"Shiny tree Arda Melkors can't torture people as much because they lack the relevant technology but they still do a lot of torturing people. Keep time stopped, and then we'll start it again when we're ready to kill him."

She sighs. "Yeah. I'd better at least find someone to hold my door for a minute so I can grab my sister first, though, I don't know how long it'll take me to get strong enough. Good thing I just got teleportation figured out."

"That's useful. We don't have that."

"It's faster than flying and I've been wandering thither and yon over Beleriand for a while dealing with assorted things and I decided I needed to do that more efficiently."

"How do we satisfy you we're not the Enemy and should get the transmissible magic?"

"Well, I haven't been in Arda all that long or spent all my time there interacting with Maedhros, whereas the Enemy had him for decades, so realistically there isn't some display of Maitimoness that the Enemy couldn't fake but that I could verify. But he never got his hands on me. Yet, anyway. Let me interrogate my and my sisters' alts for a bit and we should be fine.

Although I don't necessarily expect you to be as good at my magic as Maedhros is and I would naively expect him to be," she says, gesturing at Matt.

"Oh?"

"My magic hurts to use. In order to do anything really big you need either an extreme pain tolerance or fantastic masochism."

"Ah. ...wonder how it works for daeva."

"Not knowing a thing about the meaning of that word I couldn't begin to hazard a wild guess."

"One of your alts is one. Nothing can harm them past 'inconvenience'. I don't know if that applies to magic pain."

"Huh. No idea."

"I invited her to come join us, she should be here any minute."

In a particularly blatant example of landlordly meddling, Edie chooses that precise moment to come out of the stairs.

"New alt! Hi!"

"Oh! Hi! Dunno why I assumed there wasn't anyone here who hadn't already been mentioned to be, but I guess I did."

"Oh, is Nelyo ashamed of me? Nah, we're a right circus at this point, there's all seven of us and my dad from Ozymandias, me and Circle and ten Curufins and ten of Dad and our cousin Findekáno and a bunch of technical people from Abaddon, and Cam and a bunch more technical people from Singularity. And evil Maitimo and his Findekáno."

"I wouldn't say ashamed? He just didn't happen to mention you."

"I wasn't worried, I just give him a hard time because he's going to be emperor of the multiverse and so we all need to pool our efforts to keep him humble and so forth."

"Good for him. You're good at that kind of thing."

"At what, keeping emperors of the multiverse humble? What world are you from?"

"I am originally from a world you haven't heard of but my sister and I ended up in an Arda due to a magical accident. My nickname for the version of you I know is Best Impromptu Therapist."

"I wouldn't have expected that to appear on one of my alt's resumes, but okay. Guess it's better than having an evil one."

"Well, maybe not for normal people. Forms of impromptu therapy include telling me that they legitimately don't miss the time in their lives when--dunno if this'll make sense to you, probably make sense to your alt--when there were--no analogues of Grandmother being dead."

Edie nods.