Hug. I think I'll do that, but I think I'll give him a few weeks first. I think he was sincere about having a lot to do.

Snuggle.

Yeah, okay. Makes sense. And it gives me plenty of time to turn up a self-duplication power, I guess.

And if you can't convince your self to try it, then better I don't offer.

Taliar smiles slightly. Oh, I can convince him. Though I might want you to help.

I will enjoy that tremendously.

I love you so much.

I know. I'm so enormously lucky.

And they wait a few weeks. After two of them, an Elf shows up and asks for a meeting with Esarkan on behalf of the dimension of Independence.

Esarkan is happy to meet with this Elf.

The Elf introduces herself and says that the multiverse is big, hundreds of discovered planets, and most of it ruled by this well-intentioned but very overbearing collection of extremely powerful meddlers, and the collection had decided to deny Independence technologies like space travel and computers (computers are like this) and Independence had decided to skip a couple dimensions over and out of their influence, and they took a few hundred infants with them who would have grown up to have some of the powers that would make it possible to interact safely with the multiverse but, um.

The Elf understands why Taliar decided to just wipe out the whole species but anyway now they have no access to spellbinders and all the useful things they can do and no access to anyone who can explain advanced technology and they're trying to figure out how to reconstruct and would like to let their neighbors know what's going on.

"Well, your neighbours thank you for the courtesy," says Esarkan. "In your opinion, would it be worthwhile for me to send someone looking for these meddlers of yours and see if they'll be more generous to me than they were to you? I'll be happy to pass on the benefits if it works."

"Looking for them is straightforward; we can take them to you if you'd like. The path from your world to their collective runs through us, though, and the King tentatively expects they'll execute him on sight at this point, so we'd want a week's warning to move our world again to somewhere they can't find it. Our assessment is that if you don't mention us they will be happy to meet you and probably willing to share computers and almost certainly unwilling to share for example the interdimensional teleport, though that we can share with you ourselves."

"I'd like to do that, then. Take as long as you need to move your world, and let me know when you're settled."

"Certainly. They have mind-readers not limited by osanwë's, ah, politeness, but there are no instances known to us of them using it without consent save against known enemies and in the middle of a war. If in a week you have some scouts ready to 'stumble upon' the collective we can arrange for that."

"I'll have an appropriate scout ready to go. Should we keep quiet about the slug invasion too? Pretend none of it ever happened?"

"Would you care to meet with the King and get the full context, and thereby decide what cover story best serves our interests?"

"Yes, that sounds like a great idea."

So shortly thereafter he teleports in. "Emperor Esarkan."

"King Maitimo. Delighted to meet you," he says dryly. "Again. I haven't actually heard an explanation for why there are two of you."

"Oh, it's much worse than that, there's ten of us. The multiverse has recurring patterns, and Arda is one such pattern. About one in every fifty worlds you land on if you go world-hopping is an Arda, and they have all the same people in them. I've never heard of a parallel for Nuimë or any other versions of you, but my access to information about the multiverse was extremely restricted."

"Ten of you. Oh my," says Esarkan. "Well, what can you tell me?"

Quite a lot. Here are the worlds in the multiverse; here is their magic, which they won't give out to prevent acquiring unwanted competitors for power, here is how they met, scared the evil god Maitimo had a ceasefire with into running off to a torture dimension, asked Maitimo to dismantle his kingdom so they could execute him without disrupting anything, backtracked on that after a couple years and said they'd only do that if they had a superior solution for running his country. And then an anxious decade while they tried to learn anything at all about the technology and magic their world was being denied.

"Then they encountered the world to which the Yeerks were native and decided to go to war with them. I know almost nothing of the war, and knew nothing at all of it until a Yeerk controlling an Elf with the teleport spell arrived, asked to see me, and asked if I would ally with him in escaping the peal. I agreed, teleported my world over here, helped them give birth to a few hundred spellbinder-potential Yeerks and a few hundred daeva-potential Yeerks, and resettled us in Independence. The Yeerks had agreements with consenting hosts in my kingdom. I was notified that scouts from your dimension had landed on top of them and that they were sending people after them, and then a giant fireball swallowed most of them and Taliar killed the rest, which I would say would teach them a valuable lesson but they are not around to learn it.

So the peal knows that I aided the Yeerks in departing their jurisdiction and might suspect, if they hear about the Yeerks, that I'm somewhere to be found, but I don't think that'd color their impression of you too badly if you did decide you preferred to share it."

"I find that it's generally simplest to tell as few lies as possible," he says. "So, the brain slugs showed up and tried to conquer my world, and Dawn-shining Taliar dealt with them. This made me curious and cautious, which is why I'm sending Shadow-cloaked Nezhefena scouting to find out where they might have come from and whether there might be any more on the way. Does that sound to you like it'll hold up?"

"They'll be excited to have someone with tracking abilities that work across adjacency and they may want her to demonstrate them to track down other people who've escaped their jurisdiction."

"Nezhefena can only track people she has personally met," says Esarkan, smiling slightly. "As far as they know, you don't qualify."

"How are you claiming she's tracking the Yeerks, then?"