"About what, being a me? Or me being a her? It took some adjusting but on reflection we both like having there be more of us and are looking forward to turning up more."

"No, no, it's obviously good for there to be more of you. I meant about the war. Mitros had something to say about every one of my life decisions except what we did, and there he was just like "and that ended it? Thank goodness."

Maybe it's just the benefit of hindsight."

"Ah. I told her about it and she said 'sounds like you won' and I said 'but it sucked' and she said 'but you won'."

Maitimo nods tightly.

"I don't think I'd describe her as blasé so much as supportive?" Cam volunteers after a moment.

"I have been thinking this whole trip - 'well, if we'd known we were seven years from interdimensional travel' - but of course under the relevant conditions we might not have been -"

"I think I actually agree with your counterpart that you're being unhelpfully hard on yourself," Findekáno says. "...my counterpart said 'oh, hell, of course they did' and then gave me a hug and then asked what Maiar were like, which ones I'd known personally..."

Sigh.

He also said he'd definitely still love you, Findekáno says. 

Isn't he, so to speak, definitionally wrong?

I think so. I am a little confused about how that works. 

Cam has a cup of coffee. "Wonder what time they usually wake up."

"Do we have progress on all of the action items we could make progress on without them? We could go for a walk or something while we wait on them."

"I'm unsure of my ability to handle a commotion effectively with computer translation if some innocent morning person makes a fuss, and while you could probably pass for human without cutting off any extremities if nobody was expecting any differently you do bear a strong resemblance to members of the royal family," Cam says.

Maitimo sighs. "Well, we will have no choice but to ask the King's permission to spend some time in the gardens or somewhere at some point, but I suppose it needn't be right now." If you think we self-flagellate too much you could stop making comments like that.

Comments like that my counterpart asked me to tell him about the dead? The problem with you is that all your grief is manipulative so you assume everyone's is.

"You should really have a formalized prettiness dosing schedule, it'd be easier to keep track of. I think this is a perfectly nice palace myself."

"Perhaps we should just tell everyone we sleep in gardens or something, then we can get in our daily prettiness needs without having to say that we find their architecture soul-crushing."

"If you'd like VR sets or something for the immediate moment..."

"We'll be fine," he says, "but thank you. I wasn't anticipating that other-dimensional aliens would build things to conform to our prettiness needs. I could just sing but that seems as likely as walking around to draw attention."

"Probably, yes, although likely only more local attention and we did land a spaceship nearby."

The humans wake up a few hours later, around sunrise, and gather again to keep working on logistics. 

Cam solicits a location in the basement in which to set up unobtrusive medical experiments and goes and sets those up and eventually reports that local humans seem to metabolize everything the same way Earth ones do, who wants to try psychoactive working memory drugs?

Fannar wants to try psychoactive working drugs.

Iobel does too! She runs off and gets her immortality and teleportation spellcharts.

And Cam solicits medically relevant information and rattles off a list of side effects not to worry about, a list to tell him at once if they experience them, and bam.

An hour later he has a familiar-fountain that should work for humans. 

And Iobel manages to squeeze her immortality spell into her head for a split second and goes "WHOOO!"

Fannar claps his hands together and beams at her. Mitros picks her up and swings her around in the air and laughs delightedly.