Tentou laughs, lightly. "Anyways... I'm also rather talented at combat, if I do say so myself. I can lay powerful illusions over my enemies with just a glance, I can summon black flames that will burn anything, I can summon a spectral warrior to surround me, enhancing both my offense and defense... I can move faster than ordinary humans can perceive, and my eyes allow me to spot details no one else can - and they grant me short term precognition of everything in my line of sight. I can control the classic elements - earth, fire, water, lightning, and wind, not all that hydrogen and carbon stuff. I'm best at fire and lightning, of course. I know techniques for summoning the souls of the dead into indestructible bodies of ash under my control. I can summon any technology I have witnessed or conceived of, though that's a bit costly..."

"Costly? How so?"

"Chakra is life force - and it's a resource. It renews slowly over time, more quickly if I'm meditating, but it can be burned down, and it's required for every technique I have. If I run low, I get sick. Mostly with symptoms like hypothermia. If I run out, I risk dying - though I've never actually gone nearly that far into chakra exhaustion."

Bellona nods. "Yeah, that makes sense."

"Excellent."

"As for my story... I was born into a prominent and famous clan, the Uchiha, within an organization of shinobi called Konoha. Shinobi are the main sort of magic user from my world. The Uchiha were discontent with their role in Konoha, and the seeds of rebellion began germinating within them... So Konoha retaliated. All in secret, of course - plausible deniability is rather important to any sensible military dictatorship. They tasked my older sister, one of the only loyal Uchiha, with the massacre of our family - except me, a condition my sister laid down for her cooperation. So, when I was seven... Bye bye went the Uchiha, and my sister took all the blame as a lone wolf, tragically snapped, fleeing from Konoha before any response could be levied."

"I was discontent, after, restless, and at thirteen an opportunity presented itself - a man named Orochimaru, who offered me power and a place at his side... There was a catch, of course - he wanted to possess my body after his current one expired, three years from that point. I agreed, leaving Konoha behind. Of course, I'm not one to go quietly - at the end of my apprenticeship with him, I turned the tables back around, killing him and then leaving to seek out my sister."

"Events happened, my sister died, and I found myself swept up in an enormous war - one ultimately against a self proclaimed goddess, Kaguya. She destroyed my universe, I suspect intending to use the released energy to empower herself enough she could remake it in her image... But I'd stepped out of reality in the moment before its dissolution, and I struck her down in the vulnerable moment before her ascension."

"And then I wandered off to another world, where I met the most beautiful woman in the multiverse - my darling, the Keres, who was making some rather impressively bloody work of a labyrinth full of monsters." She grins at her girlfriend. "I rescued my distressing damsel, of course, and we surfaced in a world strange to the both of us."

"I remember it as rather more of a mutual affair, kitten. Though the world was foreign, that I will grant."

"I summon shades," she gestures and ghostly figures form behind her, "which possess a wide variety of powers, mostly physics-enabled, rather than strictly defiant. I can summon up to three at a time naturally, though I have... acquired one that can summon three shades of its own, increasing my useful limit to five. The method of my initial transit remains unknown even still, though I no longer begrudge it as I did for those first few hours. Regardless, after Tentou joined me, we quickly made for the surface and thence to the nearest city."

"We caused some delightful chaos within... I'm fairly sure the first hour, actually, though we took a little bit to escalate to terrorizing the entire city. We'd actually only sown a few seeds before we ran into the native lightning - though we didn't realize who she was at the time - Eliana."

"That is I. Eliana Fabil, erstwhile magister of Tevinter. The city was called Kirkwall and it was a truly dreadful place. The source of my native magic is called the Fade, a realm of dreams and demons separated from the waking world by a Veil. It is possible for the Veil to become worn thin or damaged in an area by powerful magics, prolonged and extreme human suffering, or mass killings. Kirkwall had seen all three in abundant quality. This is a problem that feeds on itself, as a thin Veil means demons may cross more easily, and they like nothing better than causing all sorts of trouble in the real world. I dare say the end result of your chaos is a net improvement in the quality of life in the region, as it has likely caused the city to be abandoned for good. I certainly have no desire to return."

"I was born in Minrathous, the capital of Tevinter, of low parentage, but as my talent for magic manifested at a young age, I was soon lifted from that into the upper echelons of society. Tevinter, you see, is ruled by mages. It is a popular style of tale, the lowly commoner discovering their unexpected gifts and increasing their station, thereby winning the heart of the fair lord or somesuch. So is the shape of my story, though the magister I was taken in service to was concerned rather more with elevating his own power than any advancement of mine. Still, I made do, and eventually surpassed him in my own right. My reward for such effort was the ambassadorship to the City of Chains, so I was not entirely successful in stamping out his influence."

"Without the Fade to draw on, my magic is much limited. I can still cast spells by using the power of blood, however, though this does require I have a ready supply. The practice is frowned upon in my home, both for the wastefulness and the ready tendency to draw demons. This latter downside is obviated by the same thing that necessitates the use of blood magic in my particular circumstances. I can invoke the elements, manipulate perception, and even do a bit of healing."

"Man, foreign magic gets strange..." Bellona says, after a moment.

"Indeed it can. Though I am hardly the limit. The next the Keres, Tentou, and I ran into might have a claim to that herself."

Mora laughs, a little. "That'd be me - once they finished terrorizing a city and convincing everyone Tentou was some kind of evil god, as far as I've heard."

"My name's Mora - I'm a crow, like Tentou. My magic involves ritual, and it functions by twisting reality to my whim - in a subtle, controlled manner, ideally, which makes it sometimes inconvenient for combat except as a way to boost others. When these three met me, I'd just had quite the bad time of it... I came into existence as a voice in someone else's head, a woman named Nausicaa Uzun. Our world used to be a normal planet, but then something changed - anywhere not populated by humans fell into the Void, and even smaller population centers began to crumble away. The people raised living metal walls around cities, to hold back that darkness, and train tracks began to grow between them - a thin line of light in a nothingness of black oil. My Nausicaa was on one such train, when something odd happened - the train collapsed into the Void, everyone within it eaten... Except me. I clawed my way out and over a city wall, collapsing in a puddle of gasoline before dragging myself away from that rather suspicious sight. I found myself quite disoriented and in control of Nausicaa's body, which had never happened before - and Nausicaa's voice was nowhere to be heard."

"And then I saw three people nearly as weird as I am. We danced around each other a bit, but they decided I was interesting enough to humor, perhaps - and set about corrupting my rather shaky moral fears out of me. They agreed to help me find Nausicaa's mother - I'd hoped she might have a key to returning Nausicaa to me. That... Didn't happen. Nausicaa's mother was a thing from the void - a distorted image of humanity, a many layered nexus of possibility and insanity and knowledge with a little tendril reaching out to puppet around a shape vaguely pretending to be human. She rejected me, and we found ourselves dumped into the void - I managed to protect us from being consumed, but we washed up in another world."

"There were a crow and a lightning there - the crow, Mara, was actually our first indication of alts, since she had Tentou's face, though we didn't expect the lightning, Eliko, who had the same face as El here. Both had simple elemental powers. Neither wished to continue traveling with us, so we did some investigation of their magic system, caused a bit of chaos to help Mara, and then moved on."

"At this point, I enter the picture. The four of them arrived in my domain on their next jump. As a god, of course, I recognized my alts immediately." She smiles slightly.

"It was a rather delightful surprise."

"Indeed. My contributions at this point were along the lines of offering a safe harbor, a place to rest and recuperate."

"Something we've definitely come to appreciate."

"Especially in light of the next sequence of events. My name is Elatra. I am a tiefling necromancer. Tiefling means that one of my ancestors was demonic- different than her demons," she gestures at Eliana. "Necromancer means that the magic I study deals primarily with binding and controlling the undead and death as a force. In my set of planes, a powerful wizard named Acererak," she grimaces, "was harvesting souls en masse, disrupting the life-afterlife cycle on a scale far grander than I could dream of doing. I was in the process of hunting her when the group happened upon me."

"Acererak was a crow, a major asshole, and soon enough thoroughly dead. We're not putting her back."

"Moving on!"

Hug.

"Unpleasant all around, yes. I joined the group on a permanent basis following that incident, and we began exploring slightly more cautiously with the aid of a plane shift spell of my own devising. It was perhaps not as wildly successful as Tentou's travels, but the first truly interesting locale we hit upon did prove... enlightening," she says with a slight quirk of the lips.

Glint laughs. "Exceptionally so. They stumbled across me eventually, before I was a goddess. In fact, I was at the time petitioning the god I worshipped - Sheogorath, Daedric Prince of Madness - to ask that he take up arms to defend our universe from an existential threat. That threat was Alduin - the final part of the tripartite god Akatosh who rules over time, and who becomes, eventually, the end of time. Alduin, like Akatosh, took the form of an enormous dragon, and he had swayed the dragons of my world - who were Akatosh's creations, originally - to his side as he tried to gain power in our time. He'd come a bit early, you see, and that was making things difficult..."

"Anyways! Difficult it may have been, but Akatosh wasn't being a very big help fighting off his future self, and our gods are terrible at agreeing to do anything. At least two others were trying to use the chaos to cause their own apocalypses, and a third was only refraining 'cause he was still licking his wounds from trying four centuries ago. So - I was going around arguing for an alliance. At least a temporary one."

"Lord Sheogorath, though, was nothing if not mad, and he asked me to complete a challenge, first. He framed it as protecting his realm from an invader, and to do this I'd need to run around merrily reactivating the realm's many decayed defense systems. Easy enough... But apparently madness in the old style makes you a terrible communicator, because what he hadn't revealed - "

"He was not originally Lord Sheogorath. He was, in fact, a different god - Jyggalag, the god of perfect order. He kept trying to force everyone's creative chaos to behave, so several of the other gods stripped his sanity from him, trapping him as a 'weak fool' - Sheogorath, too insane to use his immense powers to any end. Jyggalag didn't like this one bit, and he still lurked at the heart of Sheogorath's madness... And so, every time the destiny of the world grew thing - every time an apocalypse drew close - he tried to break his chains, invading his own realm with the intent of purging all madness from it - and therefore from him."

"Which, well, left our rather ragtag group trying to fight off a god. We won - but something strange happened, you could say."

"I took Sheogorath's divinity - his role, for there must always be a god of madness. Jyggalag became himself again, though a bit more restrained in ambitions this time, and I found myself with a divine realm and a tantalizing amount of power."

"We joined forces with Jyggalag and one other god - Meridia, goddess of infinite energies, which I'm pretty sure is her being poetic about the word 'science.' Meridia had a plan to beat back Alduin, even though we lacked the full force of the pantheon. She believed she could craft a weapon of immense power, which would force Alduin outside of the bounds of reality. Incidentally, it would set whatever plane she launched it from on quite a bit of fire, and it took some time to be set up - only where she'd be firing it from, she couldn't teleport in with it ready to go. So we fought a delaying action, got Meridia lined up... And then got all our squishy members out. It worked rather well! Only tore a very small hole in the fabric of space-time."

"Only a small one. Nothing unmanageable."

Kiss. "Completely reasonably sized, all things considered."

"More than one good was accomplished in the midst of all that."

She leans over and kisses Ellayania, too. "Yeah. We did spend a little while after cleaning up my world, adverting some minor apocalypses. Though the important part was I started dating my own lightnings - my lovely Elatra and Ellayania." Teasingly: "The two biggest goods, I'd say."

"As I recall, it was fairly shortly thereafter that we found Naraka."