"Modulo different things happening to them, yes. You're usually best friends with Cousin You Don't Have number... three? I think he's three."

"I don't tend to get that depressed over my uncle dying, it was a long time ago, but hearing about all these relationships that should have existed is a little weird. Are they all like my uncle? The sort of people who'd have gotten themselves killed here?"

"The cousins? Uh, not as much? One of them I forget which number he is is basically exactly like his dad only slightly less so, so he'd probably have fared as badly, but the others could perhaps survive the place."

"How many are there?"

"He has seven sons, and in Shine one day he whimsically adopted a random baby girl from Stork and therefore also has a daughter."

"That's kind of a lot. How many surviving?"

"In the unaffected Arda plot the youngest one dies early in the war - and so does their dad - the others all live as far in as we've seen it play out."

"What a nice world."

"It's not how I'd make one. Although I'll give the Valar this, they really know their ecological management, we keep stealing the Valinor ecosystem for terraforming purposes."

"I just mean, like, the odds seven even mildly ambitious kids - sometimes eight - all grow up and there's a war with an evil god and they mostly all make it through -"

"Well, the eldest does routinely get captured and tortured, he just gets rescued. And remember that ambition is not particularly dangerous in itself these places. Recklessness is but that's different."

"By the evil god we're going off to see if we can find?"

"That's the one. Although this instance of Melkor never caught the relevant Maitimo. I'm not planning to confront him like this, just see if it's likely to be him or not on closer inspection."

"I wasn't under the impression this was safe, but having something a scripted feature of wars is more - upsetting somehow - than just having it often happen."

"That one we don't even manage to avert by just showing up. Loki appeared after the capture - Gem appeared after the rescue - but I got there before, Kib did too..."

"Kinda terrifying. Every single time?"

"Evil Arda's skipped it. Being evil screwed with the history enough, I guess. And mine and Kib's got captured in different ways - in Elentári and Luster there was a parley thing that they went to and got captured at, I navigated my parley carefully enough that no captures occurred and Kib omitted it - but then mine was a casualty of a massacre of a city and Kib's was lured into an elaborate trap - we think he's going after the Maitimos in particular for some reason."

"Is there an obvious reason?"

"There is a thousand year period where the Melkors are on parole in Valinor, so they have an opportunity to know everybody personally, and Maitimos are very effective politician types; unclear whether the aim was to take them out of action or subvert them in some way which was interrupted."

"Well, lucky my nonexistent cousin, I guess."

"Loki's very attached to hers. She rescued him before the associated Findekáno got to it and feels responsible for him. And Kib's dating his, of course. Mine was forked from a pre-capture instance so they're not traumatized."

"I am definitely going to tell my brother that if no one else gets around to it he rescues his cousin-who-he's-sleeping-with from the fortress of an evil god, so habitually that this is not even surprising in new Ardas."

"One of the Valar sends him a giant eagle to fly away on! It's like one of the only times Valar do anything useful in the war!"

"That's very much the sort of thing Materian gods would do. Though divine magic is reliable and helpful."

"In Shine's case it was a pterodactyl instead, because thanks to Kib they had domesticated dinosaurs available and he could fly in and out."