Cam in Materia
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Servantmakers finish waking a sufficient army of automata ready to take instructions from the Silmarils.

And now all they have to do is find Melkor.

Cam worldleaps from Evil Arda, over and over, performing abbreviated versions of the standard new universe checks (inhabited? alts? magic? tech? dire emergencies?) followed by attempting to conjure the current form or surroundings of Evil Arda's Melkor. As with jumps from Edda, he turns up a lot of Stuff, for a value of Stuff that means the checks result in "yes, no, meh, enh, put it on the list" and no immigrant evil deities.

He's on his fifteenth try when he manages, somehow, to land on a planet, in a cornfield, where he is promptly yelled at by short barefoot people until he flies out of their cornfield. He lands by a nice little creek, starts checking for alts - 'habitable' being a clear yes. Gets nothing. Oh well. He flies on, looking for more cosmopolitan bits of civilization than random corn farming midgets. Tries to start his computer on the way to compose a preliminary report for the folks back home.

It won't turn on.

----

Six hours later a disgruntled demon is knocking on a palace door.

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The person knocking on the palace door has wings and a tail and it is quite possible they are very dangerous, which is hardly a reason not to open the door for them. They send a runner off to tell someone of importance what's going on and they open the door and smile pleasantly and welcome Cam to the kingdom of Nolordel.

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"Hello. I really am sorry to drop in unannounced."

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That is reassuring. He gets a reassured smile. What can they help him with?

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"Do you happen to have a picture of the King around? This may or may not be a mistaken identity thing."

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There's a painting on a wall in a gallery across the way. It's of the King over a decade ago; he was sixty-five, then, but a hale sixty-five for a human.

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"Nope, he's who I'm looking for. Thank you. I am not in a particularly desperate hurry and am willing to wait for him or a convenient member of his family wherever's easiest for you."

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The King is now seventy-eight and doesn't sit audiences very often; his oldest son does, but is occupied. After some handwringing and some rushed and incomplete summaries his son agrees to go meet the eccentric winged person of uncertain provenance who is waiting patiently in one of the reception rooms. 

 

So he does. "Hello. Ferardrin. If you introduced yourself it somehow escaped my staff."

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"My name is Cam and I am extraplanar visitor in pursuit of an evil god and several of my usual abilities are broken since I got here and I know a bunch of versions of you from other planes."

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This is actually not the most ridiculous thing that has ever happened. Does mean to step carefully, though, around someone in pursuit of an evil god. "...okay," he says. "Welcome to the prime material plane, I suppose? Is the evil god around, are there precautionary measures it wouldn't be useless to take?"

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"My method of detecting things like evil gods is one of the broken powers, it's very annoying, so I don't know if he's here or not. I need an explanation of why this world breaks everything which involves less screaming at me than the people in the city I visited were able to manage, and, depending on what the answer is, a locality-friendly means of acquiring an eidetic memory. Depending on what things do work here there may well be such precautions even if I can't bring in the thing I was going to use to kill him."

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"I can manage to not scream at you but please do not actually do things that involve your extraplanar powers, this is an inhabited area and also I think my father'd rather fall apart even if no one died but us. If the world's breaking things you try that's a sign you should stop. 

 

You could get a headband for intelligence but I do not think even the very highest end of those gives one an eidetic memory."

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"Yeah I got the idea that the locals think messing with my extraplanar powers is unwise after about the third or fourth time they screamed at me. Some stuff still works. Translation magic's still going, for instance."

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"Things that haven't been a problem you can keep using, though if they start being a problem stop. Maybe your home universe likes you and lets you get away with a lot more, but are you really unfamiliar with the concept that trying to find exploits in the universe is dangerous?"

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"No. Not at all. Even slightly. Not in dozens of worlds has this ever come up. I think this is a here thing."

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"It's true on every plane we've ever heard of. But it certainly is a here thing, regardless of whether it's only a here thing. The universe does not like people looking for exploits; if you are lucky it will just break things when you try. If you are not lucky you will die, or the physical regularities you were trying to exploit will stop being such. There is a place south of here where some idiot tried to measure whether all objects fall at the same speed, and for a mile around down is up."

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"Jeez, no wonder in between all the screaming your uncle was a cautionary tale."

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"...sorry?"

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"Sorry, I'll back up - uh, remember I mentioned alternate versions of you? Standard procedure when I go to an unfamiliar world is to see if anybody I know has a version there. You're one of the people I check for, but, checking mechanism's broken. When people were screaming at me one of them managed to stop long enough to tell me the story of your tragically deceased uncle as an object lesson in why I should stop performing experiments and so on. In most worlds, performing experiments is perfectly safe and instances of your uncle manage to live past age twelve, but I can totally see why this would not be a good environment for one of him at all."

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"He was thirteen, but yeah. ..I actually think thirteen was the third time but it was the time they couldn't resurrect him no matter what they tried. 

 

If there are planes where he's alive it would be really lovely to get to speak to him. I think the King still grieves him, and I know my father does."

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"...there are planes where he's alive yes."

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"...problem?"

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"You don't usually get along very well."

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"No? Well, the other versions of our family wouldn't have grown up seeing what losing him did to the rest of us."

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"He actually doesn't get along with any of his half-siblings or any of their kids. Things are typically better between you and your cousins that you usually have though."

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"I guess I would. Usually have cousins. 

 

 

Okay. We'll want to meet them anyway but I'll try to manage everyone's expectations."

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