"Loki's even slower than that!"

"How old is she?"

"Twelve hundred of your years, give or take. She's the oldest Bell. The oldest person actively involved in the running of the multiverse is the Millennia - " this world! - "version of my father, he's fourteen thousand your-years though he was dead for more than half of them. - he never actually grows up, it's a little frustrating."

"That is ridiculous, no wonder you were so slow about getting all the worlds you found enough of those necklaces..."

"Immortality necklaces take about 1400 person-hours each to write. We have people wish for the ability to do it faster but even with that it's about an hour and it doesn't go unless you happen to feel really strongly about being able to spend all your time as a magic stamp. About five thousand people have that wished on, about a thousand do immortality in particular, they average thirteen a day. Elves're slow but we're not slacking."

"Why does it take that long to make them? Why can't you do more at once?"

"Arda magic works by using our telepathy to encode really long detailed instructions in metal. You have to do it one - thought that creates the proper echo - at a time. The set of instructions that makes someone immortal is really long - we've got engineers who work on trimming it down, it's about half what it was when the Shine Fëanor first invented it - and wishes vary a little bit but a thousandfold speedup is about as good as you're going to get. There're people trying to invent a way to automate it, I know Kib spent a while trying to figure out if there was any way to Charp it or wish it onto a Charp, but nothing's panned out so far."

"And you don't have another way to do the same thing?"

"Dwarves don't have osanwë but their method's even slower and just as resistant to automation so far, though if we ever do figure it out they'll be how."

"You can turn into a bird but not just plain make people immortal."

"In Cube and Wish's neighborhoods we can and Matirin's gone and dropped Charpitoriums with morph cubes on every single one of his neighbors. But everywhere else, yeah."

Sigh.

"I'm sorry. You are welcome to look at what we've got and figure out a way to do it."

"I will."

"You can do a lot with wizardry but nothing for aging in particular and you need a Maia if you're not adjacent - they're in the middle of figuring out how to give that out at scale - we debated teleporting worlds over to Revelation so at least anyone born in there from then forward would have Limbo to catch them, but daeva information security and also we don't actually know if teleporting worlds is safe - though now we've got Sibyl, could check -"

"What's Sibyl's deal?"

"This neighborhood's called Eclipse, it's an astronomical phenomenon in some places with moons, and it gives one person in a thousand magic powers. Your alt got them. There're mages and psions - stuff that affects the world and stuff that affects minds or information or senses, very roughly - and she's a psion with - as much time as we've been talking - of precognition, she can see what will happen. Only works locally but it works on hearing about things from farther off. So we ask her "if we teleport this planet to Revelation does everything go smoothly" and she says "in half an hour you report to me that it went fine". Or that it didn't. Everyone's supposed to give Sibyl as much work as they can, it helps with her relationship problems."

"...her relationship problems."

"All in the files. Anyway, we haven't started stealing planets yet but if you think we should be doing it we could."

"I mean, is there any compelling reason not to?"

"Might break local magic systems - not even necessarily in a way Sibyl'd see, lots of them run on where you were born or conceived."

"Does mine?"

"Matirin couldn't get it to work, so probably."

"Need to know more about Limbo before calling the tradeoff, I guess. But that's for places with magic, are you not even stealing places that don't have it? Some of them don't, right?"

"Until three months - um, eighty of your days - ago we didn't have Sibyl. Limbo by default kind of sucks - you are indestructible and get one thing, supposedly the thing your afterlife would be most incomplete without, and land near people but not necessarily anyone you knew when you were alive. But we can improve on it a lot - we haven't found a way for people to stop existing if they want to but Elspeth's got something close enough, and we put down infrastructure and plants and things."