"The Space ones are okay. And Elentári's Maedhros who hasn't picked a distinguishing nickname yet and Island are at least at the point of believing they're out, I'm told receiving free will is very convincing, at least with the right leadup, Loki didn't drop it on the Luster one."

"Well. We'll tell our Arda not to let Melkor free, and wizardry might be able to kill them once we're good enough."

"It will be."

"So, there is actually a runaway Melkor from a non-standard Arda, I was chasing him down when I landed in Materia - Loki checked for a deadman's switch but he didn't stick around when confronted. We don't know if he's in Materia or not - he could still be anywhere adjacent to his origin point - but it might be very important to be able to kill them in a way that Materia doesn't object to."

"Materia'll probably object to our wizardry, since we developed it using science."

"Yeah, and not exactly safe to test. But it might fare better than an automaton army."

"I am sure whatever the risks there are people who will be willing to make the attempt. And we can think of a better way to do it."

"Here's hoping."

"Fëanáro," he says, "perhaps we should let the Bells catch up?"

Bella-clinging.

Snuggle. "Or if you don't want to let go of me just yet T'Mir can explain Warp to Cam."

"I die and spend so long in Mandos and my children get hurt and everything's horrible -"

Squeeze. "It's pretty bad," she murmurs. "Ours'll be better. Best Arda of them all."

"Yeah."

Hugs hugs hugs.

(T'Mir starts telling Cam about Warp.)

And after a little while he gets wriggly and goes back to working on spell design.

"Okay," says Boots when the little ears are out of little earshot, "what were you leaving out for the underage audience."

"I don't like talking about my war, I'll leave that to Loki too if that's okay, but it sucked more than most of them. There's an Arda where nearly everyone is evil for some reason - as a population aggregate they're not worse than a similar tech level and group size of humans but on a one to one comparison, and for Elves, they're disturbing. Maitimos and Findekános are default couples; Kib is dating both of his in addition to the husband, picked 'em up in the interim before he remembered his past life was married."

"Does Arda get less homophobic over the next few hundred years?"

"Nope, not a bit. Kib and Aydanci are publicly acknowledged because they got heterosexually married the one time and it turns out the Valar care more about marriages than about The Gays. Maitimos and Findekános are secrets from most people. Island and Pterodactyl in particular are in fact married married - that is doable on standard Arda marital architecture, it's expectation-driven - and basically going 'it's the king, suck it up' - their involvement with Kib is still a secret, Kib's worried about how Aydanci's Elf family will react. In Evil Arda they were also public but the Findekáno is on a long not-being-in-an-abusive-relationship trip off somewhere nobody can readily locate him now. Gem and her Lúthien - the half-Maia Doriath princess - are married-married, it was a surprise, turns out the expectation basis thing is wobbly enough that learning there were human jurisdictions in which gay marriage was legal did the job."

He sighs. "That was one of the fights Bella picked, though very subtly."

"Kib made a habit of being as ostentatiously, gratuitously mushy about his husband at anyone who talked to him for more than four seconds as a means of picking that fight. They're very adorable. Kind of a pair of psychological wrecks but adorable ones. Loki just told everyone they sounded like backwater idiots when they said homophobic things. And slept with a bunch of girls."

"I suppose there's no reason to have assumed we're all straight any more than there is to assume we're all girls."

"Loki actually is straight, she just didn't want to go anywhere near the soul marriage thing - didn't know it was a risk with picking up girls, which meant accordingly that it wasn't - and relevant portions of her brain are in perpetual search of an exception. Gem and Kib are gay - Kib prefers 'androphilic' what with having been a girl - I'm bi, rest of you are straight girls."