"One Melkor is still locked up and his version of Maira is supposed to be arrested any minute now for Valar values of minute, one Melkor ran away with his Maira alt in tow and hasn't been found yet, the rest are dead mostly with adjacency limited magic but there is one portable unwieldy solution."

"Okay. And regardless of intervening events all of them torture me -"

"Yeah, speculation is Erus just kind of have it in for yous. You have a human alt from a non-Arda and he's fine. And there's a science fiction Arda where Elves are cyborgs and the you there is forked from an instance before he got captured and now there's six of those and they're, well, not tortured, they have other stuff going on."

"...oh?"

"Boyfriend drama and also their war wound up with Valinor being destroyed with everybody on it and then mostly put back but not with the Valar or Maiar, to extract an airtight oath from the Melkor and company. I think my alt is more fucked up about that than yours are, mine's the one who actually did it."

"...yikes." Hug?

Hug.

"How's your alt doing -"

"Oh, he's mostly okay, another one of my alts showed up and put all the dead Ainur back. You'll meet him if you feel like it or if you want a fancy brain surgery computer. Although tiny-alt-of-your-mom can also do the fancy brain surgery computers."

"There is a tiny alt of my mom who can do brain surgery?"

"Not surgically. Destroyed-Valinor-Bell - his name is Cam - is a species that can create arbitrary matter, and that includes computer chips in people's brains, and tiny-your-mom who is the only member of the template to have actually picked a nickname and goes by Epic thinks that species is the coolest thing and has by assorted means emulated most of its traits."

"That sounds like her - do my parents still have seven children when it's my father who has to do the actual having -"

"They do! Also one set adopted a random human baby because that Fëanáro was a tourist on a planet where human babies spontaneously appear and he decided to take one home."

"...continues to sound like her. Gosh, I'd hate being a boy."

"The Arda gender roles also swap."

"Oh. ...guess that makes sense. And points to their inherent arbitrariness or something, wow."

"No kidding. Anyway, most of me are heterosexual girls so most of us aren't dating - Space Maitimo and Cam could have in theory but Space Maitimo dropped the ball and reportedly Mitros, the human one of you, was really exasperated about it, he married his me - Iobel - but it's a platonic political thing because she's a girl. The other boy me, Kib, is dating his you and his Findekáne too but is married to this other guy. Uh, if I had not fallen on you you would probably absent other divergences have wound up with Findekáne, fun fact."

"Really. Huh. I was planning to stay virtuously celibate."

"Oh, yeah, she would have had to tease you about it for a long damn time even by Elf standards, but at this point some yous and hers are married."

" - wait -"

"Yeah that confused me too. They say it does actually work on the standard soul marriage architecture, expectation-controlled - my alt Gem accidentally married a half-Maia princess called Lúthien who hasn't been born here yet, because the expectations got just that confused - I'm a little surprised we haven't had any mishaps like that here but maybe Minassë spooked everybody and they've been avoiding hooking up with humans of any description? But there's also an Arda where they've got free will and are just regular married. Free will is distributable."

"- well that's sort of inconvenient -"

"Kind of an infohazard. Joy - that being the Lúthien's disambiguating nickname - was affected by learning that same-sex marriage is legal in the relevant Canada. Seems to have followed the trajectory of same-role marriage on my Earth. I named it Eclipse. And this Arda is Ithil."

"Right, I guess the other Ardas wouldn't have moons -"

"They actually do except the one with live Trees, but the eclipses aren't magic."