"They might be better equipped to handle him - then again, they might just have more people - would your world have stood a chance -"

"It... depends on some details of how she works and whether artifact stuff would actually work on her. And whether we could solve some coordination problems. And there's billions of people."

"And she might be able to get artifact things to work for her - we could send for help. Send everybody out, hope somebody lands in a universe that could handle her and that has the means to get back..."

"That could work."

"If we still had an army of half a million I would be outright optimistic it'd work eventually."

"If there's that many different worlds and they all have magic, maybe, yeah."

"Magic or just lots of inventions."

"If non-magic can do it at all, I guess maybe it could."

"Or, like, one world has a way to travel between dimensions but not natively anything else - and they'd have to be helpful, I guess lots of worlds might hear about a lost war against an evil god in a neighboring dimension and go 'well, that's terrible -"

"Probably. But you might not need many of the people there to be helpful, just a handful."

"I will ask people if they're willing to try."

Nod.

"I was expecting there to be a contrived reason why I specifically needed to - and for the love one to come into it - no -"

Headshake. "That one's just there, doesn't enter into the strategic considerations at all, I'm handling it."

"I'm sorry."

"It's not your fault."

"I've never found that very - relevant - to whether I want to fix things but this one I really really don't think I can fix."

Nod. "I'm not expecting you to."

"What's it - like -"

"Are you sure you want me to describe it."

"Even if it happens to pattern-match perfectly to the thing I'm expecting it to, that won't be worse than just expecting it anyway."

"- if the thing you're expecting is that it be specifically a sex thing it really isn't, I mean, it was but then I found out you got flashbacks when people touch you and now it's not."

"That's convenient. And - the thing I am expecting is that some reason will come up where it'll win the war or something if I can only - and I can - or was able to the last times, I don't know, I'm probably getting worse -"

"I can't think of a way that would happen."

"Okay."