"What else do you want to be caught up on?"

"I'm guessing Cam can't do an awakened golem? Anyway, I told Pterodactyl to surprise me but I expect what he's doing is setting up the infrastructure in Stork for anyone who'd like to learn servantmaking to wake a couple golems daily in exchange for fabulous wealth. Can get a couple hundred million a day that way, sell those in Edda through Vanda Nosseo, who seem to know what to do with the sales angle and with their cut of the money. It is possible Pterodactyl will actually surprise me and it'll be something even cleverer than that. And I would like to be caught up on each Arda, how its war went, who's running it now..."

"Can't do magic stuff," Cam says, "at least not without some hitherto undiscovered workaround."

"How in-depth do you want on the Ardas, like, do you want three sentences on mine or twelve paragraphs and a ballad?"

"You all are the ones presumed to have other, pressing, priorities. There's a ballad?"

"There's several. The story's very popular. The Asgardian renderings skip the part where I discovered I'm actually not an Asgardian but a kidnapped and secretly adopted and enspelled member of a species Asgard has been ancestrally at war with, though. Anyway. So I was trying to travel to another planet anyway but went astray and landed on the Helcaraxë while the Nolofinwëan half of the host, having been both physically and politically divided from the other contingent, was crossing it; I helped them out, flew around carrying messages and running errands, and got started on a spell - my spells take decades to compose - that would get me out of the world and back to Edda where I could seek more resources. I rescued my you from Angband and started an orc cult and killed two Balrogs and dueled Thauron twice and killed him the second time and adopted the newly awakened species of Men because Eru doesn't take good care of his toys and Fëanor invented me a thing for retroactive eidetic memory so I could call up all my science reading and on this basis my Noldor put together a very very large bomb. It didn't help with the crux of the problem although it did put some orcs out of their misery, and then Doriath wound up with a Silmaril - in my world before I even showed up Fëanor and sons had sworn a stupid oath to be undeterrable in retrieving the fucking things so that was an enormous pain in the neck to avoid starting a war over, my you wound up parking in Doriath wearing the thing to appease the oath and work on getting it peacefully sent somewhere it could be more of a force multiplier - Morgoth got pissed off and everything started collapsing, I evacuated everyone to Valinor except the Noldor who were on lousy terms with the Valar and they instead used the Silmarils to time-stop themselves so they were okay while I parked in Valinor with that infuriating time-smoothing effect and finished my spell, and then I went home, picked up an artifact in possession of my adoptive family that allows arbitrary control of the locations of things, and smeared the Enemy across the cosmos until no two particles of him shared a cubic parsec."

"Nicely done. And Maedhros, uh, believed this?"

"We hung out a lot over the course of this long story and he did at first think I was an evil Maia - he could tell I wasn't Thauron in particular pretty early - and then he thought that I might be a nice Maia stuck in a nasty oath, and then based on things like the books I could pull out of my eidetic memory he thought I was probably actually Loki of Asgard and only affiliating with the Enemy on terms like 'I will stop torturing all the orcs all the time and you direct the relatively pleasant hallucinations of people who'd otherwise be horrifically tortured', and then I turned up with the ability to grant free will and he didn't think any such deal would survive my getting my hands on power like that. So. Eventually."

He glances at Kib and looks faintly miserable. "Congratulations. And the other ones?"

"I don't really like talking about mine," Cam mutters, "I'll let Loki do it." He spreads his wings and flies up out of earshot.

"Space Arda is more spread out - planets where you have continents - and higher-tech. Cam showed up and provided extra faster-than-light ships to get the Noldor host from one of Valinor's moons to Endorë, where he found a... surprisingly low-tech war. The tech disparity might or might not sound particularly irregular to you when you don't have any of the applicable anything but the Enemy was doing the equivalent of throwing rocks at people and then doing elaborate cutting-edge research to be dreadful to whoever he collected after he'd hit them with enough rocks. The Space ones fork; the Enemy could fork them too, could pull what I think are even more extreme tricks with time acceleration than the Flat Arda versions... Cam didn't want to escalate in case that provoked worse, and it could have gotten much worse - so he mostly provided supplies like food and gave everybody he could the ability to melt their chips for unrecoverable-except-by-Mandos suicide and so on. Enemy tried to make him a deal. Wanted him to destroy Valinor.

He held out until he'd be able to bring back every single Elf there when Space Findekáno invented a way to route around the demonic ability to make minds. And he held out for a really, really solid oath - it worked. But resurrection only worked via the chips. The Maiar and the Valar stayed dead until I showed up."

He squeezes Kib's hand.

"Oh."

"But I showed up and did a repeat on the smearing-Morgoth-across-the-cosmos thing and was about to do the same to Thauron but he had a biowarfare deadman switch; had to hop my Aulë around to clean that up before I could kill him too. And then my Aulë made some promises on behalf of the Space Valar to be less unpleasantly Valarous and then I put them all back. Cam is still not very popular on Space Valinor. Better liked on Space Endorë, though. - Oh, Kib, you ever meet a Thuringwethil? Me and Cam both got hit on by ours."

"Wouldn't describe the encounter that way."

"...well, we didn't take her up on it."

He squeezes Kib's hand again.

They'd mentioned three Ardas. Maybe a continuity error. If he mentions it he'll probably be made to forget it.

"And then there's the other Arda but it's all fucked up and upsets Maedhros, so I don't know if you want to insist on being caught up on it right now."

(Cam swoops down.)

"More upsetting than typical of these wars?"

"The war part is actually less upsetting than average. Everything else is fucked up. But Elspeth landed there due to a magical accident back in Aurum and went around aggressively truth-telling, she did the teach-them-to-nuke thing too, it didn't help, she aggressively told the truth some more - it's amazing how far she stretches that - she wrangled a ceasefire and then went to Valinor and explained incarnates to Valar and got sent home. We found the place on a worldhop from Edda, but when Loki checked for deadman's switches the Enemy just ran away instead of monologuing about how great his deadman's switches were, we don't know where he went."

"So he's still loose and that's not the part that's fucked up?"

"It's fucked up, but it is not 'the part that is fucked up', no."

"...do you actually have a point in mind at which we are allowed to know what's so fucked up?"

"Not a specific one, but consider it painted with brightly colored warning signs."