It's definitely not caused by Jane, at least, so placing the ansibles can only help.

And I suppose since our transit method doesn't break down, if time is moving at different rates we'll notice we haven't heard from someone and go check in, we won't - be cut off -

And the crystal balls might constitute enough connection to avoid desyncing in the first place.

I wish we could give the other peal some redundancies on that front.

Yeah, me too.

(The Fëanors are in a corner talking magic applications over osanwë because words aren't fast enough.)

This is intriguing. Matilda is intrigued. She drifts over and tries to figure out what they're talking about by looking at the visual aids. (She's doing a pretty good job, and keeping all those thoughts in her public sphere.)

Then they will include her in the loop of the very fast-paced osanwë conversation! They've had Epic conjure a lot of content on the development of magic systems in the Effulgence peal, in case any of them have an interesting origin and history, they're systemically pairing all magic things to see if they can come up with useful interactions - of most interest is whether any magic system can alter the rules of other magic systems -

Matilda retrieves and displays all her own template's notes on intra-peal magic interactions to date. Wellspring magic (her very own magic system!) is a potentially promising avenue for nudging at otherwise unnudgeable systems because it's so extremely freeform, but it's underexplored because of a combination of convenience barriers and safety concerns - it's less uniformly distributable than enchantment or wishcoins, people get the amount of it that they get and there's no known mechanism for altering that, and it might be contagious to new universes if someone started throwing large amounts of it around, and you really have to keep on top of the usage patterns or you end up with Sunshine worlds and no one wants that.

There are inconveniently no empty dimensions in which they could test things like contagiousness to new dimensions. Which is odd, if you think about it, one wouldn't expect that all dimensions would contain life - if nothing else, some would be expected to have accidentally killed themselves off, or to be before the development of life in their geological timelines -

Yes - she brainphones Jellybean to ask if the Jokers have tried to look for empty worlds with freecasting, and gets a [no but I'll give it a shot] - it makes a certain amount of sense that you would not find empty dimensions through Milliways given its mechanism for connecting to worlds, but worldleapers have no such excuse, maybe there's an underlying quirk of the adjacency system where it only connects to new worlds once they have any life in them? You'd still need an explanation for why no one has killed themselves off, but that could be related to the age of the worlds in question, maybe the worlds in the adjacency network have a span of ages such that none of them have been around long enough to have a high chance of all sapient life having wiped itself out by now - is there a way to check how old a world is, the world itself and not any local species or cultural institution, has someone done it for all the worlds yet -

Demons can conjurefor scale models of universes, no one's done it, someone should - they start refining what you'd conjure for to get the answer they're interested in - maybe it's harder than it appears to wipe out all sapient life in a world? It looks like just one nuclear war in a mid-tech universe would do it but they haven't found any such yet, maybe that's suggestive -

Could be metacausal, but Glass hasn't turned up anything - she doesn't see all possible metacausal things, though, Earths are clearly some sort of template but she doesn't get a metacausal read on them - for more evidence on this point consider the remarkable tendency of Sunshine worlds not to end despite regular active attempts on the part of residents - Jellybean says [no dice so far but a Joker might not be the best person to go looking for uninhabited universes anyway, giving up for now] - if they really badly need an empty world to experiment on at some point, how tractable would it be to consolidate a few of the lightly-inhabited ones? - should she call her alts into this conversation -

They would love to meet her alts but on general principles not because they expect the problem here is lack of any world-specific knowledge. Joy can check for uninhabited worlds, they don't know if Joy's been asked to check. How far has a Sunshine world ever gotten towards the brink of extinction?

She calls her alts into the conversation because she expects they would also love to meet the Fëanors and this discussion is likely to benefit from the inclusion of more brains. This is Tilly, this is Agent Honey, the identical moonstone-like pendants they're all wearing are Adularia who doesn't want to participate openly in the conversation but is taking notes in the background - Tilly brainphones a few people asking about Sunshine worlds and hears back that it's come down to 'if the Slayer had swung that axe half a second slower' at least a couple of times -

Okay, so there's probably a metacausal mechanism making worlds not end in extinction and that's interesting, and there'd have to be something separate for worlds not being discovered before evolving their own life because they just did a count and current worlds spent more years not-having-multicellular-life than having it, let alone intelligent. ...they haven't found an Arda before Elves yet either.

Yes, this definitely seems to point to some possibly-causal possibly-metacausal effect ensuring that newfound worlds are inhabited. If causal, the Matildas all think that the most plausible hypothesis at first glance is something about sapient inhabitants making it possible to find a world where it otherwise wouldn't be; if metacausal, they're coming up blank and don't have a good way to investigate further. Metacausality is like that.

They are really really not fans but mostly because their world's metacausality seems mostly Horribly Unfairness For Everyone. It might be that adjacent worlds tend to have things in common, and so worlds that are adjacent tend to be similar in inhabitedness, and elsewhere there's a giant cluster of empty worlds?

Plausible. And testable by observation, as they expand their network of adjacencies - if they start going out depth-first they'll get results faster on this question, but that might trade off against other concerns, the Matildas aren't familiar with the strategies currently in place for adjacency-exploration or the reasoning behind those strategies.

Places where they have leverage, though coins work everywhere and are enough leverage that it plausibly changes the strategy - it might be worth just going to a thousand worlds and wishing in various non-disruptive improvements before they even try anything more complicated.

Coins are useful and it's handy that so many templates can produce them so casually! Matildas are not personally one such template, but it's a trait overrepresented in the purple moiety for some reason. Anyways, yes, widespread wished improvements are a good idea. Maybe some productive mints will want to emigrate to various points on the adjacency map - it's useful that the adjacency map doesn't fall apart like the Jane-linked worlds tend to, it means they don't have to secure each individual world its own trusted productive mint in order to have a reasonable guarantee of a coin supply -

That should work. They start debating search strategies once they're expanding rapidly.

Which is fascinating, and the Matildas are delighted to contribute. They like this template. It's so nice to be able to have a really engaging conversation.

It's mutual.

...meanwhile other Elves are hearing about the Accidental Child Thing and doing a less good job than the Maitimos at not being visibly horrified.

...ooooh someone should make sure Kas doesn't—