"I really wish I was a tinker. Not instead of a demon, but - in addition. A tinker demon. Anyway, Andalites landed on Earth in 2005 and they released a ton of their science and I have prototypes of human stuff in the subsequent five years, so you can sorta see them gradually getting up to speed -"

"Being a tinker's great," he says, nodding forcefully—his helmet is probably designed not to jiggle when he does that. He looks at all that stuff and—" Are there Andalites in this galaxy?"

He checks. "Nope. And morph doesn't work here, which is the coolest of their technologies."

"What's morph?"

"Lets you turn into anything made of DNA. It's awesome. If I had it I could just wear different faces when I was using different powers and no one'd guess anything was weird, and it can also be used for healing."

"Oooh! Why doesn't it work here?"

"It works by putting your own body in stasis in this dimension called z-space and then forming a z-space link to let you command whatever form you have in this world. So it only works in dimensions adjacent to z-space, and we aren't, I checked."

"Oh. There are some changer powers that let people change their shape but no one really knows how they do it."

"I might be able to help learn about powers by conjuring stuff, but I might not, hard to guess."

"How would you do that?—did you say you can make people?"

"So, yes and no? I can make arbitrary configurations of matter but if I make the arbitrary configuration of matter that should correspond to an alive happy person, they just - aren't there. They're just kind of comatose. Back home there's a magic that lets you turn that kind of person - they're called a basement-dweller, I have no idea why - into an actual person, which is how we do resurrection, but I don't have that particular magic so I can't resurrect anybody here. Unless I think of a way to do it with Arda's magic and that'd take the better part of a century if it's possible at all.

But Space Elves keep backups of their brains on chips in their heads. So if they die, you can just make a chip and since the chip is where most of their mind is, if you put a working chip into a body then the Space Elf'll be alive and fine. So I can make Space Elves but not anybody else."

"Oh. And Space Elves are different than just Elves? Are you a Space Elf? Can humans get this kind of chip, too?"

"Space Elves are different than just Elves. They look the same but there are all these weird differences - like, Space Elf telepathy works chip-to-chip, whereas Flat Elves - that's the kind I am - have just general magic telepathy. Flat Elves have souls, Space Elves don't. Flat Elves have marriage, Space Elves don't. Space Arda doesn't have any native magic though now summoning works there. They've been trying really hard to figure out how to chip humans but they don't have it working yet, or I'd have offered to chip you all first thing, being resurrectable's great."

He nodnods again in that typical way. "Why are your kind of Elves called 'Flat'? What do you mean by souls, do you have an afterlife? Is it just Flat Elves that do? Why don't Space Elves have marriage? What's summoning? ...should I write these questions somewhere instead of just asking all of them in sequence, my helmet is recording everything and just showing me stuff I want to reference."

"That's so cool - and I can keep up - Flat Elves are called that because our planets of origin are flat instead of spherical, held that way by magic, and the first person from an advanced society to land in one was very offended by the notion and made hers round but mine's still flat. On Flat Arda there's a continent called Valinor and a continent called Endorë and the tech level is such that it's very arduous but not quite prohibitively difficult to get between them - so we were just on the brink of transoceanic boats - and in Space Arda there was a star system with a planet called Valinor and another one with a planet called Endorë and the tech level was such that it's very arduous but not quite prohibitively difficult to get between them - so they had FTL - 

Elves have an afterlife; our souls can't be damaged and if we die they just kinda float around or they can go to one of the gods in an Arda and get made a new body. The gods kind of drag their heels on that but they used to be even worse. Space Elves don't have an afterlife but their gods resurrected them from backup even before they had the tech to do it themselves. No one except Flat Elves has marriage in the whole multiverse, it's a Flat Elf thing. I don't know why."

"—I'm pretty sure humans get married? I mean maybe some Stranger or Thinker messed with my head but um."

"Flat Elf marriage is a soul bond thing, you get a bunch of enhanced capabilities related to your bond to the other person and then everyone in your society can see it in your eyes that you're married. Humans, like, sign paperwork? Lots of societies have paperwork marriages."

"Oh. Yeah that's different. Why are there two different Ardas like that?—for that matter, there are other Earths, but none of them have parahumans? How's that?"

"There are seven Ardas we've found so far. All of them except Shadow and Space are the same except for a single point of divergence. There are about as many Earths, but they have a couple more points of divergence - in particular, no two Earths have the same magic system. We don't know why it works that way."

"Is this the only Earth without any magic at all? Parahuman powers don't count, right? You could replicate my stuff—although I guess just because I made it doesn't mean it's magic—Glaistig Uaine thinks she does magic..."

"Warp's Earth and Cube's are no-magic too. I dunno if parahuman powers count or not."

"Well, guess we can figure that out later—oh, I forgot to mention, when you duplicated those batteries, they might not work perfectly forever? 'Cause tinker tech tends to spontaneously fail for no reason we know of if it's not looked after by the tinker who originally made it."

"...huh. After how long?"

"Depends! But like a month is sometimes enough if the tinker literally never looks at it again for problems to appear."

"...I could make tinker-tech and tinker-tech-a-month-later and see if we can find differences."