He flinches at the date. "- do explain."

"There are a lot of worlds, our source can't give an exact figure and I stopped asking after 'more than an octillion', and yours has astonishingly, unusually good Valar for worlds with Valar, plus there are more that aren't Ardas at all, and we could really use competent Valar and need someone from your world to open a magic door to it."

"- I do not think I ought to open any doors for you off that much information, but given that it's true, okay, that's more than sufficient reason - how did you fork me if you can't access my world -"

"I can create arbitrary material objects."

"- wow. I don't know if they can lock everyone's heads retroactively - is this a common ability -"

"Yes, there's a few billion of us, but a default limitation of the power is an inability to make minds, and the way I got around that is not common knowledge."

"Okay. And the magic door bit -"

He explains Milliways. "So we think we can access arbitrary chip Ardas - as opposed to soul Ardas, there're Elves a lot like you but they're magic - possibly the same sort of magic thing as the Valar? - but arbitrary Ardas where Elves have chips by forking someone and having them open a door, and this may be worth doing en masse because in most Ardas the Valar parole Melkor and then there's another war -"

He raises an eyebrow. 

"Normally the Valar are - really stupid or a little evil."

"There is a sapient bar downstairs named Bar. She has all the books. Ever anywhere. Read at your leisure, it's possible that your presence here has already stopped time in your world."

"But not in all the other octillion that apparently need competent Vala-ing?"

"No, but our presence is handling our worlds and, like, there's more than an octillion and parts of the interdimensional bar are not synced with each other so some time for you to read up is not unreasonable at all."

"All right. Then I think I'll do that - it's nice to meet you - how many of me are here?"

"Me and two Elves. One is from 1501 in a world much less nice than yours and the other one is four. Well, maybe he's older than that, I'm not clear on Elf aging, he's tiny. There're two of Cam but they don't look anything alike; so far all the mes look pretty much the same, adjusting for Elfness."

"And what happened -" he's looking at Cam -

"...what, to me? Can somebody else maybe tell you that story I hate telling that story."

"I can, later."

"- okay."

"And Timothy and my alt are both from a version of my homeworld nearly four hundred years earlier with a different magic system."

"Do you have a recommended place to start, on the reading -"

He makes some suggestions!

And he accepts those and goes downstairs and inquires after some other things as well from Bar and then settles in to start reading.

Cam loiters and reads too.

And eventually he gets around to requesting Timothy's short summary of who is in the Bar and what is in the works. It's the one that explains Cam's Arda.

He reads it.

He doesn't look up.

He asks Bar for another book about humans.