" - possibly. Is that a good idea? If your worlds' gods are mostly noninterventionist we might just leave them that way - especially if the results of the summoning tests we set up come back encouraging -"

"Oh, they don't do anything except the godsprings. Tsi's the red god, though, it's supposed to love everyone."

"How do people know what attributes they have?"

"Being a mage moves people - godward. It's worked out from that. But I don't remember most of my theology lessons."

"Midnight's working on the necklace."

"I'm not sure I'd remember them anyway, I think they were boring."

Giggle. "You're going to have to meet my world's gods if you decide you want to be immortal. They are not very boring."

"What are they like?"

"There are fifteen. One was evil and so now he's not allowed to be around people though you can pilot an avatar in his VR setup if you want. The other fourteen are - they used to be thoughtless because they didn't understand what it was like not to be a god, but they learned and now they're better. They have domains - Manwë is the airs, Yavanna the plants, Varda the stars, Aulë stone and metal and invention - but they can do things outside those, too. They mostly do things like make us easier to resurrect and protect our world from harmful magic. It's possible they could do something like a little force field so anyone who tries to touch you would instead come just short, depending how redmage magic interprets 'touching', and then you could turn it on and off..."

"Skin to skin contact," says Cir. "What's a VR setup?"

"You put special lenses in your eyes and go into a specially designed room - tank, if you're really serious - and technology makes it look and feel like you are walking around inside a world that some other person created and shared. Usually they make a story - there's a wildfire and you have to rescue people, or you're a shark swimming in the ocean and you have to catch food, or you're trying to complete a mystic quest to win the heart of your one true love."

"Are you into mystic quests?" wonders Cir, smiling.

"I've actually never played one, they were invented after the time I'm forked from."

"You never explained that."

"So it's possible to make a copy of people from my world. But obviously making a copy of someone isn't a very nice thing to do, so the Valar decided to change that. And a long time ago - a thousand, four hundred years ago - they did magic to make us uncopyable. 

And then recently there was a horrible disaster somewhere. And they found the place with the magic door, and they knew my world's gods were good at their jobs and would help, and they needed someone from my world to open the magic door so they could go get my gods for help. And they tried copying me, but it didn't work because of the magic. 

So then they tried copying me-before-I-was-made-uncopyable. And that's how I - came into existence. And it turned out that in the - years I missed - I had gotten married and had children."

Hug.

Hug. "It's okay. It's good for there to be two of me right now because there's lots to do that requires my attention and Elves don't work while they have children."

"Why not?"

"When you know you're going to exist forever, time-when-your-children-are-young is one of the only really scarce things. You can never, ever have it back. Everything else you can do as much as you like and at whatever pace you like, but their childhoods will run out and be over and if you spent them working..."

Nod.

"We also don't have children in troubled times."

"Because then their childhoods would be troubled?"

"Yeah. It's like - why would you pick any moment to have kids other than the moment that'll give them the best possible lives. I don't know if humans'll feel that way once you're immortal."

"If my parents were immortal I am literally not sure they would ever stop taking in kids."

"There are a lot of kids to take in. If that's what makes them happy..."