Tirion. They land. Maitimo sent someone to meet them. "Rúmil! Mirelótë!"

"Hello! How have you been -"

And some small talk later they're at Maitimo's house.

"Hi! Come to see our magic bar? I apologize I couldn't have located it more conveniently."

"I believe we'll manage. How are you, do you want some notes to catch up with -"

"I have been offered lots of notes to catch up with but definitely wouldn't turn down yours. There's a me, he's human, he's seventeen Endorë years old and it's adorable, and there's a magic Elf me who's seven of our years and differently adorable - or are you mostly here for the textbooks, that is also very reasonable -"

She hugs him. "Here to generally investigate the place. Where do I send you notes, do you have your own computer yet?"

"We're going as Ancalimon and Anarórë -" he forwards her his account credentials - "but right now everything's forwarding, seemed - easier to get a handle on - I don't know anyone -"

"We haven't changed that much." He blinks at the bar. It looks - not especially like the most important event in all recorded history. "Valar continued to get better, Mirelótë deserves a great deal of credit for keeping at it before it even became apparent that we'd need them at their best -"

"Of course she does. Cam, Timothy, this is Rúmil and Mirelótë" - how much history did you get, he asks Rúmil and Mirelótë -

"Pleased to meet you - we're family friends, I don't know if you'd have copies, Varda probably would have mentioned but could have neglected to." An overview - is there something we should know -

Cam's the person who destroyed Valinor. And came and found us to get it put back, and did so expecting the Valar to be terrible and possibly just execute him - which is apparently a thing they do, some universes - 

"I don't know either of you but I'm guessing our alt from the other not-flat Arda does, so far everyone here has had an alt there. Sadly he's far away at the moment and we can't have a door both there and to your world - the Valar were trying to see if they could give the bar two doors but I think the answer was 'not straightforwardly and not without possibly annoying the landlords -'"

Oh. They'd - contextualized the destruction of the Valinor but didn't say the person would just be around. The other sets of Valar sound frankly terrifying, was he terrified - "The landlords?"

"The cosmic forces that open the door on random worlds."

Yes but also disturbingly resigned to it - made a point of clarifying that it wouldn't be a reason not to ask them for help - I think I very much disapprove of literally the entire rest of the multiverse -

It seems disapproval-worthy. That was very brave but I have no idea if he'd like to hear that from a stranger. "Do they have known motives of any kind, does one write them notes and leave them in a suggestion box -?"

"They have not yet interfered with our gross exploitation of their bar arrangement to attempt to fix literally everything. I don't know more than that - you can ask Bar -"

"...Hello, Bar."

And she is offered a drink and accepts. "- ooh, yum."

He will also have a drink!

It's delicious!

Mirelótë starts trying to establish the order of magnitude of worlds, gives up when it is established that there's more than twelve to the forty-eighth power, asks for a figure on Ardas and gets an exact number -

"So Ardas are a natural category?"

More or less. If you'd like to be more exact about what you have in mind I can re-sort a handful of edge cases.

"That is a lot of Ardas for ours to be the only one with an Oath Reform Act."

"Are there any that are just alike, up to whenever the earlier is -"

Yes, there's a handful of common variants with millions of identical-except-for-time instances to the limits of my powers of discrimination, though those powers are imperfect.

"What're the handful of common variants -"

I wouldn't know what to call them.

"Are any represented here?"

In the sense that Milliways derails them, no. In the sense that some current patrons lived in typical-variant Ardas until an identifiable divergence point, yes.

"Who lived in a typical-variant Arda until an identifiable divergence point -"