"I'm still not sure exactly how much you've picked up from your neighbors already!"

"Well, how could you be, I've gone out of my way to be cagey. So, let me list a subset of things we're open about. We're familiar with the idea of germs, which we're explaining to anyone who asks. We have magic, including interworld transit, glowing prosthetics that move and feel, electricity, and an unspecified set of offensively useful capabilities which may or may not be limited to teleportation. Our materials science has exited the bronze age and I will not be clarifying how many centuries we've jumped ahead." Apparently the recent advances are better measured in millennia. "A subset of our current projects that we aren't hiding includes reducing the fraction of infants who die before they learn to speak, expanding telecommunications infrastructure across the region, expanding the use of labor-saving artifice, and increasing rural literacy."

"Those are all good projects! We'll probably be reaching out to your neighbors directly soon, do you have diplomatic or just informal interpersonal relationships with them?"

"Let me just clarify something about Emika. The way they treat orphans, and the way they treat the blind and the lame and anyone with any kind of obvious flaw, is so stunningly bad that we’ve been discussing how to work around the population and size disparities in providing a place for refugees to flee to. There are people, maybe as many as half the population but I don’t know for sure because they also have a tendency to murder them, who would be prevented from leaving by the licit use of force. Azan doesn’t talk to them. Azan raids them. If you tell them how to find us and try to recover their people, we will be very annoyed. We would win the fight, of course, but let’s just avoid it instead."

Put like that maybe they haven’t really learned their lesson about overextending themselves taking in refugees after all. But these are magic refugees who taught them to make steel.

"It's a single polity on their planet or nonplanet-habitation?"

"Yeah. - We didn’t check this in a way resistant to someone trying ten thousand ways to convince us, though."

"...would you feel more comfortable if we went on a tangent about how the precognition we have available works?"

"Well, maybe, unless it’s worse than I imagine, in which case no."

Melda snorts, but in a delicate Elf way. She finds a café with outdoor seating and gestures him into a chair opposite her and plops down, pokes a button on the table's device to order a chaat sampler. "In the Eclipse world-neighborhood - worlds can be next to each other or not, so in Eclipse itself, and worlds that are next to it - then everybody on a planet with total lunar eclipses, itself astronomically rare but standard on Earths, gets a one in a thousand lifetime chance of becoming an 'eclipsed'. Half are psions and half are mages. Brand new ones are catastrophically dangerous; the process of learning to control their powers involves a couple of years of - improving but intrinsically unappealing conditions. The magic runs on calories. Without additional supportive magic that limits how much they can do in a day to how much they can physically digest. They only work in their neighborhood; if one comes here on vacation their powers just won't function at all. Most psions don't learn precognition. There are a lot of valuable psion skills and that one doesn't even pay the best of them all, though I believe it takes second place. It takes a few years for them to get a handle on a new skill, and precognitive range, which starts at a few seconds, expands only gradually from there. There are a single digit number of psions in existence with ranges of greater than two months. For historical reasons most of those are first and foremost committed to religious organizations that are not deeply integrated with Vanda Nossëo. Using precognition itself takes time, and it doesn't work on any situation that has interacted with another precognition."

Their chaat arrives. She bites into a samosa. "Because it doesn't work remotely, a precog working for Vanda Nossëo is receiving secondhand reports about anything outside the Eclipse neighborhood. Because using precognition takes time - and more time the more decisions the vision conditions on - a precog with a midrange time window cannot path through ten thousand versions of a conversation that is taking place between other people in an out-of-neighborhood world. In practice, we want to use precogs as safety nets for so many operations that most of them are receiving heavily compressed encoded messages alerting them to vehicular accidents, industrial disasters, magical catastrophes, crime sprees, and the like in such dense specialized notation that they don't even know what they are foreseeing. They just see a bunch of letters and numbers and send them on to be decoded and the problems averted. Following so far?"

Huh, some of these spices aren't familiar at all. Not that that should be surprising.

"Yeah, I think so. Though I don't know if I should expect it to work the same way if they have it anywhere else."

"They have it one other place. Exactly one person in Aurum has it under a different magic system, one that does personality-correlated idiosyncratic powers sometimes. Hers doesn't work with information from outside the neighborhood at all, it gives her headaches to use too much, and some species native to the world can block her vision. There might be more precognition somewhere else, some other world, but you've seemed concerned that we might be dictionary attacking you.

"Now, we do have the option to get precogs to do more intensive modeling than we do for standard safety net purposes, but we need - stakes, to do that. If you're about to reveal to me that you have a doomsday weapon, yeah, then this might turn out to be a precognition that someone goes and averts so we can start over with more focus on that. If you're about to tell me that you recently genocided an oppressed native species with souls that we can't resurrect, that might do it too. If you're going to have awkward conversations with me or be cagey about what technology you've invented or give us helpful warnings about Emika, though, that doesn't rate any exceptional outlay of resources even if you ask for it, let alone if you don't, and getting a precog to work on this full-time for many iterations working out the best way to squeeze you for information is an exceptional outlay of resources."

"My most recent comments about that have been caveats about whether I could be wrong about Emika if they have precognition, which is possible since it apparently exists."

"Gotcha. I can send up a suggestion that we check on that."

"Thanks. Anyway, can we get back to - your worlds are lovely and I’m glad to see them, but I get the impression you want something here besides trade or alliance, and you tell me it’s not round five hundred of - a 'dictionary attack'? - and I believe you but I can’t quite figure out what you’re hoping to report happened in this conversation."

"So -

"Alts aren't the end-all and be-all of multiversal operations, obviously. But there's a lot we don't understand about the phenomenon yet, and a situation where we've met one of you, you've met another of you, we happen to be directed to you promptly after landing... I'm, let's say superstitious, about that. I want to get off on the right foot, with you specifically for superstitious reasons and through you your people because that's my job. I'm hoping I tell them something like, 'made friends with the local Valan, took him on a tour, got some useful tips about Azan and also Emika', for today, but I'm also hoping that if something wacky comes up in six months and you are somehow key to the whole thing we've established a good working relationship."

" - Yeah. I figured it was coincidence, why would I know about unimportant people with alts, and if you have an entire Sesat it’d be weird if there weren’t a lot of the same random serfs, but - Val could’ve ended up in Neza or Iral or Lia, are there three more of us there? Or did he happen to land in the only country on our planet with one of his alts?"

There’s something more that Valan isn’t volunteering yet that isn't an explanation but feels like a clue. Val and Mica and Jamie have interesting alts that they've met, sure. But they were just along for the ride. It was Adrian who teleported them to Azan, Adrian who was looking for somewhere safe for himself. And Adrian's alt was Azan he.

Though it's still weird that Val and Mica and Jamie match anyone. It feels like coincidence that Valan knows any of the rest of the Azani set, and Dama doesn't seem like someone who'd have gotten involved in government affairs if she hadn't been born to it and apparently she could have just not been.

"Haven't ever found more than one of a template in a world unless they, say, deliberately forked themselves. So probably there aren't more of you in more countries on your planet. It looks to all accounts exactly like a coincidence, just like it always looks like a coincidence that Bells who appear on Ardas are in a position to meet the Noldor, looks like a coincidence that out of the millions of inhabited planets in Warp the one Bell landed near enough the other to recognize the facial similarity... but it's the kind of coincidence around which important things happen."

"That sounds like gods but so did solar eclipses and now they don’t."

"I do expect we'll figure it out one day, but... for now it's just a big 'look over here' sign." Shrug.

"Well, we’re looking. - Were you chosen for being likely to get along with me specifically or what?"

"No, we didn't have that much data on who'd be likely to get along with you specifically. I think the Elf on Nelen Utopia's team ultimately came off better than most of his colleagues and they picked an Elf-led team in case that would help but nothing finer granularity than that."

"Hm. That’s surprising, I wouldn’t have guessed you’d get along with Sesatis."

"It could have been random noise, but it's what we had to go on."

"...I suppose. But the way you are is... extremely important, to the point where I’d expect it to overwhelm anything to do with your personality. Maybe not necessarily in a negative way compared to humans who would work for you."

"Can you elaborate on that at all?"