"Reasonable Valar sound lovely. Maybe we can find an Arda from before the whole mess started, reasonablize them, Melkor never gets paroled..."

"Optimistically that might not even require reasonable-izing them, since we have information about what happens when he does get paroled, but Elspeth relaying the facts certainly wouldn't hurt."

"I don't mean to sidetrack the conversation but if you have Loki's spellsymbol concepts and could bounce them to Elspeth I could get on reading the spells."

"My pleasure." He does that. 

"Thank you," Bella says, and she starts paging rapidly through the book Loki illusioned for her.

"Do we have alts in the shadow vampire world, has anyone checked?"

"Out of Tesseract jurisdiction, but nobody recognizes the faces and Cam didn't turn up any local writing by any of you."

"The shadow vampire world? Are there other vampires we are being distinguished from?"

"Thuringwethil's technically a vampire? Dunno if she really counts. She's not as pretty as you or I'd have had a harder time keeping Loki off her."

"That was not a meaningful consideration!"

"You didn't tell me this story!"

"Thuringwethils are Maiar who are apparently technically vampires. And incompetently hit on us given the chance."

"And Loki spent decades in Arda - subjectively I think it was over a century - among Elves, who are I understand it not quite as hypermonogamous as vampires but enough so that they were lonely decades."

"Loki may actually be off-model in how bothersome that was. Not that Bella isn't unusual the other direction."

"Yes, yes. I even have an explanation for that."

"Oh?"

"It was socially acceptable. It was the only thing I had innate interest in that was also that. None of the others were suffering from a lack of this intersection."

"I think I'd have much less interest in sex if it were socially acceptable. We'll have to wait and see if we find alts of me in more permissive worlds."

"Well, alts do keep turning up. I wish there were a systematic way to see if people have alts besides checking manually for specific individuals, we could see if it correlated with anything."

"It seems to obviously correlate with interestingness, unless we're thinking there are lots of people out there who are boring as are all their alts."

"Well, if there were, we wouldn't know. There could be a dozen of some terribly dull personality we will never run into and therefore never seek more of."

"Actually, my Earth matches Cam's in many respects so closely that I suspect it must have a lot of duplicate boring people just to make everything line up neatly."

"These Noldor have a few hundred citizens who have alts on space Arda, all of them exact duplicates rather than the 'same personality, different background' situation Bells have. I have a few dozen who have alts in Marlatia. I haven't checked the evil planet yet because I do not think I'm emotionally equipped for that and I am certainly not equipped to run through mental impressions of everyone we respectively know with. Him."

"Cam and I might as well have been exact duplicates as far as we were concerned in all respects not directly connected to gender - ignorant as we were of our respective supernaturals - up until we were seventeen," Bella says. "At which point the old mansion outside of Forks contained books on summoning for him and a family of vampires for me. It's the same house."

"That's weird."