"This does mean what I think it means, right? Everyone who's ever died will be there?"

"Can we bring people back? Out of that world? Man if we could get Hero back..."

And of course there's one other selfish desire...

Sadde knows that look. "Did your mum die, too?"

"...yeah. Endbringer attack—uh, Endbringers are huge evil monsters that attack periodically. When I was seven."

"Oh my god, you poor baby! ...who raised you?"

"Tobias," he spits.

"Oh my god that's terrible," she says, and—

—is a bit less pale and a bit squishier now, enough to give her other self a hug.

The kobold goes to solicit a hug from her author, emitting some quiet grumpy growls as she does. "Yeah, I know, I'll pull for you to get a shot at him if you're ever in a world where it makes sense," the human reassures.

"Does that mean we can bring people back to our respective worlds, though?" she asks the Keeper, still hugging Glam. "I would very much like to apologise to Mum and he has a host of other problems to deal with."

"I am not currently able to instantiate aware beings in a way that satisfies my standards. Biology is complicated and annoying."

"Oh. Then—no offense, but what's the point, here?"

"She'll figure it out eventually, and then subjectively there's no gap between dying and waking up in the afterlife, and everyone else will be there too - that part might have a gap, but with Lurker on the job I'm sure it'll be minimized, and you'll all be properly immortal once you're there. The immortality is the part she's working on, I think, right now."

"Yes," says the keeper.

"Oh. That's pretty good, actually, yes, I approve. Any idea on the ETA? Especially if we're going to be fighting Scion? I did mean it when I said having Hero back would be wonderful, plus a bunch of other heroes." Boots, too.

"It should not take me more than a few thousand years to finalize the design."

She looks at Adelene: "Can you make time pass in that weird way so that what she really means is a couple of minutes?"

"Not for him, no. Sorry."

"Not for whom?"

"Not for Glam. I don't have any say in that world as far as the plot goes - we can hook it up to the Keeper's afterlife, but only because that doesn't appear to affect anything from the reader's perspective."

"...having our lives dictated by plot is very frustrating. Can we exploit it, somehow?"

"If everyone who's ever died is gonna be brought back eventually, though, I guess it doesn't really matter much if it's now or in thousands of years. As long as the Earth isn't completely obliterated."

"If your entire universe and every other universe in its sheaf were all completely obliterated, I could restore them," the keeper mentions. "Eventually."

"And if it's just putting them back the way they were that can be a much shorter 'eventually' than deciding on new physics."

"Can you restore them without evil world-destroying aliens?"