"Who are their birth parents -"

"Wasn't actually in the summary I read..."

"They're descended from Lúthien somehow? Who you don't have here yet either."

"...do I have an alt who is free to tell me who everyone is-"

"There is a computerized dossier of Literally Everyone, Holy Shit, which I am told you will read nearly straight through and not be even slightly bored by the blurb on random-Edda-alien-number-six-hundred-thousand. It can probably stand to wait until you have your own computer and can scroll through it on your own."

"Oh good."

(She smiled!!!)

"Alts are convenient!"

"And if this is fake Maira will have had to put so much time into it."

"...yep. Very elaborate."

Hug?

Hug.

"If all our neighbors have eclipses and there are a bunch of Elves who can do lockdowns now then the first thing we should do is probably go find them, do we have a way to handle 'they have eclipses and more metabolic efficiency than us and are super powerful'?"

"Sorta depends on what the efficiency allows, if it breaks any hard limits. Probably we want to show up friendly-like in case they have extra good precogs and have expected us since before I was born or something."

"...yeah, definitely friendly and probably not you in case they have really excellent telepaths and probably not anyone who has scary powerful magic in case there are other scary tricks psionics can pull with enough control..."

"Golden has a good mental defense, probably better than mine, and can cover other people temporarily. Also some Space Elves don't mind considering themselves more-or-less expendable since they're easy to fork and resurrect."

"Can Golden cover people without going with them -"

"No, she'd have to go along. She isn't one of the heavy hitters in peal terms but she does have Loki's spells and stuff."

"Then maybe friendly eclipse-finding expeditions should include her and some Space Elves and unless there's a precog collision Isabella can tell us how they go anyway -"

"Unless they have collision-proof precogs but if they have that nothing but being friendly and lucky will save us."

"Yep. And - that seems a risk the peal takes any time they go dimension-hopping -"

"Yes, but besides 'the multiverse is quite a place, isn't it' we do refine our sense of risk over time. They used to do random hops and then they discovered my world and now they don't."

"Good thing they didn't land there first."

"There were not in fact casualties when Cam did land there but it was very unnerving."

"And might have scared them off bouncing around finding everyone else."

"Most worlds are not found via random hop outside of the Edda and Wish neighborhoods, and Loki and Gem expect to be able to handle what they find near them. The hop to my world was trying to track down the runaway Melkor."