"Okay, so one and a half orders of magnitude – we're at like a hundred and fifty million. And I have no idea about the fertility but we have three species and don't typically produce offspring with each other, though it's possible."

"And you are concentrated in the same landmass, so I guess it would be harder to have large technologic differences. So, I guess it makes sense, but is still impressive."

"I mean, it'd still be possible. What with the mountains and volcanoes and large plains. But yeah."

"Oceans are huge obstacles, you can't settle on oceans, and for most of history people have been dependent on the weather or supplies or simply knowing how to navigate the huge blue expanse."

He shrugs. "We haven't had anything major like that, no."

"Well, congratulations on your utopia. Fenris will be quietly seethe with jealousy about it."

"I mean, there are problems, but they're nowhere near war, so yeah."

"Sounds nice."

"Extremely nice, I don't even know how to begin quantifying all the problems that you would avoid by having a peaceful non-imperialistic history."

"And I, fortunately enough, and from such a place and so don't know them. We still had plagues and things, it hasn't been a perfect utopia or anything, but yeah, probably a lot better."

"Well, I shall seethe with less jealousy then."

"Anyway – since I haven't met any humans before, because I'm pretty sure you don't exist on my planet, what are you like? So far it looks sort of like you're the average of the three species. Ish. No vibrant hair, no colorful eyes, no stripes, no pointy ears…?"

"No, dude. Clearly the three species are derived from humans. Just add vibrant hair, colorful eyes, stripes, etc."

Fenris checks with Bar if there are humans in Itaruko's universe.

Nope. Perhaps one of the ancestors was, but if they were it's not published in any clear way.

"… I mean, that's possible, but you could have just evolved from one of us, too? Or, I dunno, got a really boring hybrid somehow?"

"No, we have evolutionary ancestors and everything. The similarity is just Milliways being human-centric."

"Well, we have them too, and I'm pretty sure none of them are exactly yours, but yeah."

"No. I meant that we evolved completely separately and the fact that we look this similar is just Milliways catching species that look similar to human."

Nod. "Any more questions about lumen then? Or, I guess, any of the species on my planet or whatever?"

"Not in the moment. I guess you could give book recommendations so we can bring some home. We know someone that does magical translation. Felix likes terrible trashy romance novels."

He laughs a bit, but does make some suggestions. Including for terrible trashy romance novels, with a variety of 'protagonists' as it were.

Other than the terrible trashy romance novels, he has quite a good selection of different genres, both fiction and nonfiction.

Felix can't wait to dig in this new world of terrible, terrible clichés. They buy the various books and leave them back in their own world (there is an assortment of various things parked on the other side of the door in the triplets' world.

Martin also buys some of the suggestions! And if the superhero world has any interesting books that he probably doesn't have, he would also like suggestions from them.

Itaruko is also interested in suggestions, and gets some from Martin too.

It turns out there are a lot of divergences in the media between the triplets' and Martin's universes. They both have Harry Potter, and the first three books look identical, but it was never as successful despite having a total of ten books instead of seven. Unsurprisingly there is more super-hero based literature, since it reflects real life. Felix makes a lot of suggestions – he also likes good books.