...Cam lands the starship.

The Queen appears when summoned.

Mitros summarizes what the familiar said.

"...well. That's certainly interesting whether or not it's true."

"Yep. I gave them a location to land their 'starship', want to go greet it?"

"Sure, why not."

But she charges as she goes, just in case.

He has some guards join them, too. Though when he watches the starship land he is tentatively inclined to conclude that if the newcomers want them dead spells will not help.

...well, they might. Her eyes go on shining as she repeatedly drops and picks up her charge.

The door opens.

Mitros assesses: man who believes himself, correctly or not, to be in absolutely no danger from anything at all this world could offer, who has even more capabilities than his astonishing message suggested, who finds Mitros himself somehow surprising, who's looking through the crowd for other surprises of a similar nature -

- and then two people step out behind him and Mitros guesses the nature of the surprising thing. 

Mitros also notices that this man who looks just like him and this man who looks just like his cousin broke up and not on 'it will be very challenging to win me back' terms.

Mitros smiles neutrally and raises his arms in a welcoming gesture. "Welcome to Marlatia."

"Thank you," says Cam's computer. "I apologize if the automatic translation isn't up to scratch."

"No trouble. My father will probably learn your language over dinner," Mitros says, watching their reactions carefully.

"I am, let's say surprised by how not surprised I am by that," says Cam.

But this man doesn't know Mitros' counterpart that well or he'd have volunteered a name. "I am Mitros, King of Marlatia; this is my wife Iobel, our Queen. Please come inside, unless you require anything in your starship."

"Pleased to meet you both. I'm Cam, that's Maitimo, this is Findekáno, Maitimo you are the diplomat why am I talking," says Cam, heading inside. "We don't need anything in there particularly."

"Shock, maybe," Maitimo says smiling at Mitros and at Iobel. "This came as a complete surprise to us."

"Oh," Mitros says. "I thought you might have sought it out deliberately. There are a lot of countries here and none of the others are ruled by my doppelgangers yet. Is your familiar a magpie?"

"We don't have familiars," Maitimo says. "We had, once we learned they existed, entertained some vague hopes that if we met the right knowledgeable people we could acquire them."

"You've met the right knowledgable people," he says, "but that would be wholly without precedent." He resists the urge to give Findekáno a hug, even though Findekáno obviously needs a hug, and instead points out Finankar, eyes glowing, among the guard. "Of course, so is all of this."

"We're literally here because I thought the canals were cute and we had nothing more substantial to go on," Cam says, "we could have landed the crane anywhere."

Iobel giggles.

Mitros stares at Cam and furrows his brow for half a second before it smooths again. "I promised Iobel once," he says, "that once we ruled this world we would find out what the stars were made of and make her the empress of those, too. Don't fear for the stars, she'll be spectacularly good at it. Can you save us the time on research?"

"I can tell you what the stars are made of and in fact can even confirm that the other stars in this world are unoccupied!" Cam says. "However, I'm not sure that knowing they're mostly hydrogen and helium will help with the project of ruling them all."

"...the crane that's apparently-not-your-familiar said that's where you came from," Finankar says. He's fallen in step with them because his counterpart is here so why shouldn't he be.

"I got the sense he was oversimplifying," Mitros agrees. 

"Dramatically," Maitimo says. "The stars are other suns; around them orbit other planets, which you can definitely colonize, and you're human so your population grows swiftly by our standards and you'll have an empire spanning the galaxy, my lady Queen, if the supply problems that'll invite do not deter you. There are also other dimensions, worlds not accessible from this one by travel in any direction, and we're from one of those. My father invented a way to hop between them and we hopped here."

"The crane's a machine like the spaceship," Cam says. "I just made it look like a crane because you have talking animals here and I figured it would blend in, how'd I do?"

"What exactly are you non-humans?"

"I am impressed by the crane," Mitros says, "it's a very persuasive crane! And I am even more impressed by, if also a little concerned about, the apparent capacity to make machines that speak and explain and oversimplify."

"It doesn't think," Maitimo says reassuringly. "Cam can make people of my species but not yours and he cannot make thinking machines."

Mitros nods. "Immortality?"

"Not yet," Findekáno says, "we're trying, sorry."

"Improved recall and working memory?"

"Our species has metal in our brains, and when we invented those things we invented them to work through the metal in our brains," Maitimo explains. "So we have those ourselves but can't share them, I felt terribly guilty about that even before realizing there was a version of me here. How do you know everyone?"

Mitros grins. "You know, I am actually not sure I would have benefitted if that'd been an achievable ambition. I abandoned it in favor of ruling the world, or are you doing both?"

"I found cause to abandon that ambition too," Maitimo says, "at least temporarily."

"The crane didn't compose its own words, we were talking through it same way we're talking through these things now," says Cam, waving his computer. "It's also loosely possible that you could get the kind of immortality I have if you travel to their world or mine first, it doesn't work here but it might not just fail to work for you."