"Cuter than Cam's a very high bar. How were you imagining yourself?"

"Like so," she says, voice adjusted too, "the voice was also wrong. I didn't even think there was a meaningful answer to the question and there is and I was mistaken, I'm so embarrassed."

He giggles. "That one's more intimidating. If one didn't notice how Cam carries himself he'd look about as frightening as a puppy, he's got such an innocent face."

"How he carries himself? I assume you mean something other than the adjusted balance for the wings and tail."

"Yeah, the indestructibility. You're like that sometimes when wielding the Tesseract - like no power could conceivably do more than minorly inconvenience you and you've had a long time to grow sure of that -

-  tail's pretty great too, though."

She giggles. "We have not actually had a Tesseract-versus-indestructibility contest because it's in such an awful mood and it seems like a bad time to discover there is something else it can't do, if it can't."

"....and also then you would not have a boyfriend, if it could? Or are you assuming it'd be able to tell you what it can do without actually doing it?"

"I was just going to take his wing off," she says, "he has those made without nerves in the joint in case he ever decides blue's not his color, wouldn't even hurt, he could replace it."

"Of course. Well, when the Tesseract's in a better mood you can let us all know how that goes."

"Yeah, although I'm not sure how long it'll take."

"Well, I'll hardly notice if it recovers its good mood at Elf pace."

"It is older than you, you know."

"And Cam is, what, a hundred fifty? You're cradle-robbing."

"Cam and I have been adults for similar amounts of time! He just got to that point with less of a running start."

"Asgardians do have intolerably long childhoods. We can get eight generations in in the same time, and we're the slow-paced people."

"That didn't start really annoying me until I was three hundred, and then I was annoyed, and then I got this extremely time-consuming magic and figured it was just as well to have a low-responsibility period of time in which to frontload the effort..."

"Several dimensions are now grateful for it."

"Speaking of which, Cam thinks the next time it is occasioned to go worldhopping to find new destinations we should do it from Edda, on the grounds that if the Tesseract's limit is one step of adjacency and the worldleapers have the same limitation we are collectively best equipped to handle arbitrary things, Enemies, et cetera, within its operating neighborhood."

"Sounds like a good idea, yes. When are we next inclined to go worldhopping?"

"Haven't set a date. Sometime convenient with respect to proceedings here."

"We can sell people a lot of lightleapers and give quite a boost to the fix-the-galaxy project, and we're checking whether our counterparts can make magic items because there's more of them. Not just the forks, they had a larger starting population."

"Cam'll be happy to supply the lightleapers, of course."

"He's so useful!"

"He is! He's very nearly as casual about making stuff as I am about illusioning stuff, only less so because he has a habit of trying to avoid making things he doesn't have a plan for keeping or getting rid of."

"Getting rid of things sounds like it'd be as simple as any spell with your magic system gets, no? Not that we'd have to worry about disposal in this case, the whole point is that we'd sell them."