"Yeah, I'm guessing he will size up whether everything is on the level, tell his alt so, and then join an engineering team or get really into magic music composition if it works outside Mirror."

Nod. "Sounds fine."

"So are you under instructions to keep me here..."

"I told him I was not going to keep you in here forcibly but I'd let him know before you left if you were going to do that."

"No, no, I'm very amenable to being kept here. I was merely planning to demand to be entertained."

"I wasn't planning to stare at the walls. How would you prefer to be entertained?"

"Come here and tell me that someday we'll be so powerful we won't have to sell our souls to make things marginally better?"

Snuggle. "Omnipotence or bust. Unsatisfactory situations will be resolved with a wave of our hands and compensatory boxes of chocolates for all those previously in harm's way."

Snuggles. "So glad we found you."

"Because I'm so entertaining or because every marginal world we can access is more leverage?"

"Additional daeva worlds with the same tech level as us aren't especially leverageable. I like you all for your personality."

"Not necessarily so much leverageable-for-power as leverageable-for-information, maybe personnel, maybe just another place for the handwaving and chocolates to look after... but that's a better reason anyway." Kiss.

Kiss. "Have to figure out how to integrate Singularity's Noldor into the empire. Under normal circumstances my alt'd want a sector of the multiverse for himself, but I am assuming he'll be inclined not to rule anybody. But if I take them all out from under him he'll probably be sad even if he thinks it's the right call."

"Inclined for roughly my reasons?"

"Yeah."

"Well, is there a you-compatible equivalent of hiding him in a belfry, is there something else he could do...?"

"I should probably meet him and confirm that when he's not Doomed we're loosely the same person, but I'm sure there's something with enough people and minimal enough formal authority."

Nod. Snuggle.

"And lots of chocolates to go around, once we stumble on magic that can fix it."

"I'm sort of - lowkey planning to park in Milliways as long as it takes to get ahold of resurrection. Portable resurrection; Nechar can do the non-portable kind but couldn't grab a Singularity Elf off my list..."

"Makes sense. ...once we have dimensional transit and a way to kill our Melkor we ought to go, time isn't holding still in all the other worlds out there..."

"I guess dimensional transit is probably as good a bet as Milliways."

"Well, doesn't have the advantage of holding time still in your world. It probably makes sense to keep some Singularity people in here."

"Long as they're willing to stay and investigate whatever the landlords are willing to throw at them, yeah."

"I don't object if you want to stay, I've just been worrying that some of these worlds are moving right along while we sit here because our dimensional travel isn't demon-proofed yet..."