The place it sounds is a nice park with a bunch of ugly children playing with oversize blocks in a sand pit, some adults of the same general sort grilling sausages and giant bugs on skewers, and some folks flying kites on a lawn covered in purple grass.

They all seem really confused. They stare. Some of the kids start crying; an adult breaks off from the grilling to go scoop one up.

Good news: definitely not a war zone. Bad news: they just got a death toll all over some kids who weren't already in a war zone. 

She doesn't recognize the species, so they probably don't speak the same language(s), but she turns and bows her head and murmurs an apology anyways. 

They indeed do not use a language she knows when they start muttering amongst themselves. But one of them pulls out a glowing device and starts poking it, and points it at Aduva and pokes it some more, and then twenty seconds later another member of the species materializes fifteen feet away from her.

"Hello," this person says. "I'm Glir. What brings you here?"

"We were in a war zone and my dead friend here is a Strider so he could teleport and he teleported us away from the attack that killed him but it couldn't have been aimed better than away because I have no idea where this is and I don't think any of the rest of us do either--" she turns to look at her friends, who shake their heads. "I'm really sorry about the death toll." 

"Is the - death toll, that's the upsetting sound? - is that normally dangerous to people?" asks Glir.

"Not beyond how unpleasant it is. It's just sad for a child to have to hear it." 

"Is there any other current danger you're aware of?"

"...If it's possible for us to get here it's in principle possible for military teleporters to get here and bring the war but if it hasn't happened yet it isn't likely to; we're not of strategic importance such that they'd probably chase us." 

"...okay. Can you tell me what they're capable of - including any combat applications of the teleport -"

"Uh, the teleport is a little imprecise over short distances, it's not much good in melee combat except for getting out of it; military teleporters are mostly used for moving troops around and removing enemy combatants from their allies to pick them off individually, but the latter's a little dicey if you're going after someone in particular 'cause you could land next to their friend instead and get stabbed before you can make it to them. That's what I've seen them do, at least; if you want me to spend five minutes brainstorming I can." 

"I've seen a part-Wraith Strider teleport someone into solid objects," Luvei chimes in. "It wasn't pretty." 

"I'm trying to decide how much this situation needs to escalate now, and how much it might need to escalate suddenly," Glir explains. "It'd help to know how many people might show up, how fast they'd act, if they have anything other than the teleport, how hostile they're likely to feel toward random strangers, etcetera. Assume I know nothing about general principles of magic and the supernatural as you know them, or about the standard of technology where you're from, okay?"

"Well, uh, we're kind of in the middle of a civil war, between the late Queen's brother and her son, and I don't know that either of them are trying to gather allies from or conquer any other planets or anything, but if someone did come here, on purpose or by accident like us, they could have striders--teleporters--frost giants, halflings, wraiths, orcs, elves, possibly sirens or oracles but not likely, harpies maybe...frost giants are cryokinetic, wraiths can turn insubstantial and size-shift, orcs can do things with plants, halflings are hard to kill--elves' magic isn't directly tactical but can be used to create interesting hybrids, I haven't heard of that being systematically weaponized but it could be--sirens can produce arbitrary sound with their voices, oracles do unsteerable sourceless truth, harpies do wind. Whether they're hostile would depend on why they were here and how aggressive they were, I wouldn't necessarily say it's likely but anything from 'polite diplomacy' to 'immediately attempts to kill everyone in the vicinity is possible. And, uh, if you knew absolutely nothing about magic I guess I'd explain death tolls and geneses...?"

"Please explain death tolls and geneses," Glir says, and "Folks, clear out of the park for the next hour; check for signs up or the municipal news ticker before you come back." Locals collect their kids and file out.

"So a death toll is that thing that just happened and if it happens somewhere there hasn't been one before it causes a genesis, has no one died here--"

"- in this city? Not to my knowledge. There've been accidents elsewhere on the planet."

"When there's a death toll somewhere there's never been one before a Genesis happens. Every species starts with a Genesis, with magic that relates somehow to how the person died and physical attributes that have something to do with who they were as a person--babies just appear in whatever population center is nearest the center of the death toll until there are enough to form a viable gene pool." 

"...yikes. Uh. Can we fix that if we resurrect him pronto?"

"Is that a thing you can do?"

"That depends. Do you have any reason to believe you - well, he - has anything other than his physical body, such as a soul, required for his life -"

"...Inconsistent unsubstantiated religions?"

"Then, probably, yes. How much time do we have?"

"I have no idea, I've never heard of a city being built on virgin soil before, and the rate at which babies appear is supposed to be proportional to how many adults are in the vicinity to care for them." 

"...okay. I'm going to... evacuate the city, get a resurrection team on site ASAP, and call in my boss."

"...We're really sorry about this." 

"It doesn't sound like your fault."

His boss, another woman of the same species with a lot of scars, shows up a bit later. "How many babies are we talking about?" she asks.

A resurrection team - presumably - appears. They look human; one of them is a young man wearing a lot of plaid including a kilt plus a jeweled pocketwatch, the other has neon orange hair, slightly too many teeth on close inspection, and neatly pressed clothes that might be some alien version of business casual. They put on disposable gloves and each poke the body at the same time; Dakker glows and awakens in perfect health. They take off their gloves and the guy in the kilt does something glowy to the woman's hand and they check in with Glir and then disappear again.

"Um, probably somewhere between four and ten thousand--that's not very precise, sorry, but I don't have that much solid data, geneses don't happen much and there's been a civil war on for years, I can only give you that good a guess because I have a geneticist parent." 

She looks at her recently-dead friend and swallows. 

Leuska falls to her knees as he sits up and hugs him. 

"I mean per capita," clarifies Glir's boss. "You said proportional to who's around."

"Oh, I see. Uh, I learned math about this at one point but I've forgotten most of it...the more adults there are in range the fewer babies per adult per year there are, it's non-linear, with the number asymptotically approaching one baby per adult per year in very small populations, I think. Um..." 

"Geneses really don't happen often, most countries--well, most we've heard of--attempt to actively prevent them. Even with a war on it's not information we ever thought we'd need." 

"Does moving the babies afterwards affect anything?"

"No. But if they die then the genesis will just replace them." 

"...we're not going to let the babies die if they show up, it just affects where we can put them up for adoption. What species would they be?"

"Man, I dunno. Something new. Probably stab-resistant or something. Hey, Dakker, you were dead and this is virgin soil with weird magic that brought you back, if bringing you back doesn't prevent the genesis do you have any idea what the new species'll look like?" 

"...Uh...my...favorite color is green?"

"They may or may not be green." 

"I'm going to borrow storks, alert Vanda Nossëo, and loop in their family services people," says Glir's boss. "You take care of these people."

"Yes ma'am," says Glir. "People, what do you want first, hospitality-wise? We can almost certainly send you home but it'll take a few hours unless you've got a very time sensitive emergency. If you do let me know."

"...We don't want to go home, there's a civil war there. We've been dodging one side or the other since it started. Do you have refugee-handling procedures, I think we count as refugees." 

"We've got refugee-handling procedures, though you're slightly irregular refugees. I didn't mean we'd plop you back in the civil war if you didn't want to go, but if there was another part of your own planet you'd want to live on, or something, that wasn't having a civil war, or for that matter if you wanted to regroup and go try to affect your civil war - policy gets pretty thorny around intervening in wars though, I'd need to call in higher ups to tell you confidently if we could assist with that."

"Our country is the only one on our planet in particular, it isn't strictly speaking everywhere but everywhere it isn't is just wilderness. Even if you don't want to intervene in the war if you could siphon out more civilians that'd be awesome...we could go to Karsatai, that's the country most of Arshalei's initial settlers came from, Arshalei being our country." 

"Can I teleport you guys to a hotel in another city and get you rooms so we're not hanging around increasing the number of potential green babies?"

"--Yeah definitely." 

Pop! Here is a hotel. No windows, dimly lit, visually uncluttered in shades of grey. "There's tons of room in here, it's used when we get a batch of hundreds of millions of orcs all at once but we can use it since it's empty now. Your civilization spans more than one planet?"

"It's debatable to what extent it's a single coherent civilization but yes, we have access to lots of planets." 

"Do you not have portals here...? We have naturally-occurring interplanetary portals." 

"...those might exist somewhere but not that I've been briefed on. I wouldn't necessarily know, I have clearance but they don't send me mandatory reading on every new world and magic, I'm regional emergency services."

"Well, every planet we know of has them--well, I guess they would, considering--and we know a lot of planets, and it was sort of ambiguous whether they're magic or a nonmagical physical phenomenon, so." 

"Might just be a thing in your world."

"Yes, this planet has no portals," Delsmiar confirms. "--I can't say anything about only our world, but, none here."

Glir's glowing device makes a noise and he picks it up to peer at it. "City's empty," he says. "Is 'city' about the right range? - also how many rooms do you want between you?"

"Depends on the size of the city but probably. Uh..." she looks at the others. 

"...Is 'one big one' an option? We've been--being separated wasn't safe." 

"Yeah, they have those for orcs who move in already alive instead of waking up from dead." He leads them into a big elevator and it takes them up and he shows them a big room with forty large beds in it.

"Orcs?" Yttren asks. 

"That's us. Uh, if that sounds weird in your language, I can adjust my translation magic so it stops."

"The word I'm hearing refers to my species," he explains.

"Okay, lemme - uruk? Better?"

 "Yeah, thanks." 

"Does this room look okay to you?"

"It looks fine. Thank you so much--for everything--" she hugs Dakker. 

"Of course. Uh, I can leave you alone if you want, but the way you get food here is with that machine over there, it's called a replicator, and it's programmed with a bunch of languages but not any of yours. Do you want me to stock you up with a bunch of stuff that'll keep for a while - with the replicator if you recognize the recipes, or make an order with Erdanet Inc. for something conjured if you don't - or I can just stay with you? - also they made all the bathrooms in here look like what new orcs are going to be used to, I don't know if that's very universal design."

"...Help getting acclimated would be good. Uh, food that'll keep is good just on, you know, general principles, but help would definitely be good." 

Glir shows them the bathroom - it does look sort of weird but at least they're all humanoids here - and starts scrolling through the replicator catalog for them to see if anything looks familiar. "I have the healing spell so even if anything disagrees with you you'll be fine but it's better to get you something that's right for your species anyhow," he says.

There's a lot of non-overlap but the refugees recognize apples and rice and pork and a handful of other raw food materials. 

Then they can have stuff made of recognizable ingredients. "If I'm ever out of this room for any reason that button," he points to a big one on the wall, "calls for help - I can set it so it gets me in particular first." He does this. "Uh, oh, and if you ever want to switch contact people you can do that. No questions asked, won't get me in any trouble all by itself either if you worry about that. - you need anything or wanna ask any questions?"

"...Not...super sure where we go from here, to be honest. The last few years have been just--how can we survive until tomorrow."

"Okay, well, you don't have to rush, at all. Some people stay in their hotel room a long time before they come see what's up and you can too if you like. ...somebody might come ask you for more civil war context and stuff though, if you don't mind. If you do mind they might still want a telepathic image of someplace in your world to get there with but then they could ask people there."

"I don't...think we mind." She looks at her friends. 

"I mind a little but I can just hide in the bathroom or something during," Proust opines. 

"Sure, that works fine," says Glir. "Uh, as far as you know is there anything going on civil war wise that needs attention in an hour instead of in a week?"

"...Well, it's a war, there will be more dead people in a week than in an hour, but if you can resurrect people not really." 

"It's not fast - not that many people can do it. But yeah, they won't be gone forever."

Nod. 

--Something occurs to her. 

"Is there--is there any way to convert effort into it happening faster--my parents are among the dead--"

"Uh, you can try to get vetted for one of the powers that they use for it. Or you can try to slow down demand if you have a way to de-age people or make them immortal, that'd make it faster in the long run. If you just want to get a couple people handled early you can pay to jump the queue with money though. Or if your parents were specifically important you can make a case for that."

"My parents were a geneticist and a housewife...if you don't have Elves here I could make a pitch for the value of Elf geneticists. Uh, translation's being a little wibbly, when you say 'immortality' do you mean 'can't die' or 'doesn't age past maturity.'"

"Either one, actually, anything that slows down people putting folks in the queue. What's special about your geneticists?"

"Elves have magic for it. I mean, strictly speaking the magic's purpose is 'make children be healthy' but can be used for purposes it wasn't intended for--elves have an extra reproductive organ in our left hands," she holds up her bloody gloved hand, "that has tendrils for DNA collection and a sort of chamber where the DNA can be recombined in different ways--there are varying levels and types of skill with that--and then in theory the combined DNA is deposited in a mother, usually but not always one of the genetic parents, where it develops into an egg which hatches into a baby. But you can also put it somewhere else and do science to it." 

"So you can do hybrids? Probably some people'd pay up for that."

"I'm a hybrid. Kaleith," point, "is a full Elf, and Luvei," point, "is a full frost giant, and Amalta and I are half-and-half. Elves are considered the best way to do hybrids--most species can hybridize without Elf help, but it's safest to do it with, and if hybridization isn't usually possible we can do it anyway." 

"Elves and frost giants aren't a particularly risky combination but you couldn't do a part-elf without an elf being involved anyway. But non-elf-involved hybrids can have problems like a kid with a halfling-sized heart in a frost-giant-sized body, or some kind of unfortunate interaction of species magics, or, or, or." 

"Huh. Well... okay, I could be missing something 'cause I'm emergency services on an uruk planet, but if I were you I'd go talk to Dwarves about getting a loan to get your geneticist parent back so they can make money and pay the loan back."

"That makes sense. --Why Dwarves?"

"They're good at financing stuff. There's uruk companies for it too - and other ones, on other planets - but mostly you go to those if you have a specialist use case and you don't. Or, you do but not one that anyone's specializing in yet and Dwarves'll be into figuring it out anyway."

"Okay. And there's us, for proof of concept, but Mama could do much fancier than we can." 

"Do you have ways for same-sex couples to have kids? 'Cause I can't think of any that don't involve Elves off the top of my head, so..."

"I think it's doable but I'm straight so I don't know how they do it. But there's tons of species and I think that's less doable."

"Yeah, that comes up more often back home, too. Except for the Elves themselves." 

"Elves are all women." 

"Huh. Uh, before I take you anywhere we could replicate you some more clothes."

"That would be for the best." 

The clothes section is pretty dizzying but he can narrow it down by everybody's measurements and favorite color and desired modesty level.

The Elves' desired modesty level involves gloves! This is probably not a modesty concern that people normally have. 

It is not but there are gloves in here. Presently everyone has something to change into. There are curtains that draw around the beds.

Presently everyone is changed! And covered in so much less blood! Not being covered in that much blood is excellent. 

"Okay, uh, finance place?"

"Finance place sounds good."

Glir looks up a Dwarf finance place on his device and pops them into its reception area. A short hairy person with a lot of beard says, "Hello, welcome to Asger's."

"Hey, uh, these people appeared on Bhadur from an uncontacted world. They want a loan to resurrect a parent they expect to be able to make a lot of money."

"Our species--well, Kaleith's species, my sister and I are hybrids, but we have the full load of the relevant species magic, so--where we're from every species has their own magic and ours is to be able to make healthy children out of genetic samples from nearly any combination of sources. Hybrids are usually possible between local species but they're only guaranteed safe and also not sterile like a liger if you get an Elf to do it. My relevant parent is an incredibly skilled geneticist, which means aside from various scientific applications she can get a lot more specific than just 'healthy' and 'uses these sources.'"

"How prevalent is this skill?"

"Lots of people can do better than random; I've never met anyone as skilled as my mother."

"That isn't what I need to know. What order of magnitude is the population of the species and relevantly capable hybrids? How many have training in the profession? How long does the training take to acquire?"

"The entire species, across all the planets it's on...tens of billions, maybe a hundred or two of billions at the high end. Counting relevantly capable hybrids, maybe half again that. Lots of us get any training but not much; enough to, say, ensure that the baby gets, say, the one parent's eyes and the other's height but not much more than that. I'd say...ballpark fifteen percent on the high end, five percent on the low accumulate a decade or two of training over the course of their lives, enough to mostly customize the basic physical attributes of a baby, determine specific ratios of parentage--so that you could, say, collect genes from five donors and ensure that the resulting child is almost entirely the offspring of two of them, with the third's eyes, the fourth's hair and the fifth's brainpower, say. The level of skill my mother has would take a couple of centuries for most people to acquire. My sister and I are as--normal--as we are because she designed us when she was much younger than she was when she died. The Duke commissioned her to design his heir and she managed to cram almost full loads of four or five different species into that kid--Frost giant, halfling, orc, strider and maybe oracle but that one's unsubstantiated, I don't actually know for sure--and the kid still looked almost entirely frost giant. Uh, that's impressive, it's really hard to fit more than about a species and a half's worth of magic in one kid."

"Full loads?"

"Full-strength species magics."

"Interesting. So, I can get you a loan for this. The loan will be to you. You can ask your parent to earn you money to pay it back, but you will still owe the money back if they decide not to. Understood?"

"Understood."

The Dwarf sits her down and asks MANY questions and walks her through the terms of the loan. Then he asks her to affirm out loud in complete sentences that she intends to repay it complete with interest, is not aware of any escape clause not detailed in the terms of the loan which she would construe as releasing her from this obligation or causing her to cease to exist as an entity with responsibilities continuous with her current ones, is confident that no peal organization has declared a delay on resurrection of the parent in question, has no other outstanding loans, and intends to use the money to resurrect her parent in a jurisdiction where resurrections are freely available for sale.

She has some questions about the terms, more in a "wants to be ABSOLUTELY SURE" way than a "confused" way. 

She affirms these things out loud in complete sentences after confirming that she is not in serious trouble if someone shows up claiming she owes them money and is lying. 

The terms of the contract specify what arbitrators are acceptable if she ever needs to check if someone is lying, but Asger's does reserve the right to sell the debt. She can look up whether her debt has been sold any time on their website.

Good to know but what she meant was that her homeworld has been in a state of civil war for over a decade and when more contact is made than just her group someone could decide to claim that they had loaned her money during the interim and the reason there were no records of it was because of rampaging soldiers. This would be false; she does not, in fact, have any other outstanding loans, but it would be pretty plausible as far as the rampaging soldiers go. 

Asger's has lie detection! She will not be in trouble for other people lying.

Okay cool she will verbally affirm the things in complete sentences. 

Presumably this has to do with the lie detection.

They give her the price of a resurrection plus bus fare and a midrange hotel plus room service at the nearest planet which sells resurrection on the open market.

Excellent. 

(They're gonna see their mom again~)

She turns to their guide, bouncing slightly onto the balls of her feet. "So how do we get to the nearest such planet?"

"Uh, I can take you, unless you want me to show you the bus system."

"No, that's fine. --Sorry I'm--really, really excited, I never--never thought I'd see her again--"

"It's okay."

Teleport to Casentar.

Anxious bouncing and looking around for anywhere that looks obviously resurrection-related. 

Glir has landed at the Vanda Nossëo embassy. He makes a face at the extremely pretty architecture and extremely pretty tall people with braided hair, who make a point of politely not looking straight at him (the people who are not tall pretty and braided don't especially do so), and follows the sign to Resurrections Dept.

"Hello," says the human manning the desk.

"Hi," says Glir, "they want to buy a resurrection of their mother."

"Our planet's batch is in four hours and it's not full up of guaranteed spots, I can sure get her on there." She names a sum.

"Yeah, they have that." He helps with the movement of money and provision of identifying mom details.

"Her name's Saerltes and she's an elf like Kaleith is and like we half are and she's yea tall and..." 

They will probably be provided with more mom details than they strictly speaking need. 

They're not unused to that. "All right, the team will be by in four hours; they are currently on schedule and you'll be notified if there's a delay. Please note that when she first appears in her designated awakening bed - you'll want to wait by 203 for her - she will not be fully alive yet. It's a two-step process and the body appears first, breathing but not conscious. However, it's safe to touch her before she's awake if you want, we just don't recommend moving her from the bed. The gap is usually one to five minutes between body and resurrection but it's not unheard of for there to be a delay as long as half an hour on unusual circumstances."

"Okay. Thank you."

The group heads over to bed 203 and the twins begin discussing how to explain to their mother everything that's happened since she died. Especially the last day, which is both awesome and super out of context.

About four hours later the lights dim; a person wearing chunky headphones and an elaborate outfit with a crocus motif appears in the corner by bed 1, has a brief sign language conversation with a staffer while bobbing to the music, and starts dancing down the row of beds, appearing people about once every thirty seconds.

The staffer says, "Due to some scheduling juggling we're getting this one-person team instead of the standard two-person and your loved ones will wake up right away rather than on a delay but the batch will take a little longer due to recharge time. Please don't touch or talk to the magic rock."

Dance dance dance goes the "magic rock".

The "magic rock" thing is pretty confusing but, like, super not important right now.

At thirty seconds a bed, she reaches 203 after an hour and a half; the earliest patients have already had their reunions and mostly left the facility. Peeks at the form at the foot of the bed, bobs in place, zaps the bed with green light, twirls to 204.

And there is their mother.

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..."

"Yeah, I dunno. Some people have souls and do age! Lotta variety."

"There is probably already any literature on the subject and interrogating you is not the best way to get answers," she decides.

"Yeah, probably."

"Alright. Uh, Dwarves sound good, I would like my wife back as soon as possible and don't really have the social context to know what any other criteria I might like to have would be, here, I don't think."

Glir takes them back to the Dwarf office building with Asger's in it and finds them an office labeled "Wayfinders" with print in several hundred languages below about what they do.

"Hi!" says the Dwarf in this office. "Welcome to Wayfinders, we'll make sure you're glad you came. Who's looking for help today, folks, all of you?"

"Not me," says Glir.

"Mostly me."

"I've already been helped, we're just--sticking together."

"We could mostly go our separate ways at this point," Yttren admits, "but, uh, instead we are not doing that."

"I have an unusual service to provide and no idea how one goes about exchanging services for goods and money here."

"That's exactly the kind of thing we can help you with. Can you give me a summary and I'll match you with a coach?"

"Designer babies, including hybrids between species that can't safely or naturally reproduce."

"Ooh, all right, let me get you an appointment with Gull, he's our Warp specialist and that sounds like a Warp career to me. He's available after his lunch in thirty minutes, how's that by you?"

"I have absolutely no schedule constraints! That's fine."

"Help yourself to anything in the waiting room."

There's water and a vending machine that takes no payment for its assorted snacks.

Novel snacks, nice. She will drink water and investigate the snacks while her daughters and their friends catch her up in more detail.

Her coach comes back from lunch and ducks his head into the room. "Hello! Are you my next appointment?"

"Yes, hello! My name is Saerltes."

"Gull, pleased to meet you, my office is this way. Bring your friends if you like." Down a hall, door on the right - "Have a seat, I think there's enough space on that couch back there - so. There's two ways to structure the coaching fees. One is, we have arrangements with several planets that they'll pay us a finder's fee for sending them workers with useful skills and having them arrive well-oriented and ready to contribute to the economy. This costs you nothing but limits you to those planets - still hundreds of options - and does mean our incentives are not perfectly aligned with yours if you'd benefit from a particularly outré strategy. Another is you pay a fee for everything I recommend to you that you ultimately make use of - places to live, classes to take, meetings to schedule, licenses to apply for, so on and so forth. This runs a typical customer not more than their first six months' income, high-earning customers can pay much faster, and you may pay this cost over as long as a decade. I will warn you if it begins to look like you will not be readily able to pay for the service. What's your preference?"

She considers this.

"...The latter," she decides after a moment.

"All right then!" says Gull. "So, designer babies. That's a potentially thorny one, culturally, I'm going to need more details to know where exactly you'll be best placed. Describe the process as it would appear to a client."

"So, my species," she taps her engloved hand, "has an extra reproductive organ in our left arms, with an aperture in the palm of the hand. The client, and any other genetic donors, give me either a pre-harvested biological sample, blood or cheek swabs or what have you, or I can harvest dead skin with tendrils that extend through the aperture. Then we hold a consulting session about what traits they want the resulting child to have. Then I spend some amount of time, anywhere from an hour to a week depending on complexity, assembling the zygote and transfer tissues. Then the zygote is deposited in someone's uterus--generally one of the parents, but it's not strictly necessary. A month or so later, this person lays an egg. How long the egg takes to hatch depends on the gestation time of the species in question. The egg is somewhat more resilient than most birds' eggs are, but still should be handled with all the care you'd give to an astonishingly low-maintenance infant--I can come up with a set of standard care instructions."

"...huh. You believe the egg-laying process to be safe in full generality for anyone with a uterus who'd normally do either of lay eggs or give live birth? Is there a size limitation? Body temperature? Atypical requirements about the incubating party's diet, medical regimen, or lifestyle?"

"If the parents are of species with a big enough size difference it may be unsafe for the smaller parent to carry the egg, but otherwise yes; it's not a solely biological process, my species has magic for it. Body temperature likewise; if the infant's body temperature is unsafe for the gestator or vice-versa problems may occur, although both that and size are factors that can be taken into account at the customization stage. The incubating party may cause harm to the egg through unhealthy behaviors but a carnivore won't cause harm to an herbivorous baby by eating meat, for example. The magic isn't foolproof but will filter out some harms that would befall a non-magical baby such as moderate levels of alcohol or other contraindicated drugs; it is however unwise to rely on this."

"Does this alleviate other complaints about pregnancy besides its duration?"

"Morning sickness is eliminated except in cases of nocebo effect, stretch marks still occur, fatigue is alleviated but not eliminated, I don't know if lactation is classed as a complaint but it occurs, complications during birth having to do with shoving a large object through one's pelvis still occur but complications having to do with the existence of the placenta are eliminated, increases in urination due to hormones are eliminated, increases in urination due to space being taken up by the uterus that the bladder was using are unchanged, swollen extremities are eliminated--in general complaints due to hormones are absent but complaints due to the basic fact of the presence of a large heavy object in one's abdomen remain present."

"Do you believe that the eggs themselves, once formed, are magical in nature, such that a form of magic which can create nonmagical objects might fail to duplicate one?"

"Since lactation but not other hormonal effects occur I have reason to believe that there is still magic going on while the egg is being formed but once laid, honestly, I don't know. It could be that they're magically resilient, but it could also just be that they're nonmagically sturdy. It--might be possible to tell the difference experimentally but, uh, it would involve experimenting on babies."

"Didn't escape me. That's a wrinkle, all right. Does this only work on sapients?"

"Nnnnno, it does work on animals, but there's a fairly strong--instinctive reluctance--so those of us who do choose to pursue careers as livestock breeders or what have you generally charge enough that casually obtaining sheep eggs or whatever for science isn't done enough that I'd know anything about the results. Also...even if you know that an egg actually contains a dog or something it still looks and feels like a people egg, so--imagine doing science that would involve smashing disturbingly realistic baby dolls, it's not impossible but it adds a layer of difficulty."

"Hm. Different subtopic, how does the hybridization turn out with very different parents?"

"Depends on what axes they're different along and how much manual control is being exerted. If you're asking me what happens if you naively mix a cat and a horse I have no idea, my area is people genetics, but I could come up with some plausible cat-horse hybrids I expect I could aim for if I got over my squeamishness enough to create one."

"I was actually wondering about sapients from different worlds with different magic and nonmagic abilities and traits of various sorts. You can pretty freely mix and match things? Even if they're - polygenic, pleiotropic, that sort of thing? Only if the trait is purely genetic?"

"Not exactly--genetic is used as a catchall, but there are actually three factors, ovoic, genetic, and thaumogenetic. Ovoic has to do with chemical factors within the egg that would in ordinary gestations have more to do with the mother and the environment than anything inherent to the fetus, and thaumogenetic has to do with magical factors that--they connect to the genetics but they aren't, strictly, genetic, and they don't cleanly encode the way genes do, it's--a related skillset but it works on different principles. You can't put species magic in a baby that has no DNA of the relevant species but there isn't, strictly, anything in the genes that codes for the magic. Honestly it's a bit frustrating but magic is incredibly valuable so I put up with it."

"So, some magic in the multiverse seems to work based on parentage one way or another, but others seem to have to do with where the baby is conceived or gestated - any guesses? Obviously I won't hold you to them."

"Hmm...my guess would be that things that work based on parentage would involve thaumogenetics as I understand them, but I could easily be wrong. I would further guess that if they don't, I would still be able to manipulate them but would have to work on the skillset from the ground up. Things having to do with where the baby is conceived or gestated I have never encountered before at all but if I had to make a guess I'd say probably either I couldn't influence them at all or once I had a feel for them I could apply indefinitely, weighted towards the former. --With the caveat that if they're detrimental in some way, even as a tradeoff, I wouldn't be surprised if I could make it go away even if I couldn't do anything else. Elf magic is strongly weighted towards 'healthy children.'"

"Particular special case of that is there's a world where babies gestated there show up with immaterial animal companions that they can solidify to be able to do spells. I assume you'd have only a wild guess if you could design the animal on top of the baby."

"...That sounds...potentially thaumogenetic? But I'd really have to try it to have any idea. And I think it's probably lower-probability if it's 'gestated' than 'conceived.'"

"Now here's the really big ticket possibility. Sometimes, a person repeats, world to world - sometimes in the same circumstances if the whole world is similar, sometimes just in weirdly reminiscent circumstances or barely recognizable ones. They sometimes look alike, sometimes don't, may or may not vary in species, gender, that sort of thing. If you can finagle that on demand you're looking at a very pretty picture."

"That sounds...this is more intuition than anything I can back up with facts, but it sounds like the kind of thing I might be able to learn. I do know that I don't know how to do it now, though."

"It seems like it might also be possible with some combination of our magic and magic that exists here? That's just idle speculation though."

"Far as I know they don't have a way to affect it at all, just detect it when they're not sure. Do you have an idea what you might be combined with to useful effect there?"

"No idea, I just know you have a lot of capabilities that I know next to nothing about but that include, like, literally resurrection."

"Well, something could turn up, I try to be informed but there are a lot of nooks and crannies out there. Anyway. I think you might want to put in a bid to some Amentan countries. They have a eugenic project, are only gradually relaxing their population controls in light of the new availability of colony planets so marginal couples keep on top of opportunities to do magic experiments in exchange for subsidy, have a pretty high rate of homosexuality. The things that might keep this from working out are to do with the eggs part of your process. Amentans like being pregnant and might not want to do less of it, though it could also make surrogacy less harrowing for them. And their original planet is in the world of Warp, but their colony planets are in Revelation so their exponentiation can add to the supply of some magical creatures that the locals get to turn into as an afterlife. Which would make it slightly more salient to them if those creatures can clone their eggs with the magic I mentioned earlier. If either of those issues scuttles it my next suggestion would be Elendil. They're making a point of harboring genetic engineers because their major state competitor as a federated group of civilizations there forbids the practice. So you'd be able to collaborate with others from that vantage point and there's a pre-existing market flow. It does put you in competition with the other engineers but your product is different enough to still have takers even if you set up right beside a standard gene therapy clinic."

"Forbids it?"

"I think there's some historical reason."

"Huh. I guess I can see that. Fear can be a powerful motivating force..."

"So Elendil takes genetic engineers on the run from the neighbors."

"That makes sense. How do I make a bid?"

"I can do that for you, if you'd like, or I can show you how."

"I should probably learn how."

"Okay. So there are two major ways of communicating across worlds - one is a networked system of technology and magic, which of those you the end-user prefer is a matter of personal taste because they're hooked into each other on the back end but in most worlds computers, the tech option, are easier to come by. And the other is the aforementioned conjuration magic; most worlds the peal is in significant contact with have a mailer demon who conjures messages on a routine basis. The former is for lower-priority messages whenever feasible; the latter is for emergencies, sensitive stuff - in that case you'd also encrypt it - or situations where you don't have access to a computer or crystal ball. I'm going to use email from my computer, here -" He turns it so she can see and demonstrates how he's finding the Interdimensional Inquiries Bureau of an Amentan country, but presently notices when she doesn't seem able to read it. "- ah, nobody's gotten you with Allspeak yet. I have a wand for it if you'd like an installation, it's a small extra charge per person. Universal translation magic."

"Oh, that sounds lovely, alright."

He bops her with the wand and offers her the instruction manual, then looks at the others in the room.

"Sure!"

"Does that manual cover how to fix weird errors?" Yttren asks.

"That's most of what it covers; if you're not getting weird errors it's pretty intuitive."

"Then the manual is definitely necessary since Allspeak started out thinking that Glir and I were the same species and that Saerltes was a Quendi, but yeah I think we all want that."

They can all have Allspeak and its instruction manuals.

Excellent. Luvei writes down exactly how much the Allspeak installations cost, because it's a reasonable expense but he wants to make sure that every single debt is accounted for and nothing will slip through the cracks. 

"How do I put in a bid to Amentan countries?" 

"Here's the Vanda Nossëo page on Amenta and its colonies - click 'migration', then 'specialty work', and there's things they already have ads for - subtle artists, spellbinders, servantmakers, those are all rare magic skills that aren't yet reproducible on-demand. And you can fill out this form, see? Modern Allspeak wands let you type, so you can probably do that fine -"

She sees. She types! Typing is a new concept and really neat. 

The form wants a paragraph or so on what she can do and why she wants to offer it to Amenta and what price she's asking. Gull fills in that last for her with a large number.

She summarizes her species magic and biology and goes into more detail on what she in particular can do with it. After briefly conferring with Gull, she weights the description a little less towards the "healthy hybrids" side of things and a little more towards selecting the better of the parents' immune systems and intelligences and so on. 

"Eh, maybe don't mention the immune system as a specific example, they don't like having to think about their immune systems."

"Huh. Alright." Well she can select for intelligence or height or what have you. Also: eggs.

"And the one month pregnancy part, and then you're good to go."

She adds it in under eggs and submits it. 

"The Amentans are very on top of all their clerical work, you should get a reply in the next couple of hours."

"Do I stick around here until then?"

"If you want more instruction and advice, yes, otherwise not necessarily."

"Okay. How do I get a response if I'm not here?" 

"I can show you to a place where they give out miniature computers and walk you through using the email interface." He gets up. "Most things do cost money but everyone having access to email is a public good so someone's funding it that way."

"Is that how it's decided what things are funded publicly versus privately here?"

"Dwarves don't have public funds per se but if I help someone get an email address I can bill an organization that draws its funds from private contributors who benefit from everyone having an email address. People who aren't Dwarves decide how to allocate their public funds all sorts of ways."

"Huh. That's an interesting way of doing it! And it works, you don't have too many people hoping someone else will contribute?"

"It works for us. We have special institutions for dealing with Dwarf/other friction specifically because that kind of thing doesn't work as well for other species, though some individual people integrate well when they try."

"Huh. Different species have different psychologies sometimes, of course...I'm glad you're able to have a system like that."

Gull gets her a pocket everything. "This is similar to the models you'll find on Amentan planets but it's compatible with all the pealed networks that are themselves up to standard," he says. "Do you have any opinions on what you'd like your email address to be? Many people just go with their names and some hidden numbers to make sure there's no collision - the program will hide the numbers if you like, see, and then you can bring them up this way - but some people like to use words they like or something like that."

"No strong opinion, no." 

He causes her email address to be her name and shows her the rest of the basic features of the everything and how to access the Protected App Source. "You can also access the Unprotected App Source if you go into your settings and uncheck 'protected apps only' but the Protected one strictly limits what can be on there to protect people new to the technology against uncapped expenditures, inefficient use of everything processing power, data sharing they might not fully understand, that sort of thing. You can also temporarily access the Unprotected to get a specific app you expect to be safe based on a personal recommendation, say, and then go back to using Protected."

"That makes sense." 

She goes into the email app and plays around with it to make sure she understands its features.

"I'll go make an addendum to your application with your address in it."

"Thanks!"

"What else can I do for you?" he asks, when he's done this.

"I think at this point I'm just waiting to hear back from Amenta."

"I'll show you to the waiting room, it's a little twisty in here." Waiting room.

She goes with all her entourage to hang out in the waiting room and check her email like a desperate glowficcer hungry for tags. 

It's another eleven minutes and forty-one seconds before the first email arrives from a Soyok of House Synva asking if there's any special setup or conditions she'd find enticing enough to skip any bidding wars that otherwise might develop.

Ummmmmmmmm. Hm. She thinks seriously about it for a minute, tapping the everything thoughtfully, consults her daughters and their companions, and then replies that while there are circumstances she would find more or less enticing on their own merits the bell curve isn't shaped such that she has any particular conditions that would entice her to not evaluate multiple offers before selecting one. 

He replies that he's happy to offer her asking price but expects to be outcompeted and wishes her well.

She wishes him well in return and sits and waits and refreshes her email some more. 

She has lots of people happy to pay her asking price and one who underbids and one who overbids!

Who overbids?

It's a country called Voa. Their email says that they are very interested in ways to improve the condition of the next generation without having to deny their citizens the opportunity to have babies.

That's a pretty good reasoning. She's leaning towards accepting Voa's offer but will wait a while longer to see if there's anything even better. 

There are some more overbids, plus invitations to suggest perks or alternative forms of compensation, but they're under Voa's quote.

She emails Voa saying she'll accept their bid and everyone else with regretful rejection notices. 

Voa asks that she appear at the office of an Allocator Bauo at her convenience during the following working hours or make an appointment with him on this site if she doesn't want to risk a wait.

When are the working hours relative to right now?

It is apparently one and a half hours into the Voan workday.

How long is the Voan workday and how fast can they get there?

Six hour shifts are typical and they can get on a bus that will get them there in one, with Gull's help!

Cool then she will just show up (accompanied) in the designated location as soon as the bus arrives!

The bus teleports through various bus stops, and finally announces Voa.

Excellent. ...How...do they go about finding Allocator Bauo's office. 

There is a directory app she can download by scanning a code on the wall or searching this keyphrase! The given example on the wall ad is about finding a place that sells picklepot but she can probably extrapolate.

She can: extrapolate. She cannot: Give a damn what picklepot is right this minute! 

Still followed by entourage, she walks or takes convenient transit to the Allocator's office. 

(If she believes the picture has anything to do with what picklepot is, it's a food.)

The navigation app can tell her what train to get on and what stop to get off at! It cannot tell her which office is Allocator Bauo's. Perhaps she will have to inquire at the front desk.

"Hi, I was told to show up at Allocator Bauo's office during work hours?" She has the email out to show the front desk person if the front desk person doesn't just take her at her word. 

The receptionist has honey-yellow hair and a lot of wrinkles and pictures of various yellow-haired children on his desk. "All right! You want the left elevator bank," he points, "floor twelve, office 12-45."

"Thank you very much!" 

The motley crew tromp past to the left elevator bank and floor twelve. 

The offices are numbered on the doors! Various people with blue and yellow hair are going to and fro.

Bog-standard humanoids with colorful hair make no particular impression given the diversity of sapient species these people are used to!

Saerltes knocks on the door. 

The door opens by itself with the cunning use of hidden machinery! A yellow inside typing something up says "Hello! Can I help y- wow, there are a lot of you."

"These are my daughters and the people they've spent the last few years surviving a war zone with. We're sort of sticking together for moral support for the moment; they can wait for me outside if you'd rather but we'd rather not be planets apart at the moment."

"They can wait in here while you talk to Allocator Bauo? If you're here to talk to him."

"Yes, I am. That's fine."

"May I have your name as it would appear on his agenda?"

"Saerltes."

The yellow does a thing to her computer. "Allocator Bauo, a Saerltes."

"Ah, two minutes, thanks," says a voice from the computer (and, faintly, behind the door on the far end of the room).

Saerltes nods and sits and waits. 

In two minutes a blue with a neat little beard opens the door. "Hello! Come in."

"Hi!" She comes in. 

"Welcome to Voa! Your writeup was really intriguing. I think it could help a lot of people. Is there anything you cut for length in there?"

"I left out a lot of detail on interspecies hybridity and species magic since it didn't seem like those would be the primary draws on Amenta."

"I'm sure some people will absolutely leap at the chance for alien hybrids, though it might take a bit since without it obviously on the horizon people are tending not to marry aliens yet. Species magic?"

"In my world, every species has its own unique magic. Manipulating what magic a hybrid inherits is--related but distinct from manipulating the DNA itself."

"Ah. But since we don't have any it won't come up till more people are marrying aliens."

"Exactly. Or until we can get alien tissue donors; I can work from more than two genetic sources."

"Ooh, that'll get the plural marriage rates up like anything. Not that that's a key metric these days."

"Which it was previously because when you have population controls more adults in a marriage increases the number of children available to a given parent without increasing births per capita."

"Yes, that's right."

"I'm very glad you didn't have to wait longer for access to more planets. I'm used to a very different set of population pressures--most species in my world have a much lower baby-drive than Amentans do, but we also don't die of old age--but my world also has natural portals between habitable planets; not having them was...never an issue for us."

"...there would be so many Amentans if we'd started out that way," he says. "Goodness."

"My species is on the higher end of the range of child-obsession of species I know, and I've been satisfied with just the two for decades. We didn't evolve; our species start during magical events called 'Geneses.' We try to limit them, mostly, but they ever happen."

"Oh, Arda species are like that, too, their gods place a bunch of starter adults and they go on from there."

"We start as babies. Which is most of why we try to limit Geneses, people prefer to have children on their own terms rather than because babies are randomly appearing and need parents."

"There's a world where everybody's like that!"

"Oh dear."

"I think these days they have it under control. Still. Here people want their own babies."

"Very reasonable. My own children don't have anyone but my wife and I in them; I completely understand the biological imperative."

"There will be an incredible rash of marrying aliens if your services are widely advertised and that's all to the good, Amentans are an important part of peal labor pool supply and getting magic and so on incorporated into our population will be very beneficial. What kind of throughput can you manage?"

"Depends on how complicated the job is. 'We're the same sex and species and we want a healthy random-assembly baby' I can do in less than an hour. 'There are five different primary genetic contributors and four of them are different species' of magic and we want as much of that tacked on as possible and three of our species have mutually lethal biochemistry and we have a four-meter-long list of aesthetic specifications' can take as long as a month. Most of the jobs I've taken in the past have taken multiple days but less than a week. That's in total time; given a biology lab that's to my standards or better I can eject a project in progress to switch to something else."

"What are your bio lab standards, in general lay terms?"

"Relevantly, they need containers into which I can deposit bundles of cells and expect to be able to retrieve them alive later, and the materials to mix substrates to deposit them in."

"- that doesn't sound hard. I expect I can get you a spot in a university lab or somewhere private, what's your preference? University labs have more paperwork and private labs will take more of a cut."

"University! I love universities, they have so many people who know so many things and will talk your head off about them if you show interest. Assuming these universities are anything like the ones I'm familiar with." 

"University full of greens it is! Let's see -" He pulls up some things on his monitor. "What things matter to you in a placement?"

"Nowhere near anything military. A strong genetics department or program or what have you is a plus; since there's this whole other perspective of genetics I'd like to see what I can pick up about it. Housing for my children and their companions as well as myself--and my wife once I can get her resurrected."

"All right, that narrows it down - these four all have strong bio departments with geneticists that publish a lot, I can't assess the quality of their work directly -" he touches his hair, "do you want to read some papers, or look at pictures of the campuses, or have me email their boards asking about how generous they can be with housing if you want to live on campus -"

"Give me a paper so I can see if Allspeak covers the jargon well enough, and if that doesn't work then the housing option?"

He finds the genetics department chair's most prominently posted research paper for each school and sends them to her.

There are some concepts she isn't familiar with but she manages to keep up well enough. She's very much looking forward to catching up on these new ideas!

She picks the university associated with the paper by a Korel be Sharon de Breon.

"My secretary will get you folks some hotel rooms in the city for the time being while university housing shakes out, you can tell her how many rooms and how many beds. How would you like your immigration bonus?"

"I should probably get a local bank account of some sort."

"She can help you with that too! And with directions to the university by train or teleporter as you prefer. Or I can come along and make introductions if you wish."

"I think I'll be fine with directions, but thank you."

"All right, I'll hand you back over to her. Thank you so much for choosing Voa, I hope you'll love it here."

The secretary has directions, and a bank transfer ready to start Saerltes's new account with, and also an introduction to Amentan law. The most relevant thing, highlighted, is that Amentans have very strenuous cleanliness standards. Their bus will have been through a magic cleaning field on the way in, they just do that with all the buses, but now that they're here they will need to obey posted signs in bathrooms, manage illness and suspected illness according to local standards, and pursue qualifying decontamination procedures (quick, magic, spendy or slow, wet, and free) after this list of events should any occur.

This is actually kind of a relief; cleanliness isn't really something you can prioritize in a war zone and an emphasis thereon is--nice, in its way. They can certainly take it in stride, at least. 

And, thus equipped, they can make their way to the university. 

The university is a lovely old campus with giant-windowed stone buildings. They have been introduced by email to the research hospital director and the head of the genetics department and funding suitable to her installation in the university has been advanced via the board.

Saerltes would like to introduce herself to the research hospital director and the head of the genetics department in person at their earliest convenience! 

The research hospital director has time that afternoon!

The head of the genetics department has time somewhat sooner!

She will meet with the head of the genetics department somewhat sooner, then! She confirms the time to meet. 

At the appointed time, she knocks on the department head's door. 

The head of the genetics department opens the door. 

The two of them stare at each other for a moment. 

"--I have an alt," Korel says in delighted realization after a moment. "Or I had better--if you're just a huge coincidence I'm going to be very disappointed at this point honestly--"

"How does one tell? The idea of alts is fairly new to me, it took me a moment to remember after you said it." 

"Tell me about your family," the Amentan suggests.

"I have two daughters and a dead wife. I was dead until my daughters wound up here and got a loan to bring me back, and I want to bring my wife back as soon as I can." 

"--I'm sorry to hear that. I have a husband, not a wife, I don't know if that matters--I do also have two daughters, twins..." 

"Mine are twins too, although that was on purpose on my part. I imagine you can't do that...?" 

"You sort of can, but in my case it was entirely a happy accident. Ada and Amila; Ada followed me into genetics, Amila does sculpture. And other art, but mostly sculpture." 

"My Aduva is a political scholar and activist--or she was, before the war--Amalta does all kinds of arts, I wouldn't have thought to single out sculpture in particular."

"...My Ada certainly has political opinions, but," she tugs her hair. "She's green. Intercaste, but my husband is grey, not blue, and Voa is matrilineal anyway." 

"If she really is an alt of Aduva, I don't see that stopping her." 

"The aliens are accomplishing most of the things she felt most strongly about anyway, one way or another." 

"That I'll buy." 

"So what's your wife like? My husband's grey--intercaste marriages are unusual and grey/green is an unusual pairing but it's not shocking like, say, blue/purple. He teaches martial arts to non-greys. He's very smart, I didn't have any concerns about his children succeeding as greens, especially in Voa but I wouldn't have not married him in a credit country." 

"I'm sure I don't know all the context behind 'credit country' or your caste system or what have you, but my wife is a different species than me. Arka is--was--will be--a frost giant. Taller than I am and blue-skinned and cryokinetic. And, in Arka's case, very smart, yes. And loyal, and passionate. And...angry, for a long time, before we met. Aduva gets her malcontent from her, to be sure." 

"That description does sound...not entirely unlike my Arek. I do think I've heard things about alts not having to be the same sex." 

"It's funny because if you'd asked me which of me or Arka was more likely to be a boy in another species I'd have said me without hesitation; my species doesn't have boys." 

"Your poor species." 

"Most of us aren't missing much. If I lived somewhere that was almost all my own species there would be plenty of folks who thought I was weird and kinky for finding men attractive at all." 

"Ha, so for you it's liking the opposite gender that's sideways? How peculiarly apt." 

"You could put it that way!" 

"I think I'm going to have to insist on meeting your children, under the circumstances. And of course you have to meet mine--and my husband, and probably Anevar." 

"Anevar?"

"Ada's boyfriend."

"Ah. Amalta's engaged, but Aduva is single." 

"I wonder if Amila will ultimately end up with an alt of..."

"Kaleith. We'll find out eventually, I'm sure." 

"I'm sure. I'd love to take you and yours to meet my family immediately, but sadly I do have other things to do this afternoon--I can give you my address and you can come over for dinner?"

"There are a lot of us, and we don't want to split up--it's not just my daughters and I and Kaleith, it's me plus the entire group that was refugees together while I was dead." 

"Hm. Yes, that is quite a crowd for our apartment. We could come where you guys are staying?"

"That should work. I'll tell the others, my girls at least should be intrigued."

"I'd imagine so."

She arranges the details of Saerltes's work with her, then, when her alt is gone, immediately picks up her everything to update her family on the situation. 

Ada's everything buzzes at her when her mother's message comes in. She picks it up and reads, her eyebrows raising as she progresses through it. 

"Well, that's exciting."

"Is this a guessing game?" wonders Anevar from where he's scrolling through his work email. "They found a way to make you a subtle artist. You have received spam about grant funding to study the wildlife on an uninhabited planet. - are there uninhabited planets in Warp, I feel like I only ever hear about ones with people, which is pretty weird if you think about it."

"I have an alt! Well, Mom has an alt, and they're pretty sure Mom's alt's wife is an alt of Dad and her kids are alts of me and Amila. No idea about the uninhabited planets thing."

"Oh! Well, that's cool. It's annoying you can only find those by coincidence unless you have important friends, but at least you get a coincidence."

"I keep telling you I'm sure at least one of us will be important enough someday." Cheek-kiss. "But I guess now 'one of us' just got a little bigger!"

He smiles sunnily at her. "Network effects, I suppose! Are we going to throw a party, I hear that's what the important people do."

"We're invited to their hotel room for dinner this evening, I don't know if that's suitably partyish but I'm sure if it falls short we can work something else out. I wonder what the other me is like! She apparently doesn't have a you--yet, growth mindset--poor her."

"I'll order sparkling juice and snacks, shall I? Since if it's a hotel they won't want a potted plant no matter how many times that's suggested in my book on caste signaling. Where are they at?"

She checks. 

"The Seasonal, over to the west of the university. Conveniently, aliens are highly unlikely to have any idea what any caste signals short of hair are."

He swivels his chair around, thwapping her in the shoulder with a forest-green braid. "Then I'm set." He orders juice and snacks to appear at the hotel's holding area for pickup in the evening.

She giggles and presses a quick kiss to the end of his braid. "A me isn't likely to care even if she did notice, even if aliens generally did, which they don't." 

"They don't! It's amazing! My sister thinks I should have moved to Endorë seasons ago, but the museum wouldn't - you know - make sense -"

"No, I totally get it." Hug. "It's an important museum."

"I'm glad to have domestic support." Smooch.

Smooch. "I'm glad to be able to provide it." 

At the appointed time he collects his delivery from the hotel's repository and carries up a bottle of sparkling cider and a bag of frosted rice cookies.

The door opens. "Welcome! Oh, goodness, you look so very like my Aduva--not exactly like, of course, species differences--and I don't recognize you a bit, so you must be Anevar!"

"That's me!" he says, offering the cider. "Nice to meet you."

"Nice to meet you!" She accepts the cider and steps out of the way. 

A well over seven-foot-tall woman with pale blue skin rises to her feet when she sees them. "Oh, you do look like me!"

"I have to admit, you look less like me than our mothers look like each other." 

"Oh, I'm half frost giant. We look a little farther from Amentans than Elves do." 

"Slightly higher budget aliens."

"I don't actually know what that means." 

"Uh--if you were fictional, it would be slightly less of a cheapass move to make an Amentan actor look like you instead of something farther from Amentans." 

"Ah." She waves at Anevar. "Hi! Tell me why Ada likes you." 

"I was surprisingly lively in response when she had museum-related questions."

"Ooh, what kind of museum."

"Red history."

"What's red? We didn't get a ton of debriefing before we came here." 

"...You know how we have a caste system?"

"Yes...?"

"Reds were the caste that handled unclean stuff. Including, uh, each other. The aliens insisted on solving the ongoing human* rights violation that that cashed out to before they would give us planets. The museum is...controversial. Not everyone is happy with the aliens making us be civil. I had the advantage of, uh, my dad had red internet friends before he ever met Mom--anyway. Before the aliens it was 'what drugs are the university students these days doing' levels of liberal for me to be like 'what if we stopped being horrible.'"

"...Ah." To Anevar: "Sounds like difficult and important work. I commend you." 

He takes a little bow.

Cheeksmooch. 

"So I hear your Amila's engaged!" 

"That would be me. Hi. Kaleith." She gestures at a corner where one green-haired and one blue-skinned woman are gesturing at an everything. "Your sister is explaining digital art to my betrothed." 

Giggle. "That sounds like Amila."

"What kind of world are you all from?" asks Anevar.

"...One that's at war. Our bit of it. Uh. We have lots of species, that part's not depressing." 

"This one has lots of species too, though we didn't meet any of them before Vanda Nossëo landed on us."

"Ours are magic. When someone from our world dies, there's this unpleasant magical event that under some circumstances causes spontaneous generation of babies of a new species. Also we have probably-magic interplanetary portals."

"Oh, cool, the portals'll be very popular, right now you have to take a bus."

"--Oh, we can't cause them, they're a natural phenomenon."

"It might be that we could cause them and just don't know how. But we don't know how."

"Huh, natural interplanetary portals, fancy that."

"Some of our mythology claims that the portals are connected to the death tolls and the geneses but it's not empirically substantiated."

"Do all your species get along all right? You're a very diverse-looking bunch."

"We don't have communications technology like yours, so we only know stuff about our planet and a few nearby ones, and some really old history. I'm sure there's interspecies violence somewhere, but our war has frost giants at the top of both sides of it." 

"What's it about?"

"Succession crisis. The queen died and her son and her brother are fighting over the throne." 

"Ouch. - I'm kind of monopolizing you, presumably you and Ada want to talk -"

"I'm not shy, I can speak up whenever. I'm interested in this stuff too. Although I admit I am curious about our similarities and differences. Most aliens don't spring, for example, that seems like it'd be really different for a me--" 

"How so? I've encountered the concept, I've got a sketch of an idea of what it's like on a societal level, but I don't think I have much of an idea of what it's like on a personal level." 

"...I spring really, really badly. In the babies way, not the sex way, the sex way is manageable for me. If nothing unexpected comes up Anevar and I are probably going to get married before next spring--last spring there weren't population controls but I didn't have a partner yet and I don't, actually, want to be a single parent because I was in a hurry, or worse have to split custody with someone I don't really like--but it was hard, I had to get Amila to help me restrain myself from doing anything stupid even with one-and-done birth control at the start of spring."

"Huh. I want kids, for sure, but I wouldn't describe myself as being in anything resembling a hurry about them." 

"That is incredibly weird."

"Well, I also don't want to be a single parent, and I haven't met anyone I wanted to marry. What would you have done if you hadn't met Anevar?"

"More dating sites."