"It seems to be somewhat predictably a consequence of the first contact between Bells and soul Elves, given their norms about mindreading."

"Mmhm."

"Anyway. Cam is debating whether to go ask Mingling's Valar for help restoring the dead Maiar and Valar and everyone's dead babies and the magic no-decay effect and so on. Timothy's worried that they will execute Cam, Cam is also worried about this but not exactly being deterred, Timothy suggests that since there are apparently lots of Ardas they instead read through Bar's published records of all of the Ardas in the multiverse and find the one with the most competent Valar and ask that set for help. Of course, the only way of getting doors available to us is for someone from the relevant world to open the door, but they can fork chip Elves.

So they look in chip Ardas for the most competent Valar they can find, and they find my world, and they fork me so I can open the door and put them in touch with my Valar."

"Welcome to the world."

"And my Valar are competent and talk with Cam and agree to help but they want to know why their alts are so incompetent - the answer is because our Arda has a Bell, and she spent five thousand years very patiently explaining to them how to deity properly -"

Snort.

"So now they're bringing Mingling's set up to competence for practice before they go try on Singularity's set, which will be - more complicated in some respects, because they were murdered and we're not sure how they'll feel about that. And meanwhile another soul Maitimo walked in, that's Midnight, he was in here when you arrived, the war's been going on for four hundred years in his world. And then you walked in. Questions?"

"Am I supposed to be anywhere or doing anything in particular or should I go ahead and find it really suspicious if that turns out to mysteriously happen?"

"You are not supposed to be anywhere or doing anything and you are welcome to find it really suspicious if that turns out to happen."

"There's yous and there's Findekános. No Aydancis."

"Might be some, we don't have a way to check. If we knew enough about your husband we could hazard a guess as to whether we knew him but secondhand I wouldn't be terribly confident in that guess."

Nod.

"Once they figure out how to take your Melkor down safely then we'll go get you yours."

"I'm not at my spousal best. You open with Findekáno on a pterodactyl if you want me like that."

"...huh?"

"That's how my Maitimo got rescued, Findekáno rode in on a pterodactyl and cut him off the wall and brought him home, that's the lazy plagiarism-minus-ten-points way to get me cooperative just in case. There was also the time with the poorly explained cutting-edge magic engineering and the one with the mountain golem."

"So if we go get your husband you won't be cooperative-just-in-case and we should...not?"

"Obviously you can produce whoever the fuck you want, you could populate the hallucination entirely with Aydancis, you could present me with a toddler and tell me he'd fucking reincarnated again -"

"We're not going to do that. Milliways pauses time in all the worlds who have a resident here. If you think you need ten thousand years before you want to see him - or your Maitimo and your Findekáno - again, they won't grieve you for even a single second more. They will not make an appearance until you're ready, and they won't be hurting for your absence in the meantime, so if you don't want to see them that's fine."

"Ooh, lemme see if I can guess the plot twist - I'm not from my Arda, it's careening off in real time?"

" - shouldn't work that way, no, Cam's Arda stopped when he found the door and he'd been there for even less time than you'd been in yours. Even if it does it'd just mean we ask the Sanity Valar to tackle yours right away, it wouldn't mean you had to do anything..."

"Until it did."

"Sure, okay, if it does then you can be very suspicious. Is the me like this?"