Sigh.

A teleporter shows up to take Cor home.

"Curufinwë has his own way to get back?"

"His alts can give him a ride, yeah."

"Okay." And home.

"You seem to have lost my brother and replaced him with somebody else?"

"Uh. There are a bunch of different Ardas. He went to talk to some more Curufinwës. This is a teleporting alien who gave me a ride home. The other Curufinwës can give ours a ride whenever he's done."

" - a bunch of different Ardas. Well. I wasn't expecting that - is everyone all right or did you need to kill some more Melkors -"

"They will show up and let me know if they need more killed but there are none running amok right this minute. I didn't get a lot of details, they were mostly talking about how to get my planet evacuated. They can find us a new one, so that's neat."

"Oh good - who is 'they' -"

"Uh, this interdimensional organization... which doesn't like yous from this... varietal of Arda. Apparently the Valar being into mind control is rare, there's one other like here and they don't get along with that Maitimo. So instead of whatever fast-track arrangement they might have for common types you're getting standard preindustrial monarch treatment. But also an immortality necklace instruction set, they have that."

" - okay. We're allowed to keep exploring on our own?"

"They didn't try to forbid me. And they said they can find us lots of empty planets even if their loaner teleporter doesn't care to help with exploring."

"- all right. We're not worse off. What are they doing with the - other me who is like me - and presumably didn't fall for you -"

"They said they badly mishandled it, there was a story about how some evil aliens stole some magic from them and then tried to ally with him against them and he betrayed the evil aliens and took the magic but they didn't follow up with 'and that's why we're friends now!' so I assume things are still vaguely awkward."

"Well. It'd be - graceless - to go around pouting about how you torture one boyfriend..."

"I told them you cut it out, they said if you demonstrated reliability for awhile you'd get more stuff like any preindustrial king." Sigh. "And they made a point of telling me that if I wanted to get help of some kind it wouldn't affect interdimensional politics."

"I guess that's thoughtful of them."

"Yeah."

Hug?

Hug!

"Sounds like they're busy and won't mind if we find some worlds ourselves. Once we've done what we can to help with resettlement, at least. And if it's convenient for them to insist preindustrial kings collect all the magic themselves and demonstrate being responsible with it - fine."

"I'm kind of curious about the other you but I don't know how to get there." He glances at the teleporter.

" - I could take you to Shadow for a visit if you like."

"Do you wanna go, Maitimo?"

" - yeah, that sounds interesting."