Gem peals
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A sculpture - or what looks like a sculpture when it's not moving - opens the door to show them in. "Hi," Kib says, "I'm Kib, good to meet you."

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Wow. Presumably the local magic. "Good to meet you too," he says.

 

Bella, until we have more information - did you tell them you reset if you die -

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Didn't come up.

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My recommendation would be to wait to bring it up until we have more to go off than someone who says he's an alternate universe version of you. 

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Yeah, I do plan to check his story there. "So how do you identify alts when they don't look alike?"

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"One of Maedhros's alts, Mitros, figured it out the first time - he was well acquainted with a girl one, Iobel, and then Cam, the other boy one besides me, showed up and Mitros had him figured out inside of a few minutes' conversation, they confirmed it from there - three questions et al."

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"And someone has interdimensional travel and found everybody else?"

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"There's several forms of interdimensional travel around. One's in common use to go to known places and one's more useful to go to unfamiliar places and check them out. We've only been checking out unfamiliar places within one step of a world called Edda, though, because there's a particularly useful magic object that only works in that neighborhood."

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"I am assuming you want to wait for our stories until everyone interested has assembled, but can we hear all of yours?"

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"Sure, although my cunning visual aids aren't going to be as good as Loki's would be. Uh, welcome to Stork! It's my native world. Few decades ago a snake monster ate me and I landed in an Arda now distinguishingly nicknamed Shine. It's a few centuries earlier there than in yours, I showed up while the Trees were still standing and we also had our Darkening fifty Years earlier than standard. I introduced the Stork magic system, it's called servantmaking, and got the Valar to open portals between Shine and Stork so that the altruistically-minded people of Valinor could lend their efforts to miscellaneous Stork problems. Discovered I was a reincarnation and the weird dreams I'd been having were memories of my past life, in which I was a girl but did not actually look like Gem et al, different face, haven't found any Bells still wearing it. Discovered I'd been married in my past life and went and found my husband, Aydanci - love you, honey!"

"Love you too!" calls a distracted voice from upstairs.

"- brought him back to Valinor with me, Valar compared their homophobia to their opinions on marriage and the latter won. Melkor was on parole at the time; we discovered he'd been taking children from Stork for their ability to servantmake which people from other worlds can't do; and when we noticed that he stopped pretending to be reformed and killed the Trees. And Aydanci. Who reincarnated. Found his reincarnation, my instance of Maedhros whose nickname is Island found him some nice parents to bring him up second time around, and then a bunch of people moved to Beleriand to have our war and the Valar closed the portals. Our war was - mostly shorter and cleaner than other people's? Servantmaking was a big edge. But Island got captured, and my you, who is called Pterodactyl for reasons momentarily to become obvious, flew into Angband on a pterodactyl and got him out, once the pterodactyls we had were grown up.

"I got captured after that. Was likewise extracted.

"Uh, Aydanci really doesn't like it when things harm me. He and Fëanáro came up with an off-model variant on Silmarils and had them controlling a ridiculously huge fleet of servants and killed the Enemy.

"The snake that ate me ate several people, and one of them had landed in a world adjacent to Stork, called Hex. Hex has a Bell and a human version of your extended family and they were in contact with some other universes via -" He calls up a map of worlds. "Via here, the Fëanáro from which had invented the exploratory interdimensional transit I mentioned. The guy who landed in Hex heard that the royalty of a Hex country called Marlatia had weird magical otherworldly powers, wanted to see if they could let him visit here. They sent a scout and the scout found the Little Valinor that sprung up near one of the ex-portal sites - the Valar had given people time to decide which side they wanted to be on, some Elves stayed in Stork - and from there found Shine, and found me and mine."

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He nods slowly. "There are Fëanors who survived the war?"

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"Yeah? This one didn't," he highlights a spot on the map, "but this one did and this one and mine. I suppose you could chalk up all three cases to sufficiently timely Bell intervention..."

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"And one of them invented interdimensional travel? That's - even given Fëanor and four hundred years..."

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"Oh, that one's Space Arda, you're from a Flat Arda. Space Arda has all the tech ramped way up. Valinor and Endorë are separate planets, for one thing."

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"...okay. So three other flat Ardas, one space Arda, in all cases an interdimensional visitor somewhere along the line - for all we know the war in fact drags out at a stalemate until an interdimensional visitor comes..."

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"Yeah. And the interdimensional visitor has been a Bell in all cases except this one," map highlight, "in which case it was a Bell's kid. Bells don't come natively in Ardas so far that we've seen."

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"And the current multiverse political setup -"

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"High-latency communications and lots of special-case magic and stuff, so it's a little scattered. Over in Edda is a planet full of the Noldor from this Arda, Elentári, they're doing a sorta federated thing with whoever wants to meet their shortlist of criteria. We're setting up something similar but a little smaller scale here, this planet is mostly city-state sized political units and they're being gradually coaxed into coalescing. Hex's bunch started out with a country and they're building on that. This world," Aurum lights up, "has a shadow government for supernatural persons about which regular people typically are not informed, its Bell already ran that by the time anybody met her or her daughter. Oh, and Loki's a princess of two different historically warring planets on Edda for reasons - Loki's another Bell."

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"And Shine, and Space, and that one -"

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"Uh, on Shine Island's King of the Noldor and Doriath is an island now because Beleriand disintegrated when the Enemy died and the Dwarves are Dwarfing it up and Valinor continues to Valinor. Space has a bunch of countries on Endorë, the Noldor are divided, it's way more populous than Flat Ardas are. This one is complicated and I would rather not explain it personally right this minute."

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"...okay. Is there magic anywhere that does - I'm trying to think what we haven't wished into place already - are any of the Maedhros's sure that they're not hallucinating?"

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"Yeah. Human alt from Hex and the one from here were never captured, Space ones are all forked from a time pre-capture, and Island and the Elentári ones received free will and found it unmistakeable but in both cases the leadup seems to have been important."

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"And Bella showing up with her magic rock and letting him wish the Enemy dead wasn't exceptionally plausible." He sighs. "All right. Thank you. Ardas all have the same magic - the engineering kind and the songs?"

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"Space Arda mostly doesn't have magic-magic, just sufficiently advanced technology - the Valar and Maiar are pretty magic but most everything else is physicalist under the cosmetics. Flat Ardas all have the same magic. Magic songs have to be composed in a flat Arda but work outside them, it's weird."

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"The sculpture is an example of servantmaking?"

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