"Well, he used to delegate it more."

"The world Annie and I are from now isn't very Eru-flavored. It has bad things but they have obvious not-divine causes and nothing gets in the way of improving them."

"I'm glad to hear that as far as it goes."

"I'm curious whether it's Eru-flavored compared to other no-magic societies of its tech level - ours, or Cam's Earth, or any place Anaander knows of -"

"Annie, what year is it?"

"2005."

"Has it got, like, Earth stuff - World War II, Diet Coke, penguins, denim, Paraguay, Buddhism, hamburgers, the Pacific Ocean, one moon with good eclipses, the United Nations, malaria, bad airplane food, Ferris wheels, Chinese Communism, Nobel Prizes, rubber ducks, Wikipedia, feral pigeons..."

"Yes. The continents match my original also for some reason, or are close enough that they seem familiar if I'm near a relief globe."

"- are the languages familiar - I guess you wouldn't be able to tell -"

"Norwegian is structually similar to what I grew up speaking and is from the right place but they aren't mutually intelligible. I don't remember enough samples of languages from elsewhere on my original to have tried to make more matches, it was a long time ago."

"Huh."

"When I encountered the globe I realized I'd never been near a relief map of Arda and thought maybe every planet would have them the same for some reason but now I don't know."

"Our continent is not plural."

"We've got several -" He waves for someone to get a map. 

"Neither the space Valinor nor the space Endorë resembles my world or Earth," she reports.

"Now I wonder if the cities are alike at all - here's Tirion seen from a helicopter, Rirosseth -"

" - not especially." Here's hers. It's got big white circular walls around the whole city, which her Tirion doesn't, and beyond that there are not a lot of  obvious similarities in design besides that they are both Noldorin cities.

"Huh. It didn't even look like that before we had helicopters."

"That's very weird."

"I don't know about very, but I was expecting reminiscent street layouts or something."

"Maybe the terrain or available materials were importantly different, or the Elves picked up different skills on the journey over from Endorë."

"And there were more of us."

"Oh, yeah, that might change a lot all by itself."

"I think there's an explore/exploit tension here, where you can be focusing energy and investment on your portal to Amenta and trading with them and you can be focusing energy and investment on finding more places but if you try to do both you might wind up being scattered and ineffectual. I guess you could be planning on making the Amentans do all the work, they seem really into the concept."

"I think I am mostly going to focus on making sure the interdimensional transit hub is supplied with local resources and then improving things with the technology. If no else wants to be the driver of the search for more places then I guess it waits."