The spell wears off as he catches up with Cam. "Sorry," he says.

Cam has taken his headphones off. "Thanks for the warning," he says dryly.

"My impression is that Matt finds mind control every bit as terrifying as you do, unless he's being mind-controlled into not finding it so, but that his brother has permission to do it anyway in any situation where he's on the brink of completely and permanently breaking, which he was very close to doing. You did see the number of Ardas -"

"- increment? Yes."

"The engineers are working as fast as they can but they weren't supposed to need to work as fast as they could, it was all supposed to stop and give us time -"

"Yeah. The other ones don't have people in here stalling them."

"Four hundred nine million Melkors. Wonder how many are shiny-tree and how many are normal..."

"Or yet further sorts. Steampunk Arda. Arda where everybody is a wombat. Lot of room for variety."

A slightly hysterical laugh. "I have millions of alts, probably."

"Maybe you're not the only sane one after all." Sigh. Hug?

A hug would be very deeply appreciated. "Matt's annoyed with me."

"Why?"

"For outing him to his family."

"...yes, that's the sort of thing that can become awkward, possibly I should've thought of it before we held hands in front of people..."

"Should think it would've been more on me. If we run across yet more I guess we should be careful."

"Yeah." Sigh.

"Four hundred million Melkors."

Squeeze. "Have ever existed. Maybe they've got good alts like you've got an evil one. Maybe somebody else is on the case via non-Milliways means."

"Yeah, sure, some of them -

- sorry, this is not a productive avenue of conversation -"

"Not really, but I understand the temptation to dwell."

"The first thing that crossed my mind was 'we need to overthrow the landlords and stop time everywhere, it's worth it even if it only has a one in a hundred million chance of success, the only thing we're risking is whatever bit of the multiverse we'd even be able to rule' -

- I am, as you can infer from the fact I said it out loud, not going to do that -"

"And then, what, allow the worlds to proceed again only as they come under thrall -? Yeah, kind of a crackpot plan."

"I mean, if there were a way to pull it off, yes, that'd what I'd do. But I don't see how - at all -"

"And if there's four hundred million Ardas there are probably four hundred million of lots of things, with circumstances we know nothing about, and we don't know how exactly Milliways is embedded into the fabric of the multiverse that it has time-stopping privileges over anywhere it extends a door and can pull all the publications and comestibles and so on for Bar to dispense..."

"I would still do it if presented with the means. But yeah."