He is reading a summoning textbook - it's not as interesting as the electrical engineering textbook but it's just as important and he wants to pester some daeva about the languages spoken in Heaven, Hell, and Fairyland. It has a background chapter on Revelation.
He asks Bar for Cam's obituary.
Cam died at age 22 and was survived by his parents and will be mourned by his colleagues, classmates, and students at the university where he taught summoning. His killer was apprehended without further incident and no longer remains at large and his name has been leaked to the newspaper by a university source.
Yeah.
He goes up to his room and draws a circle. Fairy first, most people are apparently fairies -
This person is a fairy. Here he is, with yellow butterfly wings.
"Hi. I was wondering why you murdered Cam."
The fairy blinks.
"That was a long time ago."
"Yeah. I only just met him and heard the story, and also I'm thirteen, so I couldn't ask you back when it actually happened."
"This is seriously why you summoned me?"
"Yup."
"Look, I have a regular gig, I need to be available when they summon me. Send me back."
"How long were you expecting this summons to take, because most things I could plausibly have wanted would have taken longer than answering a question. In fact, complaining about being summoned to answer the question has already taken you longer than it would have taken to answer the question."
"I was expecting this to be my usual summons, and they'll try to get ahold of me any minute."
"There's a time dilation thingy. Why'd you murder Cam?"
"He pissed me off." The fairy starts reading the binding on his circle.
He's pretty sure he did it right. "So you murdered him? Do you usually try to kill people because they 'pissed you off'?"
"Usually people don't piss me off." Read read.
It's copied exactly from the textbook. "Wow, you're a horrible person. I'm kind of disappointed. I was hoping you had - a reason, or something."
The fairy lingers over a bit of wording. "Last chance, kid."
"There's a time dilation thing, you're not missing your usual summons, and does your usual summoner know that you murder people whenever they annoy you, because it seems like they might want a fairy who doesn't do that. Most people aren't that horrible even in my world."
The fairy gathers all the air in his circle together, leaving a fair amount of vacuum around him. It pulls Minor in.
- that's not fair he didn't miscopy it -
The fairy doesn't care if it's fair.
Snap.
He goes home.
"We should probably have someone in the main bar all the time, lest people walk in and get missed," he says idly to Cam.
"Yeah, that's a good idea. And maybe some kind of shift arrangement on door duty for worlds where we're trying to pass time."
"Yeah. It'll have to be you whenever it's Hell, though, I don't totally trust Amriac not to mention it incautiously -"
"And who knows where her door would turn out to be."
"Also Michael would totally be persuadable to go to Hell with her because hey, adventure. So - yeah, let's not."
Nod. "So me for Hell, you and your folks and Miranda for your world."
"Yeah. And maybe keep it closed occasionally so people can come in, we don't want to miss out on better opportunities than more Valar -"
"And anybody can do that part."
"I will ask the Elves who are disconcertingly willing to do things for me. Though maybe not anymore."
"If that doesn't do it and you're still disconcerted you could try giving 'em that book, but apparently that didn't do it in the actual case... ...Sorry."
"Yeah. It's probably unwise but I'm tempted to find a list of people who died for the me in that war and who the Mandos isn't going to resurrect, grab them here, ask them - "
"That doesn't seem obviously unwise."
"I don't necessarily expect it to be constructive I just want to know. I don't know how they'd get on with all the other residents, though, either -"
"Yeah, wait till we have somewhere to put them."
"And can consult Maitimo on who, if he recognizes the names - don't know if there are any left of the people he started the war with -"
Nod.
Miranda comes down the stairs. "Have you seen Minor? He's not answering his door and I wanted to show him something."
"Got something from Bar like two hours-for-us ago but who knows. I think he was working his way through the summoning textbook, having finished the physics ones?"
"...and he didn't go outside or anything?"
"Nah, think he went back upstairs. If he's trying summoning he might've ignored you because he was talking with someone?"
"I said 'Minor are you in there I found a translation spell'."
"- wow, okay, yeah, it is safe to assume he is not in his room."
"So where is he."
He makes a paper airplane.
It circles.
" - huh -"
"...Milliways is weird."
"- I guess - how loud did you yell, could he have been asleep or had a privacy spell up or, I don't know, be time-dilated with respect to you so the words didn't come out as sounds - does that happen -"
"Not as far as I've noticed, I think you sync if you interact, could just be asleep though."
"Want to go check on him -"
"Yeah, I'll try yelling louder."
She goes up.
Yelling louder fails to get a response.
Comes back down. "How much do you think it would bother him if Cam gave me a key and I just...?"
He's been looking for him outside. "Won't bother him."
Miranda accepts a key and goes up again and
when she returns she is clinging to the banister, shaking.
" - what -"
"He's, he, there was a summoning circle -"
- Cam is now holding a piece of paper with a summoning circle on it and reading the binding. "- fuck -"
" - check if he's - he might be fine check if we can -"
Cam lays out a circle on the floor and hands Timothy a pen.
He completes it -
" - hi, that took you a while - I wrote you -"
"WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING HOW COULD YOU -" Hug -
" - did the Killing Curse work on daeva did you ever check -"
Hug, sob - "checked and no, why -"
"Because you should grab him back he's a terrible person but you should not grab him back if you had the means to murder him on the spot you're really scaring me Timothy -"
"I regrettably do not have the means to murder him on the spot what the fuck did you do Minor Minor how - why - Minor - oh my god -"
"Not regrettably," he says patiently, "Cam and Miranda'd be really mad at you."
"I found," says Miranda, coldly, "your corpse. What were you thinking."
"That by 2100 summoning textbooks covered how to not get murdered. I copied it right, I triple-checked before and again in Hell -"
"Minor, circles intended for specific daeva in textbooks I didn't personally edit assume you're summoning people you know and you want to let them have a little more comfortable wiggle room in exchange for it being maybe possible for them to kill you on the assumption that you wouldn't summon. A. Known. Murderer."
"When we talked about the fact he was still loose doing whatever the fuck he wanted you were the one who was like 'well, it was a long time ago and he hasn't done anything since!'"
"Yes, that's true. Perhaps I was wrong, perhaps you offered him a tray of cupcakes in exchange for rearranging your furniture and he responded with lethal violence, is that what happened."
"No, I asked him why he'd killed you and he said because you 'pissed him off' you should really grab him he's a terrible person."
Cam lets the door close. "Would I be right in guessing that you then proceeded to piss him off."
"I asked him if he murdered everyone who pissed him off and if he really thought that was an okay thing to be going around doing."
"And I can tell from how many questions you had time to ask him that you could have dismissed him and for some reason didn't do that. Which would be one thing in a safe fucking circle, Minor - you didn't even have me check -"
"Yes, I noticed."
Miranda's still shaking. She sits on the floor so this won't cause her to tip over.
He is also kind of shaking, not that Timothy is going to notice because Timothy kind of doesn't look so great himself.
Yeah he's going to hug Minor and cry.
Sniff.
Cling. "I'm sorry."
"I know. I - yeah."
Cam goes and hugs Miranda.
"Anyway we have an answer on whether people from our world -"
Squeeze. "Yeah. It's a good thing we don't have to let more people die in our world while we waited on that information but dear fucking lord Minor -"
"Can you still do magic."
"Well, not without my wand, and I couldn't make one -"
"Well, it's by your corpse."
He looks at the circle, steps out of it, goes upstairs -
"I would've made an unbound circle but it's entirely possible to accidentally make things that are radioactive or explosive if you don't know what you're doing and he's not learning the ropes surrounded exclusively by other daeva, so."
"I can snap it once he knows what he's doing, I don't think he'll mind at all.
I could in fact totally cast the Killing Curse it probably is good it doesn't work."
Cam lets Miranda go and goes and hugs Timothy.
Shiver.
"He's okay." Squeeze.
"No he's not. But he's alive."
Nod.
Sigh. "Are we going to do anything about -"
"He really hasn't caused any trouble before now. But if we get an Elf to summon him we can avoid the usual problem with prison summonses."
"You took summons all the time, how many opportunities would you have had to murder people if you wanted to -"
"I lost count, and people aren't as careful with fairies, I don't think he just likes murdering."
"Elves seem not very inclined to cooperate with prison summonses."
"He doesn't strictly have to be confined to a circle, just bound so he can't reoffend. He can have plenty of freedom of movement without being able to kill people."
"Then we should probably do that."
"In what world?"
"Maybe he can go hang out in shiny tree Arda, I have a feeling he will find Elves deeply annoying and this satisfies me."
"So you want to put it off until we have a plan for interfacing with shiny tree Arda?"
"Or grab him and then immediately close the door again, yeah."
"Since the wisdom of this plan could depend on what we figure out I'd rather do that first."
"Not a huge fan of letting more time pass in Fairyland until we have it sorted but I guess there's no reason it'd need to."
Nod.
" - and Minor has not come happily racing down the stairs which could mean no time has passed for him or it means he's a Muggle now and having a crisis about that."
"Would he want to have his crisis by himself?"
"- yeah probably. At some point it'd be good to go drag him out of it but we won't know how long it's been -"
Nod.
"You okay?"
"I found his corpse. I will be okay soonish."
Nod.
She goes up to her room.
He does not come down.
"I should tell people."
"Do you want me along?"
"...I'd appreciate it, honestly."
"Okay." Handsqueeze.
And he goes and tells people.
The Elves are kind of confused but agree that it is fair enough to keep serial murderers and murderers of children under bindings that do not let them do that.
"Jesus fuck. Okay. Well, yay afterlife?"
Amriac is having a coughing fit and shooting Cam meaningful looks. Cam sighs.
"If any children ask Cam why he did it and he murders them then we will also want to consider a binding for him, yes."
"...that really doesn't make sense, it's not like there wouldn't've been children on Valinor," says Amriac.
"The point is to do something about people who are ongoingly likely to murder people instead of just avenging things, which I will admit is dearly tempting at the moment but is silly."
Amriac shrugs.
"If you could, though-"
"I can't. - also apparently there's an alternate universe where we kill like a million people and then ourselves. So you know."
"..."
"There's a very passionately detailed book about it. It is called 'the Kinslayers', it is very dramatic and has fake blood on the cover."
"Wow. Uh. Ireland was lovely."
"Dragons are cool," says Amriac softly.
He squeezes her. "Especially when you don't have to be afraid of them. Does Minor want to talk to anyone or -"
"I don't think so."
"Okay. Well. Fantastic. Lemme know if he does."
"Will do."
They leave.
He leans on Amriac and shivers.
She cuddles him.
"Thank you for not being terrible."
"You're welcome." Pet pet.
"I don't really know if I want to read the book about the alternate universe version of me who kills a ton of people."
"I definitely don't, morbid..."
"Bit worried about Timothy but I have no idea what to do about that."
"Because he read the morbid book or because he's freaking out about your little brother?"
"Because he's - in over his head, generally?"
Nod.
"But usually if I were worried about something like that I'd go to Timothy, I don't really know what else to do.
If it doesn't make us into Muggles we should probably all daevafy."
"It is pretty nice. I wonder what you'd be."
"Dunno. Demons're clearly the best."
"I know, right?" she grins.
"Most useful and convenient powers ever. And I could pick up sphereflute."
"A fairy might be able to play sphereflute," allows Amriac, "I'm not sure any have tried."
"Well, but that's telling all by itself, I don't want to be a kind of daeva that could pick up sphereflute and doesn't."
She laughs. "There might not be any sphereflutes in Fairyland! They can do some nifty manufacturing with their magic to make up for not being able to make things directly but it'd still be a chore to assemble one."
"Okay, that's not a terrible reason."
"But they could've imported a couple."
"Yeah, seriously."
"And I'm pretty sure an angel couldn't do it at all so try not to be an angel."
"I would delightedly try not to be an angel if it were clear how trying was involved.
I wonder why Elves don't turn into daeva."
"Dunno. Maybe only humans can."
"Kind of too bad. But yeah, maybe."
Finis runs right off to go speak to Minor.
"...not sure that'll help anything but I'm not going to try talking him out of it."
"We don't know if he can still use his wand or not."
"We don't - if he can then my father will be like 'this is amazing! Okay summon me back I'm going to kill myself now' which is maybe the most helpful thing he can do - sort of gives Minor a non-traumatic frame for it - or maybe super traumatizing I would need to see him to guess -
- and if he's a Muggle then he's going to be crushed -"
"Hopefully your father would remember to perform a summoning first."
"That he'd do. He's not stupid, just - thoughtless."
"I hope he can still do magic."
"I hope it for his sake but it's kind of a problem if in general we have to choose between letting 1802 wizards die permanently or letting them wizard-daeva. Or catching them all as fast as we can and keeping them somewhere under bindings, I guess that's an option."
"Accepting summonses is voluntary."
"If they don't take any they can't get a wand. If they only take ones not specifically for them, though, then yes, we'd have wizard daeva and nothing we could do about it."
"They could get a wand if somebody brought a bunch home."
"Random wands aren't much good. But - yeah, if Minor's not a Muggle we have a logistical mess on our hands and if he is then I just have a really devastated little brother."
Hug.
"I should've been looking out for him, should've been paying more attention -"
"You couldn't've been constantly supervising."
"No but constantly - accessible - I usually am, at school he always knows where to find me -"
"Do you think he looked? Or would have if you'd had really predictable whereabouts?"
"He would've said something when he asked Bar for all those books and - whatever else he would've had to ask for to get the name -"
"We were within, not even shouting distance, less than that, of Bar, holding the door and watching Atriama. He knew where you were."
"At school I did not do things like watch movies snuggling with my boyfriend he would have felt freer to interrupt - or someone would have said to him 'what are you doing' -"
Sigh.
"I don't want to let people in my world die, now that we know, but it's going to be a logistical nightmare rolling it out - forget wizards, no one can read...and it goes wrong so easily..."
"We have all the time in the world."
"Only sort of, if we stay here long enough to have visibly aged a couple years the kids can't really go back to school, and if we aren't wizards once we die there's a hard limit on how long we have anything like our current options -"
"If the limiting factor on polyjuice is in fact boomslang skin that can handle your cosmetic needs, but granted."
"That and the having to drink it every hour, and people know about Polyjuice potion and might find it fishy if you had to drink every hour. I'm not sure the limiting factor on our plans is going to be time to come up with them - time to find more universes and for the Elf versions of my dad to develop non-Milliways-dependent forms of travel between them, yes, but not time to come up with things-"
"We could probably go faster on that. The Milliways desyncing effect seems to mostly be pretty - friendly - it might be that since I don't have to worry about looking older I should ensconce myself somewhere and brainstorm a lot and come out with a document for review."
"That would be useful, yeah. Let me get a definitive answer from Minor on magic, since it'll affect your brainstorming -"
Nod.
"And the Elves already did a fair bit, you can look through it in more depth now that we know which scenario we're preparing for - oh, we should probably do something for the security and infirmary people too -"
"More elaborate than paying their tab?"
"Presumably summoning works everywhere, at least once it's - hooked in to the network or whatever -"
"Yes, although there is a serious difficulty learning a language while in Milliways and they don't speak anything I already know." Pause. "Could get one of them to summon Minor and walk him through translating a good summoning textbook."
"He'd probably be delighted. A good summoning textbook flags bindings that let the daeva kill you, incidentally."
"Yes, one of those."
"If we had a cooperating Aulë the soul Elves're pretty sure he could fix aging but I am not completely sure no one'd tell him the whole story if we tried involving him at all."
"Someone probably would."
"Maybe there are Ardas where the Valar don't suck. Maybe we can find books about them and once we're satisfied that the books are produced by a civilization with competent benevolent gods we can fork the me and he can open the door there for us and they can fix everything."
"I was about to sarcastically wonder what it would look like for Valar to not suck but maybe it just looks like different individual ones winning their internal arguments."
"Maybe. From the outside it'd be easy enough to identify - no pardon, no Doom, Endorë nicer, more freedom of movement - Maitimo'd know what to look for -"
"Wait on getting a reply from him till we've got my murderer bound up so time doesn't pass in Fairyland though?"
"- I think we may have built ourselves an annoying little interdependency - if we want to bind the murderer in flat Arda but we're waiting on a plan for flat Arda until we've done whatever we're doing in my world, and we want Maitimo's input on things we're doing in my world -"
"Speaking as somebody who was also murdered by that same guy and does keep tabs on daeva incidents I really don't think he's an acute danger to anybody he'd get summoned by under normal circumstances."
"I am somewhat disinclined to predictably be the sort of person who completely ignores murderers if they seem unlikely to reoffend."
"...because that causes there to be more murders, come on, even in 2179 that can't be a completely foreign line of reasoning."
"No, that part is clear. I suppose you're technically not ignoring me but I don't feel very disincentivized?"
"You did not take any actions I want to disincentivize."
"Anyway, my point was he's not an emergency."
"At least among humans, responding immediately and predictably to crimes does more to discourage them than responding later when it's more convenient."
"Are you planning to become a supplement to Fairyland's criminal justice system? Or Revelation's? Is he entitled to a lawyer? Or are you a vigilante striking anybody foolish enough to answer a specific summons, heroically disrupting the fairy employment market?"
"I have five brothers who are still alive and I want them to stay that way."
"The swift and predictable punishment thing only works if you're actually predictable and you're not, and this isn't a human, he's a fairy, who if you're too predictable can just not answer your summons."
"Other daeva are not really the people I am worried about being predictable to."
"To whom do you wish to be predictable?"
"Broadly, people who might consider murdering my family members? More concretely, it would make all of us very markedly less safe if it were known in our world that Minor'd been murdered and we'd declined to do anything about it, and it is going to be very hard to hide."
"It would not be hard to hide that you let time elapse. Or to spin that as making it likelier that he'd show up."
"Sure, as long as it's dealt with before we open our door."
"But allows correspondence with Maitimo first."
"Yeah, fine."
Sigh. Hug.
Hug. "I should probably recalibrate how strongly I feel the need to signal that murdering people I care about will be a choice you regret now that murdering people is significantly less bad. But. It's still bad."
"To be fair the guy would've expected Minor to be a daeva. Or at least a Limboite if he hasn't made that connection."
"But he would also have expected that Minor's family wouldn't know that and that he'd never see any of us again. And he didn't have any of those excuses when he murdered you."
"And when he murdered me he did not resist arrest, was tried and sentenced and jailed, earned time off for good behavior and was released even earlier upon the passage of the 2037 Prison Reform Act, had no further trouble with the law for the rest of his life, died of old age, and has caused no discernible trouble since then as a fairy until just recently."
"Well, I wish your society had had laws that would have dissuaded him from murdering you in the first place."
"Such as? He was caught instantly, it wasn't a question of immediacy and surety of punishment."
"I don't know, I haven't met him, perhaps he will just undeterrably murder people for causing him mild annoyance and nothing can make him less likely to do this or likely to experience remorse for it. Or maybe it would take Azkaban, and that would be a bad trade. I do think it's bizarre that Revelation lets people out of prison for murders they don't regret and would commit again, though."
"Well, empirically, he did not in fact commit another murder until after he died - well after - and they didn't know they needed to worry about after that."
"Sounds like the only reason he didn't commit another murder is that no children asked him why he committed the first one when he was in a bad mood."
"- okay, how much of a cooling off period do you need before I speculate more charitably on his motives."
"Go ahead."
"A summoned daeva is trapped. Until one of two things happens - the summoner lets them go or the summoner dies. People can and have just kept daeva for arbitrary lengths of time. He showed up to a specific summons, which could have been out of curiosity but probably wasn't, probably means he had somewhere to be. Summoning somebody to complain about their behavior is a threat and doing it with a bad circle at age 13 is a worse one because it means no due process and no visits from your mom. I wouldn't kill somebody like that without exhausting alternate options but if I were, oh, interrupted while reembodying Elves or governing Mars or something by a summon masquerading as the one I intended to take, and it really didn't look like they'd let me go..."
"I doubt the interaction lasted two minutes."
"I said I'd speculate charitably, not reinterpret him as a saint."
Sigh. "Shall we ask the security guy or the infirmary guy if they care to learn summoning."
"Sounds like a plan."
And do they care to learn summoning, once it is explained.
Yes they do.
Cam gets a decent textbook - well, his notes from when he taught this as a class - and sets to explaining the basics on the theory that they won't need the textbook translated till they go home.
And he goes to ask Minor for a bunch of demonic small animals.
"Why?"
"I want to learn the Killing Curse."
"You said it doesn't work on daeva and it wouldn't be a good thing to do anyway."
"Oh, I know, it'll just improve my mood. You okay?"
"Can't go back to Hogwarts. Don't even know if I'll be able to see it anymore."
"I'm sorry."
"It's not your fault."
"Yeah, it is. Everything is. We're trying to find an Arda that doesn't suck so we can ask some not-terrible Valar to solve all our problems, maybe they can do that one too."
"That's a good idea."
"Anyway, box of kittens?"
"I thought you were avoiding killing kittens now that you're aware of societies that care about that."
"I don't think demonic ones count."
"Yeah but I think they mind less about rats or something."
"They do. I kind of want to kill a lot of kittens."
There they are.
He goes off to try to reconstruct the spell.
Cam goes and finds Minor a bit later.
He isn't hard to find on account of not having moved.
"Hey. Wanna learn a language and translate a textbook for the security and infirmary people to take home?"
"Yeah, okay. Does translating stuff even work in Milliways -"
"It does if you're actually fluent in both languages, but it'd be hard to learn one the long way under the translation effect. You'll have to get Timothy to dismiss you and then security guy'll resummon you."
"Okay."
"Where's he gotten to?"
"His room, I think."
"With the door closed you shouldn't experience much time between summonses," Cam says, and he goes looking for Timothy.
Who is in fact in his room.
Knock knock. "Timothy?"
He Vanishes dead kittens and gets the door. "Yeah?"
"Minor's agreed to do the textbook translation, you need to dismiss him."
"Great." He concentrates on that.
He looks like he needs a hug. Cam hugs him.
"Having fun teaching summoning again?"
"It's sort of nostalgic."
"Minor is all fetchable."
Cam unhugs and goes and gives the goldmage a circle and the goldmage completes it.
Oh look there is a thirteen year old.
And they can get to work on the textbook with Cam on hand for context-about-the-subject and the goldmage for context-about-the-target-culture and Minor for language translation.
He's good at it.
Cam tries not to be too passive aggressive about it beyond having suggested this at all.
It is a good summoning book that will not let the daeva kill you.
This takes long enough that the goldmage needs sleep, but he can accomplish that in stopped time because Milliways lets him cheat. The daeva do not need sleep, although if Minor doesn't want to feel a little tired he will need caffeine.
Yeah, he'll do that.
"Administering to the bloodstream is tricky, you should probably just develop a taste for coffee. Or tea, probably, since you're British."
"What's tricky about it?"
"If you miss you have accidentally delivered whatever substance to a non-bloodstream location and that varies from ineffective to uncomfortable - worse than that if you're dosing a human."
"So it sounds like a useful thing to get good at."
"Yeah, I know how, it was covered in med school."
"I'm not planning on spending enough time in Hell to do med school, is there a written explanation somewhere?"
"You could go through the textbooks and have me check your basement dwellers to see if you did the exercises right whenever it's not obvious, if you like."
"I'll do that."
Cam hands him a book entitled Echerilan's Guide to Demonic Pharmacology and they get back to translation.
Horrible magic disabilities world will have a high-quality summoning textbook.
Eventually he comes downstairs and asks the Bar about books in Quenya that reference a binary star system rather than Trees which are dated later than 1400 and reference a decision not to pardon Melkor.
Like this one?
Yes thank you very much.
He writes Maitimo asking for other signs of unusually competent Valar.
And eventually the book is done.
Yay.
"So should I go back to holding the door to Hell," Cam asks Timothy when he's out of the security office.
He waves the book. "Arda where the Valar didn't pardon Melkor. I don't know what else to look for as signs of competence but I wrote Maitimo and he probably will."
"Is that a 'yes' or a 'maybe after I finish this book'?"
"That's a yes, even if this universe isn't the one I don't think it's the only one Bar had that met the criteria."
So Cam goes and holds the door to his house.
"Want to read from this world also?"
"Want to get me a nonredundant book rec?"
He goes and asks Bar for another book meeting the aforementioned criteria.
And Cam reads it.
"...these Valar just, uh, sort of have the death penalty for everything."
" - seriously?
I mean, probably still less total suffering if it means they never let Melkor out, but, no."
"It's still not a lot of death penalty, because Elves, but yeah."
"What's deathworthy, shampoo commercial filming? Also we can snatch the dead ones, let's add that to the to-do list."
"Homosexuality - not the inclination, they still just do magic conversion therapy for that but less consensually, just the practice - blasphemy - porn hasn't actually come up but they have censorship about 'distressing topics' -"
"Well, fuck. The poor me - if my father didn't get killed before he grew up -"
"Uh -" Search search. "Emigrated."
"Oh, they only enforce it in Valinor proper? That'd help - he's probably planning to overthrow them, that is what he would be doing -"
"It doesn't say, but probably."
"Tempted to help them out by shoving summoning at them but if we're going to try intervening in random space Ardas with that method the actually strategic thing to do would be contacting pre-pardon ones and warning them not to pardon him, not picking fights in the comparatively fine ones."
"Well, also nobody can open the door there."
"I expect if you fork someone from there here they'll be able to open the door home, but I guess we'd have to check."
"It's consistent with how I can open the door, I guess."
"So we can in fact intervene in all the space Ardas but - let's keep looking for good Valar first, maybe they'll have suggestions on how to make the other sets suck less or how to handle them best -"
"Yeah, good order of ops."
Another book from Bar for each of them.
"This one's promising, the Valar reworked oaths to be less stupidly terrifying."
"That is promising, how'd they do that -"
"They don't bind future actions, but you can still swear that you have certain intentions or that you spoke honestly or stuff like that."
"...that's probably among the things I'd do if I ran Valinor - no draconian crime policy?"
"Nope! Or not so far!"
And Maitimo has a list of suggestions -
Does this book answer these questions?
You can register preferences about how long it takes to be resurrected, but most people prefer it instantaneously.
There does not appear to be any stigma on homosexuality; Eru is not mentioned in the book.
Doesn't say whether the registering preferences about how long it takes to be resurrected applies to people on Endorë but conjuring for the living wills of people on Endorë confirms that it does, and that most of them also prefer it instantaneously. Ulmo apparently hangs out in Endorë most of the time and can do resurrections as well.
There has been debate about letting non-Valar people do resurrections but there is concern about potential for abuse (forking, uploading). The book mentions that recent improvements should obviate that problem and that Mandos has since started teaching more people.
Lightleapers don't exist yet so there is only limited travel between Endorë and Valinor, but it does not seem to be limited by law.
Dwarves are not chipped and cannot be retrieved if they die, but they don't die of old age.
Miriel and Finwë divorced, she came back to life after oaths were fixed, and she's now dating both Finwe and his second wife which is at least a little scandalous.
They locked up Melkor as soon as the torture thing came to their attention, and it took that long because they hadn't known you could upload people like that and had thought it was a good sign he was off playing with his computers. They published a lengthy account of the errors in judgment that permitted it to happen and tracked down all Melkor's servants as well. Orcs were also mass-resurrected after the oath reform.
"I like these Valar."
"Oh?"
Cam lists the answers to Maitimo's questions. "- not sure why the resurrection of your grandma's alt waited for the oaths thing, it's in a little sidenote without details..."
" - yeah, huh.
- okay, I'm satisfied that these Valar deserve a shot at fixing stuff, are you?"
"We could try to optimize more but given the need to work from books I'm not sure it'd meaningfully improve our accuracy."
"We can grab the me and if he's like 'oh, no, that book's entirely propaganda' I assume he'll still appreciate the warning to continue not pardoning Melkor and the summoning for the Dwarves."
"Plus humans if they still show up, yeah. You wanna be there when I wake him up?"
"Probably, yeah, he'll be slightly less freaked out."
So Cam goes up and sticks a chip in the reader and pulls a chip out of the writer and embodies it.
That sure is a basement-dweller!
"That's... worrying..."
" - yeah. Uh. It doesn't mention I'm dead or anything?"
"Even if you were dead this shouldn't happen!" He checks the book again.
"Maybe different space Ardas have subtly different kinds of chips and your reader isn't working?"
"It didn't throw an error." He consults the raw data.
Chip has two kilobytes of data on it.
"That is not enough data."
He converts it and opens it on his computer.
Apologies! It appears that this is a fork of Nelyafinwë Maitimo created without his authorization. If you believe this classification was made in error, please contact Mandos Námo in Valinor or, in case of emergencies, anyone in instantaneous communication with him.
And the same message in several other languages.
"Well that's very responsible of them."
"Hmmm?"
Cam turns the display. "They have apparently at some point magicked the chips so they can't be forked without permission. And didn't anticipate alts."
"- ah. That - is responsible. Damn it.
- when -"
"Good question, let's ask Bar, see if we can get an earlier one."
"Or a my father, yeah - or bug Maitimo for people even older than that whose alts we can ask -"
Downstairs to Bar.
1370.
"So you're available as an adult, don't have to make it your dad."
"Oh, cool -"
"But you'll be missing a bit of elapsed time, does that change anything?"
"I mean, I'd prefer not to be missing a couple centuries pretty strongly but my opinion of these Valar is only rising and he's definitely not going to regret enabling us to meet them and who knows, maybe they also have ways to merge forks or add memories or whatever. Go ahead."
Upstairs. Chip from 1369. Read-write-embody -
Blink.
He looks around.
He looks super bewildered.
"Timothy."
"Cam. Hi. In a year your Valar add copy protection to your chips but this is really important so I forked you from before that."
" - yeah they're working on - what year is it - I'm Maitimo -"
"We know. You're going to need a nickname, most of you are named Maitimo. It is currently 1512 in your world, I'm really sorry about that part but when your Valar added copy protection they didn't anticipate alts." He inclines his head at Timothy.
"There are a lot of universes and they have some of the same people in them - I consented for you because it is, in fact, that important."
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.
You will have to be more specific.
So he specifies - something from Revelation that is a historical overview, something on wizards, selected writings of Arda humans once they showed up -
Bar gives him titles Fertile Crescent, Fertile Sphere and An Historie of Witchcraft and needs more specificity on what sort of Arda he wants to survey.
He reads. "Okay," he says a while later. "I don't know how much screening you did for Vala-traits - or how you're expecting them to handle everything - and my guesses will be a hundred forty Years out of date - they'll definitely fix it, no question, and make summoning a little friendlier and set out some ground rules for it - they might want to visit your daeva worlds and make forking people more difficult - but from there it kind of depends why all of the alternate universe versions are so incompetent, whether it's a resource gap or a values one -
- and I can put bounds on how they'll react to the black hole thing but I don't know."
"Previous guesses included 'summary execution', which would be one thing if they didn't also interdict summoning again for the mortals on Endorë, is the lower bound higher than that."
" - yes, what the fuck, even if you'd done it for fun that wouldn't be on the table. - I can see them interdicting summoning if they can't figure out how to make it any safer, though that'd be surprising, and they'd fix your aging species anyway - why are there even aging sapients, what a terrible idea -"
"Nobody consulted me on the subject."
"They should get a refund from whoever they did consult, all of these worlds are horrible and everyone back home is going to be completely appalled. Anyway, they've got Melkor a nice VR setup where he can engage in as much imaginary torture and wanton destruction as he pleases, even if I presume this to be full of outright lies - and I'm not assuming that, but I'm giving myself lower confidence than usual I'd notice if I were being lied to, since you have mes - anyway, unless there are some sharp limits on their capacity to act outside our home dimension no one is going to die and definitely no one is going to be executed.
And we might need some kind of war crimes procedure given how many war crimes there are, but they'll firstly make a point of not acting in any way that would have disincentivized you from asking them for help and secondly think you made a sensible call and thirdly don't believe in executing people at all.
I'm not promising they won't overreact - I don't think so, but it's been a hundred forty Years and we've never dealt with anything like this - but. The worst overreaction I could conceive of would be putting bounds on the making-stuff and keeping you in a dimension where they could enforce those."
"Which would be an overreaction."
"Yes, I realize that, I said I'm giving you bounds. You - you were going to try to get help from - I just want to give you both a hug - you're allowed to expect better of the universe -"
"I try to manage my expectations in such a way that I won't be floored with astonishment every time I leave my room."
"Fair enough. Well. Let me know when you'd like your door."
"...is there anything we should have squared away here first -"
"- depends what you're doing here, honestly -"
"Various experiments on how things interact with other things, my next to-do item was genetic testing on the wizards to see if that's just plain genetic because if so maybe Timothy's little brother who turned into a demon could do magic again with a stem cell transfusion and sufficient mental discipline."
"Need to be here in particular for any of those?"
"Timothy's little brother doesn't know what a stem cell is yet but for the testing part no. You think I should come with you?"
"No but it's possible they'll want you later, or can do demon-containing things but not in Milliways and will prefer to set up a portal of their own to your world and then ask you to leave -"
"I've been staying here to keep the door to my Arda so I can go back and reembody more Elves but if they're doing that all I'm doing is making it easy to pause and run time in the daeva worlds and Revelation and another daeva could do that."
"And that isn't straightforwardly wrapped up, I take it?"
"One of your alts is in Revelation preparing to open diplomatic relations."
"I'm not in a hurry, but it doesn't sound like there's anything in particular you'd want to be doing before I start."
"If there's a nonzero chance I will be exiled somewhere I should say goodbye to Miranda. And Timothy."
"Okay."
So Cam goes up to where Timothy is sleeping.
And after a little while he wakes. " - you okay -"
"New you is set to open a door whenever."
Hug. " - there's a case to be made that any Vala who'd hurt you over it is a Vala we don't want with access to Milliways and the multiverse, that it's a good proxy for value alignment and there are lots of them and we should just close the door again if -"
"If you wanted to look harder for more certainly cooperative Valar you probably should have said so before I forked your alt."
"I don't think we could find better from a book. Doesn't mean that if it's not going as well as the books would have suggested we're stuck -"
"I suppose, theoretically, you could shut the door on us, have Minor and an Elf from my Arda respectively make a drone and hold the door to get me dismissed, and resummon me if you didn't like how things were looking."
"Okay. I am not promising not to do that but I'd make sure Miranda agreed." Hug.
Hug. "It'll probably be fine."
"I hope so. Have you talked to Miranda -"
"Came here first."
Squeeze. "Doesn't make a ton of sense to hurry, given that it may not have been any time at all downstairs."
"This is true."
Kiss.
No hurry at all.
Cam says a very thorough maybe-goodbye to his boyfriend.
Who holds it together. Though he's maybe not going to interact with an alt for the time being they'd see right through him - these Valar had better not be evil -
And then Cam goes and talks to Miranda, and then he goes downstairs to the new Maitimo.
"Okay."
He goes over to the door and opens it.
And closes it again and leans against the wall, expression carefully blank -
"...what?"
"- I have kids. Uh, he has kids. I-have-kids-in-the-next-140-Years, I should have thought of that, it's not even especially surprising -"
"I didn't. Even think of that. I'm so sorry - should've - my alt is a thirteen year old girl of course there could be more variety we should've checked I'm sorry."
"I'd still rather - at least you didn't grab me from when they were three or something -"
"Should've maybe asked one of your dad, at least then it's a known quantity, they like forking one of 'em wanted ten -"
"He wouldn't be okay with missing their childhoods either, though, don't think -"
"No, of course not, but wouldn't've been mid-childhood the same year - or at least we would've known to check the dates - I'm so fucking sorry."
"Anyway. Sorry. I'll go through, just need a minute."
"Long as you need."
He takes a minute.
He opens the door.
There, sure enough, is another identical Elf playing some sort of card game with a redheaded kid of ten or so. He blinks at them.
"Hey," the fork says, "long story I'm filling in the Valar right now - uh, someone figured out how to fork us from right before they implemented the protection -"
" - what -"
" - worth it - there're other worlds, most of their Melkors are loose -"
" - I see. Why don't we talk in a bit -" and he picks up the kid -
"Yeah."
If they're talking they are doing so over the chips.
Reasonable of them.
And after a while - "you should check your mail -"
Letters for Cam?
Campbell Mark Swan,
This is a request for an audience to discuss what can be done to fix the Arda you recently spent time in. We would prefer to meet you in our world or if that is infeasible send a representative to meet with you in person, but we can also exchange messages over text. We were not previously aware of the existence of worlds beyond our own, and do not yet have a unified policy for handling them, but there are some principles we are comfortable committing to in advance:
It is possible that at some point in the future we will develop a procedure for prosecution of war crimes committed in other dimensions. By default the contents of this and future conversations about how to fix your world will be impermisslble to introduce as evidence at such a trial. You have the right to change this default, or to independently record and publicize these interactions.
We will attempt to arrive at agreement on any handling of your world beyond imprisoning Melkor and his associates, restoring everyone to life and ending involuntary permanent death, and rolling out changes to oaths at least for orcs and persons not actively constrained by their oaths into conscionable conduct (you can read the Oath Reform Act of 1400 for the standards we used for this change in our own world). If we are not in agreement with you about how to implement other changes, they will wait for independent review by citizens of the dimension that will be affected.
It is standard for investigatory work of this kind to take place under a magic effect which makes it apparent when either party is lying. This effect is non-invasive and does not provide any other information; you have the right to know when this effect is in place, to ask for it to be turned off, or to request confirmation of our own statements under such an effect. Refusing to interact with truth effects is a choice protected by law.
Thank you for reaching out to us.
Manwë, High King of Arda
Ingwë, HIgh King of the Eldar
Cam conjures up the Oath Reform Act of 1400.
"They want me to go in. Somebody'll have to hold the door for me to do that without being stuck. Ideally with another person from the world in the bar for in case they drop it."
"Okay - I'll ask a couple people in - everything look okay?"
"I don't hardly feel in imminent danger of summary execution. Not even inclined to insist that they send a representative here instead."
"You continue to have appallingly low standards but okay." Weak smile.
And a couple people come on in. One of them is an alt of someone assigned to Cam's resurrection help team.
"- oh, a Larya. Hi."
She is confused. "- hi?"
"I know a version of you from another world."
Deep breath. Out he goes. "Which way?"
"Train station or do you want to make yourself some other form of travel?"
"Too far to just fly it?" He waves a wing. "I can do fifty miles an hour and expect to be puzzled by unfamiliar public transit. I could make a little shuttle if it's a long way."
"Yeah we settled on the opposite end of the planet from Taniquetil in case all that divine interference got overbearing. I can recommend you a map?"
All that divine interference. Right. "Assuming Taniquetil looks the same I can find it from orbit in a shuttle in like a couple hours."
So he exits the house and makes a little shuttle and hops into it and goes halfway around the world.
It looks the same.
He lands near it and flies up.
These Valar don't do the static thing. They do give off a persistent and powerful impression that This Person Is A God. There's a conference table. Varda waves.
"Hello."
"Varda, this is Aulë, and this is Nienna. Everyone else didn't take physical form - we didn't want to overwhelm you - but they are also paying attention. Thank you for coming. Can we get you anything?"
"I'm fine. Uh, how does the truth thing work, I sometimes get sarcastic when I'm nervous."
"It might flag that but we are not unfamiliar with sarcasm."
"Okay."
"Is that consent to have a truth effect present?"
"If it is as described, yes."
"Thank you. The effect is in place. The sky is green. It functions as described." And indeed the lie rings as one, somehow.
That's nifty.
Awkward wingrustling. "I don't know how much Maitimo told you."
"That he was forked from before copy protections were put in place on the chips, by someone with the power to make arbitrary material objects from an alternate dimension where this power is possessed by many but the art of using it to create living minds is a secret; that there are many worlds, most of them in desperate need, some of them incompetently governed and with Melkor loose and doing harm, many with sapients which grow old and die inside ten Years, and that on finding a means of travelling between them and requesting works from distant ones, you identified ours as one equipped to help.
That in the course of one war in one such world, you made an agreement with Melkor to destroy the planet of Valinor and everyone on it in exchange for his binding oath to stop his crimes, and they were so ceased, and that among the things you are searching for is a means to return to life those who were lost in that bargain.
Is there anything else essential?"
"Uh, people other than Melkor have multiple instances and one of Maitimo's was on board with the forking. Other than that yes that's the outline."
"All right. We have many questions, and imagine you do as well; would you prefer to ask yours first?"
"- no, go ahead."
"Can you give us a complete account of how you arrived in an Arda and became involved in its war, up through its current situation?"
"If I consult my notes to make sure I have it in order will even the parts that are written in Quenya go unread?"
"Yes."
So he pulls out his computer and gives some rather spare context on summoning - but he would feel vaguely disloyal to Timothy if he didn't give at least half a sentence to the character defense afforded by the whole 'being Revelation' thing so he includes a first person pronoun when explaining how it came to be commonplace where he's from - and then there's the part where he appeared and it seems to have been a fluke and Alqualondë had just happened and the Doom had been issued here's the text here's the transcript of his conversation with those Valar about quarantining it and then he dropped the library of Hell on Valinor because he wasn't paranoid enough about enemy access to information. Filled out the fleet, filled up the ships. Here's his due diligence on identifying the correct side of the war and the refugee planet and making stuff and identifying the escalation problem. Parley and kidnapping orcs to interview and putting them on a planetoid and suicide triggers and less conservative suicide triggers and the initial offer and the poisoned chip and the tests on osanwë-blockage and conjuration-oath-verification and and and and.
Here's the part where there were suddenly fifty-four million fewer reasons not to take the offer if he could get it exactly right here are all the notes on getting it exactly right here is the exactly right wording they got out of him in the end -
- and then he made them new stars and a new planet and fetched help to orient everybody and it's not good enough the planet has decay and he couldn't get all the fetuses and the animals are fucked up and the Maiar are a complete loss and he's not even done with the Elves and that's when he found this door -
Nienna is weeping. The other two are listening quietly, or looking through the wording, and nodding.
"Thank you for the explanation," Aulë says. "And thank you for coming here."
"We expect that we can fix it," Varda says.
"Thank you."
"Maitimo said also that you had some reservations about seeking external help, in case they changed summoning?"
"Even if the external help didn't do that themselves, restoring the Valar from that Arda might do it, since they interdicted it the once in response to my appearance. Summoning has worked since they died."
"Are there other, similar concerns?"
"That's the major one. The Doom is no longer evident on the affected chips according to my machine learning algorithm as of when those Valar died and reviving them might put it back. I was very reassured to be told that you don't execute people - the other Arda we turned up where Melkor didn't get pardoned had Valar who really really liked executing people - but I don't relish the possibility of nonfatal constraints on my behavior either. I'm not sure what else might count as similar."
"Other things the local Valar were doing incompetently and might resume doing incompetently if everything were straightforwardly put back?"
"Their other glaring incompetence was 'not doing anything about the war' which was in itself unaffected by their demise, but according to my reading they did have other deficiencies in governance that you don't seem to."
"Thank you. We are currently checking which of our abilities work in Milliways, and should not infer that will be the same as which ones work in other dimensions, and really need to determine why the alternate universe versions of us are so - inadequate - before making confident guesses about the best way to nondisruptively restore them and their world. Are there other resources available towards that end which you could recommend us?"
"...Bar is good at recommending books. If you can make the guy on duty in the security office sufficiently immortal he can time travel."
Aulë looks outright gleeful at that.
"Probably shouldn't fix it that way, though, not if it's been months," Nienna murmurs.
"Oh, I know. We should probably draw up rules about use of time travel, actually, that sounds ethically complicated."
"The use case I had in mind was having him warn you if it turns out to be a disaster to take some risky action."
Nods. "I would prefer that to asking Eru," Nienna says.
...Cam can wait until it is his turn to ask things and in that time maybe he will think of a better question than "what in the fuck is Eru's deal anyway".
"I think those are all the questions we had for you in particular. Do you have questions for us?"
What in the fuck is Eru's deal anyway. "What are you going to do, or if you haven't decided what are you considering?"
"We are probably going to go to the other Arda to which Milliways offers straightforward access, talk to the versions of us there, and try to determine why they're - uh - not very good at their jobs. If it's a capabilities gap or a misunderstanding we can just teach them, if it's more complex than that we are considering whether to just take all their people here - depends how much capacity to act we have in their dimensions, but probably not much, not quickly, we build it up over time."
"...I made a serious oversight in forking this Maitimo but in principle other Ardas with chip Elves can be accessed the same way and we have standing access to one that has magic soul Elves instead."
"We've met the magic soul Elves - we have approximately a hundred times the attentional capacity of humans, and are conducting this investigation from many different angles simultaneously - and it is their world where we intend to begin speaking to other Valar. We would prefer not to fork people without their consent even when it is urgent to somehow reach their worlds, and are trying to determine if it can be done in any other way."
"That would be an improvement if it's doable, yes."
"We have not yet found a way."
"Were I forkable I would in fact let my alt make decisions about that for me but we match less closely than the Maitimos otherwise tended to and might have thought to check for variants like 'has kids'. In retrospect of course maybe in a world where you're good at your jobs maybe he has kids."
"Forking with the consent of alternates is not inherently unacceptable to us but it seems likely to sometimes have drawbacks like this one; it is at least worth exploring alternatives."
Nod.
"Anything else?"
"What about me?"
"You are quite apparently not a danger to any worlds you might find yourself in, and are free to leave.
We are inclined at this time to establish some kind of procedure for prosecuting war crimes. The aim would be -" Varda looks around for help, or at least that is what that expression would mean on a human -
"- right now it would be reasonable for people to be afraid of you?" Nienna offers hesitantly. "Or to hate you or to mistrust you or - to ask us not to invite you into our world without precautions - some people will read the whole story, should you choose to make it available, and make up their own minds, and some will trust us, but - that would not be a reasonable burden to place on the shoulders of every citizen -"
"The aim would be to establish a court that people can trust enough that, if it rules that justice has been done, it is reasonable for people to have faith in that. And it is our hope that if we suceeed in establishing such a court you might choose to consider yourself subject to its jurisdiction."
"...that would be nice in a way, I don't really like the reasonable-for-people-to-hate-me thing... I'm perhaps less optimistic that it can be replaced wholesale."
"Among Elves, at least?" Varda offers. "Elves are mostly very trusting."
"Dwarves as well," Aulë says, "If differently - and humans are all so young, they do astoundingly well considering but maybe when they're all a little older -"
"And there are a lot of worlds, we take it," Nienna says, "in which great evils have been committed with less cause, and all eternity in which to learn how to forgive one another."
"People where I'm from don't tend to inquire that deeply into the greatness of the cause of things that look evil. Eventually sure, maybe."
"We will update you on our progress in formulating procedures for such a court, but under the circumstances will not be able to collaborate with you on it. If you want to recommend other humans to serve as advisors they are very welcome."
"Does my alt have too much of a conflict of interest?"
" - probably. We have not given much consideration to how to handle alts."
"What about alts of my boyfriend, because if so you should know my boyfriend is a non-Arda Maitimo alt."
" - it'd be a little hard to assemble an advisory team for this without consulting Nelyafinwë, but we could avoid informing him of a potential conflict of interest -"
"No we couldn't," Aulë says.
Heh.
"We could ask him to recommend people and not work too directly on it? That might be wise anyway, given the existence of Ardas where he leads a great deal of evil himself -"
"That's an oath thing and happens after fifty years in Angband anyway."
"Yes, but if we are going to want to offer those instances of him the opportunity to answer to our court we owe it to them to ensure we can offer them the appearance of a fair trial in addition to an actual fair trial."
"Makes sense. Of course you might find that anybody has alts who do bad things - uh, like most of your alts - it's just the Maedhroses are conspicuous because his alts were already involved in multiversal," handwave, "stuff."
" - that is a very fair point. All right. We won't worry about alts per se, then, but will still endeavor not to have people who are already personal friends of yours represent the human perspective."
Wonders never cease. "All right."
"Is there anything else?"
"I'm curious about what your parallel investigation is turning up."
"We can slow down human aging a few thousandfold, and reverse that, and have gone ahead and done so for the humans in Milliways who wanted it. It appears we should be able to gate to some but not all other worlds, we aren't sure why, we are contemplating asking Eru. We have not yet spoken to our flat-world soul Elf counterparts."
"What, uh, is the deal with Eru."
They look at each other in a way that could only be described as 'awkwardly'.
"The other ones are probably omnipotent," Varda ventures. "Ours - used to be, but we talked him out of it."
"He used to be omnipotent and you talked him out of it," repeats Cam slowly.
"We asked him if he'd known Melkor was doing that, and he had, and why he hadn't stopped Melkor, and he said he just thought it made for a really beautiful narrative arc, so - we weren't sure what to do with that for a long time and then we convinced him that a god giving his omnipotence piecemeal to his people was a great narrative arc, and that he'd have more fun if he couldn't foresee everything anyway, and now - he is still very powerful, mind, we really recommend you not come to his attention, but he mostly hangs out on the Moon and posts glowing reviews of horribly tragic books - the entirety of Elven literature has an aggressively depressing bent because everyone wants God to like their writing -"
"Wow."
"Hey," says a voice from all around them all at once, "that's not fair, I also answer prayers and do shadow puppet shows with the Moon! And why shouldn't he come to my attention, he has a great story arc -"
The Valar sigh in perfect unison. "That's why," Varda says patiently. "It's hurtful to say that to people."
"I mean I assume if the one from my Arda didn't like it he could have done something about it and it sounds like possibly the principal difference is that this one has stopped taking it out on real people."
"I think the one from your Arda probably thought it was great," Eru says earnestly. "Which it is, as a story, and fictional stories are so flat when you know every motion of every atom, and in order for them to be enough I had to rip away the pieces of my own perception until I was small enough to find them meaningful, and I can imagine that most of me would not have done that."
"Most of them seem not to have."
"Eru," Varda says, "want to make chips retroactively unforkable, maybe with an exception for someone who is willing to take the risk and notes in our literature that they're the person to get in order to find us..."
"Sure, who's the exception?"
"Don't know yet, if you'll do it I will ask around."
"I could just do an exception for alt consent."
"Problem is," Nienna says, "some people apparently have evil alts."
"They do!"
"So why don't we ask for a volunteer," Varda says, "it'll be very noble of them to volunteer and they'll wonder all the time if there are more of them out there somewhere -"
"I'll ask everyone!"
"Thank you."
Wow.
The Valar look vaguely embarrassed. "Anyway. Is that everything for now? We're probably going to have someone in Milliways for the time being, so you should not have any trouble reaching us if you have more questions..."
"I think that's everything for now. Thank you for being good at your jobs."
"We are disappointed it is uncommon. Take care."
"You too."
And he flies to his shuttle and back around the world to the door.
He's still holding it. "How'd it go?"
"These Valar are really good at their jobs. Eru started talking about my narrative arc towards the end."
"Oh, wow, I'm sorry, should have thought of that. He doesn't get involved in things much, mostly holds poetry contests."
"They mentioned. It's fine except for the... implications about all the other Erus."
"Being that they're omnipotent and might object to their narrative getting derailed? - yeah..."
"Well, that and I now have to revise 'mostly noninterventionist' to include 'metaphorically eating popcorn'."
He blinks a little confusedly.
"In my native culture one eats popcorn while watching movies."
"Ah. Yep, I'm sure all the Erus with horrible nightmare worlds are having a lovely time. You should go reassure Timothy, he's been pacing."
"Oh, I was hoping he'd have stayed upstairs and only had to wait a minute or two -" Where is Timothy?
Watching soul-Elf Fëanor and Nerdanel, who are talking with another This Person Is Definitely A God.
"Hey. I'm okay, it's okay."
Hug.
Hug.
"So Valar apparently just - don't suck? Occasionally?"
"At least once! They also talked their Eru into contenting himself with tragic literature!"
"Question is how to pull that trick with all the other ones." Squeeze. "And they didn't undemon you or anything?"
"Nope. They're going to work on a war crimes court thing designed for alternate universes and hope I will turn up for that on the optimistic assumption that maybe the court will have a good enough reputation that when I pop out on the other side people will assume it was correct for me to so pop, which would be nice."
"Hope you will turn up for that? So if you don't feel like they've done a good job, you can just - not -"
"Apparently? They said I was free to leave. And that they hoped that when they established the court I might choose to consider myself subject to its jurisdiction."
" - okay." Hug. "We're all stopped-aging - or just super slowed, I think, but it'll do - so we can take our time figuring out what to do for my universe."
"They said a few thousandfold. I feel like this might be awkward if you all don't want to take a few thousand years before going back, it's sort of the reverse of the problem you were expecting."
"Yeah, we discussed it with them, they can also reverse it if we want. I don't think I'll bother but everyone else probably will."
"Well, you're already of age, less benefit to you growing the rest of the way, but I imagine Miranda will want to get around to puberty at some point if only to find out what's all the fuss."
"No doubt. We told them human development in general probably doesn't need delaying, this is just kind of a special case."
Nod.
"Does Miranda know everything's good -"
"Came here first. Where is she, did she come down to get de-aged?"
"Yeah she did. That was a while ago - well, while ago for me -"
Hug. "I should find her then."
"Okay."
And Cam goes and finds his alt and tells her that everything is fine except she has a conflict of interest relative to the forthcoming war crime court design.
And the local Maitimo puts the kids to bed (early: they eye him suspiciously) and reads the notice from the Valar, sent out to a few dozen people who ought to be apprised of these things:
Urgent announcement: there are alternate dimensions. There are 'more than an octillion' of them. There is at least one, fairly capricious, means of travelling between them: an interdimensional bar called Milliways, which occasionally opens its door to people in random worlds. Someone from one such world found the bar, searched through its catalogue of all published works anywhere to find a well-governed dimension, and forked someone from here (with permission of an alternate universe version of the same person) to force the door of the bar here so we could help them.
There are other worlds like ours, except Melkor was paroled and is loose again causing havoc. In the world the petitioner was from, Valinor was destroyed with everyone on it; we are exploring how best to restore it. We are seeking assistance with planning and preparing for immigration from other worlds, developing a system for justice and rehabilitation to deal with people who committed serious war crimes but are safe to contain, and providing other forms of aid to other worlds. Please review and revise for publication.
He checks to make sure everyone was copied who should see this - yep -
"- Dear, did you get this -?"
" - haven't been online, what -"
"Apparently there are more than an octillion other worlds."
" - wow." Flick-flick. "Oh, no."
"It is not exactly good news but it is good that we got the news."
" - yeah - and vaguely flattering that a search through an octillion worlds for a competently governed one turned us up - even if one presumed they were not literally all evaluated for suitability -"
"Yes, going through that many would probably be hard, although it doesn't say how they were searched..."
"Is someone editing this for dissemination or should we do that - aid, immigration, and war crimes trials, do you think the Valar are having silly priorities again or is it that bad out there -"
"Says to review and revise for publication, no one has said they'll take point on that yet. I really thought they were done having silly priorities, but somebody paroling Melkor, apparently without enough security on him..."
Shudder. "One assumes it was underestimating what qualified as sufficient security, which - I could see them having done that - Valinor destroyed with everyone on it isn't something I would have guessed was in his repertoire - maybe we should go ask some clarifications, just to be very sure they are not neglecting something like 'more security for our Melkor' if it's needed -"
"Our Melkor. Yes, let's see if we can find out what's going on in more detail."
"Called a shuttle. An octillion worlds - how many Melkors, do you think -"
"Suppose that depends on how much variance there is. Maybe not too many, maybe most of the worlds are full of nothing but stars and rocks and coral, but..."
Squeeze.
Shuttle.
"I am glad we waited on children."
"Yes. What if they wanted to go see Endorë without spending two and a half Years on a ship each way indeed -"
This gets a giggle out of him. "Fëanáro thinks he has that one all but sorted, too - presumably now he is tossing it aside to figure out this - though it might be useful, really, if we're taking immigrants we'll want to settle more worlds -"
"Maybe one of the other octillion worlds has something we can copy. Do you suppose Fëanáro will be disappointed, if they have..."
"- wonder if there are other hims, if there are other Melkors. If so we can just go bother one in a world where it's 4000 or something -"
"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."
" - oh, we have not checked this yet and might be able to interdict it without interdicting summoning altogether, but - naively a daeva could probably put the summoner in a coma, steal chips, return to their native dimension and reembody their prisoners there."
"...yes that is very scary."
"We have summoning working right now to let all the Dwarves try it once, then we are going to make it stop working again until everyone is very thoroughly informed."
"That sounds about right. ...How unusual is your competence -"
"We are still reading but in addition to Melkor getting paroled it seems like the bad tail end includes Ardas with mass mind control to keep the population docile and the middling range involves not only paroling him but taking fifty Years to fetch him again. And at one point in many Ardas there is an invasion of Valinor and the local Valar ask Eru for aid and he blows up the planet the invaders are departing from, population of ten billion or so, no backups."
"Are there any Ardas more like this one -"
"Presumably. It did not take them that much reading to find this one, filtering on 'did not pardon Melkor'. We will inquire after other Ardas with the Oath Reform Act of 1400 instead of the Parole of Melkor of 1400 and try to follow up with those ones first."
Nod. "Does the arbitrary material object power work to resurrect people who weren't backed up?"
"If they have chips, yes. Not the people on the planet of Númenor, which is the one Eru destroys in some timelines, we don't have a way to get any of them back yet. But there are a lot of magic systems, there is probably something somewhere that can do it -
- the Bar does not contain other publications from societies with an Oath Reform Act -"
"...are the Ardas on the same schedule, they could just be coming up on it -"
"The Ardas are on wildly disparate schedules and they very well could."
"Is the destruction of the Valinor the war crime you had in mind - I'd been guessing that was a Melkor but you didn't actually say, was it not - since apparently some Erus destroy planets -"
"Melkor asked it of a demon that had been summoned to that world, in exchange for a peace treaty."
"A treaty? But - oh, without the oath reform - oh."
"Yes. We have spoken to the demon and are satisfied that he is not a threat to any world he finds in less desperate straits, but it would be beneficial to have a process for putting that sort of situation on the public record and reassuring everyone - and doing right by those who were wronged - and there are going to be a lot of cases like that, Melkors delight in setting societies at each other's throats like that."
"Has anything about the discovery of other worlds cast doubt on the security of the local Melkor's containment -?"
"There are probably magic systems out there somewhere which could be used to break him out. We are considering solutions short of not letting any extradimensional magic work here at all, but that is the solution in place for the time being."
"That'll complicate immigration as a solution to otherworldly problems, I imagine if people are accustomed to having magic they don't want to give it up."
"Lots of worlds have no magic, or the vast majority of their citizens have no magic. But yes, it would. We are regarding the current situation as unstable in many respects.
...one of those respects, so you know, is that in standard Arda timelines the house of Fëanáro commits a fairly impressive array of atrocities. We don't know if they know this yet, and we don't know to what degree they would endorse the actions of their alternate universe versions - it was with unreformed oaths, and our alternate universe versions are pretty dreadful..."
"What precisely is the nature of alternate universe versions - if they do such different things how is the line drawn -"
"The bar in Milliways identifies them. They seem to be the same people modulo circumstances, but some people are changed quite a lot by their circumstances."
"It's some sort of natural category, okay. Are there future events in other Ardas that still seem worth worrying about here despite our irregularity?"
"Don't think so. Most Erus have created aging sapients here by now but I don't think ours is planning to at all, and if he does we will not make the mistake of refusing to fix the aging thing, telling them we could fix the aging thing, and waiting for them to be talked by Sauron into invading Valinor. Fëanáro and company steal a lot of lightleapers - ships that can get to Endorë in five days - and kill twenty thousand people when they do, but that was because no one was letting them leave and Melkor was loose, if they are allowed to leave and Melkor is not loose it seems unlikely. They also swear a series of unwise oaths over a set of chip backups Fëanáro secretly makes, I don't think ours has even made a set of secret chip backups...."
"...well, if he has, at least it's harder here to swear unwise oaths over them. Okay."
"Off to Tirion?"
"I'm very curious to see the magic bar!"
"Of course you are! Stars guide you both."
"Thank you very much."
And off they go. "We should stop and look in on the Maitimo fork, if nothing else to hug him and give him the outline of my notes on what's been going on since his fork date."
"We really should. Poor kid - 1370 - I think he'd probably have given consent even fully informed, but because with loose Melkors in the plural there aren't things that aren't worth it, not because he'd be okay - can you imagine waking up to find it's a yení later and we had the children -"
"I can imagine that. And, yes, it's worth it but I wish they'd landed on someone without that particular issue - even just married and without children would be bad, honestly, missing all that context, although come to think of it I think we could probably pull off a three person arrangement if it came up, seems maybe less tractable for Maitimo -"
Giggle. "I think you'd date a you quite nicely. I doubt he's asked his alt how they want to navigate that, not yet - were they even dating in 1370 -"
"I'd have to look it up. No, I fully expect their arrangement to remain awkwardly unhandled for at least a Year while they're all making themselves busier than they need to be to avoid discussing it."
"That sounds about right. Though, to be fair, there's plenty to occupy oneself with even if one isn't manufacturing distractions."
"I didn't say they'd have to try very hard to be busier than they have to be."
"It sounds like they possibly should not be taking point on war crimes but that leaves plenty ongoing."
"It's possible some people are just dispositionally incapable of war crimes no matter where you put them, but we'll have to sort through more than an octillion worlds to be sure of anyone being one of those. Probably people should recuse themselves from trials concerning their own alts if possible, but an octillion is a lot."
Nod. "And, truth be told - I might. Destroy Valinor to stop him. If you were sure enough -"
Nod, nod.
It's a long flight. Maitimo sends them some books from Milliways on daeva and humans and human societies and human history.
Human history is fascinatingly hideous.
...yeah. "Wow. I guess - they're all so young -"
"Young, short on hope, all alone starting from nothing and dragging themselves up."
"And dead before they have a chance to see any of it."
"At least the long term effects. Poor things."
"When there's no other magic system complicating things it'd do a lot of good to teach summoning, even with, well, the risks -"
"Sounds like it. Give at least some of them a do-over with better safety standards and more time. At least make sure they can eat, my word..."
"Yeah. So many worlds -"
"The scope of it is a bit intimidating."
Hug. "And we have all the time in the world but they don't."
"Yep."
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 -"
The Arda that Cam entered Milliways through was one such until his arrival - again, to the limit of my ability to tell - as was the one whose first visitor was the child Maitimo.
"And are we a one-off Arda?"
Even at the earliest point from which I have publications available, yes.
Sigh.
He comes in. "Oh -"
"Oh, hello!"
"Hello! We know you but I'm developing the suspicion that nobody here knows us - I'm Mirelótë and this is Rúmil -"
"Him I know - you I don't, sorry, my world's Rúmil isn't married - also might be dead, I'm sorry -"
"Huh." She squeezes her husband's hand.
Squeeze. "I think bringing everyone back is just pending on figuring out why your Valar are so incompetent - maybe it's because you don't have Mirelótë -"
"I was holding off on actually saying that..."
"I know," he says smugly. "But I needn't."
" - ah..."
"Hm?"
" - writes things down a lot, kind of quietly smug about being the best person in the world, really dislikes mindreading, would if you were a human on a human planet with summoning tell the whole world about it -"
"I mean, otherwise they die, right -"
"...didn't actually know that part at the time, just the material scarcity thing." Pause. "If I squint you do look kind of like my mom."
"Are they -"
"Think so, yeah - Bar is supposed to tell us these things -"
"Probably next time me or Miranda got in napkin range we'd have been informed." He approaches the Bar.
Yes, Mirelótë is your alt.
"...hi."
"Hi."
He sits back smugly.
"Do we know why Cam comes in three different faces and we're all the same -"
"We have no idea but at least this time I was ready for it, if no two Cams look alike I am going to catch them."
"We're going to need a collective noun, Miranda and I have the same last names but Elves don't even do last names..."
"My mothername is Ambela - I use them interchangeably, whichever is fine -"
"Oh, there you go then, 'bel', we're Bells, I guess."
"We're 'timos'? Doesn't really have the same ring to it. Hi, new Bell. What are you like as an Elf, did the taking forever to grow up drive you nuts?"
"I was born on Endorë, it was faster there, I was already twelve when we got around to leaving. Also I was very adorable."
"I do not doubt it - how old are you, like five thousand -"
"- in short years? Not quite but coming up."
"Thank you for making your Valar not suck."
"You're welcome. I didn't realize it'd matter on quite this scale... I hope they're contagious. They were a little internally..."
"Oh?"
"Well, Oromë was the only one around on the trip to Valinor so I started talking to him, but he was in touch with the others so I had slightly less groundwork with the other thirteen when we landed, and if I wound up talking more to, say, Lórien than the others some decade they'd still be caught up on the invention of formal logic or whatever I was trying."
"You spent five thousand years trying to make your gods not terrible?"
"I did other things too!"
"I mean, it's not a bad thing, it obviously worked and Cam was going to throw himself at some stupid ones, just. That's a lot of patience."
"The Valar are the most concentrated source of ability-to-do-things around and it mattered a lot if they used that intelligently! We did have a negative example to hand!"
"And now you have hundreds of millions of them."
"She also invented writing!"
"But not tengwar, nobody liked my alphabet, Rúmil made letters pretty enough to popularize." Smooch.
"They were very silly to be missing out on it."
" - so in Happy Arda Maitimo has kids."
"No way, really? With who?"
"Didn't ask."
"Do they normally not - oh but they're such good parents -"
"Maitimo flirts with everyone he meets but has never asked anyone out, far as I know."
"...hm."
"Who is it, Sauron?"
"I dunno if it matches but yours was dating someone, but secretly, so maybe you should ask him - he answers his mail pretty regularly despite the time dilations always being against him, I imagine he has a vaguely annoyed demon."
"Oh the poor - is ours the only one anywhere who gets to - Bar, do they ever otherwise -"
I am restricted to publications, Bar reminds her.
"...and there aren't any publications you can verify as belonging to someone who's from a world with presumable-alts of Nóquellë or Aratarya or subsequent siblings -"
I can't find any.
"You seem to be one of very few that averts the war and they both die in the war and the me doesn't ever come back -"
"I see."
"And in the other one we found that didn't have a war I don't think they met, and also they wouldn't have been dating, that one executes people for homosexuality, see."
" - oh. Oh. What the fuck. - that does not in fact answer my question - any of my questions -"
I am so very horrified and so proportionately smug at the same time, Mirelótë tells Rúmil.
Squeeze. Yeah, pretty much - the poor - Maitimo would not cope at all well with that, you know him -
Couldn't even tell his family -
You did so much good.
I hope they're contagious.
Yeah. We don't have enough of you to go around.
He finishes composing a letter to his brother, sighs, sits down. "What's the planned allocation of the door at this point -"
"The non-terrible Valar want to go into little me's Arda and see if they can get their alts up to speed. I wonder if having a live summoning circle syncs the worlds even if the daeva ignores it, so we can nudge Revelation along..."
"I think it must, they've taken varying amounts of time to answer consistent with the standard range. Having a specific summon open for a long time is annoying enough that I'd sooner ask for a volunteer, leaving it live is sort of like trying not to pick at a thread in your outfit. Oh, I should call Miranda down, she'll want to meet Mirelótë -" Computer message.
"That's good to know - have any friends who might do us a favor that is on the surface kind of inexplicable - how are the nonterrible Valar handling summoning, by the way, Mirelóte -"
"Having the Dwarves all do it once, then shutting it down pending safety review."
"I guess that's reasonable given how you don't have scarcity."
"And pending a check on whether you can bring a live chip back to Hell with you."
"Oh, I can have Minor check that."
"Yeah, he should be dismissed before the staff have a shift change anyway."
Hey, will you ask Minor if he minds coming down here for another experiment?
Okay!
Timothy wants to know if you mind coming down here for another experiment. I don't know where here is but I guess you probably do!
Timothy has a perfectly good computer.
Okay? Should I tell him that?
So I don't know why he's using you as a telepathy relay.
Oh I know! It's because he's jealous because mes really like being telepathic.
How do you know that, you're like three, you can't be that good at people yet.
I know if I wasn't telepathic I'd be sad? And I know chip Elves think my version suits me better, they've said so.
Minor appears. "What are we testing?"
"Your ability to steal souls."
"Oh, good idea - it shouldn't make a difference if it's from an actual person, right -"
"It might make a difference if it's a mind or a naively conjured chip but you don't have to dig it out of anyone's brain, no."
"I don't know how to make the read-writer -"
"There's one in my room, just go use that one."
And away he stomps. It's only a tiny bit stompy.
"What happened -"
"Long story. Your gods couldn't fix it, at least not naively."
"I still need to do that genetic survey."
"I don't think there's anything urgently pending - I don't want to ask Minor to hang out in Hell forever, it'll upset him, know anyone who might not mind..."
"To have a summon open? I can ask some people -" He starts composing notes.
Miranda trots down the stairs. "Are you the Elf me?" she asks Mirelótë.
"I am if you're an alt of Cam - I assume this is transitive -"
"Seems to be."
"What's being an Elf like?"
"I haven't talked with either of you enough to tease out and attribute the differences!"
"Elves: get upset if things are insufficiently pretty, very patient and a little slow-paced or at least okay with things taking forever, sing a lot, dramatic, mope for a long time, have silly romantic narratives, are uncomfortable with shampoo commercials, prudish, precious about literally everything..."
"I for one think the moping and the thing you probably mean by 'silly romantic narratives' work much better in fiction than reality - a Century, Rúmil, really - what do you mean by precious -"
"Uh, murderers should go to prison, people occasionally cheat on their spouses, giving people a per-person stipend just encourages the poor to have more children, it's probably reasonable to draw and quarter people for treason -"
"I did read a little about humans before I got here. ...But I don't know what 'drawing and quartering' is."
"It's a form of execution in which you are dragged by horses to the place of execution and then chopped into four pieces, usually in front of a crowd."
"...okay, do you actually think that's reasonable or were you just looking for a reaction -"
"That's not an Elf thing anyway, it is really very horrible."
"I mean, given the resources we have, no, not reasonable at all, if you're a Muggle king reasonable though not really any the less horrible for that."
"I can imagine tolerating execution under the sort of dire conditions humans have been known to work with, there doesn't seem to be any reason to bring the horses and the butchery into it."
"I am not especially interested in explaining things we can instead end, but public executions are astonishingly popular and well-attended and enjoyed, and talked about, and the 'talked about' is important."
"What do you think, am I being precious about that," she asks her alts.
"No."
"Maybe a little."
"2179 is also precious. Less so, though, they don't censor the shampoo commercials or books containing socially inappropriate conduct."
"All our books depict inappropriate conduct, people are competing for Eru's approval. I can hardly think of any books that feature well-adjusted people communicating effectively and overcoming obstacles."
"Not literally all, some people write for audiences other than Eru. ...Er, I don't know how you think we come to decisions about what shampoo to buy but there are advertisements..."
" -oh, I want to see an Elf shampoo commercial - recommend us a company, Cam made a big screen to watch Atriama on -"
"...Spring Dew?"
The TV ad output of Spring Dew is now playing.
A flock of doves dive through the sky in formation. Someone tilts a basket of flower petals and they fall in slow motion to the ground. Waves crash against a beach.
And there is a totally nude Elf with very carefully braided hair, not a strand loose, lifting a raspberry to his lips.
"Spring Dew," says a pleasant female voice.
Water is running down the Elf's back! (The Elf's hair remains carefully untouched.) Shampoo is pouring out of the bottle in a glorious swirl, into the Elf's palm. (The Elf's hair remains carefully untouched.) The flower petals and doves make another appearance. The Elf sets the shampoo bottle back on the side of the shower, and smiles.
He bursts into giggles.
"Oh my god why did this not occur to me before. Oh my god."
"I don't know what you were expecting!"
"We probably actually shouldn't show you human ones, it'd be inappropriate."
"Ah."
"Okay honestly though should I braid my braids into more braids - and tell Karen to if she wants to meet Elves, she usually just has it down -"
"You're fine, at least at the age you are, although it'd look prettier done up more elaborately - I can get used to humans wearing their hair down if it'd be very inconvenient for them otherwise, or if they don't like how they look braided, or something."
"We can accommodate each others' nudity taboos, there's probably even a charm for it."
"I'm very good at the braiding charm, you don't think I sit around all day every few months and do this by hand, do you?"
"Care to teach the rest of us? Does Cam get a pass because his hair is so short, should I just cut mine -"
"You look indecent, Cam looks disfigured, take your pick."
Miranda pulls a wand and aims it at Timothy's head and says "Plectere," and now he has a simple braid down his back.
He puts an arm protectively around Cam. "Elves. You seem okay on the prettiness and singing front so far, maybe that's literally just Michael's alts."
"I do sing, but perhaps not as much as most Elves do - nothing here is intolerably ugly - I'm sure you have some aesthetic threshold, though, it's probably just lower -"
" -I'm not sure we do? Like, aesthetic preferences, yes, aesthetic threshold, no."
"Not at all? Like - not just visually, because one can generally close one's eyes and darkness isn't so bad - really terrible noise or something -"
" - could be loud enough to be physically unpleasant? I wouldn't voluntarily listen to bad music constantly but I don't think it'd be deeply unpleasant -"
"I'd have to look it up but I think it only gets to 'illegal to inflict' with respect to Revelation if it's too loud to fall asleep."
"It's illegal to inflict excessively loud music - the future is so adorable."
"It's illegal to deprive people of sleep, including through the use of music," clarifies Cam.
"Okay, that's actually very reasonable once you adopt the premise that prisons aren't supposed to torture people."
"That is such a weird sentence."
"My world had a thing called Dementors. When they're around they make it impossible to experience happiness; when they get closer the only thing you can think about is the worst moment of your life. We had them as guards at the prison we sent people to for crimes like 'healing Muggles' and, to be fair, also 'hunting Muggles for sport'."
"...yes, that is worse, if for some reason you needed confirmation..."
"Most of them are in space now instead but I killed one."
"When I first heard about societies that would not just not actively prefer prison be torture but would make rules you couldn't torture the prisoners I was so delighted - it was really good, knowing humanity would get there eventually-"
"Yes, that is absolutely an improvement and I am very proud of the humans who implemented it and it's still a - strange concept that it's conceptually possible to imprison people without torturing them - I suppose if you just made the prison really really big -"
" - oh, humans are just pretty much okay being imprisoned. Like, we won't be happy about it, but honestly if you get food and visitors we won't be that unhappy either -"
"I believe you! It's just weird!"
"What's the essential feature of a prison - like, our school has rules about staying on the grounds without special permission until we're of age, would that be a problem -"
"It's a spectrum, not a bright line, but 'I could do this but it'll have repercussions' is better than 'I couldn't do this', more space is better than less space, prettier space is obviously better than uglier space, a specific occasion on which you can leave is better than indefinite - of those space is by far the most important consideration, so if your school's a single building that wouldn't work but if it's a campus most people'd be fine for a few months."
"Are Elves also just claustrophobic, or is being in a very small room fine as long as you could leave whenever?"
"My father has been known to not leave his office for weeks on end. But I guarantee you that if you barred the door - and he noticed, I suppose - he'd be dead inside four days."
"...yeah this continues weird."
"We will just have to be weird to one another, I suppose."
"You are a fairly depressing flavor of weird, too, don't do the talk show circuit unless you want all of Valinor vaguely worked up about doing something for humans with no clear concept of what that'd entail..."
"What's a talk show? ...And what would they want to do?"
"Televised interviews. People would be upset about mortality, of course, but - if you fix that it's fixed, whereas the accidental children - thing - is sort of inherently unfixable -"
"Revelation has that sorted for those who want it, now, statistically negligible cases."
"Wizards needn't have children without meaning to either but Muggles in our world still do."
"It sounds like maybe the thing to do is to get everyone to take a couple years' intensive training in summoning and infrastructure and so on and then go visit lots and lots of worlds with humans - assuming we can find a way to access them -"
"Yes, I'm hoping there's a way to get around without needing to do it through this excellent but small and singular door, it makes it impossible to meaningfully parallelize."
"And while we can at some cost force the door to any worlds with us, most human worlds we have no way to reach - unless the Valar can figure out how to resurrect people, but they did not give the impression of having even promising avenues to do that, except maybe talking Eru into handing them a new power."
"Although apparently lots of worlds have us and humans too, presumably so we can lament their design in an aesthetic manner."
"Findekáno ends up adopting a couple whole tribes of them, they fight together in the war. The brevity of their lives is indeed much lamented. All the other Erus are clearly having a glorious time of it."
Sigh.
Yeah.
"I'm told I have a lovely narrative arc."
"You poor thing, nobody deserves a lovely narrative arc."
"Are we expecting the other Erus to object if we take their lovely conclusions and fix them -"
"It's probably safer to let the Valar sound that one out. I think Erus sort of keep them as pets, which is a step up from playthings."
Nod.
"It must be really nice to have competent Valar. In retrospect they're practically customized. Made a point of saying the truth effect was noninvasive."
"They've really made a lot of progress with communication in the last yení in particular, Mirelótë, what was the breakthrough -"
"Uh, Vairë liked common-knowledge logic puzzles. And those tapestries that are different tapestries on the back. And then I sort of chipped away at theory of mind stuff from there - Lórien and Aulë too, some, and propagated to the others from those."
"You are a great gift to our world and I suspect the only reason no other Ardas were graced with such a gift is because the Erus noticed it ruined all the tragedy."
"I am now oddly confused about why I was allowed to exist even the once!"
"Ours must've had - slightly off-norm tastes? There is variance - maybe he liked the idea of being persuaded to give up his power and beyond that not being able to see the future at all - maybe he has some colossal tragedy planned, but - I don't think so -"
"Well, maybe we can import lots of sad stories and traumatized immigrants to keep him happy."
"We can import so many immigrants - Cam, how long do you think people need to study summoning before we can be really certain they won't make any mistakes, what blessings might help speed that up -"
"If you don't need specialty bindings you can just mass produce circles with a demon or a printer and have people finish them, that's really hard to mess up by accident. If you do need specialties, I used to teach a semester-long course but that was padded with, like, daeva cultural facts."
"So, pretty quick. - you can presumably still mess up at the negotiation stage -"
"Yes. That's also in the semester course but some people just have a lot of trouble speaking precisely - you can cover for that with templates for task and payment that you draw up in advance and don't deviate from. Limits your ability to interview the daeva when you daren't say anything agreementy."
"A semester lasts a short year?"
"Less than half that. For a few hours a week plus some homework."
"So world access is really the only meaningful bottleneck, here."
"There are ten of our father working on portals. He expects he can get it eventually, which suggests the Valar can too - though I think he'd be annoyed if they beat him to it -"
"It might cheer him that we have lightleapers and you don't. And the Silmarils, you don't have those either, your version of my father was seriously careless with his time."
"Not having pressing emergencies probably inspires that."
"Yeah. It was horribly unhealthy for all of us. Hopefully you're a bit more resilient to it, since you have more backup and can't be uploaded?"
"And Eru's going to disable the retro-forking thing except for one volunteer in case it's ever really important again."
"Oh, good for him, that's legitimately useful. And terrifying, I was not clear on the extent to which omnipotence included going back and changing hundreds of millions of specific things about the past without changing anything else - he isn't changing anything else -"
"Nothing else came up in conversation but I am not up on Eru-domestication parameters."
"Well, nor am I -"
"He doesn't do things that are inconsistent with people's memories as of the time he is asked to change them. So your existence will have to be special-cased but it'll just become the case that we can't be retro-forked any more."
"Useful. Once that's done, Cam, do you want a chip, they're lovely -"
"Yeah, my reservations were all upload and fork based, and even with that I was really tempted by some of the blessings."
"Your alt and I both put big bounties on development of better memory and attentional-capacity stuff, and people delivered!"
"Just shy of eidetic!"
"Do you still take notes?"
"Yes, just shy isn't exactly, and the memory blessings work noticeably better on things like 'this event happened in this order' than 'my thought process about it went like so'. Plus for anything that isn't sensitive writing's still ideal for asynchronous or one-to-many communication."
"Our definition of 'secure communications' should probably be adjusted now for demons."
"Your kind of Elf works fine with the nifty thought-controlled computers that cryptographically secure stuff versus demons but it won't work retroactively if someone digs up your history, sorry."
"Oh well."
"How do we get those computers -"
"I make them for you. The wizards don't have them only because we're waiting to see if anything happens to Michael, who got his from a different demon."
"Has anyone figured out interfacing with our computers and our internet -"
"If yours are going to turn out inexplicably the same as ours, yeah."
"There's a lot of inexplicable sameness going around."
"Written Quenya appears to be the same whether you, Rúmil, or my father invent it."
"I mentioned I didn't invent the tengwar - I had a fast shorthand instead, it seemed to me that as long as the words I was representing were pretty the symbols just needed to be serviceable."
"Gets you most of the personal benefits of writing but not the benefits of societal adoption."
"Translation: Elves would not learn to read until someone made them a sufficiently beautiful alphabet."
"Well, not commonly - there's sort of three classes of people, ones who want it even if it's not beautiful and there's nothing to read yet, ones who'd pick it up if it were practical - that is to say popular - even if it weren't an art in its own right, and ones who'll hold out until it's gorgeous, and you have to get the third kind to get the second. Do you have something against Elves, or...?"
"I think you are adorable and I am fascinated by the priorities people have when they and everyone around them is not dying."
"And he's jealous."
"Of some bits."
"Elves are actually like that even when people are in fact dying, my Arda's Fëanáro compared asking Elves to go without prettiness to asking humans to go without sleep, it's just not sustainable even on medium-sized timescales."
"How do they ever get space travel without demons -"
"Well, the ships Oromë brought us to Valinor in were not conventionally engineered and they were huge and lovely, they had whole mini-ecosystems in each one, I used to chase flying squirrels around when we were en route - and those continued to exist after we landed. The liners that go to and from for tourists are smaller but they have fewer people in them - we did have a lot of unmanned flight first though - and a space station we got Aulë to put up so we could have little shuttles tolerable for a few hours, which docked there and then we had bigger ships that we assembled in orbit and took the rest of the way."
"That's really impressive."
"You can chase flying squirrels. Miranda and I are both really clumsy - my extra appendages help but I was just as bad as her before I died -"
"...I'm a really mediocre dancer?"
"Maybe it's clumsy for the species?"
"Seems like it. Flying squirrels aren't that fast, if I couldn't even chase them that would have been very hard."
"Are there, like, blessings for it - I'm not clear on how those work - the magic Elves have magic music, including some for grace and balance..."
"Ooh, that sounds so useful - there are blessings for it, yes, they do help, I did sometimes trip when chasing squirrels and never caught them unless I had help but I could catch them now if I tried again."
"The blessings are the main thing I'm jealous of, it just sounds - really nice to be able to customize your mind."
"It's great. I hope there's a way to make them more generally available. Does the music work for everyone - is there some trick to it we just never stumbled on -"
"It works for everyone but we're pretty sure we'd have stumbled on it, it's finicky but not that finicky and they developed it beside Cuivienen. Composing it may be a magic-Elf-only thing."
"How odd. Well, I want to learn the magic songs -" She adds it to her to-do list.
And he comes downstairs and goes over to the Security office.
"Hi Minor! I have an Elf alt!"
He looks between Rúmil and Mirelótë uncertainly.
"Hello there, I'm Mirelótë Ambela - either name is fine - and this is my husband Rúmil, and it has been a long time since Curufinwë was that small but I have no idea if you'd tolerate being picked up."
"You could bother the really tiny Maitimo outside, I bet he wouldn't mind at all."
"I will probably do that."
He continues on Security-office-wards.
"Tiny Maitimo will probably be delighted and if you think it's a good idea you can talk him out of going to Lórien for conversion therapy, I wasn't sure if I should and was going to ask one of the Elf alts."
"Well this multiverse is a nightmare from start to finish."
"They just keep doing that, huh? I talked them into suspending it pending a review and they just - never started up again."
"Yes, they do. I wasn't sure if -"
"Not sure either, honestly."
"- if -"
"- if, given that he'll hate himself for it forever, it's fair to encourage him not to change it? One way to solve this is to just talk them into immigrating, if the Valar aren't contagious in the right direction, but if mes are going to grow up in an intensely homophobic society we plausibly just shouldn't be gay."
Mirelótë shudders delicately. "- asking one of your Elf alts from a - a common Arda sounds like the way to go here, if the Valar are not correctly contagious."
"I wrote - we need names for worlds - the other Elf alt, the one currently in Revelation."
"I've been toying with calling it Singularity."
"Well that's morbid."
"I'm aware."
"Uniquely identifying, though, let us hope."
"That's the idea."
"Is it a little much to call mine 'Sanity'."
"Seems to fit."
"Ours could be Wand or something."
"There're other wizarding worlds but I don't see how we'd reach them, so - yeah."
"If more of them enter the picture we can switch to kinds of wood. We could do that preemptively? Hazel?"
"Works for me."
(In the security office a demon vanishes and a chip clatters to the floor.)
(Cam idly checks his mail.)
Can't steal souls. I'd like to come back now, please.
"Demons cannot steal souls. Who wants to summon Minor?"
"Me, I haven't summoned anybody yet."
And she completes a provided circle.
And that's a demon! "So, one fewer problem to worry about."
"It's a relief."
"Yeah. And we can cover for resurrections by saying it's the competent Valar doing it."
"Yeah, good plan."
He goes back upstairs.
"I'm going to go get that gene survey underway."
"Thank you."
Cam kisses him and then goes upstairs.
Miranda hops up onto a barstool next to Mirelótë and commences the apparently traditional exchange of miscellaneous Bell information.
And the Valar would like the door closed so they can go talk to their soul Arda alts, is that possible?
He lets the door close.
And they come on into the bar!
"A little Maitimo as promised! Hello, I'm Mirelótë Ambela, either's fine - I think you probably don't have one of me at home but what about Rúmil?"
"Hi!!!! I know a Rúmil. He's not married, though, are you his wife? You're pretty! It's nice to meet you!"
"I am! And you are terribly adorable, it's been a while since the Maitimo from my world was little, it's good to meet you too."
He beams at her.
"Nice to meet you."
"It really is."
"Likewise. Have you got a name for your Arda?"
"Not yet. We're the only flat one so far but we take it it's a category."
"Seems like it. And Bar says yours is the standard sort at least so far."
"Hmm, really? It seemed, talking to some of the ones from the other not-flat Valinor, like your version makes more physical sense."
"It does, but yours is commoner."
"Huh." And he opens the door.
And Mandos and Lórien sweep through.
"I wonder how long to expect them to take - should've asked for an estimate -"
"What are they doing?"
"They're going to go talk to your Valar about some things they have learned."
Bounce bounce.
So cute. She scoops him up.
He beams at her and clings delightedly (and without any hair-touching, of course). "I'm glad the Valar are fixing everything now.'
"My Valar are especially good at that, that's why they went looking for my world."
"Our Valar are good so far, but I think some people were afraid they'd stop being good later."
"Well, my Mandos and Lórien are going to catch them up on some important job skills and hopefully it'll all work out."
Nodnod.
"What year is it in your world-"
"1512."
"Oh, I can imagine they'll have a lot to teach ours."
Cam comes downstairs. "It has been a week!" he announces, mostly to Timothy. "How long has it been here - I missed you - but I think I have isolated wizard biology."
" - like ten minutes -" hug -" - do tell -"
"...how much context do you want, I doubt you have learned much epigenetics in the last ten minutes -"
" - explain it such that it will make sense to my Elf alts?"
"I don't even think my kind of Quenya has that word yet."
"I'm gonna guess he didn't mean you, yeah."
"The really important thing is if I can get Minor to understand it, because - don't count on this, now, it might not work at all - it is possible that with sufficient concentration you could re-wizard if you knew what to concentrate on."
" - I think he'll be sufficiently motivated and will manage to pick it up. What do you concentrate on -"
"Uh, the reason people look like their parents, among other results, is a sort of chemical set of instructions called a genome in every cell of the body. Except the red blood cells. Daeva do not have genes, by default, but ex-human daeva at least have genomes that used to be theirs. Indestructibility applies to whatever seems to us to be part of our body plan and it's a little challenging to add things to it for extended periods of time, and if we slip whatever is newly destructible doesn't last very long because we're not doing biology in a way that supports things that can't cheat at staying alive with magical support. But I think if he really really wanted to he could get genes into at least some of his cells and since there does seem to be a wizard gene that might do the trick. ...This also implies that with sufficiently sophisticated gene therapy arbitrary humans could become wizards."
He kisses him.
Various people are visibly uncomfortable!
He's mostly just confused!
Since Cam is a her and she has known her Maitimo since he was a baby this is slightly weird!
"And humans becoming wizards wouldn't have to concentrate on it?"
"Nope! Genes are generally self-maintaining."
"Maybe we can get the nice Valar to nope mind-affecting wizardry and then make literally everyone a wizard, that'd be very satisfying - Cam, does that mean you can try to become a wizard yourself, instead of getting Minor's hopes up -"
"I could try it but I don't have any way to test the results since I know no wizardry and do not own an attuned wand."
"You can do at least simple spells with someone else's wand, won't be good but will be sufficient to know if it works."
"I still wouldn't really trust a negative result in case it matters that you spend a decade hanging out having wizard genes before you try to do anything, but I guess a positive result would be nice to have before telling Minor."
"And you'd be a wizard."
"And I'd be a wizard."
"What do you need to do to try it?"
"Various medical stuff and then trying hard and believing in myself."
"Do you want to do that somewhere where we won't make all the Elves uncomfortable?"
"It's not -"
"We love you no matter what."
Confused!
"It's just a little weird for alt reasons, not discomforting." Bounce bounce the tiny Maitimo. "Do you have a question?" she asks him.
Why's everyone stressed and what am I supposed to say?
Since Timothy is a you and he kissed a boy, people think that you might want to kiss boys when you grow up, and your Valar haven't learned yet that this is okay so people from your world are nervous about it. Mine are going to tell yours, and then we hope yours'll tell everybody else from your world, and by the time it matters it'll be fine. You don't have to say anything.
Squeeze. I like having something to say when everyone's stressed.
I know. I can't think of anything that would calm everybody down at once, though.
If there were something one of the grownup mes would probably have said it but there might be something you can only get away with when you're small and cute.
I don't think so. Has this been coming up a lot?
I guess? There were the people who were upset and wanted me to promise to go to Lórien so I said I would but then Cam was upset...
I suppose you could say you'll go to my Lórien and that might at least get a laugh.
Wiggle wiggle. I don't think it'd fix the thing they wanted Lórien to fix, though?
No, mine stopped doing that.
I'm confused.
My Lórien used to change people who wanted to kiss boys if they were boys, so they wouldn't want that anymore, because he thought that they couldn't get married and be happy. They can, though, my one of you has a husband and two children. So Lórien stopped changing people like that because he didn't need to in order to let them be happy.
Oh.
"I'm happy," he announces, and wiggles loose.
Awww. She relinquishes the smol without protest.
"We can ask your Valar how long they expect it to take, unless that would be rude."
"I was thinking I ought to have asked; they shouldn't mind. I, er, explained time."
"Oh, good, we've been trying to do that."
"There were a lot of inferential steps."
"Hopefully it works better when a set that does understand talks to a set that doesn't."
"I'm hoping. It was a very worthwhile project but I don't really want to do it again. Let alone four hundred million more times."
Shudder.
...she leans out the door to see if hers are in range to ask how things are going.
Hey! This is a very interesting world, these Valar have more powerful magic locally but don't have anything like the range. They care about the things we care about, it seems to be a combination of deficits of understanding and a different divine plan.
How different is the plan, and is the Eru going to make things difficult -?
He hasn't commented at all yet. We asked them and they thought it might be the case that he wouldn't have let his Nelyafinwë have a Milliways door if he was not at least - open to - whatever interesting effects that might bring. So hopefully we can talk him around to our plan.
Makes sense. Do you suppose that optimism should reasonably extend to any world we can access via the forking trick and Milliways?
I think so. It doesn't seem like our Eru knew about all the other worlds, so it seems like the same can be assumed of other Erus. and once they know there is a world where their - original script - has played to completion maybe they will be all right with the other ones going differently. It might be harder with Erus who like ours were doing something original to begin with. Do you want to ask Bar how many Ardas are one-offs?
It'll only be a lower bound, but sure -
She goes, she comes back. She can identify one million fourteen thousand seven hundred ninety which seem to her plausibly unique.
Okay. So those ones might be harder to interfere with. It might be that a problem would be as overt as "when we try to open the door to that world, it refuses to open" or it might be that we would make some progress and then experience some sort of tragic, dramatic reversal of fortune. That seems like a concern in all worlds we try to contact - willingness to go off script does not mean willingness to abandon hurting people for their stories.
Okay. I'm glad you're finding the local Valar friendly; thank you for the update.
Of course.
I think Cam is curious what would have happened if he'd gone there first.
Pause.
They think they could pretty finely affect his powers - moreso than we could, actually, we were braced to survive and fix a black hole but we didn't actually have a way to prevent one - and without understanding how you could work for Melkor without sharing goals with him, they would probably have made his magic stop working and held him in Lórien while they tried to understand what all this meant. Oh, and offered to let him go if he agreed to them changing his mind so he thought it'd been a wrong thing to do, we're explaining to them why that's a bad idea. And they'd have put the other Valinor back - they might have needed to rescue and consult their local alts first, they really really don't understand any physics - and their first thought would be to interdict summoning again, but as soon as someone pointed out mortals needed it, they agreed that making daeva powerless near Valinor was a less intrusive way of achieving what they wanted, I think they would have landed on that even without understanding things better.
And then they'd have spent Years trying to figure out what to do because of not understanding urgency. And given Cam the run of Valinor once he seemed to be visibly suffering from containment to Lórien, they think - they're confused about what demons need and so are we -
That's better than he'd feared, thank you.
They parole Melkor because they think even with everything he did, there ought to be some hope of redemption. They are very confused about how to do justice but they're trying - I think maybe after long enough we get there even without your help, but I'd expect it'd take ten, twenty thousand Years...
I have no idea where we'd be at that point, did you find any Ardas that far along when you were looking?
Yes, we mostly give up on meddling in Endorë once all the Maiar inclined to do evil there are at last contained or destroyed, and ignore it entirely, and eventually everyone is reembodied except Fëanáro and some of his children - by their preference -
Their rather circumstantially constricted preference, I imagine -
I think so, but it looks like it will be complicated to retrieve them even if we try it.
Right. We can start with more urgent less complicated targets, perhaps.
There are, it appears, no shortage at all of those.
And she reports on the friendliness of the local Valar to those assembled.
He hugs Cam. "Leave him in a forest? Am I missing something?"
"Lórien's - friendly. It adapts itself to whatever will be most - conducive to your wellbeing, as it can estimate it - at the moment. It's nice if you're stressed and want to wander through a forest encountering picturesque hidden valleys and secret waterfalls and exactly the right concentration of cute grazing animals, it'd be obnoxious as a sort of halfhearted punishment."
"That sounds a little more full-featured than ours, which I can enjoy for about two weeks if I have company along, so Cam would presumably go stir-crazy in a few days without the ability to even make himself a book."
"Which one assumed they would anticipate, however incompetent." Sigh.
"Valar don't really get bored. Or get boredom."
"Are this Arda's Valar about typical for level of suck?"
"For this point in the timeline, yes. This was a typical Arda of the most common type. The Valar later get - not exactly inherently worse but they rack up some terrible mistakes."
"The mind-control thing -"
"They have a tendency to interpret many complex problems as 'the problem is that this person is sad', or 'the problem is that this person is not listening to us', and consider the problem solved if those things are changed without much path-dependency. I had to get really roundabout to make initial progress on that, lots of appealing to Eru's intentions in creating people who would make choices and so on."
"Didn't end up mattering that Eru's actual intentions were - entertainment?"
"No, by the time that came out they'd developed enough nuance to appreciate other lines of argument. I mean, at the time I didn't know Eru was like he is either."
"He usually stays out of it, looks like."
"He got a lot more participatory when he shrank. If you ignore the thing where he originally managed his taste in literature with live subjects he's sort of fun, really."
"His idea of a great narrative arc for mes is, ah."
"It's a bit much to ignore even without knowing that but many people find him disarmingly... silly."
"We get along."
He shakes his head. "Okay. He built a world that could someday outgrow him, that's something."
"Would I have been allowed visitors in Lórien?"
"Possibly but not necessarily."
"I could at least make them hedge out all kinds of variants on paper airplanes.
This way's much nicer."
Cam hugs him.
"Now we should figure out if you can make yourself a wizard."
"Sure. Do you feel a need to supervise my bone marrow transplants etcetera?"
"Do they need supervising?"
"Not especially."
"I think I shall come anyway."
"Somehow I anticipated this. It will be gross, FYI." Stairsward.
"I will hold your hand and watch more Elven shampoo commercials. Unless that will be distracting."
"Nah, that's fine."
They go upstairs.
Cam transfuses and grafts things. It looks terribly uncomfortable but he's apparently well anesthetized.
There're quite a few curses that are more gruesome than actually unpleasant. He sits with him and watches and luxuriates in everything going splendidly.
Eventually Cam says, "Okay, that's everything I can do without actual amputations, which I'd rather skip if I can get away with it. What's a good test for whether it worked, quick before I forget to meditate on how very important having nuclei is to my body map?"
He hands him his wand.
Cam takes it.
And it trails purplish, acrid-smelling smoke.
He bursts into laughter. "You should try one of Miranda's, it'll - work better - I love you."
Cam hands it back. "It doesn't like me but it acknowledged my existence!" Kiss.
"Wands usually don't like other people, I'm just guessing alts'll be an exception." Kiss. "If not we'll just have to kidnap an Ollivander."
"Kidnap a what?"
"Wandmakers - no actual kidnapping would need to be involved but we might in fact want to relocate them, I have this strange feeling lots of people will want to be wizards."
"You don't say. Do you think I should just tell Minor, or borrow one of Miranda's wands and show him?"
"Just show him, it'll be funnier."
"And it is appropriately compassionate to optimize for that?"
"You're giving him his magic back, he won't care at all how you demonstrate as much and it is probably possible to exploit that too much but you're not going to by accident."
"Okay. Do wands only do that thing the first time you grab them, I don't see yours remarking on how happy it is to see you every time you cast something, that'd imply Minor and Miranda and I all need to be in a room without him knowing why -"
"Yeah they do - tell him we have more demoning tests, meet you both in the main bar?"
So Cam messages Miranda and also Minor and down they go!
Elves are hanging around reading.
To pass the time Cam asks Bar if there is such a thing as a half chip Elf half human and if so can he get something on their genetic properties so he can compare and contrast thanks - read read.
He comes downstairs. "What else is there to test?"
"Waiting for Miranda, would rather not explain twice."
And then Miranda comes down and trots over to them and hands Cam a wand.
Its tip lights up in a rapidly expanding sphere of soft yellow light that swallows Cam's arm up to the shoulder before it shrinks back to nothing again.
"This involves several hours of gruesome medical procedures - possible it can be cut down, I was guessing - and constant low-key concentration on something you probably don't know enough biology to concentrate on correctly yet, it will probably need redoing if you fall asleep and definitely need redoing if you stop concentrating correctly while awake," says Cam, handing Miranda back her wand, "it's possible you will find that something is different about the quality or controllability or whatever of your magic, disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer known to the state of California to cause cancer void where prohibited etcetera."
"The state of California? Anyway I will learn the biology and concentrate on the thing thank you thank you you really are a Miranda -"
(Miranda preens.)
"The state of California thing is a joke I felt inclined to make even though literally no one in this entire bar would get it, ignore it. Bio." He hands Minor a book. "I don't know what fraction of this is necessary but it's probably most straightforward to read the entire thing, let me know if you have questions."
"Okay!!!!" Bounce bounce.
"And you're welcome." Wag wag.
"Can all daeva be wizards now -"
"I do not know at this time how you'd do it with a daeva who didn't use to be a human. It might be doable especially if it turns out fewer than all of the gruesome medical procedures were necessary, but it's less simple."
Nodnod. He clings to the book. "Thank you so much." And off to go read it.
Miranda hugs him. "Do you wanna learn to do spells now?"
"Seems useful. I'm not sure how long I can hold onto the concentration but I seem to have managed this long."
"Where d'you want to start -"
"I have no idea what a reasonable curriculum would look like!"
"Uh, for Transfiguration one starts with turning matchsticks into needles, for Charms by levitating things, for Potions by brewing wart cures and so on..."
"You mean I no longer need suffer through all these warts?"
"Actually a lot of the potions curriculum is constrained by 'will blow up and kill you if you do it wrong' stuff being reserved for more advanced students so you can skip straight to - hmm, we were thinking Polyjuice would have commercial applications..."
"Yes, it'll sell like hotcakes."
"Something not-Unforgivable to bribe demons with!"
" - uh, the rest of us are rather grasping for context, here -"
"Gene therapy results in Hazel-type magic powers; demons cannot make magical objects and will become less challenging to trade with if more people have these powers. Previous magic-based trading with demons has involved among other things the consensual use of a dangerous and illegal spell with recreational applications."
"Ah, okay. Congratulations on your magic powers!"
"Thank you!"
"Things to trade demons sound useful to accumulate, if we do find ways to go visit a thousand worlds..."
"Yes. Of course eventually demons in general may figure out how to wizard themselves but it's still more labor-intensive than would make it trivial - sort of like fairies can bake just fine but it's possible to pay them in cookies."
"And some of the spells aren't easy to learn and some potions are just plain tedious."
"I mean, it's not conceptually impossible that a wizard demon can just appear potions and have them work, I have no idea how the magic enters the potion - do they all have magic ingredients -"
"Yeah - but Muggles can't make them even with the ingredients so it's not just that -"
"It'll afford some experimentation."
"Shame how all of us hate that."
"It'll be so horrible, I'm afraid, Timothy, hold me."
He waves his wand, instead, to tug Cam over and into his arms. "We're going to fix the whole multiverse."
"Oh noooooo." Hug.
"I was interviewing angels who'd want some tractable kind of payment for a recurring job answering summons on my world - preferable to teaching people to summon random ones, and we can obfuscate enough of the process that they can't easily rederive it. If you want to help-"
"You're out of paper circles, or did you have something else in mind?"
"Payment, my odds of getting anything out of Minor are approximately the same as my chances of spontaneously manifesting demonic powers myself."
"Please don't spontaneously manifest demonic powers, you'd falsify my theory about daeva type sorting. I am happy to pay your angels."
"What're you betting I'd be?"
"Did I not say? I'd bet fairy."
"We'll probably find out sometime. Okay." Kiss. And to his alt, "want to help?"
"That sounds like so much fun, yes I would - Rúmil, Mirelótë, want to come, it seems like a good thing to be familiar with even aside from getting to meet lots of angels -"
"Sure, why not."
"It sounds interesting."
Outside! Circle! "Do you have an explanation of how everything works -"
"Just the basics."
"Cam's been making the circles because he knows how and it's important to get exactly - most daeva are perfectly friendly but they're both unused to spending time around fragile people and - more in the case of demons - filtered for less friendliness among the ones who bother to take summons - what would you pay a demon with -"
"- concerts?"
"Concerts work! They're not a first choice if you have something else on hand because in Revelation you have to escort a daeva you're paying in live performance, so you have to buy two tickets and hang out with a daeva whose company you may or may not personally enjoy, but it's totally a thing."
" - commissions for things, animals..."
"Animals used to work really well but have been declining in value over time as the daeva worlds develop populations of the species people are fond of. If we find alien animals there'll be a resurgence, and some people like obscure species. Commissions are very popular but in the case of demons you want to be willing to work to fairly exacting and potentially high-context specifications lest your demon go 'yeah or I could rummage around in the library of Hell and find something I haven't read yet'."
"So most demons who take summons are pretty much doing so for fun?"
"Some of them. Others are looking for a chance to do something nasty to somebody who isn't indestructible."
" - is there a way to filter -"
"Your options are 'random' or 'somebody in particular', some people make it their business to go through randoms and interview them and publish lists of somebodies in particular and what Broadway musicals they want to see and what certifications they have etcetera."
"And there's no real mechanism to remove rapists and murderers from circulation - you can try to summon them under a binding but they don't have to accept it, and it's not as if Hell has any law enforcement itself."
"If you have a hundred live circles all for the same person open at once and just leave them there odds are fair that eventually they will find this sufficiently annoying to show up unless they expect it to be really, really unpleasant on the other end."
"Having summons pending is unpleasant?"
"Not exactly. It's like trying not to pick at something that is right there and could totally be picked at. People vary in how good they are at ignoring that but if there's a hundred of them... And this is only specific summons, it's really easy to ignore random ones unless you're on the lookout for them no matter how many there are."
"So - summoning is not super safe, is less safe if the population is more desperate, and is least safe with the daeva who are most useful."
"For pure material scarcity purposes you can make do with angels, they're slower and smaller scale and can't do forensics or information stuff but they can totally do the food-and-shelter package."
"Or enough people can do the wizard gene therapy that we have things to offer demons, or the Singularity Maitimo just spent like a month looking through Bar for music and literature and tech to recommend them that they'd otherwise have had no way of finding. The 'summoning is most dangerous for illiterate desperate people and they're the ones where we'd most want to roll it out' problem is real, though."
"I mean, a single helpful demon, and given the givens I doubt I'm the only one you could find, could probably sharply improve a preindustrial planet singlehandedly."
"Someone who is from a postindustrial planet should work up a step-by-step for that."
"Don't know if we count, we didn't have material scarcity even before we'd invented everything."
"You do not count. The wizards sort of count but not paradigmatically what with the magic."
"All up to you, then. What're we asking angels -"
"Asking, if they'd be interested in being in a pool for recurring summons to a much poorer world that can't pay them, in exchange for an ongoing stipend from us, who can. Checking how they'd react if someone's careless or stupid or snaps the binding."
"I don't actually know if I have a nefarious intent radar, I've never met anyone who was a bad person."
"Elves. I won't count on it, but it'd surprise me if you're bad at it."
"Melkor and company don't get visits?"
"Isn't feasible - well, wasn't in 1370 -"
"They got it working. Melkor was very apologetic and expressed tremendous relief over the oath reform act and was generally as repentent as one could possibly want him.
I didn't go."
Handsqueeze. "I did, he was disturbingly charming, I put the transcript in the notes I gave you -"
Blink blink -
"Huh. Do you think we'd have ever - after enough Ages -"
"If we had we would've probably worked out better supervisory arrangements than the other Ardas but maybe."
"Couldn't upload people anymore, that makes a big difference all by itself. Did my alt go, what was his read -"
"Did not trust him but could not be confident he'd feel that way without context."
"Maybe I should find a Pensieve and let you at most of the interactions I have ever had. I - would find it really really stressful to have that particular skill deficit, do you not?"
"It was slightly so when you forked me but in general no!"
"There's just not that much to worry about, but it does seem like it'll come in handy elsewhere."
"You can watch me talk to a couple angels, I guess, and then we can compare reads."
Circles!
Angels!!
There is a racist angel who is scared of Cam and a medical angel who's trying to get on a list and an angel who is so!!! excited!!! about magic!!! and an angel who gets distracted by the Igbo alphabet because he already had Igbo and that's not how it's written and an angel who is just really into the sky and wants to look at it, in Heaven they don't have a sky you see.
He can fly around for as long as he wants.
"What an amazing magic system."
"It's very you."
"It really is. - why would an angel be afraid of you, your powers don't work on each other, do they?"
"Not more than a little, I could've briefly and mildly injured her. - Though she couldn't leave the circle, so I could have invaded her personal space."
"It's a good thing Elves don't daevafy, I have no idea what'd happen to us if you left us in a circle. Is that a common problem? Personal space invasions?"
"It's not something you expect to happen on an average summon but demons have a bad reputation and I was being euphemistic."
He is confused!
Oh my god Elves.
"I didn't think - if there's a convenient way to avoid that we should avoid that -
- are there any wanted daeva we could keep an open summons for, to sync the worlds -"
"Lemme see..." There's a list of daeva who relevant authorities wish to contain as safety hazards for this-and-that.
"What does containment entail -"
"They can have lots of freedom of movement without being able to hurt people, bindings are nice like that. I'd rather not have them as permanent Milliways residents if they did show up though."
"Couldn't we just send them home again?"
"I don't actually know if going home through a door would obviate their summon. Could send Minor into my house and find out, I guess."
"Probably worth knowing; if it does you could stop being reliant on a small child in Singularity and I can stop worrying it'll occur to someone to wonder if a fork of that small child can dismiss you."
"And if it doesn't we could humanely ensure that troublemaking daeva can't take randoms and wait for someone to make a mistake."
"Without dragging them away from their homes, even."
Can you tell Minor to come be an experimental subject again -
He says 'go away Timothy I'm busy'.
It'll help us handle the person who murdered him.
He was - not under the impression you were going to bother.
He was earlier under the - correct - impression I would murder his attacker if I could.
I don't think I want to take messages for you two if you're not going to be nice.
Ouch. Okay. Can he come downstairs once he wants a break, at least?
Says he doesn't need to because he's a demon.
"Minor is busy and doesn't want to volunteer. Do you trust Amriac with it?"
"I mean, yes, but we'd have to peel her off Michael."
"He, being human, sleeps, maybe she checks her mail when he does."
"True. We could maybe talk her into it."
"Someone other than me should write her a letter, I've been too busy bristling on your behalf to have any rapport."
"For similar reasons I'm a poor choice..."
"Bristling on his behalf?"
"Amriac is coping with the black hole thing by making a point of finding it hilarious whenever Cam has an ethical opinion or ethical standards for other people."
"You should probably figure out a graceful way to deal with that."
"It's not that I don't have one it's that I am insufficiently incentivized to employ it."
"Okay. I can have my Macalaurë write and ask to meet Michael."
"He's kinda insecure about Elf alts but go for it."
"Are we biologically better singers or is it just that he's young -"
"I'm not sure. His Singularity alt thought it might be biological."
"Huh."
"He'll live."
"And if he doesn't he too can undergo gruesome medical procedures."
"I don't think he'd mind that badly."
"Wonder if the nice Valar are done being contagious since we've been out here."
"We can head in and check."
In they go!
Not yet! The soul Elves are at the door singing.
Ooh singing!
They are welcome to join in, they can send the lyrics over osanwë.
Excellent.
"Gosh, I'm good at singing if I'm a four thousand year old Elf lady."
(He sings too, and writes a letter for his brother for when they can open the door to their world.)
"Having Elf alts is vaguely disconcerting!"
"Mirelótë doesn't particularly disconcert me."
"Well, okay, you have an Elf alt who saved the world, that'd be fairly compensatory. But still."
"I'm sure you could learn to sing if you tried."
"If I were worried about you leaving for a singier version I suppose I could put in the effort but it hardly seems my comparative advantage with both Elves and Michaels around."
"I'm not planning on leaving you for one of your alts."
"I wasn't worried. If the hair thing's that appealing we can fake it, and silently pining isn't the way to have a you at all."
"I think Mirelótë implied that her husband silently pined for a Century. But I guess he must have eventually said something."
"That's a thousand years, right?"
"Yup."
"Elves."
"She very obviously merited that long!"
" - it's, like, the specialer someone is, the longer you fail to give any indication of thinking so? What a ridiculous romantic tradition!"
"Yes, imagine someone else liked her but thought slightly less of her and pined for only ninety Years, then where would you be."
"...pining?"
"Forever? Are Elves extremely monogamous or just extremely slow paced -"
"Some people will get over a romantic attachment if someone better comes along. But if they happened to have found the very best person in the first place..."
"That is cute and completely ridiculous."
Mirelótë leaves off singing to go link arms with her husband. "Like I said, it works better in fiction. Because in fiction you can just write 'and then he pined for a Century' whereas in reality an actual Century went by in which I was oblivious. But of course it was meant to be flattering, so."
"Flattery is very effective," he stage-whispers at Timothy.
"This had not escaped me."
Mirelótë looks at Cam.
"Solid half an hour of verbal appreciation was much more efficient and informative than pining."
"I honestly wasn't even trying to flirt, the gap between how he felt about himself and who he was was just really really glaring."
"I think you did deliberately retroactively convert it into flirting later though."
"You had the best facial expression - the one you're making right now - I thought to myself 'if I did nothing but go around fixing things with you and getting that smile from you' -"
"Awwwww."
He shakes his head and reaches for Cam. "Really glad we found good Valar."
Lean. "Me too."
"We could probably close the door long enough to grab the Macalaurë, figure out how circles work and get time moving in Hell - since the Valar could easily take a year or something -"
"Yes, they easily might."
Door shuffle.
New Macalaurë. "I am writing a letter to a demon who is - involved with - the sixteen-short-year-old human wizard alternate universe version of me? Asking if she minds coming and checking if bindings stick when you cross universes?"
"This morning it was 1370 and the internet wasn't fast enough to stream video, you don't get to complain that things are weird."
"I definitely was not complaining, this is amazing." Write write.
Amriac eventually checks her mail.
Hello! I'm Macalaurë from a Valinor that hasn't been fed into any black holes (we are fixing the one which was. they are calling it Singularity, and us Sanity.) Conveniently my world has different aesthetic preferences than Singularity's and my alt and I did not waste our lives composing exactly the same masterpieces. When it's convenient I'd be delighted to meet Michael and people are wondering if you're interested in helping them test whether bindings persist when they open a Milliways door directly to Hell.
Oooh another Macalaurë. She samples his work and Michael can wake up to find her bawling into a pillow with headphones on.
He is alarmed!
"- sorry did I wake you up there's another you and he writes the saddest songs -"
"Nah it's okay I'm just - another me - do play them -"
She removes the headphones from the equation.
This Macalaurë is just as talented and very deeply devoted to heartbreaking tragedy, wow. He cuddles her and soaks in the music for a while.
Snuggles improve the experience of the utterly heartrending music considerably!
She switches off the music when the finale concludes and composes herself. "Anyway he wants to meet you."
"D'you suppose he's like that in person?"
"I don't know, it'd be exhausting, wouldn't it?"
"Seriously. I suppose we can always duck back out again." Clothes!
Yes those. And downstairs.
"Hello! You must be Amriac, if I mutilated my hair and were like forty I'd look like him."
"I'm Amriac, yeah. I listened to some of your stuff, it was so sad -"
"Our world has this nutty god who created Melkor because he finds tragedy really moving, and these days we've talked him down into appreciating operas and doomed romances and so on. Much nicer than having real tragedies all the time - Singularity has one of those gods too, and he can be assumed to have let everything happen because it was so narratively satisfying."
"Oh, you mean you're not just really depressed or something?"
"I count myself quite satisfied with my life although it has until today been terribly devoid of wizards or demons or magic of any stripe."
"We're very interesting," she asserts. "Also there are dragons, Michael showed me dragons."
"Oooooh. I would love to go see dragons but Mandos is busy and would probably be irritated to have a proper resurrection on his hands, it's been centuries, and dragons sound dangerous."
"Not so much if you're careful or a demon."
"As I am neither, that doesn't help."
"I suppose you could bring binoculars but it's more fun when you can go pet them," Amriac says smugly.
"Sounds it. Eh, maybe I'll chance it anyway, there are two of Nelyo now and I think I have no obligation whatsoever to be responsible."
"Not how it works."
"Is that so, baby brother?"
"Amriac, while you're here, want to try opening the door to Hell, we don't know if it preserves bindings or preserves the status of being on a summons or what -"
"I like the summon I'm on though."
"I can grab you back if it counts."
"And you can also just walk back in and continue carrying on, unless the status of being on a summons is important in some way -"
"Oh, I suppose I've probably milked all the fun I can reasonably have out of being entitled to whatever I like," sighs Amriac.
"No one mentioned that, is there a story there?"
"You might find it insufficiently tragic."
"Timothy told him to summon me and it was so confusing but then I gave him a few hundred years of music and showed him the instrument I invented and he said I could have anything that was his to give which is a very silly thing to tell a demon you just met but it was adorable," Amriac explains.
"Awwwwww. Well, he can just do it again, can't he?"
"I will if it comes up but it won't be as exciting."
" - just with Amriac please don't do that with arbitrary demons -"
"I am exceedingly satisfied with my choice of demons. The one you should worry about is Theodore, he's liable to notice that he's coming up on the age at which wizards of the House of Finis apparently find themselves a daeva lover."
" - he's not that careless -"
"That's kind of the thing, you don't actually have to be that careless."
"I could maybe find him somebody if I knew anything about him?"
Giggle. "Uh, super pretty and he knows it, suspicious of authority in all forms and vanishingly unlikely to do what he's told no matter who is telling him, likes travel a lot, he's kind of not that smart -"
"Dyslexic. They're dyslexic. It's not an intelligence thing."
"Not translating."
"Words look scrambly," says Amriac.
"Huh. Someone should tell him, I don't think he knows it's an actual thing - anyway, he gets terrible marks and plans on working in a dragon preserve when he graduates and has a giant pet wolfhound who might be magic we're not really sure."
"He straight?" she wonders.
"Uh, apparently if people aren't they don't say anything -"
"Ours is bi."
"Yeah."
"There you go then why don't people tell me these things -"
"Tyelcormo'd be happy to but he's off exploring on Endorë somewhere, we'd have to steal tech from elsewhere in the multiverse to go and grab him and he wouldn't honestly be all that interested, at least not until we make contact with some actual pre-literate people or whatever."
"Well, anyway, off the top of my head there's 'shallow asshole who breeds exotic shepherd mixes' and 'once did an entire medium-sized town's earthquake reconstruction in exchange for a shot at wandering around the literal original Alps and probably sleeps with her skis on'?"
"Let's not do any shallow assholes and also that's sort of sweet - are there precise replica Alps in Hell somewhere -"
"Why wouldn't there be Alps, all a set of Alps takes is wanting a set of Alps for like a few hours and having somewhere to put 'em."
"And gravity, or does that fall under somewhere to put them - I hope I'm a demon when I die - anyway I don't think Theodore knows how to ski but I bet he'd pick it up -"
"I can introduce 'em then if he wants."
"Thanks. So door thingy or no, we can make them find someone else -"
"They'd have to be someone we didn't mind having around unbound in Milliways, but yes, we could try."
She gives Michael a kiss and opens the door into a huge, gigantic garden lit with bright levitating globes.
"Ooh!"
"Is that your place? It's lovely."
"I used to be super into landscaping! I don't update this place as often as I used to but I still like it to look nice," says Amriac. She steps into Hell, still holding the door. "...Well, I haven't reappeared in my closet, so maybe I'm still summoned?"
"There's still a binding, right, you could check, try injuring one of the Elves or something -"
"He means one of the Elves who are his alt or his alt-sibling, please."
"For a while Nelyo had the authority to order whatever he wanted but eventually they decided that was a silly system and reformed it. I think he was slightly disappointed."
"If you trust yourself enough all restrictions on your power are restrictions on bad options that you could conceivably need."
"And we love him so much that we all agreed that with respect to us he can still play autocrat."
Amriac steps back into the bar and squints at Elves. "...nope, still summoned," she concludes.
"Thanks so much. That is useful."
"No problem," chirps Amriac, and she shuts the door behind her.
"What're you going to use it for -"
"Fix the time dilation effect, mostly. Possibly a side of noninvasive law enforcement."
"If you summon horrible people and then want to put them in Hell you are not turning them loose in my garden."
"We can let them get the door themselves."
Nod nod.
"Anyway demons are much nicer than people where I'm from so it's not really going to be a priority."
"I don't know how nice they are, I didn't talk to many people, but gosh was London smelly," remarks Amriac.
"Yeah, it looks like Muggles nicen right up once they invent sanitation and widespread literacy and infant mortality rates below one-in-three."
Poor babies.
Shudder.
"Well that's - that's the most depressing thing I've ever heard -"
"...is your music going to get even sadder is that even possible -"
"Who would even have children if they stand that kind of chance -"
"According to the books I went through on my way to Tirion they don't do it on purpose."
"..."
"Humans do not have volitional gamete control."
"Then why the fuck are they having sex."
"They die before they're ten, Cáno, they never get a chance -"
"Also occasionally the state of education is bad enough that they literally don't know about the sex/pregnancy connection, or sometimes not all participants in the sex were thrilled to be having it, or, odd as this may seem given the state of preindustrial human societies along various axes, people want children. Or less pleasantly they need them for complicated socioeconomic reasons."
"Bar, how many universes with - with humans -"
Humans are extremely common, as are assorted variants on the theme, well past my ability to keep count.
He hugs his brother.
Hug. "Summoning seems to work everywhere."
"That won't actually help with infant mortality, you can't reliably get a newborn to complete a circle, it doesn't count if you hold somebody's hand and move it for them."
"Not directly but it can change the underlying conditions. - how does it evaluate who is responsible, if Timothy's mindcontrolling people does that count?"
"...has not been tested."
"The mindcontrol thing has some pretty serious drawbacks and I'm not even sure it'd work on babies."
"Are you incapable of feeling evil towards babies, is that it."
"The form of feeling evil I do best is 'I will acquire this accessory for personal convenience', babies are not very useful accessories, but also I'm just not sure - it works by making my will overwhelmingly appealing, and I don't know if that'd even do anything, I don't know how much volitional control babies have."
"Yeah, and the ones who are liable to die young are liable to have the worst motor skills."
"Context, please -"
"There's a wizard spell that does mind control. It's very illegal, not because wizards are especially high-minded about mind-altering magic but because you can only cast it with actively malicious intent. I've been using it to pay demons because some of them enjoy it?"
"It's enjoyable?"
"It's sort of floaty? Dunno. If that's your thing."
His audience is staring blankly. "I can't tell if Elves don't catch this sort of comment because your society is so open or because you haven't invented anything more complicated than pining and hairpetting."
"There's a blessing for all kinds of weird stuff but at least by 1370 no mind control, that'd be - it'd inspire a lot of discussion, to put it mildly. And - there have been one or two cases of someone being forced to have sex, in Valian history? But it's ...present as a hypothesis... in a way that'd make no sense back home."
"- oh, that's what you were euphemizing."
"Yep."
He hugs his brother.
"Timothy if they're that sheltered they should not be doing summoning."
"They just watched, today."
"I'm sure we can pick it up as necessary."
"Yeah but we should be more thorough about mapping things you don't know you don't know."
Nod.
"Anyway," he says, taking Amriac's hand. "Now that the Elves have been inspired to greater levels of depressingness by the existence of my species, was there anything else - oh, new Macalaurë, are you taking a mourning-related century off from a personal life -"
" - I have no idea - are we treating it like if there were a war, Nelyo -"
"Doesn't make any sense, it's going to be like this forever, we'd just burn people out. My fork was planning three and they'll stop at two, but that's different."
"We were going to get around to having children soonish but that's getting postponed till - some distant milestone to be determined."
He nods fervently.
"Cam, who can we open a circle for?"
"Intending to send them bound back to Hell?"
"Mostly just intending to get time moving in the daeva realms and Revelation but if they happen to show then yes."
Cam picks a name off his list.
And he finds a slightly out-of-the-way spot where the demon nonetheless wouldn't turn up and not get noticed, completes the circle, leaves a note that says how to contact him.
The demon does not appear.
No mystery. What'd this one do?
Killswitched his summoner and caused fatal vehicular accidents, then self-dismissed when a fairy was dispatched to take him elsewhere.
Charming. He goes back to rejoin everyone else. "Now Singularity-Maitimo can send up updates."
Anything pending?
Nope!
"We should probably send him an update, who wants to write that."
"I will do that. Door to soul Arda again?"
They'd gone back outside, probably to protect young ears. He goes and fetches them.
Door-holding! He likes door-holding, the bar has so many people in it. Bounce bounce.
"Wow, you were a cute kid."
"Thank you."
"I know you, you're a Canafinwë Macalaurë. If my parents have another baby it might be a you."
"We are not going to have kids for a long time, so it also might not."
"Do Elves, like, have really high standards for tolerable conditions for children -"
"It would be silly to have them at any point other than the best moment in all eternity to give them a good life."
"Fortunately people have slightly varying standards for this so there have been children in Valinor even though we can't yet travel to Endorë in less than two and a half years."
"I like existing before all problems have been solved! I'd get so bored if I'd only been born once there was nothing left that mattered - and we hadn't discovered the multiverse, I suppose..."
"You know you can have lightleapers now, right, when the Valar suck more my dad's alt gets to it faster."
"Yes, if lightleapers were the only thing the multiverse had to offer we'd probably have a baby on the way very soon, but they are not."
"Lightleapers and Melkors and felonies you don't even have words for. Why would a demon cause fatal car crashes, just because hee hee how funny -"
"No motive is listed, he didn't stick around to be interviewed."
"Car?"
"Wheeled vehicle."
Amriac gives him a little model.
He animates it and sends it racing across the floor to small Maitimo. "Huh. Clever."
He pats it. "What's its name?" he asks Amriac.
"Uh. Cadillac."
He tries out the sound. "Cadillac. Cadillac. Ha! Is it a boy or a girl."
"...it's a car," says Amriac.
"Cars don't come in boys and girls? How do they get more cars?"
Amriac laughs. Cam says, "They're made. They're things, like furniture, just more complicated."
"Cadillac. Cadillac. Ammë, Atta, we should get our Rúmil so he can meet the other Rúmil and Mirelótë Ambela and the bar and the Cadillac."
"I did check that, he's not in range."
"Could message him, if it's not going to rain."
"Rain hasn't been implemented yet, there were some distribution problems."
"That sounds like a computer game bug report. How fast do those little airplanes go?"
"I couldn't give you it in meters."
"I do have a calculator app, you can give it in cubits."
"Three hundred a minute."
"Wow, that's a good clip, although still probably more than an hour to get to anyone out of maximum osanwë range."
"I think meeting another Rúmil would be lovely."
"Write something up - uh, on paper - and I'll send it off."
"Hmm, under the circumstances what do you think would be the way to put it, dear -"
"Oh, hmmm... perhaps just that there's another Arda in which it's a later date and the Valar wiser, and they are aiding his, and we'd like to meet him..."
"So I shouldn't be a surprise, you think," she says, holding out her hand in Cam's direction and accepting a pen and paper.
"He will be terribly envious." He shakes his head. "But probably not, no. - the soul Arda ones can't be rolled back from before Utumno, I don't want to pull too many surprises..."
Nod.
She writes a note - other Arda, other Rúmil, she's his wife, if he'd like to come meet them among other interestingly multiversal persons there's a door at Fëanáro's house. Hands the paper to Timothy.
Who enchants it and sends it off. "Bar, can you recommend everybody dinner?"
Of course she can!
Then everyone can eat dinner!
"Cadillac. Amriac. What are my kids named when I have kids?"
"Aratarya and Nóquellë."
"And fathernames?"
"Finyarë and Finyárima but they're all fathernames, they didn't even distinguish one pair from the other."
" - huh?"
"They have two fathers, so all their names are fathernames. Some people like to still have one parent pick one name per child like that but not in this case."
Now it is not just the small Maitimo who is looking completely baffled but also both his parents!
"Do you have a question?"
" - I'm trying to identify the disconnect."
"I count a minimum of four of them."
"How are there babies without a mommy and why isn't he married? That's only two."
" - I'm not married because I'm forked from earlier than that."
"They have a Maia friend - Ardilorë aloud -" She bounces the soul Elves the real name. "- who carried the babies for them."
Soul Elves bounce the name to everyone else. "That's down to three fundamental disconnects."
"Which are?"
"What exactly do you mean when you say they're married, how is the child's father not married to the child's mother, Maia or no, and, uh, broad astonishment that no one objected to this - are the children all right -"
"- I suppose you must formalize marriage some way that doesn't involve chip blessings since you don't have chips. For us it's chip blessings, sort of pick-and-mix which ones. Ardilorë is not the children's mother, although he's frequently around and loves them very much; in much the same way that fathers and mothers are equally children's parents even though only one carries the children it's possible to have two parents who are both fathers and a Maia helper who mostly just incubates. There is nothing of import to object to except perhaps the fact that no one in the entire family can do without the string 'Fin' in one of their names, which has always seemed to me like a bit much; the children are doing very well."
"Ah hah, yep, there's the fundamental disconnect. We don't formalize marriage, it, ah, formalizes itself."
"...that sounds potentially inconvenient."
"Well, it's not something that happens by accident. But you definitely could not end up carrying someone's child and unmarried to them."
"Well, that's that explained, then, but it's not like that for chip Elves."
"Well, as long as everyone's happy. But it can't work that way in our world, Eru made marriage and it works as he designed it."
"If we're very lucky your Eru can be convinced otherwise and then after fixing any other metaphysical unfairnesses retire to read tragedies all day long."
"That would involve being very lucky indeed."
"Well, it happened the once."
"And failed to happen the - four hundred million -"
He has gone back to playing with his model car.
Nod.
"I will confess myself mildly surprised that we married as young absent the motive," she muses.
" - yes, me too, actually. Not that I have ever experienced even an instant of regret."
"There's an insight and memory transfer blessing they were impatient to have."
They giggle. "I find it appealing to know I would have married you with significantly fewer good reasons!"
Kiss. "And been happy hundreds and hundreds of Years and many grandchildren later, that part's reassuring too -"
"Should we call our set over, see how much space-warping this place will do to avoid being untenably crowded -"
"I expect it'll do quite a lot, and that'd be lovely."
Doorshuffle! She can osanwë her set as long as they're in town.
Which they are!
"Welcome to the multiverse!"
"It's horrifically depressing."
"Must be, if you think so." And then he sees his alt and - "awwwwwwwwww -"
"I'd forgotten how young we were -"
"You were so adorable you hadn't grown into your height at all -"
"If these weren't my parents," Timothy tells the room at large, "I would tell them that this is a popular use case of a potion from my world. But they are my parents and already kinda skirting the line, honestly -"
"Wouldn't that require a lot of planning ahead?"
"You cut off a lock of hair on your wedding day. It's sort of traditional."
"This is for humans legitimately the most noninvasive way of getting the applicable potion ingredients in any quantity."
"Of course it is."
"We haven't been using hair when we experimented if it worked with Elves, don't worry. ...that was approximately as horrified as you looked at the methods-of-public-execution debate."
"If I were called upon to actually prioritize I doubt you'd find fault but juxtaposing a rather intimate form of mutilation with one's wedding day is in fact unpleasant."
"I apologize. So you know, humans cut their hair regularly, every couple months or so. And we shave every day - do Elves even shave -"
"Of course not."
"How does that - you know, you could write up a fact sheet and then we wouldn't have to upset you with questions, and vice versa, ours can include 'this is the range of atrocities people will reasonably expect you to commit if they are in your power' -"
" - does this multiverse have - physics textbooks, or anything -"
"Yes, ask Bar, be more specific."
He takes his wife's hand and hurries off to do that.
"I'm sorry. I legitimately didn't mean to upset anyone. Though you are incredibly precious."
"I mean, there is a biological difference here, I'd try to draw an analogy but then I too would be contemplating repellent topics."
"I remember. I just don't even find any analogous - oh, the future totally wouldn't have that anymore either, would it -"
"D'you have Polyjuice around, Timothy, now I'm curious."
"If we're out it turns out boomslangs aren't magic."
"It's still like a month and a half to brew."
"I could acquire more but that'd be an awful lot of juggling of doors in the pursuit of cultural exchange."
"I think we've had enough cultural exchange."
"Assuming you don't have to stand over it for the entire month and a half I suggest setting up somewhere, setting a timer that will send a message to your computer, and wandering off."
"There're parts that only work at the full moon, no idea how that'll play with Milliways."
"Marvelous, we can find that out at the same time."
"Might try on something that's less hassle first. But yeah, fair enough." He stands. "Uh, someone should super warn everybody that soul Elves have a different marriage thing going on, otherwise there is going to be a horrible misunderstanding sooner or later."
"I'll add it to the notes."
"What would be the actual fallout of the horrible misunderstanding - the chip blessings pick and mix but it sounds like the soul kind doesn't, what does it do -"
"You get three new - senses, capabilities? Suited to you and your partner, by far the most common one is a kind of emotional feedback thing. I don't know what would happen if one of our Elves tried marrying someone who wasn't our kind of Elf or Maia - it might be one-sided? It would surprise me if it didn't occur at all. I have no idea at all what happens if - Nelyafinwë, it's past your bedtime -"
Conversational privacy spell.
"You can forcibly marry someone."
"And my expectation that your Eru might retire drops..."
"It would be out of character."
"Your Valar could make our Valar more sensitive about handling it, though."
"Minimum."
"You could start by not saying they're married, because yikes."
"It's not - it's a natural category, not a social one. You can see it in peoples' eyes."
"Which seems intercompatible between Elf varieties, although presumably the more ostentatious augmented reality versions aren't. Might be too subtle for species with worse eyesight to learn to pick up on...?"
"It actually hadn't occurred to me humans can't see it, and I hadn't met married humans -"
"There's augmented reality versions?"
"Most people eventually uninstall those, they're silly. They can let people who can see them know who you're married to, though."
"Do you have a chip, Cam?"
"No, but with magically augmented no-horrible-side-effects chips available I'll probably get one sooner or later, why?"
"Are there daeva with chips, it seems potentially relevant to making them work for humans."
"Not yet, but since basement dwellers' problem with chips is 'spontaneous death' I'm not sure it's very helpful..."
" - ah. Yeah. If they just didn't work that'd be interesting. If they die - well, I assume we already have medical people on it -"
"If it doesn't work for me that'll tell you something and at least I won't spontaneously die."
"Yes, exactly. Plus they're very useful."
"I was tempted even before."
"I was so jealous when I read my alt's notes - he gets so much done -"
"I bet we have better memory blessings than the other Arda, Maitimo kept commissioning improved ones as presents for Ambela." Kiss.
Cam laughs.
"That reminds me, I want to hear what Macalaurë sounds like when he's not trying to move the listener to horrible sadness."
"I've written uplifting things."
"You've written emotionally complex things, I don't think I've heard of any that were just straight happy."
"Didn't feel like people needed to escape to fiction for that. I guess now maybe they do."
Amriac puts on the cheerfulest symphony from Singularity.
It's lovely.
"Bar, can you get us the recorded works of all the Macalaurës?"
I can only confirm althood in person.
"Lots of them have the same name, though, right -"
Yes, I can make educated guesses on that basis. However, I cannot do format conversion and cannot fit even all nonredundant works, especially those not set to electronic form, on my surface.
"Fair enough. ...could pay demons with an hour to talk to Bar, couldn't we -"
"If they're ones we trust around Milliways, yeah."
"Considering she can't sell minds or magical objects we would have to trust them with literally anything she can sell and some things she can mention, including things we haven't thought of."
"What sort of things would be a problem-"
"Maybe some dimension has a conjurable mind control ray, some do have ways to incubate children outside the womb -"
"Aside from that being really weird, what's wrong with demons having children - we're not going to make humans stop having children even though some of them aren't married and can't give the children a good life -"
"Hell is an anarchy populated entirely by indestructible people who can make arbitrary material objects and the equilibrium could get nasty fast if there were people there who were not indestructible, or even who just couldn't make arbitrary material objects."
"Timothy -"
"Yeah, you are experiencing an Elfiness-related failure of imagination."
"If you want to do a project where demons get to have kids vet individual demons and have them do so outside of Hell."
"- okay. Is this, like, 'in a billion people there will be one Melkor so it's not worth it' or - some more fundamental thing -"
"Some of that - though you've got the numbers wrong - and some 'in Hell it does not constitute particular unneighborliness to have extremely radioactive things around, occasionally torch your entire block, or express that you're in a bad mood by dropping an anvil on anyone who says hello'."
"So people would presumably not want to have children who aren't resurrectible but why would anyone want that anyway -"
"Personally, I think I'd object to radiation poisoning even if it wouldn't permanently kill me. Anyway, nothing about Hell's norms or setup is designed for destructible people, and some demons - not that many but more than one in a billion - find destructible people's destructibility interesting, and there should not be nondemon children in Hell. There's a setup where most of the electricity for the Martian grid is produced by fairies who have that as their day job for very long-term summonses, and raise children given up for adoption, do something more like that."
"What are you planning to do if someone does have children in Hell?"
"Don't have a plan set up for that yet but if they belong to somebody with any business having children probably attempt to extract them and put them somewhere else."
"And if they aren't."
"Separate child from unparental demon or demons, put child somewhere children who have been removed from unparental adults go."
Shiver.
"...to give you some context, Bells who are not Elves are clumsy enough to routinely trip and fall. I had bruises a lot growing up. My mother taught the first year of formal schooling I attended but the year after that, when I was six, a teacher noticed I was frequently injured and wanted to know if she was hitting me because this seemed likelier. She wasn't and I was sufficiently convincing on that point, but as far as the other teacher knew, she could've been. And this was a substantial improvement on the child discipline of a few decades earlier where if someone thought my mother was hitting me they would have figured I was misbehaving and this was a legitimate way to punish me."
"I trust you that it is sometimes the least horrible thing. Just."
"I mean, I suppose if we manage to harness Milliways's time-stopping procedures more usefully we could pause the kids, put the parents through intensive not-being-a-horrible-person classes, and then reunite the families, but sufficiently brutalized children do not actually want to go back to arbitrarily tearful promises to do better..."
"Obviously kids who want to leave should be able to, that's - different from taking them -"
"...some complications, one is that kids are not super good at knowing what's good for them and if the parent doesn't either the kid can want to stay and the parent can want them to stay and this can be a disaster. Another is that bad parents can psychologically warp kids and you wind up with children saying they are bad and deserve whatever's going on. Another is that unfamiliar things are scary and a kid who feels competent enough at navigating abuse might not want to abandon it for supposedly benevolent aliens."
"All of that makes sense, and it's not that you should just...leave...children whose parents are hitting them-"
"There's just going to be a lot of monstrous-but-necessary and it is not pleasant to anticipate."
"...has anybody told Elves about speckled milkweed yet - or the Muggle equivalents, are there Muggle equivalents - maybe not in 2179 -"
"...I can't tell you without knowing what it does."
"Induces miscarriage."
"There is much less need for that in 2179 but if it comes up it's a thing."
"- because they're accidents -"
"Or medical problems that Elves don't have, yes."
"I mean, I - people shouldn't be pregnant if they don't want to be, but the poor children -"
"I don't know if this helps but most not-medical-reasons abortions happen within the early stage of the pregnancy when the demon inability to make even mouse-quality minds doesn't enter into it if we try to make embryos that small."
"I guess that's better than the alternative."
"I would congratulate Eru on all of the horrifying species design things he could have done and didn't but I don't want to chance giving him ideas - what kind of monster invented humans -"
"Oh, Singularity has humans. They appeared spontaneously on Endorë midwar."
"Is that standard or did the Eru notice you and think 'what a lovely idea' -"
"That's standard."
"But there are humans elsewhere too, I'm not sure how that works."
"Is your world's creator even less evident -"
"Yup."
"Sounds nice."
"So non-evident that most people these days don't think there is one at all."
"Who created you, then -"
"Humans evolved naturally, there's fossils and whatnot. Daeva no clue."
"How old are the oldest daeva -"
"Sort of unclear, but younger than the human species, more like six to ten thousand years."
"...weird."
"Guesses include that they began appearing when valid circles were first drawn."
"Can't you just check that?"
"We can get the first valid circles, but we don't think they were answered, so we can't match them to daeva."
"Has the rate new daeva start existing changed over time? Is it the same by type of daeva - when did Limbo start catching people -"
"Increased some, close to it, and well before anyone knew what year it was but probably fifty or sixty thousand years ago."
"Huh."
"Do you have an idea of what we should read in order to - think of things humans would think of - well enough to summon safely?"
"...I can teach summoning but I'm not sure I know how to fill those gaps and be sure I got them all."
"There's lots else to do, anyway - we were going to come up with a plan to get everyone in my world summoning, unless your Valar can just fix things..."
"Not fast enough, they build up their power over time. We can take immigrants but that sounds like also something that'd require a good model of things we don't know."
"Yeah, taking refugees is praiseworthy but not risk-free."
"It seems obviously worth it but if there are sufficiently many horrible things that haven't come up yet then doing it more carefully is definitely worth it. - do human societies sometimes do that, what goes wrong -"
"They do. Sometimes the refugees are opportunistically used as cover by attackers, sometimes they overwhelm the resources of their hosts, sometimes they have values differences that are particularly troubling in democracies but even if they don't vote they can lobby and make disagreeable neighbors, sometimes they resist assimilating and reproduce the problems that led them to flee..."
"So maybe we make another planet for them somewhere, Valinor's orbit is a bit delicate and I'm not sure we could have another habitable planet in our star system but the Valar can extend themselves better within our world than to new ones, and the status of backups would at least be clearer -
- are humans hard to rule -"
"I am unclear on what rule even entails among Elves. If someone disobeys you, do they get into trouble?"
Blink. "Uh, you might need to be more concrete? If they were hurting people and I asked them to stop and they didn't then they might get into trouble..."
"But that's for breaking the no-hurting-people law, right - who sets the laws, who enforces the laws, does 'you are the crown prince' mean anything except 'people will voluntarily do what you tell them'-"
"...what else would it mean -"
"Elves are kind of surreal."
"No kidding. Uh, I am aware of exactly one case where a human's status as royalty meant exactly and only that people would voluntarily obey him and it was a crazy guy who spontaneously declared himself Emperor and was humored on smallish matters by many of the people around him because they thought it was funny. Usually with humans being in charge means having the ability to enforce rules by retaliating against violators in some way."
"We have about a dozen laws and we have courts - just, not very often, it really doesn't come up - if I wanted to add a new law I could do that, if there's a disagreement my word settles it, but that's more a point of fact than of law -"
"Maybe you should have a planet built somewhere where the Valar are relevantly powerful and then have Miranda run it for you and then if you really want to rule humans you can watch and learn."
"Humans don't usually love being ruled by thirteen year olds but it's been done."
"...I was not at thirteen up for running a planet -"
"Could you have got that way in a hurry if someone handed you one anyway?"
"...I suppose."
"Humans hurry faster."
"We've been planning to take over our world for a long time. This sounds strictly easier- or you could collaborate on it, Miranda to notice humans things and someone with chip blessings for all the administrative work. Just - if you try to do it yourselves it will fall apart as soon as someone notices all of your laws are more like friendly suggestions."
"Collaborating would be good, I don't think even magic lets her run the place without help."
"I am assuming -"
"Yes, there are easily several thousand people who'd be happy to do the administration. -our way works -"
"Yes, you have astonishing organizational competence, it just works off a level of social trust that I can't quite fathom and that could get undermined-"
"When humans do high-trust environments like that they're usually tiny, context limited voluntary association things, or held together by hating some other people in concert or something. It doesn't just happen. And when they do happen they're vulnerable to exploitation when outsiders notice they exist."
"I can imagine everyone kind of writing off humans as not in expectation trustworthy enough to be worth giving important work."
"Humans can be trustworthy. There are some people you'd probably be completely appalled at who I trust and work with just fine. But if there's absolutely no incentive then no, you won't get cooperation just out of whole cloth."
"Are you still talking to that guy -"
"If I need him for anything."
"If it's reasonable to write off humans as untrustworthy it's reasonable to write off Elves as naive."
"We're trying. Okay. Presumably you don't need to literally imprison humans to get their compliance in most cases, what do you do, fines?"
"Sometimes, or revocation of license to do this or that, or in some times and places corporal punishment - my native time and place thinks that's barbaric but it has some proponents over prison on humanitarian grounds - community service, having to account for your whereabouts to officials, banishment..."
"That's not totally unconscionable - I should look how orcs handle things, orcs have a crime rate -"
"Orcs don't have the imprisonment thing either, do they, did they pick up the norm from you or for all you know could they lock people up for playing loud music when their neighbors are trying to sleep?"
Shiver. "I haven't ever been to Endorë, I suppose it's possible they could if they didn't do it to tourists. - Dwarves don't have a government at all."
"No? What do they do?"
"You - pay a company to arbitrate disputes you get involved in and make everyone whole? And if you get into disputes often you have to pay more. It works with Dwarves - it'd work with some Elves but not all -"
"...there are humans who would get very excited about that being a thing that works anywhere and is actually being practiced, but it's never been effectively implemented - it's possible most humans could slot into that system reasonably well if it was already established and running."
"It is established and works very well, as far as I know. They thought everyone else with their governments was very silly."
"It'd be worth a try if the Dwarves would have them, anyway. What do they do with people who are bad at producing value and expensive to have around?"
"If you're just bad at producing value I think your share of the land value taxes would cover you, most people really aren't expensive to cover. If you're bad at producing value and expensive - so getting into disputes a lot - and no one wants to pay for you then I think you end up having to leave."
"Some expensive humans are criminals but some of them are just sick or disabled."
"The Valar should be able to fix that."
"That'll be great as far as it goes till you run into the ones who through whatever quirk or adversity turn it into an identity thing. Like, deaf humans are also a linguistic community because they use sign language, and have a culture that emerged from that, and some of 'em would resent a cure because it would cut them off in spirit if not in actual fluency."
"...hmmm."
"We can just pay the Dwarves for disabled humans - or give the disabled humans the money and let them use it to go live among Dwarves if they so please - if that would be a good environment for them."
"Might work, if the Dwarves'll take your money and you have enough of it to throw around. How do their dispute arbitration companies tend to resolve questions of fact?"
"We trade with Dwarves - summoning is going to shake everything up but as of right now we could definitely fund a hundred thousand humans as a trial run -"
"The companies are pretty good at investigating things, there are fewer disputes if everyone trusts they'll be resolved correctly and a company doesn't want to damage their reputation over any individual case..."
"Have any Dwarves made a serious study of evidentiary obfuscation, because some humans have and others find it comes naturally."
The Elves blink at each other uncertainly.
"I'm really glad the tech differential doesn't run the other way or my society making contact with yours would be a nightmare."
"Oh lord poor innocent Bronze Age Elves no -"
"...are humans in 1802 particularly terrible to societies with less technology than them -"
"Little bit."
"Excruciatingly."
"Before we met the multiverse we were considering 'ending the human slave trade' among our most important problems -"
"And that's when the primitives are valuable alive in some way. To say nothing of the spread of disease to naive immune systems."
"...the human slave trade -?"
" - there are also house elves, they are magically enslaved and happy about it and it's going to be hard to fix. Harder than humans, at least, humans you can tell 'okay, you're not slaves now here are enough resources to start over' and they'll go for it -"
"You are welcome to meet our house-elves, if you think it'll be clarifying."
"You have some?"
"Yeah."
"Why are they happy about it -"
"They really like work and they're brought up to believe being freed is the most shameful and horrifying thing imaginable."
"- mm. What would they do if no one wanted slaves?"
"Not have kids, probably."
"They have kids because other people want slaves?"
"They have kids when they anticipate there'll be enough work for the kids to do."
"...and work that didn't happen to involve slavery wouldn't count?"
"It'd be a hard sell, you might eventually get somewhere with some of them."
"There're a lot of things that should really be higher priority. Maybe when you give them longer lives they change, too, hard to say."
"How long do house elves live?"
"Like fifty years?"
Nod. "Do they develop very much over time - how good at learning things are they -"
"They don't let us meet them until they're at maturity, they can learn new information plenty fast but they pretty rarely learn new - ways of thinking about things - they get more emotionally invested, as they get older?"
"Invested in?"
"The family they work for, usually? Sometimes a specific member thereof, the Hogwarts ones are loyal to the institution..."
"I mean, there's - There would be nothing wrong with them choosing to cohabit with people they care about and do many or all of the household chores since they like them. What about the arrangement causes it to be best conceptualized as slavery?"
"Well, they have to obey us - magically bound to - they usually want to, but still, they don't get a choice - they punish themselves for failing, I don't think they do that because they want to, exactly -that you can talk them out of by being really insistent that it is upsetting to you -"
"...how much is known about the nature of the magical binding, would they object to its absence if nothing else changed -"
"You can end it by giving them clothes and that upsets them tremendously, they will usually drink themselves to death, I don't know if being free feels unpleasant in itself and if you just silently removed the bindings what would happen..."
"Can they be asked, would they know?"
"They panic at any discussion of freeing them. Maybe they'd panic less if it were someone asking who didn't have the authority to do it -"
"Do they have an opinion on - the human slave trade?"
"Doubt it, wizards don't practice that. Or - not systemically."
"I wonder if that would be informative without distressing them."
"I'd be happy to go fetch an elf for you to talk to."
"I'll put it on the to-do list."
"Does the problem with human behavior towards more primitive humans mean that we can't put evacuees from different human worlds on the same planet, or would it be fine if none of them are in positions of authority -"
"I'd expect that to solve some problems but not all of them. Mostly it's an issue when the more advanced humans want to colonize a place that is already inhabited by less advanced humans."
Nod.
"This is getting to be an impressive to-do list and I bet there are things we're not thinking of because there's just so much; I'm going to take a break. Which means you might not see me for five years, technically, so write if you need me -"
"Of course. It is nice meeting you even if everything is terrible."
"We'll fix it."
"Yes we will. - will the war crimes courts need to handle lots of 1802 slaveholders -"
"It's not really a war crime."
"Right, fair, but should we be establishing courts or something for people committing atrocities that are considered everyday in their time period but which objectively should disqualify them from membership in civilized society at least until they figure out it was wrong -"
"Figure it out independently or acquiesce to a change in zeitgeist?"
"I am trying to have very low expectations here, but would you feel comfortable being neighbors with a slaver who had - acquiesced - to this being no longer acceptable - would the people he or she enslaved -"
"I mean, I was not there, but my understanding of Revelation history suggests that people did exactly that and that freed slaves frequently went on working for their owners under slightly modified terms. They didn't have great alternatives, mind, but they still did it. Also there are lots of people who paid lip service to knowing it was wrong but did not actually manumit their slaves."
"Well. I guess as long as we give them better alternatives."
"It's probably better for the slaveowner not to be isolated until he or she grows up, even if, should no one want to be his or her neighbor, we could hardly insist."
"Pretty much exclusively he, for what that's worth, Muggle women can't own property."
"I don't think that's true across the board, I remember something about George Washington freeing all his slaves in his will but this not affecting the ones that belonged to Martha."
"Those are colonists? Yeah, don't know about there."
"My history education was skewed towards the context from my lifetime, yes."
"I know they fought a war and handled the aftermath much more neatly than France, and I briefly looked into why it went better afterwards and decided it was complicated -"
"How often do human societies fight wars?"
"All the time? Maybe we're better by 2179."
"They space out more but the nature of warfare changes a lot with technology."
"I think I might take a break also. Can we sing outside -"
"Yep, there are a bunch of Elves already doing that."
"Lovely."
Elves go outside to sing.
"D'you want to listen to them," he says to Amriac, "it's probably going to be more sadness -"
"I wanna drop a microphone but I don't have to personally be there."
"Sounds good."
He sighs and shakes his head and gets his computer. "Have you told Miranda that we are considering having her help Elves administer a human planet, or should I -"
"I have not, go nuts."
So he sends her a message: hey, had cultural exchange with the Elves. They mean well but as it stands taking human refugees would be a disaster, they're way too naive from way too many angles. Interested in running a planet with them and pointing out things like 'if your laws have no enforcement mechanism humans might break them'?
That sounds fun.
Thought it might. They're outside singing but if you have questions for them I am sure they'd be happy to answer.
I think I'll make Cam recommend me Revelation history books for broader context first.
"I'm going to bed," he tells Cam, "and Miranda wants Revelation history books for context on mistakes to avoid with a refugee planet."
"So she says. I'll get on that."
He sleeps. He wakes. He comes downstairs before Cam's finished the booklist.
"I think we should meet some orcs from Sanity, they sound more humanlike and also I want a feel for whether they'll be a disastrous population in which to roll out summoning."
"Yeah, that's a good idea. It'll take five days subjective to get there though, even if we get time running with a circle for a daeva who needs binding."
"And even that won't work if there're people from there in here, right, we'd have to shoo them into soul Arda? I'm a little confused about how the time effects all work."
"No - I'm here, Amriac's here, time still moves in Hell with the circle open. I think circles seem to override the pausing."
"Okay. Would you be willing to come along or are you still staying here until Singularity's sorted -"
"...I think the location of competent Valar may actually suffice to detach me from my, like, vigil or whatever you'd call it, as long as we have transit every which way reasonably secured."
"Oh, good. I hope it doesn't take them a year to get the incompetent Valar up to speed but that's at least less of a cost if it's not pinning you in Milliways. And I'd very much like you along. Shall we get through all the to-dos that other people might be counting on, plan on leaving in subjectively a week or so..."
"Sounds like a plan."
And bounce bounce bounce - "genetics is really cool I think I get it now -"
"Cool. So, I found a wizard gene; when I tested on myself I amended my own genome-I-had-while-human to have it but you can skip that step. You just need to have enough chromosomes in you to qualify. This requires thinking of them as part of your body plan so they'll do the indestructible thing and not get expelled from your cells as irrelevant waste. I have no idea if I've sustained it this long, I could pick up Miranda's other wand to check I suppose..."
"But if I'm concentrating it'll be there?"
"If you are concentrating and have concentrated continuously since your last set of transplants, yes, but I don't think you can heal them into place any more than you could heal on wings you hadn't ever attached. I suppose you could also try interpolating yourself with nuclei and assuming the ones that don't land mid-cell will not be covered by your concentration and get cleared away, which would be faster and less visibly gross."
"- sure, I'll try that first - how many did you need -"
"I wasn't sure so I just did all the transfusions and grafts I could self-administer without leaving bulky whatever-it-was-removal equipment around. Most of my various fluids, skin on my hands in case that mattered for wand handling specifically or something, bone marrow. It probably wasn't all called for. ...I don't know if wizards have good painkillers; 2179 has great painkillers."
"We don't, really - pain's supposed to be character-building - recommend anything?"
"You don't know how to administer to bloodstream or nerve cluster... but if you do it right you'll be thoroughly numb and nothing bad happens long term if you get it wrong -" He names a dose and a drug and where to put it to get any given limb or the trunk and everything below it.
"You're amazing, you know that?"
"I do."
And he goes off to try it.
And a while later he sends Miranda a message - I'm a wizard again!!!!!! I told Cam he was amazing and he said he knew but he's a you so I thought you might be pleased with yourself by extension.
Some of that, some intimidated by what I'll have to pull off to not embarrass him and Mrs. Cultivated The Only Valar Who Don't Suck.
Are you working on something to one-up them with?
Apparently I'm going to help Elves administer a refugee planet because they're too naive but that's more of an assignment than an accomplishment.
Sounds like kind of a ton of work. Refugees of what?
Places with humans in them, not otherwise specified yet, there's enough of a selection that if I'm helping at that level I can probably filter a lot but I'm doing more reading.
Good luck.
Thanks!
Fair bit bigger than a continent, isn't it.
Yes, it is.
And he sends Cam a note asking for the best demonic med school curriculum please.
Cam replies promptly with the one he used updated with new discoveries since then.
Cool! He will go play with mindless bodies somewhere where it won't weird anyone out.
Meanwhile the Elves are singing. It helps.
Well, their moods; it doesn't do a thing about anything else.
There isn't anything they can currently do about any worlds except the ones where time is frozen, waiting on a better plan for handling. They can sing as long as they want.
But, yeah.
Eventually - "do you think humans are just horrible or do you think once they get a chance to grow older and not be in constant danger they'll -"
"My reading suggested that there were some good ones even under those conditions - even not counting my alts or yours - so there's room for optimism -"
"I don't really like the idea that even in a thousand years we're managing most of the multiverse by containment - not letting daeva figure out there are ways to have children, not letting malicious people summon, not letting murderous daeva take more summons - preventing horrible personal crimes by threatening to imprison anyone who commits them -"
"In a thousand years we will probably have improved on at least some of that, I just don't know how yet."
"Me neither. I'm just trying to think whether that's a sign we should take a thousand years before we do anything or whether we'll need to govern humans to get any better at it -"
"It could be there are intermediate challenges of some kind to be had..."
"My Singularity alt is opening diplomatic relations with Revelation, I expect that to be interesting."
"Even just learning more about the worlds where the Valar are worse and the Elves there could be instructive."
"Yeah. Maybe we can go get some reading material from all the representative types of world -"
"The varieties of Ardas, you mean?"
"Yeah. The recurring ones with millions of members, at least."
Nod.
So they go in to quiz Bar.
There are gender-swapped Ardas, that's mildly interesting.
"Huh. How common -"
4%, approximately.
"That's - almost weirder than it existing at all - you'd think it'd be half, or - not that -"
"Depends on what governs them - maybe it just all stems from Erus being mostly male for some reason."
"Do the genderswapped Ardas have genderswapped Erus?"
"They use female pronouns. I'm not sure it's a terribly meaningful distinction with Erus to begin with though."
"Yeah, fair."