Soft smile as she leans against her girlfriend. "I'm the other Uchiha Hisame. Since we had the same name, Tentou and I picked new names for ourselves."

"I was... In a really rough, bad place when Tentou and the Keres found me. I didn't want anything else to do with that world - I'd had far fewer positive experiences of it than Tentou... So my darling swept me off my feet and far away from that place." Kiss. "I suppose probably our group also prevented that world from going down the same path as Tentou's, but I never bothered with the details."

"Mostly a few well-targeted assassinations, as I understand it. Though I was dead for the actual happenings, and resurrected later."

"I directed a lot of it... It really wasn't anything exciting. We did need to move quickly and at once, but our group was big enough for that by then."

"I'm from that world, too," Naruto says. "Name's Uzumaki Naruto - one of the Lukes, I guess. I have really far ranging sensory powers, and realized that there were interdimensional alts with resurrection capabilities - so I tracked them down to ask them to bring back Elieyha."

"Hence my present state."

"It was a reasonable request, and we were more than happy to oblige."

"Definitely - it's become a bit of a routine service, all told."

"After that... Eliana and I wandered off for a vacation of our own." She laughs. "That was... A bit of an adventure all on its own - we ran into a crow, Loki, and a maybe crow, Ikol, who actually was literally shaped like a crow... Anyways, Loki's world looked nice and idyllic on the outside, but was secretly a mind control dystopia being run by the mom of her best friends. So we decided to help her undo that, which went, uh. Kind of sideways. The fake world cracked open, we think dropping everyone who belonged there out of the simulation and back to their original world... But Eliana and I weren't native, and we fell out of that reality - without Loki or Ikol, and we haven't been able to find either of them since."

"Somewhat unfortunate, but we did land almost on top of another pair. The Yew Queen and Shade, here."

"They were very helpful. My darling Shade and I had been hunting a man who'd harmed Shade in the past, without significantly closing in on him - he was more powerful and canny than us. But Mora and Eliana gave us an edge, enough we felt confident upping our pursuit... Somewhat too arrogantly, at least without getting the rest of the group as backup - we killed our quarry, but I ended up very briefly dead." She hugs her girlfriend. "That was... Tough, though we've been working toward a more stable place."

"It turns out that for our sort of people, if you have a heart and it gets broken, it's not very pleasant."

Snugs. "We're healing. That's what matters."

"The next meeting we had was rather interesting, actually, as the first documented instance where two of the same template coexist natively in one universe."

"That was us," Ani says, smiling. "The Keres and Naraka had apparently decided to take a vacation just for them... And landed in our living room."

"It was a bit startling for all of us - I'd grown up with Elesse, and then met my mistress Occlus, so the idea of alts was strange but not entirely unfamiliar to us... Though it seems I was also the first subby crow we ran across, and the first with children." She smiles a bit wider. "And unless I'm guessing ages wrong, still the only one with grandchildren."

"Neither of mine have gotten around to it."

"Leia has very delightful children."

"Still... Our world was stable at the time, but it'd seen its own tragedies." She looks sad, a bit. And, softly: "One of those was Elesse's death. It'd been - decades."

"It was- difficult, to come back and see how much time had passed. And how things had changed."

Ashes leans against her, leaning her head against Elesse's shoulder.

There's an awkward pause, which Wyld decides to break. "I'm Shimmering Wyldclaw, or just Wyld, a crow." She smirks at Ruby. "Though maybe we can get that changed to panthera finally. I've got a tiger form too, after all."

"My darling here is Elucidation of Immanent Will - Luc' for short. There's also a Luke from our world named Jubilee, though she's currently in that world..."

"Anyways, we're a sort of magic person called Exalted, who are mortals that get a kind of divine magic machine stapled to their soul. There's different types, depending on which deity made your exaltation, and individual exaltations outlive their hosts, reattaching later to their reincarnations. I'm a Lunar - my exaltation was made by the god of madness, Luna. Luc's exaltation was originally made by the Unconquered Sun, so her past lives were Solars." She pauses and takes a deep breath. 

"But between Luc's last life and this, the Yozis - evil demon things kind of like gods - had gotten ahold of her exaltation and modified it, making her an Infernal and binding her to their will. They sent her on a mission to spread their influence farther... Right into the area I was building a nation of freed slaves in. Our exaltations are bound together - we've loved each other in every life we've met - and this one was no different."

"Except... I didn't know she was an Infernal. She let me believe she was still a Solar, claiming she'd allied with me while still working for the Yozis. And... I didn't remember our last life, though I knew the name of who I'd been - other Lunars had remembered her, and she left behind a few records. Luc' did remember, and..." Quietly: "She remembered how things ended last time, which... Wasn't information that made its way to us."

She shifts, a bit uncomfortable. "The Yozis had slightly modified all the exaltations even before successfully trapping some Solars. It was the Great Curse - it'd drive us slowly mad. Our previous selves lived a very long time, and... Things did not end amicably. My past self killed Luc's, then threw herself into war after war until she found one that killed her."

Sigh. "Which still - haunted us, I guess. I kept building my nation, and Luc' and I grew closer... And then I found damning evidence she'd been working against me. I confronted her, we argued... But neither of us actually wanted to hurt the other. So Luc' turned fully to my side, and I made destroying the Yozis - and setting her free - my greatest goal."

She smiles, a bit. "Which the group has been amazingly helpful with - Naruto and Elieyha removed the curses on us, and we've been chipping away at our world's problems significantly faster now." Teasingly: "Maybe someday we'll see if I can have tiny tiger cub Luke and Leia."

"I'm sure they'd be just as cute as you."

Kiss! "And next really big thing was Elesse vanishing, I think? The rest's been just - plugging along in the same direction we were going."

"I was kidnapped, to be precise," she says. "By a rather unfriendly sort of world that seems to appreciate grand conflicts between so-called heroes and villains. It imports these on a regular schedule, whenever the previous winner is getting stale, I suppose."

"The first person I met was Luka, and together we went to rescue Leya from an unpleasant local warlord. We began helping with her endeavors after making our getaway. Word began to get around, and Ashes decided to investigate."

"Elesse and I actually ran into each other accidentally, anyways. She and the twins had come to investigate attacks on a local town, from an aggressively spreading Tomb of the Great - which are a thing that springs up from the bodies of powerful magic users in that world, usually altering the landscape in their borders and generating guardians. Elesse was... Very impressive, in that fight, and she recognized me and offered to introduce me to my children."

"Things were... Complicated, though. The cycle - the world drags in a person, up until Elesse a child, from outside its bounds, and grants them a potential for amazing magic. It also changes their aging - I was pulled in, the turn before Elesse, and it took me twice as long as it should have to go from 'about eleven' to 'teenager' - and I stayed stuck at that age for decades more. The world tries to pit the alternating heroes and villains against each other, and I'm fairly sure it - pattern matches people to play off each other. Possibly referencing the sort of thing that alts are, actually..."

"The Great Hero before me had approached me, early when I was playing around with the idea of being a Great Villain. He'd established an empire of absolute peace and prosperity, with revolution fermenting at the edges... And he wanted neither of us to fight. I - agreed, after a time, and we mostly avoided each other for... At least two decades, I think. But - nonetheless, I eventually went to war and overthrew him. I didn't exactly bother reigning as a villain, unlike most - I preferred roaming, causing trouble wherever I popped up. I was still - trapped in that cycle, though."

"I... Realized I needed to grow up, then, decades too late. There was a lot in that, a lot of things I saw or did..."

"And - apparently, given I wasn't aging, I'd gotten pregnant at some time in the decades since my body froze in time, and it'd simply never advanced. I found myself physically growing up, then - I didn't know how to do... Anything, actually, around being a responsible adult, so I disguised myself and sought out two couples to adopt my children, and then set about screwing my head back on straight."

"I started opposing the universe, as well - started trying to find a way out, to end the cycle... Elesse was pulled over before I finished."

She smiles at her girlfriend. "It took me a while to tell her all this, but - she's rather wonderfully even keeled."

She smiles back.

"I believe that catches everyone up on our story."

"It's all eventful... And when they got out they dropped on us - on my sister, actually, knocked over a few of her books." Bellona laughs. "Our stuff was... Kind of complicated..."

She trails off, a bit - unsure about relaying everything.

Brisingr, from where she's flopped, pipes up. "It was fun! Bellona and El got trained under this alchemy lady when they were kids, and the alchemy lady's kinda cool I guess but mostly boring, and an evil alchemy lady tried to trick them into making evil gems out of people's souls and killed the cool alchemy lady to keep her from going 'hey that's a really dumb idea, it's dangerous' at the tiny alchemy kids. But Bellona and El are super clever, I guess 'cause they're a me and Ellisaria, and they resurrected cool alchemy lady, which no one thought you could do at all, and it'd go bad if you tried anyways. It kinds went bad anyways, apparently El lost some limbs and Bellona got stuck in a metal body? Which made her less squishy but she didn't like. But everyone was alive, so that was cool. Except for evil alchemy lady being alive, that wasn't cool."

"Cool alchemy lady went to work for the evil government which was being secretly run by a super evil alchemy dude who was apparently the like clone or brother or something of El and Bellona's mysteriously immortal dad, but he kept calling himself their father even though I think he was probably their uncle? Squishy reproduction is weird. But cool alchemy lady didn't know about evil alchemy dude and thought the government would protect her and the smalls from evil alchemy lady. Which they did! While also being evil."

"And then they went to live with September and her dad, who was just a lame alchemy dude trying to be as evil as the super evil alchemy dude but mostly just being pathetic. But he hurt September so El killed him and then cool alchemy lady unhurt September. But then El and Bellona apparently had an evil older half sister or something, who was the kid of their actual dad and the evil alchemy lady. Evil sister decided to fling them into Arda, where us - being very cool dragons - were hanging out."

"Ellisaria, to back up a bit, isn't from Arda, though I am. She dropped on me after an encounter with a snake with a mirror for a face that's apparently very bad at eating people. Kinda feel sorry for it, you gotta really suck to try and eat someone and actually send them to another universe. But while I was lurking and plotting the overthrow of this one asshole dragon, Smaug, Ellisaria dropped on me, and she's really cool, so we killed Smaug and scattered his hoard everywhere - usually you just steal people's hoards, right, but he'd cursed it, like an asshole, and sunlight's good for curses. And then the dwarves whose mountain Smaug had stolen to put his hoard in showed up, and we talked to them, and Ellisaria agreed to kill some asshole minor god who'd kicked them out of their other home - I have no idea what our universe has against dwarves, it's weird. So we went and did that! And then we started building a proper dragon nation. With rules about not stealing treasure, even, and I started building a really big hoard because I made my hoard into a museum-hoard and charged people admission, which was the best idea I've ever had."

"We also met Agon when we ran into Bellona and El. Agon's cool but also weird. She'd been trying to overthrow a different minor god - this cockroach dude who kept coming back after people killed him, super obnoxiously. He'd had most of the orcs - Agon's people - enslaved. Anyways, we didn't like cockroach dude, she didn't like cockroach dude, so it was a perfect match, and we funded her revolutionary efforts."

"Bellona and El moved into the cool dwarf home Ellisaria and I'd cleared of pests for them, and they made it super cool technologically advanced, which was fun, they started producing the awesomest things to stick in my hoard. But then cockroach dude declared war on like everyone, because he's dumb, and the dwarves decided to kick his ass instead of turtling in their mountain. They asked Bellona and El to make weapons for them, which they were kinda reluctant about at first, but then this evil ring cockroach dude made somehow ended up in El's possession and mind controlled her into thinking weapons were a great idea. There was some drama about that or something because evil mind control ring, but Bellona was immune so she just took it away from El and then jogged into cockroach dude's stupidly underdefended homeland and threw it in a volcano. Which cockroach dude had been trying to, like, keep secret that this specific volcano is where you throw the evil mind control ring to destroy it, but apparently this random kid Bellona was friends with knew about it somehow?"

"Anyways, cockroach dude had apparently been using the ring as a soul jar or something, and it was how he kept cheating and coming back from the dead, and he died when it was destroyed. Mopping up his army after that was kinda boringly easy, we mostly just offered everyone fertile lands to relocate to and help learning how to farm. Those are the orc nations, now, Agon bounces around everywhere being their main ambassador."

"El and Bellona got their bodies back, too, and figured out how to get back to their homeworld, where super evil alchemy dude was causing problems, so we ate him and his government and also evil alchemy lady, and everything's been great since."

"And then I guess other than Ruby and Nyx showing up and then Elesse showing up nothing else really interesting's happened since."