"How many of them have already been landed on?"

"Not very many! I expect we'd raise our standards for external interference if most Ardas were getting derailed instead of getting to play out nicely."

"...then why are most of the ones in this region of the multiverse derailed?"

"This region of the multiverse has a lot of interdimensional travel going on! And a lot of Bells. There are not four hundred million Bells."

"Is the density around here of Bells and interdimensional travel a coincidence?"

"The two are related! Bells tend to come in worlds with interesting magic and lots of interesting magic can do interdimensional travel. And the Bells are near each other so they can find each other because it's cute when they do. I didn't arrange that personally but I can see what caused it and that's what caused it, sort of."

"Sort of?"

"'caused' is complicated."

"Complicated how?"

"It is not caused in the sense you understand causing to work!"

"So what is it instead?"

"I picked the word because it was the closest approximation, despite not being particularly close."

"...and you can't explain it?"

"I could explain it but you will get impatient before you understand it."

"Ah.

Do you know how many Bells there are?"

"It changes! And I'm not the one changing it. There are some Bells you won't find because the place where they are isn't reachable from here, too."

"In principle at all -?"

"Yep!"

"So how do you know about them?"

" - omnipotence?"

"But if it's impossible in principle that sounds like you couldn't get there either or then theoretically we could talk one of you into helping."

"- if I tried going there it might work but it would work differently than you want. And I don't want to, because it wouldn't be a good story."

"Differently than we want how?"

"...I would make a copy of those Bells that was close enough to be accessible. The original ones would still be inaccessibly where they started."

"Ah."