She will encounter some slightly older kids without animals. "Oh, new person! Welcome to Milliways!"

"...that's very welcoming, do you also do explaining."

"I think they were meaning to write up a fact sheet but never got around to it? Anyway! There are other dimensions! Some have magic, some don't, some have humans, some don't - I'm assuming you're human, you look human -"

"I look human 'cause I am, this looks like a Zigzagoon 'cause he is..."

"We do not have Zigzagoons. Anyway, Milliways randomly opens its door on new worlds - or, not randomly but we aren't the ones controlling it - and people are hanging out here curing everything wrong with all the worlds we can reach - like, if you have death, we can fix that -"

"We have Zigzagoons and death. How do you fix it?"

"Close the door. Pauses time in your world so no one dies while we're explaining. Maybe get a grownup first if you know one who's close by and would be useful?"

She shuts the door. "Useful for what? Most grownups aren't particularly."

"Fixing your world? I mostly know useful grownups but Milliways seems to mostly grab useful people. Anyway, there's a kind of magic being you can summon and if you do that then you become one when you die and they're indestructible and live forever, so that's death solved."

"What's the catch?"

"Uh, you're supposed to trade them stuff when you summon them and some places don't really have anything to offer them, and if you do something stupid then they can get loose and kill people - most of them don't want to, but if all humans had tons of magic and were indestructible and wouldn't get in trouble for it..."

"Well, do they like Zigzagoons, we have a lot of those."

"And you're the only ones who do, so I bet Zigzagoons will go over great unless feeding them and taking care of them is a hassle or something."

"You do have to feed them and train them."

"Magic food or anything? What happens if you don't train them?"

"Nnnno, regular chow and treats are fine. If you don't train them then they might do things you do not want them to like eat your furniture or something."

"Those don't sound like dealbreakers. Yeah, you can trade Zigzagoons. Are most people literate?"

"Of course they are!"

"Lots of places they aren't, my world they aren't. We still do summoning in those but the Elves send tons of support staff. Wanna go summon an angel?"

"I don't think you explained enough things yet."

"There are kind of a ton of things, do you have specific questions?"

"Do I have to trade something right away? I want this Zigzagoon, he's mine. I'd have to go catch another one."

"You're supposed to trade stuff every time but I'm a wizard, I can give you something for it this time."

"What's a wizard?"

"Where I'm from some people have magic. We can use it to make stuff, and daeva aren't magic so we can usually trade them magic stuff. If they want something mundane we can buy it off the bar."

"Is there someone around who will be better at guessing what I might already know and what I might not."

"Maybe? You can talk to Bar directly and there're lots of people around though the majority are Elves - they're another species, taller than humans and immortal by default and with telepathy which you can block by thinking about keeping your thoughts private -"

"See, that's a thing I didn't know, that should have gone first unless also we're on an active volcano."

"They don't listen to people who're new and might not have it down yet. But yeah, you just pick a way of mentally designating things secret and then they can't."

She hums about that for a moment and then says "How do I tell if I did it?"

"Bug an Elf. I think Mingling was around here earlier - Mingling, new person, come meet her -"

He pops around a corner. "Hi! I'm Maitimo and this is Cadillac."

"Why are you introducing your toy?"

"Wanted to! Nice to meet you."

"Why did you want to?"

"Because otherwise you wouldn't know Cadillac's name. I don't know your name. I like knowing names."

"I'm Bella. Do I have to remember Cadillac's name, because that seems stupid? Do you want my Pokémon's name too?"

"Yes I want your Pokémon's name," he says patiently. "No one else has to remember them but I do."

"This is Zag. It's not a very good name but I didn't pick it, he used to be my mom's."

"Hi Zag!"

"Bella wants to know if she has the osanwë thing down."

"I would have to try listening for your thoughts, do you want me to do that?"

"If I don't have it how much stuff do you get?"

"Things you are thinking right now."

"...okay try."

"Nope! I can tell you're there but it's like you aren't thinking anything."

"Good."

Nodnod. "I really scared Cam when he came because I didn't know people other places didn't have osanwë. It sounds kind of lonely."

"...why would it be lonely? We can talk."

"Yeah, but you can't send senses, feelings, ideas you don't have words for... and you can only talk to one person at a time..."

"We can too talk to more people if they're close enough."

Nodnod. "Anyway you have it all good. Nice to meet you. Does Zag want to learn too?"

"...he's a Pokémon. He's pretty smart but that might be a bit much."

"Is he smart enough I shouldn't try reading his mind though."

"I don't think so... Hey, how do you speak my language."

"Milliways has a universal translation effect. I speak English and Latin and Greek and a bit of Igbo, he speaks Quenya, but you'll hear whatever your native language is."

"Hey Zag, say something."

"Oon."

"Yeah I don't think you need to worry about reading his mind."

"Okay! Welcome to Milliways!"

"Who made this place?"

"We don't know and they are non-interventionist as far as we can tell. There's security which enforces the rules - don't attack people, pretty much - and an infirmary and Bar, who can recommend you food and drinks and books and medium-sized nonmagical stuff but can't explain how the door opens, or who made the bar."

"I don't have any money."

"So the daeva I mentioned earlier come in three types. Demons make stuff, angels change stuff, fairies move stuff. I have a brother who died and now he's a demon so we have infinite money, basically, you can just ask Bar to open a tab and then ask my brother Minor for tons of money next time he's around."

"That would work really well if I knew what he looked like or anything."

He helpfully bounces her a mental image. "You can also ask Cam and Amriac, they're demons too! Or I can summon a demon, I have been summoning lots of demons for interviews and I know one who likes little kids."

"What's the catch?"

He blinks confusedly. 

" - since demons can make arbitrary stuff it's usually hard to pay them? We've pretty much got that problem solved with all the magic we have around here. Is that the kind of catch you mean?"

"Sorta. I dunno, it's very weird that I would be looking for the library and find this place, if this were a story there would be something wrong with it."

"There are lots of things wrong in the multiverse but unless Zag has secret god-killing abilities you haven't mentioned you could kinda pretty much steer clear of them and just roll out summoning in your world. Or ask the Elves to do it for you."

"She looks like Ambela a bit but little."

"Huh, yeah, maybe a little."

Down the stairs comes Cam.

And Timothy - "oh my god. Oh my god. Thank you, landlords - they're actually listening - do you suppose they then continued to listen because -"

"Let's maybe not think about that. Hi there!"

"Hi. You have wings, why do you have those?"

"So I can fly."

"...that's a good reason."

"That's Cam he's one of the other demons I mentioned."

"And I'm Timothy. Hi!"

"Hi, I'm Bella. And this is Zag. He's a Zigzagoon, apparently you don't have them."

"We do not. Hi, Zag."

"Oon!"

"Has anyone explained what's up, Bella?"

"I think they sort of tried."

"It's kind of a lot. Do we have a summary written up -"

"Not really. Keeps being unclear who should write it."

"Do you have particular areas of interest, tiny Bell?"

"...what'd you call me?"

"Oh, dfiferent universes have the same people in them, for some reason. Mingling and I are alternate universe versions, you and Cam and Ambela and Kib and Miranda are. - I'm going off the fact that you look like a small Ambela, are named 'Bella', and I just asked for a tiny Bell, I suppose it is possible these things are coincidences."

"Who did you ask, 'cause it wasn't me."

"The landlords. I was not at all expecting it to work."

"The who?"

"Beings and/or impersonal forces who decide who gets a door."

"That's weird."

"It is. They have my gratitude, though, otherwise we'd never have found the multiverse and there's a lot that can be accomplished now that couldn't have without Milliways." And they haven't, like, given a Melkor a door, though he doesn't say that. And they could've given Cam one six months sooner, but he doesn't say that either.

"Like the death thing? They said we could trade Zigzagoons for immortality..."

"You can summon and become a daeva when you die, yeah, at least probably. It's worked everywhere so far. Summoning works better in societies that have something to trade but we're going to make it work everywhere."

"I'm pretty sure you don't need to set a task and payment to collect on the immortality, but response rates might suffer if a lot of summonses were just 'hi, sending you home now'."

"And we're going to increase supply, eventually, but there's going to be a lag - and we might not increase supply much if people mostly summon back their relatives for good - and we're increasing demand a lot in the meantime..."

"Yeah, I don't think you can count on a lot of ex-summoner daeva entering the summonee population if their bereaved actually know how it all works."

"So we should make summoning really really worth the daeva's time. - I might pass my Singularity alt a note to do something about gags in Revelation, it seems like that kind of turns a fair few demons off taking summons..."

"It really does."

"Kind of an adverse selection thing, too, I bet it turns off friendly curious people more than the ones who just want to murder someone once they get a chance... we're being terribly rude, Bella, sorry. Are there any gaps in the explanation we can fill in for you?"

"...all of them."

"Uh, lemme get a sense of where you're coming from. Name something that was invented recently."

"Uh, the really fast trains?"

"Do you have airplanes?"

"Not personally."

Cam snorts. "Okay. Have you got magic?"

"Not really unless you want to count Pokémon and psychics and stuff."

"I may want to count those things."

"Well, we have those. Are your 'mon less with the special attacks?"

"We don't have the thing you're talking about at all, I think."

"...really? Like, no Zigzagoons is one thing..."

"What are Pokémon? Certain category of animals?"

"What's an animal?"

" - Mingling -"

He sends the concept: ducksbearscatstoads are animals, plantsrockswaterfalls aren't -

"...the first things looked sort of like weird Pokémon, but there are 'mon that are plants and rocks too..."

" - weird. The Elves will approve, they are upset by wild animal suffering. How do Pokémon reproduce, what makes something a Pokémon if not all plants and rocks are..."

"They lay eggs, and the plants and rocks that are 'mon can move around and make noises and be caught and learn moves."

"Learn moves?"

"Yeah. They fight each other a lot. Zag doesn't know anything really fancy though."

"It's a - mechanical thing? Like, as opposed to a model where they fight and generally get better at fighting but other factors like strength or luck or conditions still dominate, they develop specific skills called 'moves' and fighting is mostly determined by those?"

"I don't actually know about mostly, I only just got Zag to myself instead of having to go everywhere with Renée so I don't know much about battling yet. But they're specific things."

"Huh. We have not heard of anywhere else having Pokémon."

"That's... wow, what else do you not have... that sounds really boring."

"Pokémon make life more exciting?"

"I never tried not having them around but if they were gone so would pretty much all things, so."

"The moving trains and airplanes?"

"I guess you could still have those but I think it would be hard to get electricity for the trains without Pokémon."

"Most places do electricity without Pokémon, yeah."

"Pokémon generate electricity?"

"Some of them do. Zag can't right now but he could later maybe."

"Can you recommend a book about all the types of Pokémon and what they do?"

"All of them? The Encyclopedia of Pokémon. There's hundreds."

"I will make the Elves read it."

"Why?"

"They are numerous, can do lots of things at once, spend a lot of their time singing and can read while singing, and will benefit from broader cultural exposure."

"The Encyclopedia of Pokémon is not very cultural. It's an encyclopedia."

"Can you recommend cultural books too? - though you would be surprised at some of the inferential gaps between humans and Elves, an encyclopedia would turn up lots of them."

"Why, what's Elf culture like?"

" - the relevant ones here are mostly Sanity's Elves. They are all immortal and their world has no material scarcity and there are gods who fix any - rough edges - so pretty much no one, anywhere, is in a state of need or misery. They also don't have a crime rate and were shocked at the idea of people lying to investigators and have hilarious shampoo commercials. They're sharp, and they'll work very hard when they need to, but they are continually surprised at what people elsewhere are like."

"Shampoo commercials?"

"Elves have a taboo on loose hair."

"Why?"

"They find it very distracting."

"Why?"

"They've said it's sort of like why humans wear clothes." 

(Cam is again a shirtless demon.)

"Do they go around naked?"

"Not typically but they don't see anything wrong with it. The bar has a rule against nudity so here they do not. If the bar accommodated Elf sensibilities it would similarly have a loose hair rule but I think the Elves are coping."

"So do they wear hats?"

"Braids. One of our alts can do very tidy braids with magic if you want her to do yours to be nice to the Elves."

"What if your hair's too short to braid?"

"Doesn't come up with Elves. I'm told I look disfigured."

"The two of you have an Elf alt. She's very pretty and very old and said she could get used to humans keeping their hair loose but she said it with an interesting expression on her face and your other alt promptly braided my hair for me."

"You're the youngest but Miranda's only fourteen," Cam tells Bella. "Kib looks eighteen but he's much older and I look twenty-two but I'm much older and Mirelótë looks like an Elf, who appear to be vaguely mid-twenties forever, but is super old. You probably shouldn't talk to Kib, he's had very bad things happen to him and is not as easy to understand as alts usually are and you're not the only one he has available."

"How old are you?"

"Coming up on a hundred and eighty."

"I think that might be too old."

"Mirelótë's almost five thousand."

"That's old enough to not even be too old any more."

"Mingling there is seventy."

"...that is too old to name toys that are not of people or 'mon. Or is the toy of an animal? I guess animals could be like 'mon and you could name toys of them."

"The toy is of a car. I don't think cars are animals but I've never seen a real one. Elves grow slow, I'm not grown up yet though I can pretend pretty okay."

"Growing slow sounds sad."

"Why?"

"'Cause you have to be a kid for longer."

"I like being a kid. I can't think of any things I want to do that I can't do because I'm a kid."

"Well, have fun with that."

"Are there things you want to do that you can't do because you're a kid?"

"I'll be able to do stuff more when I'm ten. I don't like having to get my parents' permission to do things. I can get it, but it's annoying."

"I guess I don't like having to reassure people that my parents aren't -" his face screws up in concentration - "negligent? But in Milliways I don't even have to do that."

"Do you have to do that a lot where you live?"

"Kinda. I'm the prince so people have lots of opinions about how to raise me."

"We don't have princes where I'm from."

"Some of the human worlds have them but not Revelation neither and not Kib's world. I like being a prince, people do what I say and all I have to do is give them good lives and I'd do that anyway."

"That does sound nice!"

"Mirelótë's not a princess, I don't know why not, I bet if she said she was in charge of some place people'd go live there. Maybe the places were so nice she didn't feel the need."

"Maybe she planned it for after her children would be grown up, Elves do that kind of thing."

"Or just for after she was sure she was all done with the Valar thing, I think she doesn't otherwise prefer to live in Valimar."

"Is she not all done with her Valar they're very nice."

"The eventuality of Milliways may be the proof of concept that saves her another thirty or forty Years of fine-tuning."

"She wasn't sure how they'd do with something like this until it happened but then they did good?"

"She wasn't prepping them for this in particular, but more or less, yeah." To Bella: "The Valar are a kind of god the worlds Elves come from have and they're usually very bad at being gods, but Mirelótë explained very patiently to hers how to be good at it and now they are."

"...am I supposed to be patient when I am grown up."

"Nah, you're not an Elf."

"Elves are patient-er and singier and likelier to follow the rules and we don't make bathrooms messy."

"That's a weird set of things to be different."

Shrug. Vroom vroom.

"I wanna meet the other ones of us," Bella says.

So Cam trots her off to find Mirelótë and Miranda.

He and Mirelótë have been advising on recruitment of Elves for interdimensional humanitarian work! There's a lot of interest; acquaintances in Valimar have been messaging them to ask if they can get into the filled-to-capacity classes.

"Hey look. Tiny Mirelótë-lookin' human Bell."

"Awww, hello!"

"Hi! Awww - how old is that for a human -"

"I'm six!"

"Nice to meet you!"

"So who're you?"

"This is my husband Rúmil."

"You're married? Ew."

"I would not have been very enthusiastic about the idea when I was six either."

"We were much older than six," he agrees. "Who's that?" at the strange animal.

"This is Zag! He's my Zigzagoon. I didn't name him that, Renée is not very creative and just sort of asked him what his name was and that doesn't get you a lot of variety with Pokémon, but it's his name now."

"I see! The Valar used to say Valinor had every kind of animal but I guess they will have to stop saying that now that we've found the multiverse."

"He's not an animal, he's a Pokémon, we don't have animals and they sound weird."

"Huh. What about them sounds weird?"

"A lot of them are too small and they just look kind of wrong and none of them are plants or rocks or things."

" - I can hardly argue. What's the world you're from like?"

"Well, we have Pokémon. They're for fighting and keeping as pets and making milk and eggs and riding around and generating electricity and gardening and all kinds of things, it must be weird not to have them. I only have this one but I got checked and I can have six, most people can't have that many, so I'm going to have six when I'm older and travel around."

" - what do they check to see how many someone can have?"

"I went to a place with rentals and tried holding onto as many as I could and I could do six! Then I gave them back."

"I mean, what usually goes wrong if someone tries holding onto too many? Which things predict being able to hold on to lots of them? What does holding on to them constitute?"

"Oh, there's a little bit of a psychic thing where the 'mon knows it's yours at least for right then, and they'll do what you say - or at least think about it, they're not all really obedient - and if you try to add another one it doesn't work and if nobody has it for too long it'll go wild unless it was really really tame. I don't think it runs in families or anything - Charlie can do four and Renée can do three -"

"Huh, that's interesting."

"Zag used to be Renée's but he likes me more." Pet pet.

("Zig," says Zag.)

"He is fascinating! Do Pokémon live forever?"

"No. There's stories about ones that do but not regular ones."

Nod. Frown. "Maybe once the Valar have set off their competence cascade they can do something about that."

"That'd be nice." She snuggles her critter. It nuzzles her.

Miranda shows up. She aims her wand at Bella and says, "Plectere." Then she sticks her wand back in her hair. "Hi!"

"Hi," says Bella, feeling behind her head at her new pigtails. "I'm Bella. This is Zag he's a Zigzagoon you don't have them."

"We don't! Can I pet him?"

"Sure!"

He will also pet Zag!

Zag is friendly! He sniffs people and is bristly but still pretty pettable.

"Does your world have anything that needs fixing? Aside from mortality, humans always have that."

"...that's the big one, I guess? Maybe it would be nice if people didn't have to bring Pokémon to go anywhere safely but it's not like there aren't enough of them to go around as long as you don't want designer variants or something."

"Why do people have to bring Pokémon to go anywhere safely?"

"There's wild ones, they might attack you. If you have your own they can fight the wild ones for you."

"Huh. I wonder if people not born in your world can hold a Pokémon."

"Dunno! I could try loaning someone Zag but you have to give him back."

"I'll try it, what do I do?"

Bella transmutes Zag into red light with a small expansible spherical object from her pocket and he disappears into it and offers it to her.

"...how did you do that."

"...it's a Pokéball, that's what they do."

" - everyone else also doesn't have Pokéballs. How do they do it, are they magic -"

"No, I don't think so... there's also a fruit called Apricorns that can do it if you hollow it out and stuff but it doesn't work as well..." She lets Zag out again. "It's really easy, see, you just point it and press the button -" She returns him again and hands the ball to Miranda. "Now if you let him out and you've got him we should be able to tell."

...Miranda pushes the button. Zag comes out.

"No, I've still got him." She takes the ball back.

"That was fascinating, thank you."

"You're welcome!"

And he lets the Bells catch up. It is adorable how they do that.

After the Bells are caught up to a reasonable standard and have dispersed, Cam would like to go ahead and try to kill his demonic mouse.

Convenient how Cam's boyfriend knows the Killing Curse.

It's more complicated. More elements, more finicky about getting them exactly, more concentration needed on the mindset.

He can get the mindset but concentrating on it for very long while doing other things is really hard and doing it at something other than a demonic mouse is going to be harder.

Yeah. Though, Melkor. 

Yeah, Melkor will be easier.

"This is not something I want to work on continuously for hours. Want to see what happens if I make a basement dweller Elf who looks like me and take some of its hair and don't try to throw off a Polyjuice?"

Giggle. "I would love to do that."

So Cam makes a basement dweller - "What do you think, is this what I'd look like if I were an Elf - or should it rather be 'what Mirelótë would look like if male' -"

"Vaguely curious if those get different results and what the differences would be, but either one seems reasonable. - and very pretty, obviously, but I can't find a basement-dweller of you appealing, they don't do that smug expression at all -"

"Oh, the magic can't naively do either conversion, I had to make it up manually, but the potion can't be going off genetics or anything because it can do things like age and hair length." Hair: yoinked. Basement dweller: set in the hallway for Extremely Mysterious Milliways Garbage Collection.

Polyjuice potion!

Quaff!

Cam is a very pretty Elf. He reaches out to pet his hair, of course.

"- ooh -" Cam leans on him, giggling a little breathlessly.

Pet pet. 

"I think I look silly with long hair but this is worth iiiiit," purrs Cam.

"What even happens if an Elf has it short -" Pet pet -

"I think it hurts or something -" Nuzzle.

Cam with no wings is very weird. He rakes his hands through his hair and snuggles him and giggles.

Elf hair: awesome stuff.

The potion wears off after a normal amount of time and then a slightly panting Cam can put his wings around his boyfriend again.

"Will shampoo commercials never look the same to you again?" Snuggle.

"I'm actually sort of wondering how Elves manage to get to the point of washing their hair."

"They have that bodily control thing, right, maybe they can tone down the hair."

"That could be it, although naively I do not think the thing extends to toning down nerve input."

"Kind of a lot would be different if it did, I guess. Perhaps if I want to make one of my alts blush I will ask them."

"Well, better to ask in the context of hair than in the context of whether they can still do that if a Melkor grabs them."

"I assume not or the hallucinations wouldn't work so well, right?" Sigh. Shiver.

Hug.

The Sanity Valar think they can restrict summoning to specific locations within worlds, and are experimenting with allowing summoning in their world but only in specific summoning installations where the circles are pre-drawn. They send Ambela a note requesting comment, and tell her they're ready to talk to their alts in Kib's Arda.

She thinks that restricting summoning locations is a good plan. If they could make some kind of exception for a shortlist of cleared daeva who could be tried for in emergencies away from the specified locations that would be an improvement but if that's technically impossible what they've got is fine.

Vairë is optimistic it could be done eventually and promises to send Ambela updates. 

There's a contest for the design of pretty summoning installations that fill the circle with water or something similar.

Of course.

It will probably be ideal not to resume time in Kib's Arda until they know what can be done about his Melkor. Cam's working on a spell that may accomplish it. It should be tested under safer conditions if those can be arranged.

The Valar they've been bringing up to speed are willing to have their Melkor subject to attempts to kill him, once they have confirmed that worlds identical to theirs up to the point of Milliways contact always result in Melkor committing more atrocities once paroled. If there are any Melkors that don't, then they can't offer that.

...This is not unreasonable but Bar can't actually confirm identicalness except by checking publications and writing was really recent in their world.

"Are there any repentant Melkors, in general?"

This one time there was!

"I know 'darn it' is the wrong reaction but -"

Mirelótë nods and solicits published works on the subject.

This Arda (a space Arda) received an accidental interdimensional visitor from a world with no magic and which to all appearances forcibly made magic things which entered its domain run on physics. Melkor, currently on parole, seized on this opportunity to open an enormous portal between the universes and de-magic his own. It took three hundred Years, it worked, it looks to have killed Eru, and when it was too late to stop him he warned everyone to take corporeal forms when it happened so they wouldn't be erased. The Valar are no longer gods and some of the Maiar got deleted entirely but Melkor is by all accounts now a model citizen, though sometimes he punches people in the face and giggles 'I can just do that!!! Fate doesn't exist!' Sauron and Thuringwethil have kids.

...well, it's a Space Arda, and not identical to Mingling's one.

Mingling's Valar are also not very convinced that counts as a redemption arc.

Punching people in the face isn't an atrocity, but yeah.

They could maybe help with holding Singularity's Melkor, who has definitely done execution-worthy stuff, still?

Can they get his various Maiar too, so they're not running around trying to get around their oath as fast as possible in a panic?

If they have a list.

They can check who took the oath, because Cam made sure it was conjuration-verified.

How many is it?

Thirty-one.

They'll need more sets of Valar, unless they're all conveniently in one place.

Seems unlikely, their movements weren't restricted per se.

Then it'll have to wait. Maybe they can onboard the Valar from one of the Ardas creeping towards the pardon of Melkor - there are Elves monitoring that, right -

There are. With Bar's help, they identified publications in several different flavors of Arda that would be published the Year before the pardon and mark the time to intervene; unique ones are being watched individually. There are a couple thousand people on it.

She doesn't usually offer a service of alerting people when specific things come out in specific worlds but she has been convinced that it is sort of like providing a magazine subscription. Once this understanding has been reached there is no trouble about there being a thousand of them.

They pick one. Identify someone who is very sure their alt would volunteer and whose alt is very definitely childless. 

Cam crosses his fingers when he does the fork anyway.

And gets an Elf who is confused, then highly entertained by the whole situation, and wants to know if she gets with this guy she's liked for forty Years, and then will happily let the Sanity Valar into her world.

Well, did she, inquiring minds want to know and they might do this a few million times.

"I couldn't tell her," says her alt, "I'm gay, but we looked it up and they're happily married before they both die violently at Alqualondë, standard timelines."

...good to know. Away with you, Sanity Valar, trailing sanity wherever ye may tread.

Bella, meanwhile, summons a fairy and trades some books for taking her flying around in the backyard and then dismisses her.

"You should get some textbooks translated."

"Textbooks about what?"

"Summoning. For your world."

"Okay, how do I do that?"

"It's kind of a hassle to learn a language in Milliways because of the translation effect, but you can summon me and I can do it or I think Midnight's got a whole list of demon linguists who might do it."

"Pokémon hatch from eggs and are the thing we can trade until somebody notices that."

"Me, then, probably. Are you sure they aren't magic?" He tries a Zigzagoon egg.

He gets one. "Huh. Okay, draw me up in ten minutes and I'll translate you a textbook."

"Okay!"

She has Cam make her most of the circle, and waits, and then finishes it.

Then he will in fact translate her a textbook. A good one that mentions whether the daeva can kill you.

And he has memory necklaces, who wants them first.

"I want Cir's but it probably makes sense to give Cam his first, he's on a lot of our current projects."

"Makes sense." So he goes to find Cam.

"Hi there!"

"Hi! I got you a present. It took someone ten months to make so take it off before you go recreationally hopping around the insides of stars or something."

"I don't actually think I'd like anything about being in a star, but I can take it off before I go try to kill Ainur who aren't being held down for me and other hazardous activities. Miranda's jumpy enough about letting me borrow her overpowered wand for it."

"I really really hope the killing Ainur works." Necklace.

Wag wag. "Thank you!"

"My pleasure! Looks like we'll be kind of busy - there are another few Ardas coming up on an intervention point - and these help a lot with that."

"Well, as a general rule I like to be busy."

"I am very glad. Take care."

And he goes and knocks on another door.

" - oh, hey."

"Hey. I got you a present." 

"With humans jewelry's sort of a girl thing."

"That's a shame. Jewelry's pretty, are boys just not supposed to be pretty? Anyway, it's magic. Enhanced memory and reflexes and attentional capacity. I really want you to have it."

"Okay, okay. - wow. Cool."

"Yeah. Can I show you what I'm working on?"

He's wearing it at breakfast the next day in the main bar, reading through Godspring plans.

"Is that one of the magic necklaces?"

"Yeah! It's amazing, I feel about twice as smart - it'd help with duelling, too, not that that seems especially likely to come up anymore -"

"Maybe it can be retained as a sport. Did you need one for something?"

"I didn't know I did, but when Midnight dropped by with it he had a bunch of logistical stuff he wanted me to take a look at. In Godspring there's no statute, we might as well help out where we can, and he thought I could fix a couple infrastructure problems that way."

"Which problems?"

"I can forward it to you - uh, there's a kingdom that won't go for the clinics because they're touchy about sovereignty, so we're seeing how far we could get sneaking in and charming their wells and rivers and so on, making food's a bad idea even though it's the first thing people who want to help Muggles always think of because then you drive the local farmers out of business, but magic can do fertilizer, too..."

"Ooh, magic fertilizer."

And later she goes and finds Midnight.

"Hi!"

"Hi, how are you doing?"

"Okay. Reconstructed most of my world's artifact magic from the notes, taught it to Mahtan and a couple other people. Mingling's Fëanáro thinks he can do better than what we've got for memory and I do not doubt him."

"I should borrow Cam's necklace for long enough to see if it stacks with chip blessings."

He takes his off and hands it over.

"That works too." She puts it on.

They stack but with the memory boosts she already has there's not much discernable difference. The attention boost is a bit more noticeable.

"They do but it's certainly not efficient to have one on me while they're scarce." She returns it. "And they don't patch the problem I always have with memory blessings, but the attention bit is lovely."

"What problem is that?"

"The blessings help me recall facts and sensory input. I know where I was and what was happening. But they do much less for helping me remember what I was thinking and feeling at the time. - I think this is why Kib shut down, actually, he was told that Melkor could read memories and would not naturally think of an interpretation of that which didn't include 'thoughts and feelings maybe a half-second out of date' so he expected to be outright mindread even though the evidence suggests even flat Melkors don't do that."

"Evidence which I take it there's no point in presenting to him." Sigh. "We can try to get a Fëanáro to patch that, it should be possible in principle."

"That would be marvelous but not a particular priority with everything going on."

"The set from Singularity's experienced six years so far. Engineering time might not trade off too hard against other things."

"Then maybe I will not chide anyone for poor planning if I get something that does the trick for my five hundredth birthday."

"I'll keep it in mind. You came out to ask why I gave one to Fredrick?"

"I have a couple of guesses, but I don't know which if any is right."

"Go ahead."

"It could be that you just miss having a Findekáno uncomplicatedly pleased to receive attention and presents."

"And Timothy's - they were best friends, but Timothy is not going to maintain a best friendship with someone who has a crush on him who he marries in other universes, so he's just kind of been ignoring him -"

"That's - surprisingly clumsy of him, I wonder if I should have Cam remark that he's not going to read into it or something -"

"Someone should probably say something, yeah - but spending more time with him's not the solution if he wants Fredrick to in fact get over him -"

"Presumably there is something less unfortunate to be had than dropping him altogether."

"Probably. It's also a waste of resources. Findekáno's brilliant, and very practical, and very good at his job."

"He is, and Fredrick seems similar and very excited to have useful things to do."

"Yeah."

"My next guess was that you just thought he was underutilized, although giving him a necklace wouldn't have been strictly necessary to fix that so it's only a partial guess."

"I did think so but the necklace was mostly wanting him to feel valued, more than - wanting wizarding patches to the gaps in the Godspring rollout."

"I think it worked."