Most of them were earlier. Maybe most of them are earlier, I don't see anything obvious about the new one that would've trapped somebody who landed there.

Did we check that it didn't get a Bell who - died or something - there were a lot of close calls -

...good question. Cam and the girls were not recognized, but I suppose depending on where they landed they might not have been, or it could've been an Aly-face or some other face.

I might ask Cam to check. 

He finds the crystal ball and does that.

Response is pretty quick: No, nothing.

He tells the room this. "I don't know that it would make sense to hope for that anyway. It'd confirm a sort of underlying pattern, but..."

"The patterns thing is weird. I mean, Ardas are one thing, they run on rails and it may be oddly specific that they all wind up the same way but they do have rails. Every other template is unexplained. Including human versions of your folks."

"The human versions of my family have all shown up adjacent to an Arda or two, I wonder if somehow Eru...leaks? Or wants a heroic figure to jump into his world and save it, but doesn't have control outside his dimensions and accordingly can't get any more specific than a template... also, Bells vary in appearance and gender and sexuality and so on, why do only Bells vary..."

"We are inherently the most interesting."

"Why didn't that occur to me."

"Seriously I don't know what's up with that. I being me would not have assumed that all of me would match like so, since I don't match myself, but T'Mir and Boots weren't wondering about it when they noticed they were straight girls with the same face except T'Mir's greenish and pointy-eared, it wouldn't have seemed unnatural to find a dozen of those unremittingly alike."

"I actually wondered at one point if it was possible Bells not on Stork reincarnated without remembering it, and you and Cam's face was 'second Bell incarnation' or something, but that's not it."

"And if it were you'd have to explain why his childhood matches Golden's and Gem's."

"Earths don't have an Eru to explain the degree to which they stay on the rails, and Revelation isn't even adjacent to an Arda so it can't be Eru somehow leaking..."

"If we assume he has to obey adjacency."

He whimpers.

Nuzzle.

"If Erus are keeping the whole multiverse interesting-according-to-their-lights -"

"Don't."

"You think speculating makes it worse?"

"I don't know I just don't actually think I can cope with knowing there's something omnipotent who by default prefers the Millennium story arc for me who will probably tamper if things ever get boring -"

"Loki's been considering asking Elentári Aulë to step out of the universe and grill him about that sort of thing, the angle was different though..."

"What'd she want to know?"

"If all this nice noninterference we've been getting from Erus is temporary and something will change if we nail the multiverse of utopias thing."

"Very worth asking."