"Wasn't there anything interesting there?"

"There was, but traveling between universes is difficult for me, especially if I want to keep attention on my Realm - and running the Realm often takes up the bulk of my time. It's not something I can easily take a vacation from."

"What's involved in running your Realm?"

"Keeping the borders with the rest of Oblivion stable. Countering moves that the Daedric Princes unfriendly to me make to intrude on my territory. Diplomacy with the Daedric Princes neutral to me. Answering the requests and prayers of adherents. Keeping an eye on events in the mortal realm, and passing on relevant information to my priests. Passing on scientific information to my priests, and ensuring that the educations given to adherents are scientifically accurate. Making sure that when my adherents die their souls come to my Realm as they should, rather than being stolen - which sometimes involves fighting other gods and requires fairly constant vigilance - and then reembodying those whose souls I have collected. Sometimes I need to work with someone who has become dissatisfied with their body to change it. Also, sometimes someone desecrates one of my shrines, and I need to coordinate a response to that, or I need to guide someone in the consecration of a new shrine."

"There's also some other assorted tasks - for instance, I forced a fort into the Realm of Molag Bal, one of my enemies who's prone to torturing the souls he collects or steals. Currently it's mostly meant as a safe place to flee to; I can move anyone who makes it to the fort into my Realm. Molag Bal sometimes attacks the fort, and then I usually have to send a piece of myself to defend it."

"Sounds busy. What does consecration do?"

"It makes it easier for me to act in an area outside of my Realm. I'm connected to all my consecrated places, and can view, listen, and speak there, though I have trouble manifesting physically."

"Like you can't or like it's hard or like it's costly?"

"It's hard. I don't believe those of us who have managed the trick find it costly."

"What are the - regular people, I guess - who live in your world like?"

"There's many types of mortals. Elves, humans, Argonians, and Khajiit usually make themselves the most relevant. They all live on land, and have roughly the same body plan. Elves are a bit taller than humans and live longer, and they usually have more talent for magic. Argonians are a lizard-like people, and they're tied culturally to the Hist, which is a distributed organism - they're a single plant-like being that's very large, and spread over a large root network with trees emerging into the air. I haven't gotten a chance to speak to the Hist, but the Hist is apparently intelligent. Argonians themselves are much like humans in being unique individuals, though. They can breathe underwater and prefer to live in swamps. The Khajiit are a cat-like people. Their morphology is determined by the phases of the moons at their birth - a person who looks very like a human with a few cat-like features could give birth to a tiger, if the moons were right."

"In my own realm, there are the restored souls of mortals, as well as the lesser daedra that serve me - they can change their own forms, but have little ability to alter a Realm, unless thousands of them worked together."

"What interests them in serving you?"

"I provide them a safe place, away from the more violent daedra, in a Realm that's to their liking, and if they're destroyed I'll remake them."

"Makes sense. What's going on with the violent daedra?"

"Some are easily bored. Some are sadists. Some simply enjoy destroying things. Many or even most daedra lack a concept of other people being morally important, and the more powerful ones don't find they need societies to protect them, so it's relatively rare for them to bother being pro-social about their hobbies."

"Why were they even invited to the new world?"

"It was more that rumor spread we were trying something, and whoever showed up had a chance to argue themselves onto the committee. Also the et'Ada generally care less about people curbing destructive impulses than mortals do. It's hard to permanently kill us, and extremely difficult to trap us, so what we can do to each other is limited."

"Was it anticipated at the time that there would be mortals?"

"I didn't anticipate that. Some people had a few ideas for them, I believe. No one really understood they'd be fragile, and that they'd just wear out as time went on was a surprise. They didn't even actually do that when the world first existed, though it hadn't occurred to us yet to make a single, overarching frame for time to operate in, which might've had something to do with that."

"...can you rephrase that last bit?"

"When we first made the world, we neglected to give it a timeline. We were used to time being fairly malleable. One of the Aedra eventually became the God of Time, so things happen only once, seconds take a predictable amount of time, if two people go separate ways and meet again they will agree on how much time has passed, things happen in a set order, and you can't split and choose between timelines, or have two timelines both happen - a coin can only flip heads or tails, not simultaneously both."

"...I can sort of imagine the other stuff but what would it mean for a second to take unpredictable amounts of time? A second is an amount of time."

"Synchronization. A second for you is a second for me. If I went somewhere with unpredictable time flows, a second for you could be a year for me. Most places are stable enough such that anything you're interacting with is in the same time frame as you, but not everywhere is, and our world had some more chaotic pockets. Mortals have internal senses of time and apparently dislike it when that doesn't line up with the world around them."

"So that's actually the same as the one about agreeing on how much time has passed, okay. ...Bar says that if we go someplace we can't see each other in here we could desync."

"Interesting. Is there a pattern to that?"

"She says people are more likely to find it convenient than not but that might be because if it goes an undesirable way the faster party can go find the slower."