"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."

"Yep. But my family of vampires - and everyone else Cam looked up - have no alts in Revelation, Limbo or a daeva world, so they somehow managed not to have been born in Revelation without their presence or absence affecting anything in the life of a middle class American between the years of 1987 and 2004."

"I'm missing all the childhood stuff, and it's not just not being from an Earth, in translation Iobel's birthplace has a suspiciously similar name to the town Cam and Bella are from."

"So you seem to come in various genders, backstories, and families, and we seem to come in 'space' and 'not'. And 'rapist'."

"...similarly to not wanting to meet an evil Fëanor I do not want to meet an evil Bell."

"That was among the first things to cross my mind, yeah."

"We'll check new alts over a bit before going full speed ahead."

"Oh, is that what you were doing."

"Hey, you thought I might be maliciously impersonating you with witchcraft."

"Yes, yes."

"If the Valar hadn't happened to mention it I think the evil version of me could have leveraged the trust the non-evil versions earned a long way - certainly into getting free will and getting his father back - and if he pieced together at that point that we weren't all like him he might have been able to manage it a while longer."

"I don't think it crossed his mind that you might not be."

"I don't care if this makes me a little bit more like him, when the country's safe he dies."

"What if his Findekáno objects even with time to decompress?"

He buries his head in his hands. "I could persuade his Findekáno not to object but I suppose that's a very very bad idea."

The Findekáno in question may have been persuaded of too many things.

"Yeah. I - just - do not want to live in a multiverse with him in it, it's as bad as knowing there are still Thaurons about."

"You know what would be really trippy, would be a good Thauron."