"I would be too if I'd spent millions of years on a thing."

"Yep." And they're outside. "Welcome to Tirion." It looks again extraordinarily pretty, and extraordinarily planned for a city. The only thing that isn't perfectly designed to compliment everything else is the lighting, which is all recent and haphazard.

This is not really surprising on any level!

They walk. He handles a few dozen logistical queries in his head while they do so.

The daeva do not yet know that chips enable this ability.

Then perhaps they'll think he's a little absent-minded. When one of his brothers passes him in the street he will speak aloud for their benefit.

"Hey! Unusual combo, did'ya find a universe where Heaven and Hell are best friends?"

"Nope, but these two are sisters - they don't back people up, and you become daeva when you die."

"Sounds like a pretty good deal."

"Yep. I'm not asking someone to destroy their backup and test whether it works for us."

"Well, we're all volunteering for a different suicide mission, we can at least share the results. Hi, by the way. Tyelcormo. He's my brother."

"Emily Xavier, and this is my sister Edie."

"Pleased to meet you."

And palace-wards. "I cannot believe I've really answered all your questions."

"The trouble is less that we think we know enough and more that we know we don't have enough information to ask the right questions."

"Okay. This nation is called Túna, its capital city is Tirion, population ten million, twenty million if you count the surrounding metropolitan area. It's a monarchy. My grandfather was the King until Melkor murdered him - melted the chip, too, obviously - so now my father's the King, though contestedly. Being immortal we didn't have clear rules for succession. We are two and a half light Years from Endore, which is the planet Melkor's currently terrorizing. We're going to go there and figure out what's going on and then try to distract him for long enough to grab everyone and run."

"Who's doing the contesting?"

"My father's half-brother."

"What does the dispute look like?"

"People pointedly obey orders from the person they think is the King. It'll be a disaster if we try to fight a war together, but in the meantime, doesn't really matter."

"But you are expecting to fight a war together."

"I'm hoping to have fixed things by then."

"Good luck with that. Did your grandfather ever summon anything?"

"No. No matter what was happening, no one'd have been willing to kill him - I'm also taking something of a chance on that front, but under more desperate circumstances..."

"I suppose having people it would be problematic to see dead summoning daeva has risks," she sighs. "But--given how that works, at least in our universe, and the fact that permanently killing you is possible--I strongly recommend having everyone you can summon something. A fairy for a minute and give 'em a batch of cookies'll do it. And there's Limbo, if that's also the same..."