"Poor Osirian traditions, not designed for that at all. Go ahead."

So she pats her Maitimo on the arm and goes over to the wives' table.

They seem rather delighted about this. 

"Hello! The new person who just appeared, you know him?" someone asks her.

"Yes, he's from my world. I'm a friend of his family."

"Huh."

"We were speculating how you knew each other," someone else explains. "No one guessed that."

"I'm not sure how much you were told or how much you can hear from over here."

"We were told to evacuate, earlier today, and then told we could come back because there was a very mysterious security situation but it didn't seem dangerous, and then that it involved people from other universes no one knew about."

"We can hear most of the conversation but it doesn't make a lot of sense."

"I appeared first, and since then more people with my personality have been accumulating and so have people who match Khemet and are from, or passed through, the same set of worlds. As far as we know we're all here except the one who goes with Cam, the fellow with wings. Belmarniss, the purple one, is from this world and was collected more conventionally. May I have your names?"

Their names are Laila and Alulu and Abada and Faizah and Kalila and Samar.

"It's lovely to meet you all. I'm Mirelótë Ambela. What did you all guess?"

There was a betting pool between 'his sister' and 'his sister-in-law' and 'married-but-it's-like-the-pharaoh', see.

"I'm married to one of his grandfather's advisors."

"That's a really good anti-aging spell."

"My species doesn't do the... aging... thing."

" - you mean you just look nice until you die? That sounds wonderful."

"We also do not under normal circumstances die."

"Does that mean you don't ever get to go to Axis?"

"We don't go to any of the afterlives here. If we have an accident our god of the dead puts us back. We generally appreciate this arrangement, though no one has so far attempted to sell me on the virtues of Axis."

"Axis is nicer than this world, so it'd be a shame to never go to it, but I don't know if it's nicer than your world. Maybe it isn't."

"Maybe we can copy whatever's nice about it."

"My life is very good," says Laila, "but I have a sister who isn't very happy, right, her husband's mean and she has eight babies and she doesn't really sleep. And of course she has no right to turn her back on any of that, not while she's alive. But the dead have no relatives, no husbands, no children, no titles, no duties, and she'll be able to rest, and then do anything she likes forever."

"I don't have any children yet but I think most of my people with children would not like to be considered to no longer have them on dying. And certainly if something happened to my husband or I we would like to still be married after whatever it was was fixed. But perhaps this is because people mostly don't marry mean husbands and only have as many babies as they feel ready for. ...also I think we need less sleep."

"That sounds useful. There's expensive magic to need less sleep, the pharaoh uses it, but ordinary people can't afford it."

"Well, if it's expensive in diamonds and not in labor maybe Cam will have a chance to fix it before he goes, though he's accumulating a lot of tasks and isn't sure he'll be able to stay longer than five days."

"I think it's just hard to make."