"In English as spoken in Hell, Hell is sometimes called 'Void'. Yes, no, maybe? Fairyland, similarly: 'Evergreen'."

"Nothing to worry about there. Is 'Void' descriptive? Emptiness plus lakes of fire sounds surprisingly unpleasant considering that the population should have everything they want."

"Oh, we do. There's stuff in the void that people have made. Most of the population lives on an enormous tacky plane of solid gold, it's incredibly stupid and covered over in most inhabited areas with a layer of less stupid materials. But by itself it's all void, like in Ambular it's all cloud by itself."

"Much better than the other way around. Or movers in either would be pretty stuck. Is there a reason it's that convenient?"

"Nobody knows. It is very neat and tidy, at least for the daeva."

"And the humans? What's your world's Limbo like?"

"I mean, they're indestructible too, so there's a hard floor on how unpleasant it can be, but it's very disappointing. They import what they can from the daeva worlds - I send stuff myself, whenever there's a concordance. There's small patches of scenery here and there, and like one ocean - I don't remember if I explained to you the theory on what exactly appears in Limbo? But mostly it's featureless flat earth in all directions. When they have sources of water - near the ocean or somebody's house or whatever - they can turn it into basically serviceable bricks and build things, but not complicated things. I have a side project of keeping up with efforts to make decent nanotech, because decent nanotech could fix Limbo with a package-sized amount..."

"Pretty featureless. I mean, there's a limit to how far down they can dig until someone dies with the understanding that afterlives just aren't complete until they include giant drills, but they've never found anything but more dirt."

"A small number of people have gotten plants, or things that included plants, and Void exports plants too. They don't grow really well unless they're part of somebody's original thing-they-get, but the soil isn't actively poisonous to them or anything - they need fertilizer and water and the former is not to be found underground and the latter utterly fails to fall from the sky. I know two people who got water sources as part of things - one of them has a house, the other has a mobile home - and they're very much in demand to supply water; the faucets more or less run continuously."

"That raises more questions. How does one get things, and where does the house get its water from?"

"There isn't known fact about why people get the things they get, but a theory I have never seen disconfirmed is that people get whatever non-person, non-person including thing that they would previously have considered an afterlife incomplete without. Sometimes this means an ocean, sometimes this means their house, sometimes this means their favorite dead dog, sometimes this means an ice skating rink. These things are sort of indestructible in the same way daeva are - it's hard to map that directly onto, say, a house, but the way the house works is that the plumbing and electricity and climate control all work even though they aren't attached to anything, you don't have to replace the filters or unclog the sink or even dust the shelves, it just carries on being a house. If you remove something from the house, the removed instance continues to exist, and eventually you find it in the house again - so in addition to constantly running the faucet the person I know with a house will give away pillows and apples from the fridge and spare clothes and stuff as often as he can. The person with a mobile home perpetually has about a third of a tank of gas and is not much inconvenienced by the lack of truck stops. And so on."

"There are patches of trees - no really big complete forests that I know about. The ocean's also totally empty - no fish, no seaweed, no islands, no weather, just a gigantic thing of salt water which does tides in total disregard for the lack of a moon. They're somewhat inhibited from attempting to dismantle the houses for pipes and wires by lack of tools, but it takes as long as a few months depending on what you do, it's not as fast as healing on an indestructible person."

"Trees are alive and behave more like indestructible people or animals. You can get leaves and sticks but not lumber. Mail works via people with vehicles - the makers provide some of those in addition to other exports. The one of my pen pals whose thing is a mobile home does mail runs in it when there are concordances."

"I mean, how is it that you can send physical things from Void to Limbo but can't go there yourself and fix everything in an afternoon. I take it that's what a concordance is?"

"Oh! Yeah, I haven't explained those, have I. Concordances are occasional, regular, smallish - like maybe amphitheater sized? I've never been to one in person - overlaps between worlds. People can go into concordances, but if they leave them, they come out in their usual world. You can't go through one to another world. But you can bring objects - including live things, houseplants or chickens or whatever. So whenever a concordance happens, there are postal offices set up near them and the postal volunteers swarm in and get as much throughput in both directions handled as possible. So when I want to send something I make a package and leave it at the nearest post office and it gets trundled off to the correct concordant site to be sent through. Except when Void and Ambular have a concordance there is no mail because extremely stupid makers and changers prefer to spend the entire time having a tiny stupid war."

"Makers can't make things start out already in Limbo, but the state of the art does involve train tracks and little carts, is my understanding."

"I mean, concordances happen less often than once a decade per pair of worlds, and it's easier to lose a slip of paper or forget to include a bit of data than to totally miss a package in the roomful of packages. So unless it's shortly before a concordance it is pretty typical to send actual physical objects to the post office and have them loaded up on carts and lined up in a train much longer than the concordance itself. This also allows you to not tell postal workers exactly what you want to send. Messages to Void are often just 'so and so, be advised that this person wrote you a letter' - and then we can conjure up the letter. I do that routinely without having to be notified, with my pen pals. It will be interesting to see if I can do it from here."

"They get everything through, but it's tight. And no, at least normally it is perfectly possible for me to conjure 'letter to Cam number five hundred and eight' or whatever. The question is whether I will be able to conjure letter five hundred and nine, since I don't expect it to be written yet but it should be soon, for values of soon that assume time is passing in my usual timeline at a normal rate relative to my subjective experience."