"You, ah, seemed prepared to. It meant a lot to me."

"I don't have... any reason to want you dead?"

"I mean, I'd have been surprised if you stabbed me because you don't have any reason to want me dead. I wouldn't have been surprised if you failed to take any actions about me being dead, though. Lots of people are dead, most of them people you don't have any reason to want dead."

"I don't usually have - uh, I have not in the past usually had - avenues to make people stop being dead!"

"Yeah, this alternate universe thing sounds really neat aside from the hazards of any interaction with it."

"I can interact with it. I'm going to write them a letter."

"Oh good. All right."

"Anything you want it to say?"

"I'm curious how their magic works but I suspect you were already going to ask about that. Uh, I want more context on the one they were willing to kill, I'm ...confused about that."

"Yeah, I'm confused too."

"And I want to know what it means for people to be alternate universe versions of other people."

"Well, one of them that we saw looked like you and two of them looked like me. Except for colors. I'm not sure what the deal with the other ones was but I will try to find out."

"Thank you. Let me know if you need anything from us or if they've got anything we can use here."

"Am I going to have an even more annoying time figuring out what things I might want in exchange for my services? I suppose I can see if any of them want to house prisoners in nice conditions for me."

"They seemed to have a lot of fancy stuff, maybe they want that."

Giggle. "I'm glad you got your grandmother back."

"Me too. I should go check if she's settling in okay."

"I might be able to disentangle from that idiot. I'm not in a hurry about it, but if we got ahold of her and re-did some of that rigmarole with her and it cut me loose, would I be able to speed up and slow down just by manipulating whether I was in debt or not at any given time? Like I could consolidate all my debt onto one fairy, and then they could tell me they'd consider it a favor if I did some thing that's doable slow, and then I could square with them and do that thing whenever..."

"Might work. Even if the speeding-up side of it didn't work you can speed up at will anyway with a circle."

"That's simpler! So I guess if she would like to be rid of me this court can try to borrow her from the one she's with now."

"I'll see what we can do."

And she flutters off to write her letter.

He notifies everyone it's safe to come back to their conference room.

"Did everything go okay?"

"Without a hitch, yeah, we're all disentangled and nothing went seriously wrong. A cleric has a heap of gold, fairy dude has his grandma, my fellow winged person is gonna write us a letter, I guess there's a magical gate that goes between here and her place now so hopefully the letter explains that so Khemet's security doesn't have aneurysms..."