The ducal palace was supposed to be safe. But no. The fact that the fighting hadn't reached this area yet was no guarantee with the number of Striders about, and even the best security can fail in the face of surprise.

Saerltes runs through the corridors, trying desperately to find her wife, their children, a safe way out--

She turns a corner and rams into someone, stumbling. The orc she impacted falls out of the way of a blow to the head, which catches the taller Saerltes in the shoulder. She tries to turn and run in the other direction, but the soldier reaches out and grabs her hair and yanks her backwards. She shrieks in mixed fear and fury and her hand dives to the knife hidden in a sheath on her thigh and she stabs him and she lurches away and he's swearing and--

--he has a friend, who is the dark purple of Striders--

--the friend is in front of her and grabs her head and twists.

And then she wakes up.

It's a curtained nook open to an aisle; there's people waiting by an empty bed across from them at 253, the rhythmic footsteps of the dancing resurrecter, and her own welcoming party surrounding the plush clean queensized bed. She is wearing the outfit she put on during her last birthday.

She scrabbles for her knife before realizing that not only is she not holding it, she isn't wearing anything that would support concealing one. She's wearing her favorite wrap dress with the matching fingerless glove, something she hasn't worn in months. What...?

Well. Not the most important thing. There are her children--and she doesn't recognize where they are...

"What happened? Where are we? Did--" she looks at Dakker. "Did you manage to evacuate all of us?" That wouldn't explain the outfit but the outfit is sorta inexplicable.

"...Yes, but, uh, it's more complicated than that," he says.

Aduva sits on the bed beside her to hug her. "It's--it's been seven years since the palace was sacked, Mom. You were dead--we were all on the run, trying to survive--all the portals offworld were guarded by one side or the other, we couldn't get away, just stay alive--there were places that weren't hit too bad yet but they weren't too friendly, mostly--we've been bouncing around and staying alive, since. Eventually Dakker managed to accidentally teleport us offworld--very, very far offworld. Things don't work the same way, here, they'd never heard of death tolls and they have lots of magic that doesn't correspond to a species at all and some of it is that they can raise the dead."

...Oh so much hug. "Oh. That's--alright, that could be worse.

"...Where's Arka?"

"--Died and still dead, we haven't gotten her back yet."

Flinch. "When, then?"

"That...sorta depends on you. People, like, die sometimes even when everything isn't horrible and on fire and at war, and they have a limited amount of resurrective ability, like, not absolutely but at a time, so who gets raised when is kind of a matter of prioritizing and it's prioritized differently different places but random refugees from a newly found world aren't really high on anybody's priority list but some places just let you buy a slot and they don't have Elves here so we got a loan to raise you 'cause safe hybrids are a niche that's super, super unsaturated here and you're the best."

She nods, then turns and stands off the bed, dragging her more enhugged daughter with her.

"Alright, then." She looks around, sees the group's guide, correctly infers their purpose, and says, "How do I advertise this service?"

"...nice to meet you, I'm Glir, uh, you could get Dwarf help with that if you just want money as fast as possible, that's kind of their niche. If you have other criteria I think there's people who make a point of knowing all about all the places and options people in pealed worlds have so they can consult on where people should live and what they might want to try. ...I'm a little out of my depth here, honestly, my species doesn't handle things like everyone else."

"Sorry, Glir. It's nice to meet you. The past, uh, hours, several years ago apparently, have been extremely stressful. --How does your species handle things?"

"Oh, uh, uruk are from a recurring sort of world called Ardas where an evil god invents us and makes us all swear unbreakable oaths to serve him and stuff, and when the peal finds an Arda they resurrect all the dead ones, take us all out of the Arda and put us on a dedicated uruk planet, get rid of the oaths, and issue us all blanket amnesty for everything that happened. And we mostly handle ourselves internally from there instead of joining multispecies peal organizations."

"Oh. Wow. That's...sure a species origin story. I'm glad y'all're okay now."

"Thanks."

"So--how do other species handle things, what's a 'peal' organization?"

"Uh.

So like I said there are a lot of Ardas. They are mostly exactly the same. Same history and magic. Same people. They're different ages though. So there are a bunch of me, since I'm from early in the timeline. They're just like me because we all died before anybody showed up to resurrect us except then after that we did things a little bit different. Uh, some people can be the same in different universes even if the universes aren't the same. And 'peal' is a pun in a common language, a pun about the way one kind of person's name is always the same. That one kind of person, a Bell, is always the kind of person who likes doing things like founding interdimensional organizations to efficiently resurrect people and.... stuff like that? And they cooperate well with each other. So they do a lot of that and they have lots of friends who are also common templates who help them and it's a whole utopian project. They go find new worlds and throw lots of magic and technology and manpower at them till they're all fixed up nice and integrated. But there are Quendi everywhere and we still don't really want to hang out with them that much and there are enough of us with consistent recurring uruk-specific needs that we're usually handled separately in the three worlds with uruk colonies."

"Huh. That's a bit peculiar, I suppose, having a lot of the same person...still, no more than anything else today, I suppose. Is the planet we're on now an uruk one or a peal one?"

"Peal one. We have souls so we get resurrected differently if we have an accident."

"Souls?"

"If we die the part of us that has our personality and memories is still hanging around and just needs a new body or a fixed-up old one to move back into. Reductionist people like you need specialist magic."

"Huh. Interesting you have the same body plan I'm used to if you don't store your personality and memories in a brain."

"Oh, we do have brains, they're just sort of redundant. There's also a kind of uruk from a special Arda where their souls're physical metal objects in their heads. Again redundant with brains."

"...Peculiar. Although--hm, I suppose the parts of the brain that govern autonomous bodily processes wouldn't necessarily be redundant--do you have advantages in not dying since your brains are largely redundant--"

"We don't age but we're not much harder to kill than most people otherwise."

"We don't age either and as far as I know we don't have anything like souls..."