"I wonder if there's more of us!"

"I hope so! An octillion worlds sounds like a bit much for just the one of you - we could fork, if there are dimensions without much contact with this one that'd require a lot of direct attention - one of the things we'll have to ask the Valar is how straightforwardly these places can be reached, but if they're thinking about immigration maybe it wouldn't be too difficult after all -"

"Forking still doesn't appeal much but this just might call for it, depending..."

"Depending on a dozen things that should really be included in explanatory emails, yes." Oh look it's Taniquetil.

"I was rather expecting you," Varda says cheerfully.

"I'm predictable like that. Good afternoon. The message was very exciting but a little spare..."

"Some of the information given was given confidentially, sorry about that. The entrance to Milliways is in Tirion, at the moment, we are seeing if anything can be done about that. The entrance can only open on one world at a time, and any world with residents in Milliways is frozen in time until the door opens on it again - so there are pending projects in a few different worlds, but they will have to proceed a bit at a time. What did you want to know?"

"How much do the worlds vary, why is the number we have 'more than an octillion' - is that the correct order of magnitude or just a lower bound - are there more of people other than Melkor -"

"Not the correct order of magnitude just the point at which the petitioner we met stopped asking. Worlds vary - a lot. In a majority of the ones we've been apprised of so far all the sapients are a species that ages and permanently dies within ten Years. Ardas seem to mostly all have the same people - or, to be more specific, they all have us and they all have the house of Finwë, and there are a few other Elves known to have alternate versions - you should probably just ask Nelyafinwë, honestly, I bet he's checked more closely than that - there are also alternate universe versions of people who are different species, there's a house of Finwë in one of the aging-sapients worlds, they're involved in all this -"

"Ten Years? That's - my word. Can you fix that?"

She nods tightly. "On an individual basis yes, haven't figured out how to stop it yet but we can slow it ten thousandfold. There's also one world with a magic system wherein you become a magical being if you summon such a being and subsequently die - it does not appear to count Elves or Maiar or Valar, perhaps because we do not relevantly die, but we're teaching all the Dwarves and if there's an accident we'll know if it applies to them - and it appears to work everywhere it has been tested so far, so we are looking into means of teaching it everywhere, complicated by the fact that summoning magical beings is very very dangerous not just to you but potentially to the planet you are summoning on."

"Is that what happened to the other Valinor -"

"Yes. There're three kinds of magical being - angels, who can change things into other things, fairies, which can move things, and demons, which can make arbitrary material objects, a category that includes black holes and also forks prior to 1370, that being how our world was contacted."

"- so not a consensual fork per se, the message didn't specify if it was someone who'd issued some broad permission..."

"The fork was of Nelyafinwë, an alternate universe version gave permission."

" - but he has -"

"Not in any of the other timelines, apparently, and they did not think to check. The alternate universe version was a different species, didn't know -"

"I see."

"Oh no - oh, the poor fork, we'll have to check up on him -" She makes a note. "For the announcement I think a lot of it depends on what you're hoping to get - buy-in on immigration, compliance with safety warnings, general informedness, all of the above -?"

"All of the above, really - and people throwing their creativity at ways to help, we are going to be spread pretty thin if it turns out that the alternate universe versions of us - we were selected for unusual competence - can't be brought up to speed. Safety warnings - we were debating whether 'there is a Valinor in a black hole' was necessary to get everyone to take summoning seriously, or whether it would simply panic them - or whether to not introduce it at all until we can protect very thoroughly against that outcome -"

"Creativity might come from crowdsourcing but as long as there's substantial tradeoffs involved in announcing everything to everyone it does not have to do so immediately; shortlists of people on specific projects can make initial progress... Aren't there any serious but less dramatic stories of summonings gone wrong?"

"Probably, let me look that up for you." Pause - "ah, yes, sometimes the magical being will put the summoner in a coma - summoners can otherwise send their summonees back to their native dimension - and on one occasion an angel did that and then went around turning people into living furniture until they attempted to - uh, overheat a nuclear power plant into exploding? something like that - to get rid of her, which did not work, magical beings are indestructible - no, that's not really less dramatic, is it -"

"Well, it's scaled down a little..."

"Okay... Curufinwë Atarinkë has an alt who was - thirteen - and was murdered by a fairy he summoned, that's scaled down even further, better?"

"Might not get taken seriously by people who can do fork resurrection if it seems like that's the principal risk. Coma followed by a summoned person running around auditioning for Eru's new favorite play is the right sort of thing."