Giggle. "Yep!"

And after a couple more minutes of kissing she will go get Fingon, pop, pop.

"Maedhros says that Kib is an alternate universe version of you and declined to comment on anything else, I think he's having to recalculate how the Enemy could benefit as the plot gets more and more absurd. Ready to head back?"

"Yeah."

Pop, pop. Knock on the door.

The golem opens it again. "Hey. What'd he say?"

"Confirms we're alts."

"Yeah, they're kind of approaching psychic on that sort of thing."

"He did not want to visit, sorry. The King extends his regards and etcetera etcetera, too."

"Regards and etcetera accepted. And not visiting is quite reasonable."

"So how'd you come out of Angband so functional?"

"If you got caught," says Kib, "and you were under the impression he could read minds, which I was, what would you do."

"Oh."

"Enlighten us?"

"I'd... stop... thinking."

"Yeah. It also helps that as a side effect of the reincarnation thing whenever he erased something - like my expectation that he could read minds - it'd go into the pool of things I could dream back as memories. So I had a very unpleasant time but was not for most of it mentally present enough to develop - phobias, twitchiness, whatever - things that happened did not constitute information - I've got damage but it mostly doesn't manifest day to day -

"- but then I was still like that when I got rescued and to drag me out of it a few of our alts stood near me and narrated my counterfactual thought process until I concluded I was not successfully preventing the Enemy from having my thoughts by not thinking them. Took a little while to kind of de-rust my brain. I still don't do any servantmaking, just - in case."

He nods.

"Got dragged to Lórien and rolled back to just before Aydanci died once, was fine for a day, had nightmares... they let it be after that. Probably would have started me over if they could be sure I would start over and reincarnations aren't one to a customer or something."

"The reincarnations are specific to this world? We've got humans - Bella's world has humans -"

"Stork humans are weird as humans go. We do not reproduce, we just appear in random locations as babies. Most people aren't reincarnations - I'm intermittently working on a work of fiction that includes reincarnation the way me and Aydanci did it to see if anybody recognizes the concept but it's definitely not commonplace - and we seem to be the only place that has even rare reincarnation."

"Well, we got death cleared up anyway." He nods at Lúthien. 

"Congratulations. Everyone will be very excited if that ports and scales."

"I'm guessing 'scales but doesn't port'. Unless the effects of wishes can reach past adjacency even though they have to be made near my world."

"It took the wishing mechanism, so it probably doesn't - though didn't you have a six-wish sequence worked out to solve it, that'll work at least everywhere wishing works..."

"Yeah, so we might want to go on a world-finding spree of places adjacent to us."