Andi is annoyed by all this not having alts she's doing. Bella comes in singlet, so maybe she does too. They should look. C'monnnn. It's not, like, urgent or anything, but she thinks she is pretty neat and there should be more of her.
They have multiple magic rocks that can in principle search for alts, now, but they are trying not to tell everyone about alts lest everyone on the Earths bounce around looking for their selves and a single version of their high school crushes and people destined for eventual celebrity. So she is the designated alt-finder. "None of these worlds have Bells," she says, "I checked a couple years back - so they won't have you unless you come without a Bell."
"- apparently they're adjacency limited, damn, but I can pan forward in my sensory experience for a little over an hour in my neighborhood. You didn't have to give me a ride, just the stopoff points, you were going to have fetched Elspeth to fix my Valar and I got the teleport off her and already have an eidetic memory. Where's Boots -?"
Crystal ball. general channel, attn: Boots, there's a new Bell, has precognition but only locally, has a girl Maitimo in a coma, wants you to fix her, attn: Elspeth care to fix the new Arda, the Bell already has Loki's spells because precognition, apparently.
"I might not be born at all, if your Arda's genderswapped - or I might eventually have siblings, depends -"
"I can do enough that she'll probably be willing to wake up off that and alt consent. I'll be in my office - looks like this -"
And she and Maitimë teleport away and Boots waits for her to wake up to be switched over to subtle arts means of unconsciousness, and she tells the Maitimos about the situation.
"I don't think any psions have picked up anything to do with Elf marriages - well, any who are still alive, one of the kids was eighty percent of the way to figuring out magic soul divorce before he got killed - or is there a way to do it same-sex on the standard architecture? -"
"...it's entirely fine to just tell mes to stop making their loved ones miserable, you know, and then we'll do that - after Boots is done she won't internally have panic attacks if you touch her but unless you have told her to stop making you miserable she is unlikely to express enthusiasm about getting married for an Elf while."
"It's like trying to imagine a straight me - there's no reason it couldn't happen but it'd be really hard to wrap my head around. I - if it had workable parts I might just work with those, if I was expected to marry someone who could run the country and have lots of children then I - have absolutely no idea. Might not end up seeming much like an alt."
"What frightens me is when events that should be path-dependent aren't. But - Bells don't seem to come in Elf, probably because not having free will just doesn't suit you. It would not surprise me if I similarly fail to come in 'a gender where my social expectations were all things I couldn't do'."
"...well, I'm assuming I was unattached, since Isabella's come out here alone? And probably in denial, because those went together, and - a girl, I don't know how that bit affects it - and anyway less likely when trying to acquire the shiny Bell to think of it in those terms."
"Unattached, yeah, should I like, apologize to Findekané for counterfactually stealing her girlfriend do you suppose -? It's sort of a cute story how it came out she had a crush on me actually. I already had eidetic memory down when I landed and she was jealous and I said I could learn to hand it out and she said if I did that she'd offer me anything in her power short of the empire - and then later I did, and gave it to her and said I'd take a raincheck on my anything, and she blushed, so I asked - counterfactually but I bounced it when I had the answer -"
"Awwwww. I do not think you should apologize to Findekáne for counterfactually stealing her girlfriend, I think she will say 'it does not seem like that life choice would have bought either of us much happiness!' and at least until you two are all squared away that will just make you needlessly sad."
"...I don't know how determined to navigate that in particular you are, but - every time she'll expect it to turn into something else halfway through, that's the whole point - and you can tell yourself that you'd rather just know, but it's still hard to make yourself seek it out -"
Nod. "Boots is useful. I've got more oomph but she doesn't have to meditate on a skill she wants for five to ten years before it comes in and she's got actual training, I was expecting to have to spend ages on collecting whatever dubious this-and-that and turning it into some kind of regimen and half-guessing on whether she'd even want me to go through with it..."
"That's useful. ...it wasn't you, it's that - the first time we put ourselves together and it's so awful but there's the promise that you'll have forever once you just get it together, and then it's a lie, and the second time and the third time you push just as hard because in principle you should act like it's real except insofar as it helps the Enemy and this doesn't, and then eventually it becomes harder and harder to do it just on the off chance it were real and mattered and didn't just open you up to hurt even more when it turns out to be a lie -"
"I don't think Liz had enough time to learn much besides what I know to have been her precognition range and maybe a little of one or two other things. And she was insulated from the really overtly unjustifiable stuff, whenever I managed to convince her it happened Maira deleted the conversation out of her head."
"Liz didn't have enough time to do that at all, that would be intensely complicated - I haven't even picked up thought acceleration in spite of how stupidly useful it would be because it just takes so damn long to get even if the psion has a knack for it! And we have to do our own detail work, she would've had to compose the twenty years of memories to just put them in, and she didn't have time to do that. I can't chalk that up to Liz. Did I have a nonstandard Melkor...?"
"Skimmed it. Okay, why else would she turn up in a dream with twenty years of memories -" Bounce.
"It wouldn't hold up long but if you were always there as soon as she fell asleep it wouldn't have to in order to serve some small sadistic purpose? And normally they wouldn't do it that way but you were dropping eidetic memory on her all the time and the usual hallucinations rely on a lot of backtracking."
"Well, the Valar don't understand what they're doing wrong. This seems not to be Eru's problem. Anyhow, Eru thought that the Space Valar should stay dead because that was delightfully tragic, and the Luster Eru thought that Yeerks should come live in Luster because it would make a great story. - the latter has not yet been a disaster, although I was half expecting one -"
"Yeah, probably. There's likely to be some very high-power stuff flying around - we're calorie-limited but that's species-dependent, an eclipsed Ent did a time dilation trick that I've never heard of a human pulling off, so we might be able to find species that can use my magic system for very cool stuff."
"Very. Even the Valar are capable of alacrity now and then, though, Ulmo was pretty easy to work with when I was trying to prevent Valinor from melting - though I do have to dock points for not having figured out that if Melkor escapes you tell the local precog instantly -"
"I want the ability to affect adjacency but have no particular expectation we'll get there. ...we're close on portals between adjacent worlds, though. Space can do this sort of permanent worldleaper gate thing that's lethal half the time but they think they can fix that ... I suppose you could always go home and see what we can be expected to come tell you happens if we resurrect the powerful entirely magic aliens..."
"Portals are possible with eclipse magic... that or somebody passed through, but they selectively admit specific eclipsed or people who've interacted with eclipsed in certain ways so I'm betting it's native. But we're adjacency-limited. Valar can do portals, are they limited to doing it from their Ardas or hard to convince to do 'em elsewhere or -?"
Maitimë will be tempted to do nothing much both because she expects that if this isn't real she will be nudged into being more interesting and because she will expect she can get a longer reprieve by testing its limits less. Conditional on it being real she would prefer to be nudged into doing things.
Okay.
Isabella explains to Maitimë's family where she vanished to and apologizes for not leaving a note. She sits with Boots and her sleeping Maitimë to find out what all the associations are; Boots can't necessarily find all of them by description alone but she can find about half, and Isabella can tell which ones, so that'll cut down on how long Maitimë will have to be awake-and-not-yet-all-fixed -
- and then when Boots is out of things that can be done with a sleeping patient, Boots wakes her up.
...there are two of Isabella and she doesn't know what the game is there - guess which one is real? But neither would be real - or maybe Maira found a way to insert herself into the dreams - one of the Isabellas has long hair maybe Maitimë gets to choose the real Isabella or a sub Isabella that'd seem like a game that would entertain Maira - the last hallucination was so good, the last hallucination had the premise she could die, this one is practically guaranteed not to have such a lovely premise -
"Hi lovely," says Standard Issue Isabella. (Boots was able to find that one, she can call her that again without getting a flinch -) "This is an alternate universe version of me with different more freeform mental powers and an actual therapy license. You did say I could wake you up if I could fix it - she's at the limit of what she can do while you're asleep."
"Keeping you from freaking out about being awake, at the moment. Sibyl - uh, that's the disambiguating nickname your Bell picked - precogged a few things I usually need to talk to patients to find, but that was only enough to let me actually locate about half the associations that need pinching off, and also my method for preventing panic attacks does require me to induce one and follow it home, as it were."
"Lots. There are more Ardas, this one is the genderswapped version and all your alts are guys. So are two of mine. There are more Earths, with all different magic systems. Mine's the only world that does roles. Worlds are or aren't next to each other and lots of things only work within one hop of the hub of the magic system or wherever something more portable is being used."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"...well, that's not what Kib concluded but he had different background assumptions, the existence of psions complicates matters some for you. The powers are really different but they could probably emulate any specific telepathic application of my powerset I could name and of course it doesn't prove anything that subtle arts also gives me telekinesis."
"He was slightly vaguely informed about Enemy mindreading capabilities - not that 'can detect any actions you attempt to take and read your complete history of sense data' is much better - and turns out that if we expect to be mindread all the time we can sort of self-destruct and instead not have any thoughts to read. Also when his memories were deleted he'd get them back in dreams because he's a reincarnation and 'getting memories back in dreams' comes with the package, so he couldn't be stuck very long convinced that the Enemy couldn't actually do that or that he hadn't actually been captured. So they rescued him and he hadn't developed triggers or anything, he was literally not paying enough attention, but he was thoroughly unresponsive. Cam and Iobel hung around narrating the thoughts he would've been having if he'd been having them and he figured if he couldn't prevent the Enemy from having his thoughts he might as well have them himself and then he was pretty okay, just wouldn't use magic or do politics until I finished convincing him."
"Lots of stuff, although we're very much current events ourselves. Here, have a map -" Sibyl has a chiplocked computer. "Ardas are yellow, worlds with Earths are blue, red worlds are interesting but neither, little gray ones are boring, non-circle shapes have useful adjacency properties. We're actually just guessing that Eclipse is the 'middle' of the magic system, this world between us and Wish has no inhabited planets with moons but my magic still works there but we could all be clustered around some other world. Multiverse facts come in a wide range of pleasantnesses and any awkward talking around stuff is because of that. Uh, I'm supposed to call your attention to the fact that your shapeshifting blue centaur alien alt Matirin gave my alt Butterfly her Earth."
"Her Earth was being invaded by smaller yuckier more horrifying aliens and his lot came to help and accumulated lots of political capital in so doing and then he turned himself in for the most justifiable war crimes of all time and went to be in political prison on his home planet - he has since been sprung - but not before leaving her all the political capital."
"Yes, although he didn't actually tell her she was receiving a planet in advance so she snarks about that. Also she's the only other Bell with an Alex, most of me are only children - Loki's adopted and has an older sister that way, Golden rounds to 'sibling' with some adopted inlaws, that's all."
"They will find the competing gender roles thing really weird but get over it quickly enough to have a spectacular and globally-televised wedding on whoever's planet has more people to be impressed by such and then they'll sing together for all of time. ...are we genetically similar to our alts -"
"I'm genetically identical to Gem, Golden before she turned into a vampire, and Butterfly, and very similar to the others except Loki who is a frost giant, I don't think anybody's checked Ithil Elves against alts yet but Flat - as opposed to Space - Elf alts are in other cases identical."
"Undiverted trajectory is fifty years sidereal in Angband followed by a would-be mercy-kill-suicide-mission by the Findekáno which Manwë sends an Eagle to turn into an actual rescue mission followed by centuries of miserable war and that is actually not too late - too late is - there's usually Silmarils. Three of them, and later. You and your mom and sisters would've - after Melkor violated her century of parole - sworn a not particularly well-worded oath to retrieve them undeterrably, which seemed like a good idea as long as the Enemy was the one who'd made off with them, but other people get hold of them and stupidly hang onto them and there is much more horrible oath-driven war and eventually the Valar show up and try to claim the Silmarils after not doing anything much for centuries and your alt and Macalaurië's are the only ones still alive and you have to go get the Silmarils and wind up getting hold of a couple of them and then your alt jumped with his into a chasm and spent entirely too long in Mandos and the peal got everybody out of Mandos, but -"
"Bell consensus on Silmaril-related mass murders is pretty much 'the ability to exercise moral agency on that sort of thing was wiped out when they swore the oath in the first place and if we find them post-Oath but pre-murder we still like them, and also, fuck Elu Thingol'. What's the idea?"
"I think you'd need to not tell them anything - get them out of Mandos, fix them as much as you can fix them without waking them, they kill themselves and they wake up a thousand years before it all started with just enough space to believe that they didn't do it - If we know that not existing is an option then it's really really really hard to keep on going -"
"So this relies on being able to find another too-late and a matching variety of Arda at the same time or subsequently which we can stand to leave mostly alone because I assume that if one day it's like 'oh look it's a thousand years ago' and the next day it's 'oh look aliens' it looks way less plausible -"
"It might not be, we'd want to check with the Findekáno and also the couple of half-elves adopted during the Silmaril-related-murder-incidents. And I guess other family members but they didn't seem even slightly inclined to be impediments to cessation of existence last time."
"There is a computerized dossier of Literally Everyone, Holy Shit, which I am told you will read nearly straight through and not be even slightly bored by the blurb on random-Edda-alien-number-six-hundred-thousand. It can probably stand to wait until you have your own computer and can scroll through it on your own."
"Melkors are a little more single-minded about the being evil gods thing, most of the ones from my worldcluster have something else going on too. But mostly my entire world needs to be evacuated and then condemned as unsafe for sapient beings. We're working on it."
"They know that I whisked you off to see an alternate universe psychic therapist version of myself who I anticipated being told about, and that more alternate universe versions of people may swing by to visit, and that I'm reading up on all the interesting alternate-universe-related facts and will be more able to answer questions after I have finished doing that."
"It's also probably going to be impractical to keep certain secrets when some of your alts are openly married to their Findekános, you - possibly after consulting them - know better than I how to handle that. Kib thinks that as soon as that part is known your mom will put together the part about me."
"They are fine with the disapproved-kind-of-monosexuality thing and your mom likes me in principle; they don't like Findekános, Kib went for a while with his Fëanáro aware that he was dating his Maitimo but unaware that either one was dating their Findekáno. Then Kib turned out to be married and his Fëanáro was passive-aggressive about that because he wasn't clear on the whole 'reincarnated, gradually recovering memories from last time around' thing until Kib noticed he was being passive-aggressive and went and repeated the story to his face. Kib thinks he figured out about Findekáno around the time he rode a pterodactyl to Angband and came home with their Maitimo, but that was never explicitly brought up until they got married."
"Probably but only because for some reason it turned out to be possible to make it to the inexplicably outdoor holding location on foot while fucking singing a fucking song not even a magic song instead of trying that resulting in immediate death by orc. Probably doesn't work even that well with Liz around."
"There is a Noldor planet in Edda called Vanda Nossëo and they have a thing and hand it out like candy. Alex's alt is a heterosexual girl and also a world-famous performance artist with groupies and she was singing the praises of her magic ring specifically to annoy Alex. Her name's Alexandra, Andi for short."
"I got it counterfactually and was waiting for Andi and Joy when they got there. Elspeth is also capable of turning Valar into reasonable people, she's got magic truth-telling powers that stretch in all kinds of fun ways like 'telling the truth really fast' or 'telling the truth so that Valar actually understand it' or 'telling the truth to a hunk of metal about how it is supposed to be magic'."
"The three big multiversal hub spots are Vanda Nossëo in Edda, Mîr in Wish, and Elendil in Warp. And Space Arda, but that's more 'it's literally in the middle of everything adjacencywise, and has some personnel conveniences special to Space Elves' than a political hub-shaped organization. We're closer to Mîr but Vanda Nossëo is more Noldorin in character by far, it's a reasonable first stop."
"It works, it's just all - dreamy. By that logic I should never bother doing anything in real life that I could put together in dream form. And you do realize that insofar as I can determine that you don't appreciate things that affects both my enjoyment of a hypothetical and my resolve to hypothetically try it?"
"...oh, Isabella said that my alts were all the socially-unacceptable kind of monosexual but I guess I didn't think much of it? I'd been assuming that my problem was that the most appealing person in the world happened to be a girl, not that I was categorically broken on that front --"
"Sure, but they're never already married, whereas a bunch of me are to a wide variety of people. I'm not supposed to meet Golden's husband because he's weirded out by people who look like her and aren't, and Kib will gush about his husband at the slightest provocation, and there's Gem and Joy who are very cute at each other, and Boots is dating her Rúmil - not sure if you picked up on that or just that she's fond? - and then there's Cam and Loki. Rest of 'em are single unless you count Iobel being technically married."
"Aurum has two kinds of species-specific pairbonding things, there's more people with Boots's powers, Warp has some species with psi abilities but Boots pretty much categorically outclasses them all, Wish can throw mind-altering wishes and mind-altering powers if you become a magic rock but Gem's careful about wishes that might do that, spellbinders are pretty flexible but do have particular trouble with mind-affecting spells in general compared to other things, Edda contains the Mind and Soul stones which are the ones Loki is not advised to try operating, and there are Yeerks who are not magic but are mind-controlly, did the dossier contain a footnote or anything -?"
"Yeerks are the small horrifying aliens who were invading Butterfly's Earth. Their empire has been conquered and all Yeerks are currently under much more neighborly jurisdiction. They're slug-like, yea big," gesture, "and parasitic in the sense that in order to do things other than be aquatic slugs they crawl in people's ears and wrap around their brains and apprehend their contents astonishingly fast and pilot the bodies however they like from there."
"Yeah. Butterfly too but his was worse, she had very nearly a best-case involuntary Yeerking scenario - Butterfly's Yeerk has since permanently shapeshifted human and lives in Cube's Israel - and Matirin was not Yeerked for very long but it was long enough for the Yeerk to use him to kill his Tyelcormë alt."
Only a tiny bit. "...hmm, okay, so if you'd landed on us later - I would gush endlessly to Findekáne about how you were the best human in the world and the way she plays Governor and I think I'm in love, that bit's plausible, but Findekáne would probably not go 'that does sound like a very crushable person, I am not melodramatic and deeply closeted so I shall ask her out' - because, like, I'd be miserably jealous and she'd anticipate as much -"
"So much! I do wish it worked out because 'most of your alts are happily married to theirs' is quite an endorsement of a person but probably I would have just written a lot of melodramatic songs and then been fine - until you found a sub, and then written more melodramatic songs..."
"I wonder just how much creative output is permanently squirreled away never to see the light of day, privately ode-ing this or that unattainable... Anyway the population of Eclipse is unusually polyamorous but I don't think I am, I didn't pass 'sharing' in kindergarten."
"Space and Hex were the first deliberate interworld meeting. The others branched off from that except Boots and Epic and Scroll found Warp independently. Warp is most crowded, followed by Edda - we think, those are estimates - and the least is a Shadow neighbor with what appears to be a population of exactly four fused hivemind things two of whom are considering a merger, but if you don't count that it's an Edda neighbor with Stone Age humans who have a population of a few thousand and so far refuse to talk to any visitors. Uncontrolled worldleaping is now considered unsafe so we're only looking for worlds by parameter now and that slows us down, but it's still about one a month, mostly around Wish, and the bottleneck is how quickly we can feel reasonable about moving on from the typical new one having done some reasonable first-pass interventions and mined it for useful contents."
"A majority of worlds have at least one or two natives who know at least a little about the multiverse because it's usually more accurate to supplement conjuration and reading with actually talking to somebody, but in most it's nothing approaching common knowledge. There's ongoing projects in or confederated status of polities in fifty-three."
"Develop stuff. The ones who do music have to be in Flat Ardas, it doesn't work if composed outside of them, but Cam made them a dwarf planet in Elentári so they don't have to be on the usual one. And distribute things, and Elves are usually a first choice for getting and using wished-on powers if Gem doesn't find people from Wish to do it because on a population level they're very trustworthy."
"Yours might be an exception since you're from early and didn't have the specific Valar failure mode of Telperion, but mostly the Noldor are very sick of the Valar. Which isn't entirely fair since I can make Valar much more reasonable but still inspires a lot of not-living-in-Ardas."
"Kicked Boots back to Materia because they panicked about her doing too much too quickly and inspiring Epic likewise. Be almost completely useless during standard trajectory wars for multiple centuries. Exhibit excess social conservatism and use that to decide who should be dead. Doom the entire Noldor over a fight for some boats, in standard trajectory." Elspeth comes with magical footnotes.
"No need to move if they don't want to. Shine retains a lot of its Noldo population too - so does Telperion, the Boots incident mostly offended only people particularly close to her. And I've already swung by to explain incarnates to your set, it helps a lot."
"I mean, I am curious what people will assume if we just proffer no explanation whatsoever. ...we could have the Andalites make contact and pretend to be from some-moonless-elsewhere in the same dimension, if we want to drop all the stuff before explaining the multiverse."
"Most of the Andalites are not actually likely to be friendly to this project, we'd bottleneck on the availability of the ones who went and helped out Cube's Earth. Standard-issue Andalites have serious taboos on sharing technology and are currently the victims of Butterfly trolling them by not sharing the teleport."
"Shame. Okay. ...it doesn't actually look like there's anything urgent for us, then, if we want Golden to intend hard enough to look for Eclipse-neighbors and Earth's not in a state that'd justify immediate tech dumping and Arda I assume continues to be entirely fine -"
"So take a vacation from Ardas, if not from doing things. Matirin got himself a lot of Charps with knowledge of the whole tech tree up through the modern Internet and has been hopping around leaving them in little auditoriums to teach endless physics and biology classes to anyone who wants to learn, which natural experiment is of course very interesting but it could stand some followup. Or you could just grab the top priorities off the aforementioned enviable projects list."
"I am!!! I highly recommend it. Findekáno is the one who set up our current way of handling priorities and he's been corralling the musicians - everyone agrees that what we need them to develop is a better healing song, and deaging, and ideally long-distance communication, and instead they keep coming out with cosmetic deaging and street-sweeping and metal-polishing."
"Uh, there's an Arda where the Enemy was sort of subtler and most relevantly this means Rúmil came out extra fucked up, was not in a position to do good supplementary parenting to the Fëanor, this snowballed and all seven of his kids there were badly brought up? ...details unpleasant."
"...something wrong?"
"...we use money here, it's just flat Elves who don't bother - go on, though, it's fine -"
"Flat Elves -"
Handwave. "You're magic and stuff? And have yet to invent currency. Like I said, go on, it's fine -"
"I'll pay you, I just don't know your money or how to acquire it -"
"Yeah, I haven't the faintest idea how everyone else handles their allocation problems - well, Vanda Nossëo has little signs on everything saying what it'll go to if you don't use it, so you can decide if you're a better use of it than that thing, but honestly I think even Elves would feel uncomfortable making allocation decisions that way if they weren't shellshocked by the horrible state of most places in the multiverse. We do money. Most unchipped people get a thing for it in their finger, you can also just tell people to charge it to me."
"Please don't worry about it. Uh - I'm guessing offering a tour would be counterproductive, but care to pick up a guide book? There are a lot of cities like this - though my word isn't good for credit in all of them - and we've got three colony planets."
"Kib concluded that too but he did start out assuming the Enemy could do that. You could pin it on Liz likewise I guess. Or wait out however much dilation you think can go between dreams and wait for me to say she hasn't had time to pick up mindreading? No that won't work psions can do sleeplessness..."
They're doing such good touristing; they are walking through this city and she's checking to see if any blocks or buildings or pedestrians are duplicated.
"...usually it was that I wasn't okay and you got impatient, that occasion there was actually a lot of political intrigue on top of that -"
"Well, partly I'm curious and partly I have this problem where aside from desperately flinging you at a therapist who is known to be able to make progress on cases strikingly similar, I don't know how to - look after you - and I don't know if asking you to tell me constitutes becoming more able to do that, or failing to do it in the course of asking, or both, or what."
"I have the oomph for like, five, today, and then I need my break -"
" - it'd be more suspicious than this, but it'd also mean a closer alignment between 'what I do if this is real' and 'what I do if I'm not sure?' I could just - leave, and go get citizenship somewhere badly managed and make friends and fix things and eventually run for office -"
"Has Cam come by with the computers? Cam will come by with the computers and they have explanations written by alternate universe versions of you which are very likely to be more informative than me because I have only had a day's exposure myself and I spent it being computationally expensive."
"Was, but one of her alts broke it, and also - I get to decide in what order I want to put myself back together, and if I don't think 'whoever I was before all of this' is possible I still have to move forward somehow.
And we were together before any of this, and we were happy."
"Computer!" says Cam, handing one over. "Teach it how you think and enjoy the best user interface in the multiverse, comes preloaded with everything pseudopublic, one of your alts will have to authorize you for anything your template can see that I am not allowed to."
"Hi, Tyelcormo as a girl. Uh, I am in fact competent to give a software engineering lecture but I am kind of booked timewise, I can't help you on the hardware and suspect you should just read the developers' documentation, which your alts have probably conveniently tucked into a folder for you," he tells Curufinwë.
Cam wiggles his fingers. "Chipped and," he hands out computers, "computerized, tutorial should be self-explanatory, yours is already in your alphabet," he tells Tyelcormë, "but our universal translation solution fixes that as an incidental, swing by Vanda Nossëo whenever to get that installed."
"I like being able to do stuff! Sort of no matter what stuff it is! Also I like it when everyone recognizes me as a Fëanor and it sounds like your world is weird about gender? Telperion was too I guess but I don't even live there and Warp's not. I wouldn't have the wings though."
"...I mostly think you're cute because you're short and excitable and look like a child rather than because I was inferring things about how long you've been around, but you should be advised that being very concerned about exactly how old people think you are is also childlike behavior."
The Plane of Chaos has lots of things happen but none of them are predictable from any things that have previously happened and there is no reason to expect that answering the voice in his head would have any effect because nothing has any effect because effect does not exist at all.
Yes, I'm using an artifact to talk to you and I can hand it off to somebody who wouldn't be of use in spell development to keep that up. How do you want to trade off speed at getting out against getting a description of spell development in a science world sooner?
I'll hand off the earwire soon for the time being, anyway, someone else can give you the basic introduction and teach you a language or something. Uh, in addition to being a friend of your family's I also know a lot of alternate universe versions of you and them.
-there's this concept in science worlds called entropy, it's loosely how orderly things are - living beings are ridiculously orderly, a book or a computer chip is ridiculously orderly, one interpretation of 'chaos' would be 'maximum disorder' but that would actually just be kind of boring -
Earth art form, did you never run into any? Theatrical or film productions where the characters start singing without any of them acknowledging that this is not a human-typical activity - it's sort of hard to describe the way in which it's conventional for the songs in musicals to work, we normally pick it up by exposure...