Hug. "You guys got handed a nearly impossible situation and seem to have held it together astonishingly well. I'm so proud of you."

"I'm planning to be emperor of the multiverse. I kind of sort of did it to impress a boy but only kind of sort of."

"Um."

"Weren't you going to do less of the incidentally outing your alts to their families by virtue of your own gayness?"

"Yeah but then I considered how that'd mean spending the next century lying to my family and his brother's not even here. And he needed to believe I was actually okay not just better at faking it."

"Why would you have to fake it? You've never been through Angband."

"It's - complicated? He's not in the habit of distrusting certain forms of reassurance because of their source, he's just in the habit of not trusting them, and the ways a healthy me is different than a perfect-liar nightmarishly traumatized me are important -"

"Ah.

Well, um, I can personally vouch that he hasn't been to Angband. Um, he did die that one time, but his kind of Elf is different from yours and I fixed it after a couple hours."

"Is there, like, a song to help people keep this all straight."

"Uh, I don't actually know, I'm not an Elf so that's not my memory aid of choice--dear?"

"The computer can read it out to you."

"What is a computer."

"Magic box thing that contains information about all our exploits and can read it aloud to you."

"Not actually magic," she clarifies. "Just way more advanced nonmagical technology than you probably have yet if Illia also had to introduce the printing press."

"Also?"

"Your alt Imliss introduced the printing press to Valinor."

"In non-Stone-Age Ardas my father invents it when he's forty."

"Writing hadn't even been invented by then."

"Because you are a Stone Age Arda!"

"Iron Age at least," she scoffs.

"Not helping."

"In my world Valinor and Endorë orbit different suns and you need spaceships to go between them and instead of magic indestructible souls we have chips in our heads that record the contents of our brains."

"And the kind of daeva that I am can create arbitrary matter and therefore new bodies around chips. I have no idea if it works with magic soul Elves."

"I'm betting not because of the souls part."