"I'm alive? I mean--one of me is--you're saying my plans have not all been ruined, I'm just not personally in this experiential thread going to be the one to carry them out?"

"That's what it seems like to me!" 

Tension he didn't actively realize he was carrying drains out of him. He all but collapses to the ground, taking some time to just be without worrying about the next step in an ambiguously long game of high-stakes Xanatos Speed Chess in...longer than he would like to think about. Since the first murder, to be sure. He would be worrying about the long-term effects of stress on his body if he couldn't just fix them with magic and if he hadn't just been emphatically murdered by a rogue universe. The psychological effects are less irrelevant but there's not a lot he can do about them just now, aside from exactly what he is doing. 

The angel was created to be literally superhumanly patient. She waits while he decompresses. 

It's a good thing that the angel is literally superhumanly patient because he is just going to fail to function for a while. He has no real basis for a solid idea of how long it's been, when he finally shoves himself up into a sitting position, since there's no timepiece and he doesn't have any bodily needs to attend to, but he wouldn't be surprised to learn it had been multiple hours. 

"Alright. That changes the calculus significantly. This isn't a setback, it's an opportunity. And I suppose I have less reason to be annoyed about the gender change, since there's already a me going around being the me that I already am. Change isn't such a bad thing, as long as it's not along axes that will just go on forever." Pause. "As long as the gender change is comprehensive, and I'm not just going to be stuck in a woman's body acting out a woman's role for however long with my own male gender identity intact."

"That's the idea. Some people have very stubborn gender identities, so it doesn't always work out in practice."

"I have a gender identity, but I don't think I would characterize it as particularly stubborn," he says. "Alright, what were you going to say about magic level?"

"There are three magic levels--well, technically four. Low, Medium, and High. And None. You get an extra perk if you pick None, and I suppose it would be less of a bad idea for you since you could do your current kind of magic anyway, but in general it's just a really bad idea. You can get new magic if you pick literally any other magic level!"

"Do people do that a lot? Choose None?"

"Not a lot, but a surprisingly large number of people think that the options have to be balanced in some way such that None is just as good actually. Those people are wrong."

"Are there other options where one is just actually worse?"

"Actually Archaic in the tech level is. Aside from that--there are options that are taken less often than others, and for what I would consider good reason, but I would consider those niche rather than bad. I suppose Blonde in the hair color options could be considered worse than the other options, but even then I've seen people pick it for reasons I could respect."

"Which are?"

"All the other hair color options had effects they couldn't put up with." 

"Alright." He thinks for a moment. "Obviously my world had a tech level of Contemporary, but what would you say its magic level was?"

"Medium. I would say high-medium now and low-medium in the not-too-distant future if the usurpers have their way." 

He makes an annoyed face. "I can only hope that my living fork manages to throw a wrench in their plans...but I'm not optimistic. I'll be satisfied if he survives to deal with them another day. Alright. Does a higher tech level necessarily result in higher quality of life?"

"Not necessarily, you can get some nasty dystopias at high tech levels for example, and of course happiness set points are psychologically complicated, but in general higher tech levels are better for people."

"Alright. Space Opera and High Magic then...I must confess, I don't have any idea how to model what a tech level that high would look like..."

"Don't worry too much about it, I can get this shunted off to a cooperative subcommittee of the worldbuilding team with a note that we want a maximally ethical setup, it won't be perfect but don't beat yourself up about it. There are constraints set up by my ASSHOLE BOSSES," she yells out into the void, "that mean perfect isn't remotely allowed even if it were a coherent thing in the first place. So don't beat yourself up about not knowing how to micromanage things a little bit closer."

He startles when she yells, then laughs softly. "Alright. I'll do my best." 

"Good! Self-recriminations never got anyone anywhere."

"No, I suppose they wouldn't, at that. ...Can you get me examples of relevant works of literature, that my own universe doesn't have?" 

"Oh, sure! --None of them will be written for your particular cultural background and set of starting assumptions, though. I can get you more books to help fill in the gaps but historically the results of attempting to do that have...varied." 

"Varied by...?"