"I'm not actually sure why they're called that! There's probably infinite stone on the flat worlds that don't do planets but the infinity stones are six magic rocks from Edda that have phenomenal cosmic powers."

"...Flat worlds...that don't do planets?"

"Yeah, there's a couple of those! Just infinite flat ground, sky of various sorts on top, physics are weird there. I've never been to one but I want to go to the one with the wandering suns sometime, you can do a working vacation cheap there because there's a few things they like having people without souls doing."

"Ooh, like what?"

"My cousin did this, he went there and was manning an outpost in the wilderness for frequency of monster passthrough in the area for 'em. There's a kind of monster that's insubstantial and eats souls, but only if the person with the soul's asleep, and the locals have souls and solve this by squishing two souls in each body so one's awake all the time, but stuff like the outpost gig, it's hard to convince both of them that they should move there and work the job. Soulless visitors can sleep there safely, just miss a few hours of stat-collecting."

"And you can presumably solve this by having multiple stat-collectors on asynchronous sleep cycles."

"I think they don't actually need it done round the clock."

"I guess that makes sense. What do they want the statistics for?"

"Trying to see what methods are working best for keeping the monsters out of an area."

"Have a lot of problems with monsters, do they."

"Yeah, under all their infinite non-planet land there's monsters and they climb out of a hole in the ground."

"Yikes."

"At least wars end."

"They're working on it. It's not in range of the big guns."

"Maybe we need to invent better artillery."

"They're on it. A lot of stuff just doesn't work more than one step away from its home universe."

"--I mean, I said we and not they for a reason." 

"Oh, do you have - artillery magic of some kind -"

"Well, not yet, but we still haven't done that much research into how our magic can be synergized. We only made contact recently, after all."

"Oh, yeah, there's always a combinatorial explosion when something new hits the peal."

"I'm very hopeful. Apparently there are all kinds of ways people can be born with magic and we have no idea if elves can affect any of them."

"You'll have people lining up for blocks to find out."

"I can't wait. And who knows, maybe we'll find out before next spring."

He grins at his girlfriend.

She grins back. 

"Network effects. Combinatorial explosions. Babies. The world is full of wonderful things."