"Different year, different background magic system. I'm a little surprised we have any matching media, you'd think the magic would butterfly-effect the heck out of everything."
"You'd think. ...The, uh, other one, I got a couple of impressions of her world before everything went to hell, and she didn't have any magic at all until mine got imported, and it still looked pretty recognizable."
"...I mean, in an infinite multiverse I guess it would make sense that some worlds would happen to turn out basically the same way despite fantastic odds against, and given the premise of Milliways in the first place being attracted to superficially similar worlds makes sense."
"Yeah, I guess. But this suggests a really - really staggering array of worlds, beyond just 'way, way many'. If it has to get this way at random instead of by some sort of pull."
"I mean, is there any reason for the multiverse not to be literally infinite? Lots of things are infinite."
"You could represent that in numbers. You could assign universes numbers but maybe not represent them that way."
"Like - with time, you have a system where it's now and now it's some amount later, with space you have a system where there's here and there's a ways off to the left, etcetera, but you couldn't be like 'Bella's world is yea earlier and this much off to the left of Edie's world' in any numerical sense where you could define all the intermediate points along that line."
"Well, no, not like that, but do we really know that there isn't some kind of--order of universes smushed against each other like planes in a three-dimensional space?"
"I think mostly it seems nonstraightforward because it's impossible to really visualize a tesseract, but I'm not a scientist or a mathematician or anything."
"It doesn't really matter, for most practical purposes. I'll leave it to the theoretical physicists."
"Well, not yet, but I bet people are going to sit up and take notice when all of a sudden a family of assorted magicians turns up with the Lost Knowledge of the Ancients."
"I'm not sure yet how much I'll publicize once everything has gone down. I'm not sure how much will be necessarily public and how much I'll even have the option about."
"I don't think we're probably going to go public with this stuff all at once immediately but stuff's going to get out over time, if we want to get any use out of it."