"Yes. Apparently I'm off putting, though, and I'm one of the more thorough of our kind. The more pro-social of us were more open, though, and the primary architect Magnus was very open and explicit about worlds he'd seen - but he quit midway through, and that ruined a lot of the air of cooperation."

"Why'd he quit?"

"He hadn't known either about the world requiring us to sacrifice power, and he felt that was an unacceptable cost, especially since he felt tricked by the only one of us who had known about that, Lorkhan."

"What was Lorkhan's deal?"

"He wanted the world to be made, and didn't think we'd do it if we knew the cost."

"Wanted it for what?"

"He never said. Several of the others killed him in their anger, so I didn't get a chance to try to tease the answer out."

"How did the lot of you get enough - uh, is 'power' here a thing on its own or should I be imagining it as skills with various kinds of magic or what - how did you all get the ability to contribute to making worlds?"

"I didn't acquire it as a separate thing. Lorkhan seemed to believe we all simply had that capability, regardless of our lack of experience with actually doing anything of the sort. What we could actually contribute varied widely; some of us were powerful enough to carve our own small planes, while others had to pool the effort of hundreds or thousands for their own little corner."

"Where did you get the ability?"

"For the skill, I figured it out as I was going. I don't know where I got the actual technical power, or if I ever didn't have it."

"Huh. What does it mean to be an accidental pattern -"

"If there's enough random chaos, some of it can at least briefly form coherent patterns just on pure luck. Things in that world happened entirely randomly if there was no intelligence around to guide them - I was essentially the result of several trillion rolls of the cosmic dice turning up lucky, and I was intelligent enough then to form my own patterns and influence my surroundings, allowing me to sustain my own existence."

"...huh. Can you rephrase 'pattern'?"

"Discrete concept, object, shape, being, image... 'Pattern' is fairly generic. Somewhat - if you wove a tapestry by selecting threads at random, and you kept weaving for eternity, eventually you'd get an image in it that looked like at least the outline of a person. Every discrete thing you can identify in the tapestry is a pattern in the underlying threads."

"Okay, but the outline-looking thing in the pattern wouldn't then move around."

"And then if you arranged the fundamental pieces of the universe at random - and you did this for eternity - eventually you'd get an object, existing in three dimensions, that has a mind and a body and can move. Minds are an emergent property where I'm from; you could say something similar enough to something that has a mind will begin to think on its own."

"You'd need - not just the mind and the body - also the conditions for it to stay alive in - for every mind that randomly started existing, only a tiny fraction of those can have survived -"

"I think most minds were more self-sustaining, in that world, but - yes. I don't know how many were lost."

"Self-sustaining? How?"

"The world was morphic, and responded to thoughts, so you could create an environment suitable for you, and keep it from being subject to the chaos. While you were paying attention, at least."

"How would a new mind know what it needed?"

"I had some instinct for it, but I don't know that everyone did."

"Does your original universe still exist?"

"I think so, but I haven't interacted with it, even indirectly, in millennia."