"...I cannot imagine there being social repercussions to what my alts get up to even if they are universally terrible people, and I also imagine they're not, since you came here?"

"No, your alts are perfectly nice folks even in the universe where everyone else is evil, actually, they're just usually dating their - male - cousins and in some places this would get them in trouble if it got out."

"...cousin that doesn't exist?"

"One of those, yes."

"I might tease him about that, is that a social repercussion? But we don't follow Khersis here or anything."

"Are the other versions of me going to be like 'you poor thing, no cousin to date' -"

"Not all of them. For example, the one of you from the universe where everyone is evil, you're an exception, he's not. Also I'm not keeping track of the Space ones and even if I were I'd probably have lost the detail when my necklace stopped working," he taps a node he's just added to the map, "- there's a bunch, they can fork, four of you six of cousin, they broke up and only some forks are reconciled?"

"...okay. The universe where everyone is evil?"

"That's where the stray Melkor is from. He's usually evil, it's everybody else that was a surprise. On a population level looking at things like crime rate or whatever this is only about enough to get Elves to 'oddly well behaved if they were humans', but the baseline for Elf populations is 'crime rate: what the fuck is that', so it's startling by comparison and especially alarming when it's alts of people we normally like. Our current suspicion is that the Valar - those being the high-caliber gods including the evil one - are worse than usual and it's all their fault. Like, they usually suck, but in a fumbling well-intentioned how-the-fuck-do-people-work sort of way, and the ones here seem to suck in a flailingly vicious way. It's not a completely satisfactory explanation because there seems to be a lot of ripple effect past the borders of where the Valar themselves intervene very much."

At this point he's willing to call Cam the weirdest thing that's ever happened, if this is all true. Or even half true. "Being humans and not Elves, are we evil by the standard you're concerned with -"

"No. Well, I assume not, your other human alts aren't and you don't seem to be. The odd docility of Elf populations is pretty much only the relevant factor on a larger scale; with alts of individuals, who they're an alt of is a better predictor. Except for Evil Arda."

"So -" he looks at the map - "evil Arda, near us - thus your presence here - space Arda, way over there..."

Draw draw. "Edda in between, that's where Loki's from - here's Golden's world off Evil Arda - here's Hex, it hooks up to - uhhhh - right okay Hex hooks up to Stork hooks up to Shine and snakes world and snakes world hooks up to, the fuck did Gem name her Arda, Luster? Hooks up to Luster, which hooks up to Wish. And off Space Arda are the daeva worlds - when I'm not on summon I'm in Hell, if I go incommunicado they'll try dismissing my summon - and then off the daeva worlds is Limbo and Revelation, Revelation's where I was born."

"And science is safe everywhere but here and all the planes we know of?"

"Yep. Also except for Ardas all these places seem to be void of deities."

An envious sigh. "Okay. Want the local equivalent talk? The planes we know, our magic, how it works -"

"Yeah, sure, before or after I summarize the other worlds?"

"No, go ahead."

"Aurum has a me and no your-family, the me is nicknamed Golden because she shares her actual name with Gem. Golden runs the vampire shadow government. The planet's an Earth, which is a recurring theme - I'm from one, Gem is too - but not as repetitively as Ardas, all the Earths have different magic. Golden is married to a one-off named Edward and they have a daughter named Elspeth, who had an adventure in Evil Arda armed only with the power of telling the truth really hard."

"...okay."

"In addition to vampires and werewolves - not the same kind of werewolves Sauron turned people into - I'm not even sure how this is translating - anyway in addition to that Aurum has individualized, personality-based magic powers some but not all people there get. Elspeth's is telling the truth really hard. If she does it hard enough it kills people, I kid you not, but most of the time she just uses it for communication and being tactlessly informative and these days she also goes around explaining concepts to Valar because they thoroughly cannot absorb information about how incarnates work through normal channels."

"That sounds useful. Are the Valar - nicer once they know what they're doing? I don't think most of the gods here are bad for that reason in particular..."

"Valar are... better conversationalists when they know what they're doing. Well, the non-Melkor ones are, this hasn't been tried on a Melkor and probably will not be. By the time we can send Elspeth to tell a set of Valar things like 'it matters to people when things happen' and 'incentives: exist', those Valar are already a little past being useful except we still don't have the soul-collector one beat on efficiently re-embodying dead Elves. They default low-intervention anyway."

"Explaining how people work to an evil one seems unwise, yes. Okay, so these worlds -" gesturing at the middle links in the map -

"Daeva worlds! There are three kinds of daeva. I'm a demon -"