited. If causal, the Matildas all think that the most plausible hypothesis at first glance is something about sapient inhabitants making it possible to find a world where it otherwise wouldn't be; if metacausal, they're coming up blank and don't have a good way to investigate further. Metacausality is like that.

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They are really really not fans but mostly because their world's metacausality seems mostly Horribly Unfairness For Everyone. It might be that adjacent worlds tend to have things in common, and so worlds that are adjacent tend to be similar in inhabitedness, and elsewhere there's a giant cluster of empty worlds?

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Plausible. And testable by observation, as they expand their network of adjacencies - if they start going out depth-first they'll get results faster on this question, but that might trade off against other concerns, the Matildas aren't familiar with the strategies currently in place for adjacency-exploration or the reasoning behind those strategies.

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Places where they have leverage, though coins work everywhere and are enough leverage that it plausibly changes the strategy - it might be worth just going to a thousand worlds and wishing in various non-disruptive improvements before they even try anything more complicated.

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Coins are useful and it's handy that so many templates can produce them so casually! Matildas are not personally one such template, but it's a trait overrepresented in the purple moiety for some reason. Anyways, yes, widespread wished improvements are a good idea. Maybe some productive mints will want to emigrate to various points on the adjacency map - it's useful that the adjacency map doesn't fall apart like the Jane-linked worlds tend to, it means they don't have to secure each individual world its own trusted productive mint in order to have a reasonable guarantee of a coin supply -

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That should work. They start debating search strategies once they're expanding rapidly.

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Which is fascinating, and the Matildas are delighted to contribute. They like this template. It's so nice to be able to have a really engaging conversation.

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It's mutual.

 

 

...meanwhile other Elves are hearing about the Accidental Child Thing and doing a less good job than the Maitimos at not being visibly horrified.

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...ooooh someone should make sure Kas doesn't—

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—too late.

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War emergency-taps every Joker in reach and freecasts after Kas, wherever Kas went, hopefully not directly into the nearest available star but with that look on his face it's hard to be sure -

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Kas is not in any stars. Kas is crying on his daughter.

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War hugs them both.

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I have no ability to stop hurting the people I love, Kas sends to War, who promptly echoes it to the rest of the Jokers and Helen. I am not okay and I have not been okay in a really long time and everything I do makes it worse one way or another and I'm tired of not being okay and I just want to stop -

He manages words to ask directly, out loud, "Button, will you be okay without me?"

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"Yeah," she says. "I'll be fine."

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Miscellaneous Elves are concerned at this scene.

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Kas kind of doesn't notice. Kas is trying to figure out how to tell his girlfriend that he is going to freecast into the sun. Some sun. Any sun.

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War notices but he's a little busy coordinating Jokers. Queenie is on standby to come hug Kas but right now if he gets a little more comfortable he might pull himself together enough to freecast into a star and not enough to say any more goodbyes first and this is not what he would want on reflection but pulling him out again immediately afterward would hurt him a lot. Do any of these spectators think they have anything useful to contribute to the situation?

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Not really? They're curious why you'd do 'horribly painful and not in fact fatal' as a suicide method but it doesn't seem appropriate to say that and also this seems like a really terrible solution to hurting people you care about but they know enough Maitimos not to say that and, like, it probably doesn't help to observe that no conceivable thing about this situation will be improved by the proposed solution?

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While War hugs Kas, Sue pings Aegis. Uh so Kas wants to fling himself into the sun can you help us figure out how to tell Amariah and also maybe hug me this is really upsetting?

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Aegis pops into place and hugs Sue. Why does he want to fling himself into the sun.

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Hugs.

He heard some people talking about how having Helen was totally unforgivable and like - it's not that he actually cares what a buncha strangers from the other multiverse think about his life choices, but it reminded him of all the things he's upset about in a really clear and vivid way and now he's having a breakdown?

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How will being in a sun help.

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He bounces the things Kas said.

So one, being in a sun is preferable to continuing to have this breakdown; two, flinging himself into a sun will predictably upset people but, like, predictably, and once, as opposed to unpredictably and who knows how many times; three, even if he weren't actively having a breakdown about it, he's been fucked up for decades and he still hasn't figured out a way to handle it and the one thing he tried that seemed like it was going to work turned out to be, well, Helen. So he figures at this point he's not going to find a good way to deal and this one's at least been tested, Harley flung himself into a sun and he's fine now, Kas figures we'll leave him in there for a chunk of eternity and then someone will figure out a way for him to be okay and we'll pull him out. And if we never pull him out then he never would've been okay and at least he won't have to experience not being okay because he'll be busy.

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Uh, he and Amariah should like formally break up first. Is Helen, like, self-sufficient, or going to live with Amariah's parents, or figuring Amariah will step in, or what.

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Self-sufficient, might decide to live with Amariah's parents anyway, might find somewhere else to be. Can you interface with Amariah, none of us has any idea what to say to Amariah and you are like, the Joker-Bell Communication Expert.

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Is he in fact breaking up with her or does she have to do that or should she just consider-it-done.

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...I don't know what those options work out to - he's, um, the thing he's doing is closer to killing himself than breaking up with her but in situations where everyone isn't immortal the one kind of entails the other... I don't think he is actually capable of, like, issuing a formal breakup notice, he's barely functional, he wants to tell her what's going on in whatever way will be least bad for her but he needs other people to figure out what that is and do it because he can't.

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So the last thing. Okay, I can tell her.

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Okay. Thanks.

Hug.

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Aegis relays the information where it needs to be. Personalized version for Amariah, digest for all the other Bells because they'll want to know -

 

...Uh, good or bad idea to suggest specific suns.

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Might depend on why? Who's got a specific sun in mind?

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Loki. The Erus sorta kink on tragedy and may not be getting enough of a dose to make them non-dangerous in the Ardas. If there's a sun in Telperion that would do for Kas's purposes that's the one with the most tragedy averted and Erus might remain dormant longer if we were throwing them a bone occasionally.

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Oh, that's perfect, he'd love to actually end up doing somebody some good with this - he bounces the idea to Kas, gets back a wordless reply - he can do two, he and Petaal don't have to be in the same sun, is there a runner-up?

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Shine. If these places have actual working stars, they might not, if those two don't Millennia's worth a try and Space Arda definitely has real stars.

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Okay. Anything else before we get him in shape to freecast and he goes - does Amariah want to say goodbye in person or no -

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She'd take a hug goodbye.

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He can hug her goodbye. Sue sends the location.

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There she is.

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And there is Kas, and there is Petaal being a tiny chinchilla with soft downy wings and fluttering over to Path, and there is Kas hugging Amariah.

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Sad hugs.

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Very sad. Very hugs.

"I'm sorry - I can't - handle anything - I never wanted to hurt you," says Kas.

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Sue says to Aegis, Can you get a prioritized list of Ardas from Loki? Harley's going to go scouting so Kas doesn't have to jump around looking for suns.

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Telperion Shine Elentári Luster Shadow Millennia Space.

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Telperion and Shine both work. Okay.

Sue bounces the results from Harley to Kas, and—

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—they're gone.

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Amariah looks into the space he occupied for a moment, then - teleports off somewhere.

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...Millenia's Fingon also teleports off somewhere.

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Sue hugs Aegis. Queenie hugs Helen.

War informs spectators, Anyone who has questions about what just happened can ask me, I won't mind.

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It is unclear to me why someone would prefer eternal torment to death.

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Well, death isn't on the table, he's torchable and that doesn't come off, says War. So the question is what if any experiences he wants to have until he eventually ends up having to walk around like a basically alive person again. No experiences at all would mean it'd feel like no time had passed and he'd still be in the middle of having an emotional breakdown. Vague dreamlike experiences would be both of the worst things in the world to a Joker - we handle loneliness and sensory deprivation really badly. The less vague the dreams, the likelier they'd end up just being more of this emotional breakdown he really doesn't want to be having. Flinging yourself into a star, on the other hand, is great for making sure you come out in a different mental state than you went in. And it's the exact opposite of sensory deprivation and it keeps you too busy to be lonely.

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He's that confident that someone will against his wishes bring him back?

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Forever is a long time. If nothing else, those stars are going to burn out eventually. And he's fine with being brought back if the Jokers ever figure out a way for him to be okay again. Which I'm sure we will. Jokers are always okay in the long run.

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...okay. And this was - caused by the Elf opinion on reproductive coercion -

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Less caused, more - set off? He wasn't okay, he hasn't been okay in sixty years, he was on track to keep right on being not okay for the forseeable future and eventually that was probably going to end in something like this one way or another, but overhearing some people having opinions about Helen is what ended up getting him there.

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Is Helen okay?

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Yeah, she'll be fine, she'll miss him but in an okay way not a life-ruining way.

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And Amariah?

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I don't know. Apply to a Bell for that one. I'm pretty sure she'll be all right at some point but I don't know how long it'll take or what it'll look like in between.

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...okay. Thanks.

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No problem.

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Meanwhile in Telperion Eru says delightedly to the person who has teleported inside a star - 

Hello!

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...this is not quite how this was meant to go.

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...didn't you pick this universe because it would delight me? I am delighted. I wanted you to know that.

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...I'm mostly confused about the part where I can hear and understand and think about you while being inside of a star? he says. But, you know, glad to hear it. It's nice that somebody's getting something good out of this mess.

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Oh, I did that so I could tell you I was delighted. I'll undo it when we're done talking, I know you wanted to be inside the star and not just for the fancy light effects. (He tinkers so that Kas can see the star the way he sees the star. There are fancy light effects.)

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...that's really pretty, says Kas.

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I know! ...I can leave it, if you'd like! You probably won't be able to appreciate it because of the horrible agony but still.

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Sure, that'd be nice.

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Okay!

 

Back to horrible agony from repeatedly torching in the middle of a sun.

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Horrible agony and fancy light effects! The fancy light effects actually are a positive contribution to the experience, it's more sensory information and Jokers are generally in favour of more sensory information.

Also, Eru is adorable. Kas is no longer in much of a state to appreciate that, but wow, Eru is really adorable.

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Meanwhile back at the party that is kind of a party-ending turn of events, isn't it.

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Kinda, yeah. People are welcome to hang out if they feel moved to do so but it's no longer a very party atmosphere.

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If there are people who aren't immediately clearing out he will in fact ask a Bell if Amariah's going to need anything.

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"...she'll cope. She doesn't have as much of a, a retinue as some of us, might bite her, but she'll take some downtime and filter her sheaf for masochists and borrow somebody's Libby to do interviews probably?"

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"Okay. I - get the sense you usually have a strong preference against relationships crashing and burning with intense dramatics."

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"This is actually literally the first time a Bell has had a breakup, at all, uh, unless you count Iobel's thing where there turned out to be false pretenses, but if one was going to happen this would not be the preferred format no."

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"What -"

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"We don't date until we do and then we kinda latch on, turns out?"

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"Elves are the same way - with us we'd also spend at least a couple centuries grieving a failed relationship, Bells seem like they'd prefer to not do that -"

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"...yeah that sounds like a waste of time. But we don't have a process because this has not in fact happened before even in a less dramatic way. I'd have better predictions if somebody had in fact broken up with their significant other before, especially a Joker."

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Nod. "Are there other topics we shouldn't bring up lest we bring to the forefront -"

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"Uh, there's all sorts of history but none of it quite has the simultaneous complete unavoidability of the subject and also the barbed wire everywhere of 'Amariah steps out of the universe and comes home to a teenage daughter'. Like, most of the shit there is no real reason to bring it up unless it's a good time for that? But Helen, like, exists and it's not her fault, and has alts whose moms actually brought them up, and is legit entitled to come to Bellparties, and stuff? Soph might be a similar minefield except Juliet could, like, fix that, so they're cool now. - Soph is Juliet's sister who was created complete with everybody's memories of her except the memories thing didn't work on Juliet, but she patched that once she decided Soph was not secretly evil or something."

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He shudders at the 'steps out of the universe and comes home to a teenage daughter'. "I did notice that this situation seemed like a ticking time bomb but still, we would prefer not to have sped it up."

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"Not sure letting it sit would've really helped? I guess it depends on how Helen reacts."

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"What's the Bell perspective on the whole thing?"

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"...the Bell perspective on the whole thing is that we feel very uncomfortably inhibited from perspective-having because oh God Helen exists and is an innocent thirteen year old girl it is not like Amariah came home and he'd done something it's reasonable to treat as unadulterated negative like turned China into Swiss cheese."

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This is reasonable enough. He does not have enough of a read on Helen to decide if she should just Probably Not Be Around Elves, so he leaves it at that and goes home.

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Peal integration proceeds. Transmissible magic is transmitted; everybody who's picking up enchanting gets the spiel on the use of Jokers as enchannels; it turns out that Boots and Golden are part of what is in a larger group of Bells a pattern of mental opacity that simply happens not to have been sampled much in the adjacency-peal's set; Goldens still have not picked disambiguating nicknames; anyone who wishes to can sign up for Jane's newsletter, an ongoing text ticker of peal events by brainphone; "coin" gets verbed given the ambiguity of "wish"; it turns out that going to a daeva world and torching does not confer daeva powers; keen observers might notice that some of the Bells with Jokers are not as heavily represented in interpeal interactions as one might naively expect...

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He spends a week and a half in Millenia's Valinor quietly reading and occasionally singing and then he goes and finds Midnight.

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"What's the new peal like?"

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"Well, at the grand introductory party someone decided to suicide-by-throwing-themself-into-a-Sun and then I was too distracted to follow most of the exciting news since.

 

 

...there's a Bell who sees - they call it 'metacausality' - from our background it makes more sense to call it fate - and she's curious if you have the standard Maitimo one and wants to come see it and tell us."

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"Sure."

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And he conveys this to Glass.

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Glass shows up shortly afterwards. "Hi, I'm Glass."

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"Welcome to Shadow. I would've named it something cheerier."

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"If you want to suggest something go ahead. Frankly I find all Ardas pretty unpleasant to look at; this one is worse but not by all that much."

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"What's the difference, if it's describable?"

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"Ardas are the world equivalent of being in a terrible mood and then going for a walk in sleety weather just to sort of wallow in it. I think it's the Erus, based on other clues, but it's embedded in the Ardas themselves, I can't see the Erus. This one is like that and also after the walk in the sleet you go home and your roof's caved in, or something?"

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"...huh. And me? You won't be able to get the other ones to line up for reference."

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"They lined up at the party, it helps to look at everybody at once but it's not strictly necessary. ...I think there could be more of you, everyone will be so thrilled."

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"...huh. Maybe they'll try a better handling strategy."

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"Wouldn't hurt to have one lined up. I do expect you to be consistently outnumbered. I don't think you started different, you just reacted like so to the," handwave, "roof-caving-in thing. So if we find a Shadow-like Arda earlier in the timeline evac's an option, except then a you we evacuated would get the other end of the horrible suffering thing - there's a horrible suffering thing, standard Maitimos take that on themselves, you offloaded it."

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"That's - possible? Could they have done it as well -"

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"Could they have offloaded it? No. Flat Elf standard Maitimos don't really get options there at all except with some luck they can spend less time with it or something, non-Flat-Elves can potentially avoid it outright."

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"...huh.

 

I didn't choose either."

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"I don't mean 'options' in some literal friendly sense, I mean some metacausal stuff will chase people if they don't sit still for it. And a Flat Elf of you who does not grow up in a Shadow-like Arda and do something in the genre of what you did with that situation to offload the attractor will be hunted down by the horrible suffering thing. There's another template with a horrible suffering thing too - it's usually abusive parents, so we found a baby one and kidnapped him and gave him to an Elspeth, not the one you met, a different one, you met Rhyme and the other's calling herself Reason now. And he had a lovely childhood with no horrible suffering in it and then he spontaneously developed the ability to uncontrollably teleport and landed in over his head among his worst nightmares and spent a few years in a sun to avoid that. Metacausality likes to be unobtrusive when possible but some things are very insistent."

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"Is there someone we can murder -"

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"Not that I know of."

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"Well. Thank you."

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"You're welcome. I'm not sure if it'll improve relations or anything - I mean, you were already known to lack free will and stuff - but I'll tell everybody."

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"They've recently been talked down from withholding the information I need to make my world a nice place to live, and beyond that I'm not sure it's productive to improve relations? Well, possibly with the Bells who are separable from my alts, for its own sake. But for my alts it's a trauma thing, knowing no one in the merry circus had free will doesn't change that."

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"Nobody in my peal had any of you around, so there's that."

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"I would be delighted to be a resource to your peal in any way I can. In particular if you have people who think applying science to wizardry sounds like tremendous fun and want help acquiring a Maia best friend for that project -"

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"Funnily enough we have a fork of Boots. Aether's much younger and hasn't studied much wizardry, but knows the basics."

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"Well, I take it there's half a dozen of Olórin running around and she knows she gets along with him. Or can you coin yourself infinite mana after all, I know they were trying to get that to work -"

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"Can coin amounts of mana; amounts cannot be 'infinite'."

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"Oh, excellent! ...assuming reasonably large amounts, at least."

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"Scales with coin size."

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"I assumed as much. Anyway, anyone who wants anything we have is welcome to drop in and figure out how we can help."

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"Thanks. Anybody put you on the brainphone yet?"

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"They have not."

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[Here you go.] "That'll let you talk to Jane if anything comes up, she has arbitrary attention, don't worry about pestering her."

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"I won't. Thank you for the - read."

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"No problem."

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"Anything else while you're here?"

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"Don't think so. Bye." Off she goes.