"There might be yous I could check if you want."

"I'm... not sure. In what sense is someone with a different appearance and life conditions altogether another one of you? And separately I believe Hero would enjoy being a part of this conversation."

"Epic, do you want to ask Hero if we should go get him? Anyway, we have the same personality and inclinations, we think the same way. It might be clearer after you've met several, depending on how your people-reading skills are. Maitimos are really good at noticing when someone's an alt of someone else."

Hey Hero the world's saved and we're talking want to come?

Are you joking I'm on my way.

"At any rate, interfacing with China and wherever else is definitely one of the things the ethically dubious shadow organization I mentioned could help you with, alts or no alts."

"Great! Always nice not to have to stretch staff capacity farther than we have to, training's still not infinitely quick at churning out professional miscellaneouses from Mîr and culturally desensitized Elves and such."

A few minutes later there's a sonic boom that mysteriously doesn't break anything, a feeling of slight acceleration, and a metal suit painted in gold with a helmet lands in front of the house.

"Hello, you must be Hero."

"Hi!!!"

He removes the helmet. "Hi! You must be Boots. Pleasure to finally meet you. Heard you needed a nerd?"

Legend laughs and shakes his head. "They were discussing the metaphysics of the multiverse, I figured it would be more your area."

"This place is weird, a bunch of Earths all smushed together with the same underlying rules is weird. Other Earths are like, this one has wizards, that one has aliens and this kind of FTL, this other one has different aliens and this other kind of FTL, that one has an extra social construct on top of gender and also psions and mages, that other one has summonable demons, this one's got vampires... all one at a time. I mean the demons one has associated places where the demons and angels and fairies and dead people live but they're not Earths."

"And they're not I presume point-of-departure Earths like the ones here are? That's fascinating. Does anyone study this? Are there hypotheses about why this happens? My other self from Aleph is, uh, dead, but I wonder if there are other mes."

"You could extrapolate an extremely boring Earth that didn't have any of the things, and suppose that all the ones we've found depart from that, but I'm not sure if they do it at single points? Does adding an entire magic system count as a single point? Anyway, there are people who think about it a lot but it's challenging to actually study. - If you're not nonreductionistic in some way we can resurrect you guys, though that's slightly bottlenecked."

"...if you can do that you can probably fix crippling disabilities, right?"

"That's way easier assuming they're physical disabilities and not complicated stuff that needs thirty sessions with me or somebody who has the same powers and training, why?"

"'Cause he will only want to be brought back if you can fix that. And it's physical, yeah."

"Yeah that's way easier."

"In that case yeah, he'll be thrilled to be alive again," he says, beaming. "Anyway, uh, yeah I don't think I'd count entire magic systems as points of departure, not if the Earths are very similar otherwise, our Earths are all butterflied up but from small changes, not something as big as that. The, uh, other me I was thinking of was from Aleph and the only difference between Aleph and us is that Scion never showed up there. And, I suppose, there's all the meddling of Cauldron and the other interuniversal shenanigans, that sort of throws the pure point-of-departure state out the window..."

"The Earths are very similar otherwise! It's kind of eerie how little most major historical events are changed by stuff."

He turns to look at Legend. "Am I strictly needed for the diplomatic part or do you think you could serve as a good enough interface with Cauldron while I try to charm them into letting me go talk to anyone who has studied this at all?"

"You are not 'strictly needed'," he sighs, a small exasperated smile playing around his lips. "I can interface."

"I think there's a university in Mîr with an interdimensional studies program. At least one."

"A university program—I don't suppose I can take a sabbatical—"