There is a squid in the lake. The squid likes it here.

There are two humans who have heard of private thoughts but aren't very good at it.

There is the shallow presence of a sapient bar who accommodates telepathic interface but only yea far.

And there is a little child who doesn't keep many thoughts private yet even though he learned how because it makes people happy to hear him thinking little child thoughts. Although less so here because practically no one can hear his thoughts anyway. He is playing with a toy Cadillac and wishing he could dart through the door back into his world which was less confusing than Milliways. 

...huh.

And he steps out through the trees and blinks at the assembled singing Elves and the endless building behind them with both genuine and feigned confusion. 

They recognize him! They are terribly pleased to meet him this is Milliways how did he get in - 

- he should go talk to his alts, they're all inside, there's a human and a chip Elf - what kind of Elf is he -

"I'm afraid I've only ever met the one kind -"

"Do you have magic telepathy or just a communications interface with the chip in your head that backs up your brain?"

"...the former."

"Soul Elf, then - that's what we're calling them - from a flat Arda?"

" - yes -"

"You need to warn the Valar not to pardon Melkor -"

Unhappy laugh. "It's too late for that."

"By how much?"

"Nearly four hundred years."

And a moment later he opens the door and steps into the bar and blinks at two more of him and assorted other people.

"Okay, y'all officially can't put off nicknames anymore. Hi, I'm Cam, that's Mirelótë, you probably recognize the others."

"There was some effort to give an explanation outside. Hi - uh -"

"Timothy."

"And all the rest of us have the same name and in fact the same aversion to going by the first half of it, so we're stuck - I'm Bright and my fork is Dawn and everyone else could just stick to the theme, at least until we run out of positions of the Suns -"

"I'll be Midnight. My world only has one sun, though, are we missing out?"

"One's serviceable for most purposes. Flat Arda with a sun means it's too late to keep Melkor contained in the first place unless you're a one-off -"

"I'll write the Singularity forks and alert them to your charming theme."

"He's been loose for nearly fourteen hundred years and we've been at war with him for four hundred. - can you help -"

"We're from what seems like the only world where Valar are good at their jobs, but if possible something faster with less collateral at stake would be better..."

He visibly flinches. 

"- how bad are yours, the standard is awful but we already know it gets worse than that -"

"Even with Melkor loose I would not want them better at their jobs - what is the standard -"

"Standard has Mandos cluelessly judgmental about who and under what conditions he reembodies anyone and in the Flat Ardas the Halls virtually intolerable and packaged with mental inspection, Lórien performing ostensibly consensual psychic surgery on gay people, none of them understanding the concepts of incentives or timeliness or distinguished thought from action, issuing mind control curses on entire tribes as punishment, etcetera. Ulmo's usually the most sensible and Aulë the friendliest and that isn't saying much."

"Ours check for antisocial thoughts, beliefs, and tendencies and then modify everyone who has them, every Year, and somehow still failed to catch Melkor not meriting a pardon."

"They usually do parole him but that does sound worse than standard - are you okay -"

"It is not at the moment the most urgent of my world's problems. It is reassuring that it's worse than standard."

"The moment in question is probably paused - that may not work exactly the same way if you came in through the back and not the front door though."

"I was riding outside - with a dozen people, I don't know why I came through and they did not -"

"Bar's the person to ask about that sort of thing." She gestures at Bar.

"- pleased to meet you - do you know why that happened and whether time is paused in my world -"

Occasionally forests, caves, and bodies of water, especially those which have their own spatial inconsistencies, lead one or more people into the back yard of Milliways. The time pausing effect is much less reliable in that case but may be checked by opening your door if desired, or, less precisely, you may consult me to determine if a forthcoming publication has been released, as I can access published material extant from any world.

" - can we check with the door, please -"

"Yeah, we need time to pass there for reasons but we can spare you a minute to check."

Bounce bounce out of the way!

"All yours."

"- thanks. 

My you has been dead for a long time, I really missed him -"

Hug. 

Hug. 

And then he opens the door onto a large, graceful, very symmetric low-tech palace room, tosses a coin, closes it, opens it again -

And it falls the rest of the way from where it paused in midair.

He looks very deeply relieved. "Okay. You can have the door back, thank you. Is there - a summary of what's going on and where everyone's from, anything like that..."

"There really should be, especially if we're going to start exporting Valar-sanity-as-a-service to every Arda we can fork into. I don't think there is one right now unless it's some internal document for your template..."

"Not yet, sorry. We can make the chip Elves put it together, they've got attention-expanding technology -"

He gestures at his collar. "We have that too. Should I await it or does everyone just want to give a summary -"

"I'm from another recurring planet template called Earth and mine has summonable beings with supernatural powers that summoners become when they die, on top of the ones that spontaneously generate; I'm a demon and that means I can make material objects. My alts don't look like me. I got summoned into a chip-Arda early in the war. Shit happened. Is that the depth you had in mind -?"

" - I'm not actually clear on what a chip Arda is beyond that my confusion demonstrates mine isn't one -"

"There's a few kinds of Ardas. Some of them are on flat planets like yours where Valinor is a continent; some of them, like mine, are in galaxies with planets that, being spherical, don't need magical help to exist, and Valinor is a planet. In our kind Elves don't have magical telepathy; our osanwë only works with each other and it runs on chips in our brains that also save the contents of our minds to let us be reembodied without needing magical immaterial souls."

" - in what sense are they still Ardas, then -"

"They still have Erus and Valar and Elves and Dwarves and orcs, and with a higher tech level roughly the same - plot - can play out at greater scale. There's other variants. Some Ardas are gender swapped. I seem to be in only one of them as far as Bar can tell - I'm one of Cam's alts who doesn't look like him -"

"Otherwise they have the same people?"

"The chip ones have almost all the same people except Ambela and differences that are plausibly a consequence of her, the soul ones have fewer but some are the same. We're putting together a big document of people, for each other."

"It'll have to be really big -"

"Hundred million or so. I don't know how magic blessings work but if they don't stack far enough you can keep it on a computer -"

"They don't stack quite that far but if time's stopped perhaps we can fetch my brothers and they can park here and improve them - it's just a question of research time -"

"That'd be useful to have, since ours only work for chipped people at all."

"There's a different kinda brain chip that can let you control a different kinda computer, works fine on the sci-fi Elves, probably you too but - well, maybe Bar knows and if she doesn't there's an infirmary we could install it in for safety."

"And you're already familiar with the Enemy because all of the same people?"

"Yes."

He nods.

He sits down. 

"Okay. I think I want to read about the not-terrible Valar and decide whether contact between them and my set is likely to be a disaster. Is anything at all time-sensitive, is there anything from my world non-redundant with the resources you already have -"

"The other soul Arda's really new so most magic artifact stuff you'd have would be new, and most of your magic songs invented since you were four, and also you seem to be a non-standard variant - at least, you're not one I found, Ambela did you -"

"Nope."

"What's your point of reference for standard -"

"Commonality. At least up to whenever the multiverse intrudes."

"Okay - Oromë eventually finds Elves by Cuivienen, Valar imprison Melkor, Valar take some Elves back to Valinor with them, my grandmother dies and is prohibited from returning to life lest the king have two wives, which is against Eru's teachings on marriage, Melkor pardoned, Melkor sows rumors and provokes fights and murders people and so on -"

"  - murders people before Finwë?"

"Couple dozen unexplained deaths and disappearances in the leadup to the Darkening, yes -"

"The Valar didn't flip out about murders in Valinor? Or they did but not quickly enough -?"

"The Valar always flipped out about murders in Valinor, that's when they'd try things like altering everyone to be more pacifist, it kind of scared people so they took to covering things up..."

"...That wasn't the first time?"

"...no?"

"So the divergence is... earlier."

"...usually there are no murders in Valinor until Melkor kills my grandfather?"

"Even in the larger population planetary version there's... one negligent homicide...?"

"My empire has a lower crime rate than Valinor ever managed even with the mind control but - it's not zero - are the Valar just usually better at changing everyone around -"

"No, they usually don't have that much of a target."

" - so - we're worse - and they tried to handle it more aggressively than the other sets needed to?"

"It's possible that the Valar aren't different at all from baseline, yeah, although it's not the only possibility."

"This does not make me enthusiastic about inviting a more competent set in."

"I can see why you'd react that way but the things they are more competent at are not mind control."

"Would they be willing to stop Melkor and then leave us alone? We sacrificed a lot to build a society not ruled by them and would not be eager to see that undone."

"They might, we'd have to ask - our Ulmo is usually on Endorë but they are overall less active there - I imagine they'd have some concern for the state of your Valinor and want to talk to their alts even if they didn't mind leaving your polity alone."

"It's obviously better than not stopping Melkor but with all the time in the world I do wonder if we can just do it ourselves."

"Maybe. My Valar might end up spread pretty thin anyway."

Nod. "Okay, so - after Melkor kills my grandfather there's a civil war, is that everywhere or just us..."

"Just you."

"Okay. Uh, I end it, we cross to Endorë, we win some battles and besiege him and there's four hundred years of relative peace..."

"Crossing and siege is standard - how'd you get there -"

"The Teleri lent us the swanships."

"Well, that's actually an improvement."

" - what usually happens -"

"Usually they decline to do that, there's a fight about it, the Noldor win and steal the ships and thousands die, and rather than go back for Nolofinwë's faction Fëanáro sets them on fire on the far shore and a bunch of people cross the Ice. There's an equivalent in standard chip Ardas too."

" - my father was already dead. So was Nolofinwë."

"Among the leadup disappearances -?"

"Ah, no, Nolofinwë had my father assassinated and then I had him assassinated when I ended the civil war."

"I assure you it was not on my top hundred forty-four ways of solving the problem. Hundreds of people were dying in clashes in the streets every day - I should have acted sooner but I kept hoping better choices would conveniently present themselves -"

"...the two of them do come very close to violent conflict in standard versions but not - like that -"

"What's the difference -"

"Possibly that happens naturally when murder is - on the list of options - but I still don't know if I should be modeling this as a single point of departure or something systemic -"

"Maybe if I met some of the others I could help you guess."

"The only other flat Arda we have door access to is the one in which your alt is seven."

"Then I don't know. How long does the siege traditionally last - or is the political situation sufficiently changed to change that -"

"Usually ends in 455."

"And then?"

"All the civilian kingdoms in Beleriand fall one by one over the next ten Years, and when nearly everyone's dead someone with a stolen Silmaril makes it back to Valinor, pleads with them for help, and they come over and stop Melkor."

"Are there more kingdoms than us, Doriath, and the Dwarves..."

"I think standard soul Arda Noldor are pretty splintered - there're at least four or five independently governed polities and Nolofinwë is usually at least nominally high king of them all but this does not seem to entail much concrete power -"

"Fëanáro makes it to Beleriand but doesn't survive long so there's no one who takes it quite that personally."

"We're united, and govern all the humans as well. I don't know how much difference that'd make -"

"None at all, probably, he seems to match the capabilities of the army up against him pretty much regardless of what those capabilities are."

"...but you have practice governing humans, that's been a topic lately, is it as hard as it sounds?"

"What about it sounds hard, it's gone really well except we can't get them to stop dying -"

"These are crime-rate-of-no Elves you're talking to, they're rather appalled at dire predictions about how humans would interact with systems designed for... that."

"- oh. Well, I didn't design my systems for that. They all serve seven years in the army and get pensioned off at 25 and most of the court is structured through the military, so it'd take some wrangling to rule humans in peacetime off what we've got, but I'd expect it to be easier, on the whole -"

"...well, having heard today about a species that claims vehemently to thrive on slavery I can't say it would be impossible to find one that thrives on warfare but it would not be expected, no."

"Well, being united against a common enemy is really genuinely helpful for integration and so on. But I do not expect I'd do worse with fewer constraints on my resources. What species thrives on slavery?"

"They're called house-Elves. They're from another Earth, mine, which has a lot of species of magical beings and then humans. We don't manage to pension them off at 25, either - and I don't think you've got more advanced technology -"

"It took some doing but their lives are so short as is -"

"It's actually kinda impressive even without taking the tech level into account - I mean, more advanced societies tend to have strictly volunteer armies but that's mostly because technology can do more of the work, I think. For a society at constant war it's nicely done."

Tired smile. "It was satisfying to prove you can rule people who aren't all saints without warping their brains into something more manageable. Do you have something for the dying - it's absolutely appalling -"

"Yes we do. It has horrible safety risks but they can be managed if your people can follow simple instructions reliably."

Less tired smile. "Oh, they're excellent at that."

"Cool. So if you summon a daeva then when you die you get to be a daeva, there's three kinds. I got murdered this one time, it was no fun but here I am."

"They lose a lot as babies but that's something, it'd be easy enough to have everyone summon a daeva tomorrow - bit harder if the Enemy were still loose, but I'm planning to wait until we can take him -"

"Infant mortality plummets with, like, adequate sanitation and medical care and stuff. If you have the same diseases that's straightforward and if you have different ones less so."

"How do we check?"

"Convenient translation effect might do it, name some diseases."

He names some.

"We have those! Malaria's easy, you wipe out the mosquitoes that carry it and it's gone, most everything else you get through vaccination and sanitation. ...Actually the lack of motive for sanitation implies sorta distressing things about what water quality Elves typically enjoy without humans around. Ew."

"And do you have anything for the having children without meaning to in the first place - we've got a solution but it's not really ideal -"

"Yeah, that's technologically doable - what's your stopgap?"

"Service is gender segregated and we're pretty strict about relations between people who aren't ready to have children. The rates are very low but at the cost of considerable trauma to the people who do break the rules."

"...I am less impressed with that. What traumatizing things are going on."

"It's considered horrifying, because it is, and people will be conspicuously appalled at you and if you broke regulations you'll face the consequences of that. We obviously don't make it more unpleasant on purpose."

"Oh, so not more traumatizing than 'being around Elves with an accidental baby', okay. I wonder what all the Elves in the room will do if I remark that I am not remotely clear on whether my parents were trying to have me."

Mirelótë squeaks.

These Elves will definitely flinch!!

"Sorry, irresistible. Anyway, birth control exists in both 'follow simple instructions' form and in 'medical procedure' form, it's a whole spectrum, the good stuff has a statistically negligible failure rate."

"Oh, good. All right. So if the not-terrible Valar are actually not terrible and willing to accept that we don't want to take their word for it and don't want to be anywhere near them...I think that's all we'd need. Or at least most of what we'd need, and then I could put people on song and artifact research for whatever all the other worlds need..."

"They understand the difference between being trustworthy and being in practice trusted, yes."

"Impressive. My set doesn't - that's - part of what I am correcting for here is that lots of people have in fact been forcibly made to trust them -"

"I can confirm that her set can do the thing even in unfamiliar circumstances. On a reasonable conversational timescale. It came up."

" - how's that -"

"We petitioned them for help salvaging an Arda after having ended the war by striking a deal with Melkor to destroy Valinor with all its inhabitants. They sent a letter thanking Cam for coming to them, requesting an audience, and laying out what his rights would be if they thought the circumstances of the destruction of Valinor merited action on their part, and then they talked to him and decided that it didn't. And I don't even think they were leaning on Mirelótë directly - were they -"

"By the time I heard anything about it Cam was back here again. And they hadn't broken the confidentiality."

"They had alternatives for if I didn't want to go to them, too, I could've hid behind Milliways security talking to a representative or insisted on written communication only."

" - my set would have made you find the idea of hurting a fly, let alone a person, utterly repulsive, and then come up with a creative idea like 'make you relive the lives of everyone you murdered, this will foster repentence' and pinned you down in Lórien to blunder around implementing that. And if you resented this they'd fix that, too."

"...that is substantially worse than what we heard from tiny you's set."

"Good! I do not want the multiverse to have many Valar like mine in it."

"It hasn't, which I fully agree is to the good. The regular ones are still bad though,"

"What would their handling have looked like -"

"Penned me up in Lórien without my magic, offered to let me out if I agreed to a modification to think it had been wrong, gone and put their alts back, alts would probably have considered forbidding summoning but might have been receptive to arguments about its use with respect to mortality and settled for making daeva powerless around Valinor. If Lórien seemed to be distressing to me they might've given me the run of their Valinor."

"Has any progress been made on convincing them that this would have been a less than maximally helpful course of action?"

"Yep, a couple of the good ones are talking to them."

"I will look forward to seeing what results from that. It'd also be useful to see how the competent Valar handle actual non-justifiable crimes, which my world does have."

"We do have a Melkor," she says. "He's in a virtual reality setup with most of his Maiar - a couple of them were wedged in bad oaths and they got off like the orcs did when we had a solution for that."

"You can erase oaths?"

"They might have to come up with something different for soul-based oaths, but in our world we just revised the entire system so that oaths can't bind future action, just confirm honesty or intentions or things like that. There's a little potential loss of utility but it got the orcs out of theirs, among other things."

"We do sometimes use it for law enforcement - if you murder someone you can be exiled or you can swear not to murder people - have to be inordinately careful with the wording but it gives us more choices -"

"...yeah, that makes sense. It might be that they could leave negative oaths open without allowing positive ones..."

"I think that would capture almost all the value, yes."

"They would probably really like to talk to you or someone you designate about the details first though."

Shiver. "I assume you don't have a different reembodiment and orc freeing and Enemy-handling solution just lying around. We'll talk to them."

"Technically have not tried seeing if a disembodied soul Elf can take up an empty body, but otherwise yeah that's the size of it."

"Sadly if they don't go to Mandos the Enemy can grab them, so even with Mandos as bad as it is everyone goes there, there aren't any disembodied souls just hanging around to try it..."

"This is among the reasons it has not been tried."

"How does the arbitrary objects thing work, how much information do you need to go off, can you do magic ones..."

"No magic, no minds, no another thing that will not make sense without more physics background. A sufficiently direct identification of the thing does it - title and author for a book, say, or an author's complete works and then I don't need titles but have to sort through them the long way."

"And humans can become this when they die?"

"Yup. Elves seem not to, presumably because you don't die very dead."

"Dwarves?"

"There are Dwarf summoners but not yet any dead ones, so we don't know for sure. Also Flat Ardas come standard with a nice Dwarf afterlife."

"I don't think anyone's told them that, but okay, that's good to know."

"Yeah, Aulë's design sense does not extend to good documentation, and yours might be a one-off anyway lemme check -" Check.

Dwarves still have an afterlife!

"Yeah, you have one of those."

"That's good."

" - in standard timelines you also get captured by the Enemy, you didn't mention so I'm guessing -"

"Eru. No, that - didn't happen, I wouldn't be running things -"

"By default Findekáno later rescues them and they turn out pretty functional for not being rolled back, but yeah, it didn't seem like that happened in yours."

" - how does he pull that off -"

"Suicide/mercy-kill mission turned actual rescue by an Eagle which Manwë couldn't be troubled to send anytime in the previous fifty years."

"That makes me feel less bad about never having attempted it for anyone. I don't think our Manwë would trouble himself to help."

"It doesn't sound like it, no."

"Where are you getting all this from, can I read it..."

"Bar. She has all the publications. Cam can supplement if you can identify something unpublished that you need."

"Thank you very much. It really is a pleasure to meet you all, I'm just - am not in the habit of relaxing, lately. Bar, can I have some books on Ardas like mine, if you can identify any, and the ones that are closer to standard, and Ambela's with the capable Valar..."

Stack of books! Turns out his Arda is actually not unique.

He'll start reading.

He's looking mostly for things about him which might concern the others, if they were to think to read these as well.

Things written around his era are of course as polite about leaving concerning things unmentioned as he might wish.

Well, yes, but they're not confined to his era.

They're not! After the part where his nearest alts die and some other people survive while knowing things, his grip on the press is substantially curtailed!

He sits quietly and reads and thinks what to say, if anyone else should bother reading into the second age of worlds with his trajectory.

"If you have advice on governing humans in ways conscionable to Elves we could really use it."

"I'm not entirely sure it would be conscionable to you, your world sounds very...nice."

"I think we can make some tradeoffs if they let us improve on what the humans in question already deal with."

"Well, we've got them all enlisted in the military - maybe there's a civilian equivalent? A humanitarian relief corps or something, just something that gets everyone during young adulthood working alongside people from different cultural backgrounds and in a clear and well-defined command structure where their officers can get to know them - most human crime is concentrated in men aged sixteen to thirty, you can very nearly vanish it just by keeping them occupied during that time period. Wouldn't even have to be mandatory, just very generously compensated.

Then if, say, someone is beating his wife, she can go to her commanding officer and they can investigate, sit him down and figure out what's going on and warn him he's endangering his status, if necessary transfer him across the continent -"

"If necessary?"

"Something like twenty percent of human relationships involve a domestic violence incident, if I immediately dragged off all the perpetrators not only would I be imprisoning a significant fraction of humans but also their partners wouldn't report it!!"

"- ooh, and you're also making it unlikely for people in that age group to have kids in the picture, I bet that helps."

"Yeah, younger parents are significantly likelier to be abusive or just plain incompetent and significantly likelier to split up and significantly harder to discipline because we really, really don't want to take custody away, so we just aim for very few births to people under twenty-four - twenty-six for men - and then we can get all the at-risk families special attention."

"What form does the special attention take?"

"Counseling, mostly - sometimes help hiring another person to take some strain off the parents - humans need more sleep than they can get when they have children, it's really dreadful -"

"It is. Sort of an evolutionary miracle, at least in places where we appear by evolution and not 'Eru having a giggle'."

"Mine are Eru having a giggle. Anyway, once they're out of the service they get a pension, with increases for each child which they qualify for at first by seeing a healer during pregnancy, and then by getting the children an education - practically everything we do actually goes through the pensions, if they break laws the first resort is fines garnished from the pension and if they're financially irresponsible the first resort is breaking the pension into smaller more frequent chunks - if you have competent Valar then maybe you can just get the plants edible and you don't have to figure out what to do if someone spent all their money on alcohol and is now starving -"

"Am I correct in thinking that if humans could not have children by accident they would promptly go extinct."

"Sounds about right. There's a thing called demographic transition where once reliable birth control is freely available reproduction rates drop to or below replacement. Revelation got over a tech hump so parenting is now cheap and comparatively easy and enough people pick it up, but - yeah."

"Our birth rates are six to nine, varies regionally, were ten to fourteen before we started aggressively discouraging young parents, infant mortality is fourteen percent."

"That's half Muggle Britain's."

He puts his head in his hands and whimpers.

"Do, do most people lose a child or is it concentrated more -"

"Most people lose a child - there'll be a disease outbreak that kills half the children under two, or they're born dead or born early and die right away - if you count lost pregnancies than the mortality rate is near fifty, humans lose pregnancies all the time..."

"Most lost pregnancies are very early, early enough that it's entirely possible not to have noticed it," Cam mentions.

"We don't know if humans have souls or when they get them, but Elves- uh, soul Elves - get them at conception-"

"I am not aware of any evidence for humans having souls except maybe wizards. People don't show up in Limbo from Revelation unless they die after being born, if you want to use that as a benchmark."

"Eru humans seem likelier than humans from other worlds to have souls but I don't know how we'd check. Maybe Mandos might know."

"We don't develop our chips until a ways into gestation and they are serving the function of souls for us but I can't say I ever found that very morally relevant."

"If they have souls then there's something that keeps existing and perhaps keeps developing when they die, even if they die unborn. It would be pretty relevant."

"What's the story on - wizard souls -?"

"There are a couple forms of magic which are said to work on the soul, all of them are obscure and hard to test for one reason or another and given the information available to me there could be non-soul explanations. Wizards who die violently can leave a ghost, supposedly you can cheat death by tearing up your soul in dark rituals and then hiding the pieces, the Dementor's Kiss supposedly had its effect by sucking out your soul, things like that..."

"Can Dementors not - 'kiss', what a euphemism - Muggles?"

"They can."

"So maybe humans have souls, or have them in some worlds, maybe they appear at birth or before that or after that, we don't know, we can consult assorted deities."

"Sounds good. How much do humans need to know or how closely do they need to follow instructions in order to summon safely?"

"If you distribute premade circles, they just need to complete those, keep their mouths shut, and concentrate on dismissal for a minute and then poof they're summoners. The problem is if they alter the circles, have to make their own and make mistakes, talk to the daeva and wind up saying something that counts as agreeing to task and payment, or fail to dismiss the daeva and leave them trapped in their circle forever. Daeva are separately useful to employ but you can have specialists do that."

"Yes, I think I will. People won't experiment, they are used to the stakes being high."

"You can cut the risk further by having the circles summon specific vetted daeva but that'd slow things way down."

"What risks are we looking at?"

"Angels and demons in particular can incapacitate their summoners and then go wreak nearly arbitrary havoc, demons at larger scales. Fairies have a harder time preventing their dismissal but there's plenty of damage to be done in a minute."

"I'll make sure people are adequately warned and have better options than secretly attempting that."

"The rollout went okay in Revelation with a few hiccups more than outweighed by the end of material scarcity - we've been concerned about extending it to Hazel, the world with the wizards, because it's early enough there that most of its population is illiterate."

"Most of my humans can read but the ones who can't can still follow orders."

"You've got substantially more power than any human government. And it sounds like your people are less desperate."

Nod nod.

"Once the Enemy's dead we'd delightedly take immigrants, though I would worry about successful integration if there were going to be millions of them."

"That's sort of the problem, we might find loads of places to put immigrants but not enough to accommodate all the ludicrous number of worlds there are. Also your planet is flat, it might get crowded."

"Timothy, what are the barriers to doing this in Hazel directly -"

"Someone would kill me within a week but I guess we can specify I daevafy and get the wizardry working again? You seem to be pretty confident you'll get good outcomes from these military tribunals for everything, I don't have very many people I'd trust in that capacity and I'd need a million of them - I don't know how you have people reporting internally or how well it'd scale up for a population of a billion - people are loyal to their extant governments and religions and so on and it's currently popular to dispense with monarchs and I'd have insurgencies everywhere -"

"Humans on their own kind of have to self-organize in ways that are robust against or at least poison-pilled for hostile actors coming in and telling them to do different stuff."

"Ah. Ours were new and didn't have that yet. Which the Enemy had great fun with, of course - he found them first -"

"Singularity's landed next to orcs but the war didn't last all that long - what happened with yours -"

"Ah, Sauron showed up when they were only a couple weeks old, taught them to worship Melkor, taught them that the most devoted such worshippers wouldn't be murdered by demons, enforced that, orchestrated a few wars between the new humans and nearby tribes of Elves, helped the human victors of those wars keep Elf prisoners alive long enough to get an answer on how Elf/human hybrids turn out-"

"Delightful. I suppose this at least left them used to - top-down organization in a way that made them relatively easily transferred to new leadership -"

"Haven't had trouble integrating the tribes that escaped his attention either, but it didn't hurt. - hybrids work fine, don't have native osanwë or oaths, age to a human thirty-five or so and then stop..."

"You don't sound anywhere near appropriately horrified."

"It wouldn't really help, would it."

"Is that - entirely Sauron's influence on them, or -"

"Not really- that's not even just humans, at Cuivienen Elves would occasionally have wars that were just as ugly."

"Not our kind of Elves."

"I bet the difference is circumstances, not kinds."

"There are no conceivable circumstances-"

"You seem to have a very narrow conception of the set of circumstances people can find themselves in. Not - defending them, of course."

"I don't think it's kinds if by kinds you mean soul versus chip. There might be something else going on but - I don't know what -"

"Nor do I. We didn't have writing back then so we can't even ask Bar at what point my world's works diverge from - innocent Elf worlds -"

"Chip Elves invent writing earlier, if it's not me it's Rúmil - I don't know if there's a version that's like yours but with chips, there could be false matches -"

"- worth checking - Bar?"

Bar cannot find any chip Elf Ardas which seem to her likely to be plot matches with Midnight's world and its cluster.

"Maybe having writing earlier changes it, Hazel humans would get the horrible reaction from the Valar but Revelation humans might not..."

"Humans seem much more ethically malleable in response to technology differences than Elves do, but maybe."

"Orcs and Elves are - the same kind of thing, fundamentally, do orcs have a crime rate -"

"Not a big one by - multiverse standards - but yes -"

"So that might be all Elves from my world have but it's enough to have caused lots of problems - and, oddly, to have made us more equipped to handle other ones -"

"It's convenient in a way, yes."

"It didn't feel that way at the time but it sounds like we lost a lot fewer people getting to Beleriand than the nicer worlds where 'a fight over the boats' hadn't occurred to anyone as a thing which might happen until it did."

Nod.

" - people will not exactly be thrilled to learn there's a world where they naturally are the sort of person the Valar were trying to modify us into, even if it's objectively better - there's a lot of trauma there -"

"I can see that. It's not identical, my Valar are for example fine with gay people, but yes."

"Huh. Were from the beginning or were talked into it?"

"Talked them into it. Well, they weren't totally sold until they... found out what Eru's priorities are like... but I got them as far as 'suspend the practice of changing people for it until further review, stigma does more harm than good even if in the end everyone ought to be heterosexually married and people should be discouraged from making baseless assertions about other facets of moral character on that basis...'"

"It sounds as if we really, really could have used one of you."

"I wouldn't have held up particularly well under mandatory inspection every yeni."

"No one really did."

"Yeah. I - started out by being curious and hopeful, not terrified and angry, I think that was important to getting anywhere. I was yea high and Oromë was taking us all to paradise and I wanted to know what being the sort of thing he was was like - I don't know what kind of first impression your Oromë made but my parents disagreed on whether to go, I broke the tie, I might have stayed behind if it were obvious enough -"

"He scared people pretty badly, but he didn't display any especial propensity for mind-control, as far as I know -"

"Maybe I could've pulled it off. It's not definite though."

"Well. If they can undo the damage they did and we can continue leading independent lives without too much brushing against Elves-who-are-the-thing-they-tried-to-change-us-into then it's all reparable with time, and we have time, now."

Nod.

"Do you not have any sweet harmless fluffy Elves or did those ones just not leave Valinor with you or do the sweet harmless fluffy ones just feel solidarity with their imperfect friends or what?"

" - I mean, we obviously have many many people who wouldn't dream of hurting innocent people for fun, but I don't think we have anyone who had enough faith in Eru and enough trust in authority and enough repulsion at the idea of ever hurting anyone ever -"

"Suppose the picture changes if 'trust in authority' is a target feature, yeah...."

"It's not like we want to have random murders - though I think we do take some pride in not having been successfully rendered harmless, there are people who let me get away with a personal life they'd consider abhorrent because 'well, we're free, we can be abhorrent if we please' - or 'I'm not a Vala, to judge -'"

"Didn't get anywhere on the attitude towards homosexuality even with all the Vala-contempt you have going? - Eru just threw it in because doomed romances are tragic and it was less maintenance than occasionally declaring specific couples star-crossed -"

"Really."

"Yeah. Our Eru has been convinced that it is more fun if he limits his perceptual scope so that he can read books like a normal person."

"Good for you. - anyway, no one's having romances anyway, there's a war on, so I didn't expend a ton of effort on it, beyond observing that with humans it prevents the accidental children and people had better not discourage anything at all that did that."

"Oh, clever."

"They're very good about it. I think it might eventually spill over."

Nod.

And he settles back and keeps reading.

"Can we put circles everywhere we want synced, leave the door closed so more people can maybe wander in..."

"Yeah, good idea. Who wants to complete a circle, should it be for somebody else on the criminal list or would that be too complicated if they showed up..."

"What kind of binding have you been doing?"

"The summonee would not be able to hurt anybody, destroy property, etcetera, but I didn't put a gag in and they could travel around, so they might upset Elves."

"If you are very confident they couldn't find a clever way to hurt people I doubt contact with someone who committed - whatever sort of crimes these tend to be - will be more upsetting than the existence of the multiverse at all - what sort of crimes are these -"

"Uh, the list has murderers and rapists on it, I don't want to do indefinite binding summonses for art fraud or airspace violations, but I could probably find something middling?"

Shiver. "If they can't hurt anyone anymore then we'll be fine."

(He does not visibly react at all, but he notes the nodding people very carefully.)

"...I appreciate your perspective and I'm still gonna take an hour and find somebody who seems like they had an actual reason beyond sadism so they don't fly around trying to traumatize children by yelling uncomfortable song lyrics or whatever such options remain to them."

"Are there demons who want to do that very badly? I could pretend to be sad about people yelling things!"

"That seems like a poor use of your time, but you know what you'd be great for, if we wind up launching a program where demons get to adopt kids the way the Martian-power-grid fairies do, you could be really helpful in interviewing them."

"Okay! I like talking to people!"

"I know you do."

"And you'd be able to hang out in your world, if you want, once everything's synced."

"That would be good. ...I guess if people are bad you can't just explain to them that they shouldn't be?"

"Has a very poor track record with anyone who's older than, like, Miranda."

"That makes me sad."

"Works okay with Elves who've done something bad but rapists and murderers are - outside what we've encountered."

"If you tell a human teenager or adult that they have done something wrong then a likely outcome is they think you're being condescending, and can either be treated with contempt because you lack the power to follow through on your opinion in a way that matters to them or should be offered pretend contrition and subsequent increased subterfuge because you do."

"Do humans never change their minds about what's right?"

"They do, just, not because random people come up to them and say so."

"So you just have to make friends first?"

"That actually can work and you would be very good at it but it doesn't scale well."

"I want to try it anyway."

"I don't - know how you would design a binding to stop rapists but - it will not even occur to people as a thing to be worried about -"

"Bindings can handle physical coercion but cannot without enforcing celibacy cover purely verbal persuasion of any sort so I will try to find someone who is unlikely to go around claiming to have a medical condition with a weird treatment protocol or what have you."

"Thank you."

"...a medical condition."

"Or if Elves get blackout drunk someone might take advantage, or they might try to talk a kid into it -"

"As far as I know there are not any such medical conditions and if there were they would not trouble daeva but I'm not going to bind somebody indefinitely and not allow them to lie, and if they have no compunctions about falsehood and are solely setting out to get someone to sleep with them... I suspect that humans may just have higher sex drives than Elves, incidentally, not that it excuses anything."

He shakes his head.

"Our world would not have that problem, particularly, no one's going to marry a daeva just because they say it's really important."

Shrug. "They could also say they're in love because of somebody's beautiful singing and are super excited about getting married. They could say anything. Also the thing where apparently only heterosexual marriage works for soul Elves."

"Engagements last a Year."

"Is everybody really consistent about that?"

"Accidental marriages aren't unheard of but there've been maybe two in Valinor, ever?"

"Three. - 'accidental' being a catch-all for 'unannounced and not properly planned', and proper planning includes the Year - no, the bigger problem with summoning daeva to our world is that we can all read their minds..."

"...right, and your etiquette around that is based around having presumably taught everyone to fend it off when they got past the 'screaming infant' stage of elsewise communicative ability..."

"Yes, it's not that people'd do it on purpose but they assume that if you're thinking things in public you are doing that deliberately."

"I've played with the idea of a blessing to switch the default-public thing but there would be no way to install it on immigrants..."

"Okay. We could also make it a circle for someone who doesn't answer summonses but is not particularly dangerous, thereby slightly annoying an innocent bystander for the greater good but making it so we can send them home at once if they accidentally answer."

"We can send anyone home, right, including sending them home under a binding, if we have them open the door from Milliways -"

"Yes, but criminals who were trying not to answer circles are less likely to cooperate with that when they could instead wedge us into an awkward dilemma, or flee their circle at high speed and be hard to contact."

"I mean, we can stun them and dump them in Hell. But yeah, maybe safer to protect the innocent Elf worlds."

"Okay. The leader of the team that invented chiplocked computers is extremely reclusive but I bet she'd like Fëanáros, might find it adequate compensation for her time to be introduced if she answered?"

"I am sure any of us would be delighted."

"Right then." Cam makes a circle for her.

And he steps into his world and sets it down carefully and finishes it. 

"So I can go play now?"

"Yeah, go ahead - do you know how to write yet, can you write Cam if you need anything and need us to open the door for you -"

"I think so!"

"He won't see it if you spell it wrong."

Cam tosses him a roll of address labels. "Stick one on a letter and then you don't have to worry about that."

"Okay!" And he wanders off singing.

"And something similar for our world -"

"...fairy with a name that inspires random people to summon her and refuses to change her name or show up -" Circle.

Door open, circle placed and completed - he squints at it out of curiosity, what's the name -

It says "Titania".

Huh. He comes back. "So, Midnight, what gets achieved with artifact and song magic in the millenia since you were seven -"

"We can do enhanced memory and attention, grace, balance, extended osanwë range, healing, crop growth, warning when you're in danger, going longer without sleep, general improved endurance, lie detection, sleep, generalized more-power-for-the-thing-you're-doing - that one's a bit hazardous but if there're volume limits on demons or something we could probably boost them - we think we can get aging eventually but it will never be a efficient solution, not if the Valar are willing to just do it -"

"We have range and volume limits but it's 'a planet takes a few weeks' scale."

"Well, if you ever need a planet in a week go fetch Macalaurë."

"Noted."

"I would like to need less sleep."

"I would be delighted to sing it for you."

And he leans back and does that.

Cam sets up a recording.

No one has explained what those are to him but after a couple minutes they will have a recording of a sleep-skipping song. "Humans shouldn't do it more than four days straight and around seven or eight it'll fail to work and you'll fall asleep and be impossible to wake for eighteen to thirty hours. Elves shouldn't do it more than sixteen days straight and around twenty it'll fail to work and you'll fall asleep and be impossible to wake for twelve to sixteen hours. Dwarves are similar to humans, it does not stack with other songs or with artifacts that do the same thing and Macalaurë's not sure why."

"How does it interact with caffeine or other stimulants?"

"Don't think we have those."

"What, not even tea?"

"...in Valinor, which was before we had the song. Food is fairly restricted in Beleriand at the moment."