"Is this- underground?"

"Yeah. We're living with the dwarves, who build all their halls underground - we're currently under the tallest mountains on the continent. Some of the outer levels meant for visiting foreigners have natural light allowed in, though."

"Impressive."

"Their civil engineering knowledge base is awesome. And they've really taken to all the imported technology - and to alchemy."

"Useful friends to have, it sounds like."

"They've been good, yeah. We dropped near here first time we ended up in Arda..."

"Did you meet anyone similar to one of us at the time?"

She hums. "We weren't exactly on top of anyone, but we ran into a woman pretty quickly - Agon, an orc. Her people were bound to work for the petty god Sauron, and she was opposing him... And just before we hit the dwarven halls we ran into two dragons, Ellisaria and Brisingr... They hold territory to the east of here, so we've interfaced with them or their representatives a lot with trade... Ellisaria considers herself a guardian of the earth, and she's not originally from this world or ours. She likes the dwarves because they're good stone masons. Brisingr is - I think younger, she's really kinda silly... I remember hearing she set up her hoard as a museum - local dragons apparently compulsively hoard stuff."

"I ask because when traveling at random, we quite often run into alts."

"Huh."

"Well, if you'll be sticking around, I can almost certainly arrange for you to meet the dragons... Agon might be harder, she's the primary ambassador of the main orcish nation and is constantly roaming around. Though I can probably leave a message for her with her people."

"That would be good. We wouldn't want to miss anyone."

"Anyone else tend to alt? There's some people we interact with a lot..."

"Luka shows up alone sometimes."

"Hm. Well, you guys are gonna meet September soon - and I'll try to get Estel and his girlfriend Arwen over here at some point, as well as Akira-sensei... Estel's my best friend, and Akira-sensei's the one who taught us alchemy."

"I look forward to meeting them."

"The other people important to our personal narratives were mostly enemies - there's, like, some people we talk to a lot, like King Thorin, or Russet Took, but I don't know we're close... If I'm calling Estel over I might as well call Russet, though..."

"We don't seem to have recurring villains, thankfully."

"Yeah. There's some ones that'd really suck to have repeats of - the big ones who hit us personally were Dante and Sauron, but Father probably counts, too, even if the dragons ended up taking care of him..."

"There's not much that can stand up to our combined forces."

"One major advantage of working together."

"Indeed."

"I don't want to go out of my way to enable people who use their power to hurt others to have more power, but - I'm not actually opposed to helping with issues like it sounds like Luc' and Wyld have."

"Their problems are- mostly of scale."

"And I think our worlds are going to be shy about another great war."

"Entirely reasonable."