"You were born on Earth," he says, "I can trace backwards or forwards from there if you want."

"Let's wait till Miles has gotten Mama. I wanna know more about worlds and mes."

"Okay! So in the order of how they met up - there's an Earth called Revelation. It has a you called Cam. Around the year 2000 he discovered that it was possible to summon daeva to his world. There're three kinds of daeva - angels, fairies, and demons. Angels change stuff, fairies move stuff, demons make stuff. I'm a demon." Wing-fluff. "He decided that this should be publicly known because there were people dying of hunger and lack of medicine and stuff, so he arranged for it to leak. Someone was mad at him and figured out he'd done it and shot him."

"...I guess I should have guessed there were boy mes because you weren't sure if it was me or Miles. Did somebody bring him back to life, can you do that -"

"Yeah we can but I can't do it on my own. Anyway in Revelation when people die if they've never summoned anyone they go to Limbo and if they have summoned anyone they become a daeva and Cam became a demon."

"Oh, cool."

"Yeah. So he's a demon for a hundred fifty years, sometimes he gets summons but they don't let him talk because of a rumor demons'll talk you out of your souls, and then he accidentally gets summoned by a kid who doesn't even realize they were drawing a summoning circle, and who isn't from Revelation."

"...so you don't have to be from Revelation to summon things? Can we summon things here?"

"It turns out that you can summon things from a world that is adjacent to the world you're summoning from. Except the only worlds adjacent to the daeva realms, as far as we know, are Revelation and Space, and Space had gods who had powerful magic that as a side effect mostly prevented summoning. We aren't sure why Cam went through but probably it was a fluke.

Anyway, Cam lands on a moon where some people are assembling to go off to war, and they're so excited to have a demon because he can make them more lightleapers."

"Are those the same thing as jump ships or different?"

"Take exactly five days to get anywhere in the universe, work by pinching space..."

"...jumpships do wormholes. Anywhere in five days, can you make those?"

"Yeah."

"Cool."

"Being a demon's really cool. Anyway, we call that world Space and it's my alternate universe version in that world who invented it, it took him like four hundred years to figure out."

"...Space is a weird name for a world."

"It's because it's an Arda - there are Earths in a lot of places, there are also Ardas in a lot of places - but usually Ardas are single-planet and low-tech and magic, and Space is spread across a couple star systems and high-tech and no magic except the Valar themselves - the gods I mentioned."

"Huh. Whole worlds with only one planet in them?"

"...Ardas are kind of unusual that way, their gods personally design them and they don't really get the concept of planets so they just kind of hack one together with magic and put illusion stars in the sky."

"...that's weird and dumb."

"Yeah, when your alts from sufficiently advanced societies find Ardas they are not impressed. Anyway, Cam lands on them and they want lightleapers to go fight a war and he isn't sure about helping with the war but he offers to administer a refugee planet? And he goes and makes one really hard to find and takes some people there and then has read enough to decide to help a little with the war so he makes them ships and they go to Endorë, which is where the war is happening."

"Okay."

"And the war is really horrible. Some of the people in Space have chips in their brains, so they can be resurrected if they die, and the Enemy is killing them and uploading them off their chips to torture forever."

"Um why."

"Because he's evil."