'S not your fault. And I still have you and Wishbone, that's something.

And Spike! And Drusilla! ...I'm not helping, am I.

She laughs, weakly. 

Think you can convince them to move me to a room that has - I dunno, maybe a bed? I'm a fan of beds.

Yeah, of course. They should've - but they're scared we're a present from Melkor, aren't they. Ugh. I'll talk to them.

Thanks. - not that I'm complaining, they gave me lots of paper and ink and they haven't been rude or anything. It was kind of disorienting to be dropped here and immediately be greeted by the other you holding a sword to my throat, but like, I guess if random people started materializing in my room this would probably be pretty alarming for me, too.

Yeah that's probably what I'd do if an interdimensional stranger showed up in my bedroom. Sorry, though.

'S cool. No real harm done on that front.

I'll tell them to set you up somewhere nice. Once I've convinced Maedhros that I'm useful enough in the worlds where I'm not a trick of the Enemy that he should keep me around.

All right.

I... guess I'll help Wishbone wrack his brain for spells and other useful info. Maybe see if I can dredge up any other scientific knowledge out of the forgotten corners of mine. Not super sure what else there is for me to do here, besides be a source of infinite hugs. Which is doubtless a very important function.

It sucks, but yeah, you shouldn't do too much probably. Riding horses into battle is a bad use of you and if you were captured it'd be pretty disastrous - same goes for me, there. Maybe I'll do diplomacy.

It's whatever. I was planning to be useless forever anyway before I got hit in the face with the magical destiny. I'll live with it.

Everyone here has been useless their entire long immortal lives, that's - what life is for actually when everything isn't horrible.

I guess. I've never been to a world that wasn't broken, so I guess it makes sense that I'm - shaped the way you end up shaped when everything's broken all the time.

Well, I wish we'd landed here a couple centuries ago but - we didn't.

Yeah.

You really are gonna have to be the one to stop this hug if you want it to end before dinnertime.

Why would I want that?

Eee. Then this hug will go on for a long time.

Really really glad you made it here. Partly because I don't actually want anything to happen to you and partly because I'm selfishly really glad to not be - I mean I had Wishbone, but - I missed you. A lot.

I wish you weren't here but if you're gonna be stuck here I'm glad I'm here too. 

Eventually Karen makes up for all the hugs she's needed and hasn't gotten, and a while after that she gets hungry and bored and ends the excessively long hug.

"OK. So. Any idea what you're gonna do now."

"Get you settled in somewhere nicer, get the other people settled in, talk to my sorta-brothers, I guess. I can bounce things if you want to talk with Wishbone about whether there's magic that'll be helpful."

"It'd be convenient. We have a system where he points to letters on a sheet of paper and I write them down and then I can see what he said, but it's a little slow. We might not be able to come up with anything super useful without knowing what you guys need, though."

"Teleportation would be super useful, magical concealment would be useful, anything relevant to building infrastructure or growing food faster or magically shielding locations or people from attack, obviously anything useful for killing gods..."

She squats down beside him. "Well, boy? Got anything?"

There is. Uh.

There is technically a spell to kill moderately powerful gods that we might theoretically be able to cast under these conditions.