"- fuck, I'm so sorry -"

He shudders. <It's - I do not know how much Bella told you about it, it's awful, it's the worst thing imaginable ->

He makes a slightly hysterical noise.

"She didn't mention one had gotten you - we didn't tell her she had alts, so we were getting the public story - Loki'll have the spell in, well, a few decades, if we don't find anything sooner."

<They pick up your personality and skills and so on permanently, it's not even just being able to see everything, there's a Yeerk on the Moon who reads people just like I do->

"Something has it in for your entire template - somehow Iobel manages not to have hers constantly supervised just in case - ugh."

<Sorry?>

"All of the versions of us except the one - Iobel's - and Midnight but I don't think I mind if he does - got captured by an evil god and tortured for years. Even when other things happened to change the story. But we're at least all from Ardas - there are recurring worlds, Earth is one, so is Arda, Ardas suck - so we could have told ourselves it was maybe just something about Ardas..."

"Ardas suck. They suck less when a Bell shows up, the earlier the better. One of us got to hers so early that it barely sucks at all. I come in second."

<What ->

"There's an evil god, the evil god is committing horrific crimes, the only person who can maybe invent something that can take him is our father, who's in the middle of a psychological breakdown over his father's murder and wants us to swear - we can swear things, bindingly - to retrieve the things he built to protect our people, from anyone and at any cost - the evil god has them, we were aware it might incentivize him to hand them out and were hoping for that outcome - none of this happened in my world, Kib would've slapped me, but if there isn't a Bell there by then we all swear to kill anyone who withholds the things. Then the evil god kills Father anyway, there's a six-hundred-year long futile war which ends with everyone on the continent dead some of them by my hand because binding oath to kill withholders of the magic jewelry, then the marginally-less-evil gods step in."

"I wouldn't have slapped you! ...Well, I don't know, would yelling not have worked?"

"I have no idea if yelling would have worked. You had the prophecies, actually, made it easy, but even without that..."

"Anyway, I didn't derail things enough to keep him away from the evil god altogether," says Kib, a little subdued. "That has actually not been pulled off in any Ardas where you exist, again excepting Midnight's - the one who showed up early enough that her Arda doesn't suck appeared when your dad's alt was a small child and proceeded to approximately adopt him and it seems unlikely he will wind up with the same spouse and offspring."

<Great. Well, I'm not qualified to evaluate whether being a Yeerk slave is better or worse than being tortured by an evil god, maybe I got lucky.>

"There's a Bell who's a therapist. Eru knows we all need it. - Eru's the incomprehensible omnipotent deity of my world -"

<Ours is supposedly called the Ellimist or Ellimists but I have no reason to think it or they exist.>

"Eru interacts with people sometimes."

"And is appallingly bad at his job. This world is - stylistically Arda-like more than most non-Ardas, I think? A little too crowded, a little insufficiently musical and fated, but the - arc of things is about right?"

"Compared to the other worlds with non-Arda alts, yeah. Iobel and Mitros just - did not have anything horrible happen at all, and Materia's horrible in a distinctly un-Eru-like way, this world had a war with terrible odds against a far more powerful enemy. This world had a plot arc."

<We might want to ask Ristrell how to dismantle the Yeerks. I think she would have valuable ideas and appreciate having a role in it.>

"She sounds useful. We checked for alts here and it's just Bella and her parents - Bells are usually only children, my planet doesn't do reproduction at all - and your family, so she's nobody we know, but plenty of cool people are one-offs."

<Then I recommend we send her a message - we will have to do that from the Imperatrix's building, I taught humans how to do computer security ->

...Kib starts laughing. "They have computer security!" he tells Island.

<Hmm?>