Nod. "Are there other topics we shouldn't bring up lest we bring to the forefront -"

"Uh, there's all sorts of history but none of it quite has the simultaneous complete unavoidability of the subject and also the barbed wire everywhere of 'Amariah steps out of the universe and comes home to a teenage daughter'. Like, most of the shit there is no real reason to bring it up unless it's a good time for that? But Helen, like, exists and it's not her fault, and has alts whose moms actually brought them up, and is legit entitled to come to Bellparties, and stuff? Soph might be a similar minefield except Juliet could, like, fix that, so they're cool now. - Soph is Juliet's sister who was created complete with everybody's memories of her except the memories thing didn't work on Juliet, but she patched that once she decided Soph was not secretly evil or something."

He shudders at the 'steps out of the universe and comes home to a teenage daughter'. "I did notice that this situation seemed like a ticking time bomb but still, we would prefer not to have sped it up."

"Not sure letting it sit would've really helped? I guess it depends on how Helen reacts."

"What's the Bell perspective on the whole thing?"

"...the Bell perspective on the whole thing is that we feel very uncomfortably inhibited from perspective-having because oh God Helen exists and is an innocent thirteen year old girl it is not like Amariah came home and he'd done something it's reasonable to treat as unadulterated negative like turned China into Swiss cheese."

This is reasonable enough. He does not have enough of a read on Helen to decide if she should just Probably Not Be Around Elves, so he leaves it at that and goes home.

Peal integration proceeds. Transmissible magic is transmitted; everybody who's picking up enchanting gets the spiel on the use of Jokers as enchannels; it turns out that Boots and Golden are part of what is in a larger group of Bells a pattern of mental opacity that simply happens not to have been sampled much in the adjacency-peal's set; Goldens still have not picked disambiguating nicknames; anyone who wishes to can sign up for Jane's newsletter, an ongoing text ticker of peal events by brainphone; "coin" gets verbed given the ambiguity of "wish"; it turns out that going to a daeva world and torching does not confer daeva powers; keen observers might notice that some of the Bells with Jokers are not as heavily represented in interpeal interactions as one might naively expect...

He spends a week and a half in Millenia's Valinor quietly reading and occasionally singing and then he goes and finds Midnight.

"What's the new peal like?"

"Well, at the grand introductory party someone decided to suicide-by-throwing-themself-into-a-Sun and then I was too distracted to follow most of the exciting news since.

...there's a Bell who sees - they call it 'metacausality' - from our background it makes more sense to call it fate - and she's curious if you have the standard Maitimo one and wants to come see it and tell us."

"Sure."

And he conveys this to Glass.

Glass shows up shortly afterwards. "Hi, I'm Glass."

"Welcome to Shadow. I would've named it something cheerier."

"If you want to suggest something go ahead. Frankly I find all Ardas pretty unpleasant to look at; this one is worse but not by all that much."

"What's the difference, if it's describable?"

"Ardas are the world equivalent of being in a terrible mood and then going for a walk in sleety weather just to sort of wallow in it. I think it's the Erus, based on other clues, but it's embedded in the Ardas themselves, I can't see the Erus. This one is like that and also after the walk in the sleet you go home and your roof's caved in, or something?"

"...huh. And me? You won't be able to get the other ones to line up for reference."

"They lined up at the party, it helps to look at everybody at once but it's not strictly necessary. ...I think there could be more of you, everyone will be so thrilled."

"...huh. Maybe they'll try a better handling strategy."

"Wouldn't hurt to have one lined up. I do expect you to be consistently outnumbered. I don't think you started different, you just reacted like so to the," handwave, "roof-caving-in thing. So if we find a Shadow-like Arda earlier in the timeline evac's an option, except then a you we evacuated would get the other end of the horrible suffering thing - there's a horrible suffering thing, standard Maitimos take that on themselves, you offloaded it."

"That's - possible? Could they have done it as well -"

"Could they have offloaded it? No. Flat Elf standard Maitimos don't really get options there at all except with some luck they can spend less time with it or something, non-Flat-Elves can potentially avoid it outright."

"...huh.

I didn't choose either."