"Earthlings!" giggles Gem, and she slaps his hand.

"Is it the same as with Bella - identical up to moving to Forks -"

"Uh, born in Forks parents divorced moved with Renée to Phoenix lived there till she married Phil and moved to Jacksonville so I moved in with Charlie - that was when I got hit by the van, did you get hit by a van?"

"...I almost got hit by a van," says Golden, as Charp opens the door for her. "My precognitive sister-in-law saved me."

"I didn't even have a close call with a van."

"You're taller. Maybe he saw you."

"I am still confounded by the idea that three worlds with three different secret magic systems could avoid diverging near-immediately."

"Did you find your secret magic system in the big mansion outside town?"

"No, the magic system found me dying in the hospital and patched me up. And I was like 'hey, a magic system'. And then the world ended and I had to fix that."

"Congratulations on the fixing that."

"Lúthien showing up was enormously helpful, I'd probably still be working on it and not much closer to a solution without her."

"Arda's magic system showing up was the helpful bit, all I actually did was accidentally scare an airplane and cling to Bella rather a lot."

"Because anybody at all from Arda would have wanted to help me and would've landed with a happiness song already composed?"

"Scare an airplane?"

"...most of them would probably have helped, I don't think anyone else has got as good of a happiness song. And we were hiding away in the cargo bay and the airplane was really loud so I told it to be quiet and it turns out that stopped the engines and then it was freaked out and wouldn't get in the air for another couple hours..."

"Awww. ...Where'd the happiness song come in, exactly...?"

"Emotion powered magic. It's an infinite energy hack. Broke an evil artificial ecology."

"Before me they were getting the energy from granting people wishes and then making them fight horrible despair monsters and driving them into becoming horrible despair monsters. Now they can just play the songs to people and keep their weird civilization running."

Another knock on the door.

"Hi!"

"More alts? More flat alts - gosh, Eru's a lot eviller than he is creative - nice to meet you, I go by Delight -"

"Gem. How'd you pick yours? Mine is because I am technically a rock."

"We can have arbitrarily many copies of us made and the postwar reconstruction was looking insurmountable so I had four made, and we went by tinco, parma, calma, and quesse, which being a Bell you'll either find objectionable right away or find objectionable as soon as someone tells you those are the first four letters of the Noldorin alphabet -"

"...letters of the alphabet - I mean maybe as placeholders until you'd diverged more or something but -"

He laughs. "Yep, it's a Bell! Well, Cam wasn't in a mood to lodge his complaint but Loki went straight to hers and demanded improvement and so my ex-boyfriend's alt named us all."