Kib can't so much flee. He can shriek - he can lurch in the direction of the nearest house and try the door - it's locked. He can amble briskly...
He can break into a run when the snake gains on him and fall flat on his face.
And he can get eaten up.
And it's too bright too bright too bright and he flings his arm over his eyes.
"I think I'm okay." He shakes his head. "- I've never dreamed Aly being older than maybe twenty-four."
"Yeah, I think the anachronic story my brain's telling me has her die young and I think I know what of now and it sucks."
"I think I'm up now. If you want to observe the foreign human ritual of shaving or something no need to leave on my account." Out of bed he gets.
And Kib performs the foreign human ritual of shaving, and changes and gets up and goes to eat something and work on the scribe.
Kib does not like the static in the air or the echoes but it's probably rude to comment or something. I was walking down the street at home and a monster I have absolutely no explanation for, which looked like a giant snake with a full length mirror for a face, slithered around chasing people. I tried to run away, but I tripped, and it - put its mirror on me - and I landed in the street in Valinor.
That depends a lot on what kind of longer-term transit access there is. If all you can do is send me home or not do that, I'd just as soon stay here, you don't have any other servantmakers and there's better prospects for my personal immortality; if I can be of use organizing some social program for handling, say, babies that are rescued and brought up to age four or five here and then sent back, or colonization efforts on a third world to deal with excess population on mine, I can do that.
At this point all we are confident we can do without large scale disruptions of a type that could risk the habitability of all involved worlds is occasional transportation of known and well-specified people back and forth. We are trying to think of a stable way to aid children, other than drawing them all into this universe. We have not found one yet. A third world would likewise need to be known to someone or very well specified.
...So you could send me there and back, and if I then brought a sufficiently well-specified report of someone who wanted to come you could bring them too, but no third worlds, no anonymous babies.
Okay. I'd like to tell my teacher I'm not dead - someone else may have also been mirrored by the snake monster and landed somewhere else, if they find a way home we can maybe establish contact with more places, so checking in now and then would be beneficial to the long term project but it's probably not worth doing more than every - Let's not say 'six months' or 'half a year' - couple dozen weeks. What do you need to know about my teacher to bring him, or should I just go myself to be recalled in a day or so?
...Actually if I go myself I can bring books. Right? Or would bringing me plus cargo be difficult?