"Oh, we're pretty sure they do. They seem to be from some kind of world that's really similar to D&D. This is how they have evil gods running around that need slaying. This is part of what makes this stressful. But, like, time is paused, so I don't think they can retaliate right now."

"Huh. Okay. Do you have a way to contact people without kidnapping them?"

"Nooot really, if they're in other dimensions. I guess I can send everybody from a particular dimension home and ask them to talk to people for me. And I could probably develop a spell for it, but I don't have one right now, and I have said that about so many potential spells in the past two hours."

"Okay. Sounds to me like leaving the dimension with the evil god paused is a pretty reasonable thing to do, and probably the safest thing to do, until we know whether the evil god has a way of noticing that you're coming for him. Does that sound right?"

"Yeah."

"Also sounds like it'd be pretty good for you to be able to pause everyone when you need some time off, do you have a way to do that?"

"I - could try going to the fairy circle? I'm not actually sure whether the passage of time in the demiplane is connected to my plane or to my subjective experience of time. - all the people I summoned are in my personal demiplane right now. Because I have one of those."

"Cool!"

"...thanks."

"Who all is there right now?"

She counts off on her fingers. "The version of Connor who's royalty, the version of your dad who's royalty, the version of me who's from their world, the version of me who's been in hell for thousands of years, the version of Connor who goes with her, the version of Connor who's a full fairy, the version of me who belongs to the full fairy, your actual dad, and the version of me who didn't have a Connor and seems to be running from something called Wolfram & Hart and who might want her kids evacuated from her home dimension at some point. I think that's everybody. Oh, and the me who belongs to the fairy has a baby."

"Gosh. That's - a lot."

"Yes. Plausibly I should have summoned, like, two of those people. Sorry."

He shakes his head. "No, no, don't apologize. Metaphorically, you own the bank, here. We can solve their problems. Do you wanna tell me about these people or do you just want me to meet them -"

"....it might be good for you to meet them before we summon the you who's a king, at least. I could summarize our concerns about all of them first if you want."

"That sounds useful."

"Okay. The royalty people have the biggest problems that are going to take the most magic to solve, probably. Connor thinks he maybe offended the royal version of himself - who's going by Hagan, half these people have pseudonyms and half just have, like, identifiers - he thinks he offended Hagan by trying to convince him to serve the me from his world, which I could have told him was a terrible idea except I wasn't there at the time. The me from the D&D world worships Asmodeus, the evil god, which I assume is indicative of also having other problems. The version of your dad from there seems fine, he just wanted to talk to people about their native languages.

"The full fairy Connor and his version of me seem okay, apart from the fairy being accidentally true-name entangled with me and with the me who's alone, which we think we can solve with magic later. Also Hagan was concerned that it wasn't safe to leave the fairy Connor alone with anyone, which maybe indicates that he's displayed other problems and is maybe more like the fairies who kidnapped us that one time than Connor is. His slave doesn't seem immediately distressed so I am giving him the benefit of the doubt right now. Don't know a lot about the me who's a fairy slave, she seems pretty quiet and is mostly focusing on her baby. She's going by Cecelia.

"The me who's alone is also pretty quiet and I need to talk to her more about her situation and her kids and how I can help her. I know she says she's stuck working somewhere and expects that she needs to go home for her kids, but thinks it might be better if her kids were here, except that she doesn't really know what's going on and understandably doesn't trust us yet.

"The me who was in Hell is, like, conscious and making inferences but really confused and doesn't seem to have language anymore. She's really into apples and being hugged. Also apparently she can fly. The Connor who goes with her is a telepath and had taken her away from the others to hug her a lot; we're considering trying healing magic on her but we don't want to make anything worse. Telepath Connor suggested that we might try to get divination spells to tell us how the healing would go.

"The fairy doesn't know anybody's names except for the Karens, so like, don't let him know yours or Connor's but if you do it's not a total disaster because I think I can unstick people eventually."

"Okay. What's your favorite movie and have all these people seen it?"

" - the Princess Bride is probably pretty far up there, or maybe the fourth Star Trek movie? I suspect they have not all seen it."

"Maybe we could set them up with a movie while you take a break and check whether the demiplane moves with our plane or with your subjective experience and decide which of the plot hooks you want to explore first."

"I actually kind of have no idea how to get the demiplane set up with electricity, and moving everybody from a specific dimension out of it might unpause their dimension, I haven't done extensive experimentation with this."

Nodnod. "Well, it doesn't have to be TV. Just want you to feel like - they'll keep, while you check how everything works and figure out what to do next."

"Yeah. Uh. I'll see if we have anything useful for entertaining people from other dimensions. You wanna go to the demiplane and talk to people?"

"Yes!" Bounce bounce.

Aww.

And they both appear on the demiplane.

She snaps her fingers.

"Everybody okay here?"