"Staged it. I knew in theory how I would have sent someone home who still had an outworlder's power, but I didn't have the power anymore and couldn't do it myself. When I lost that body I lost a little clarity on my memories from when it was my only one, but they've stayed stable since. The - mental architecture, I suppose - of the King and Queen has very long-term-stable memory storage, although it takes some effort to reach things from more than five centuries ago."

"It's really weird that you were able to assume both their - positions."

"How so?"

"It seems like it has to be a meta-fact about how outworlder influence works that it lasted long enough for you to get the Queen as well as the king but not indefinitely and it's kind of an arbitrary meta-fact. Whence the meta-facts?"

"'Not indefinitely' is because I was becoming something with a different relationship to reality; the fact that the transfer wasn't instantaneous is a common thread among acts of outworlder influence, they tend to be slow and subtle and gradual rather than taking effect all at once; I don't know why this one was so comparatively fast but my hypothesis is that the juxtaposition of my two natures was - an uncomfortable state for the world, like holding two magnets together when they want to jump apart."

"That's potentially useful as a model but not exactly an answer about whence meta-facts."

"I'm not sure I understand the question, then."

"It is a fact that outworlders affect this world in a way. Why?"

She frowns thoughtfully.

"I know the answer, more or less, but it's difficult to describe the answer. It's... hmm. To some extent, all minds have an effect on this reality. It's just that with most people, the effect is so small that they barely notice it, especially living in a society made up entirely of other people with exactly the same ability. People here are, on average, just a little bit luckier than people who live in a physics-based universe. Then there are the King and Queen, who made the world in the first place. Their connection to it is direct and personal, but limited: if I wanted to use that power to change the fundamental structure of the world, I would have to tear it down and start from scratch, which the King and Queen each preferred over continuing to coexist with each other, but which I obviously find an unsatisfying solution. And then outsiders... because they don't come from within the system, either by having originated there or by having built it and in a sense built themselves within it, their influence on it is stronger, with a wider scope."

"I'm not following that last inference."

"It's difficult to explain. I'm trying to think of an analogy and none of them are coming out quite right. Saying that you have diplomatic immunity from the laws of physics, while snappy, doesn't have a lot of explanatory power."

"Not really. I guess if we table that part my next question is why the Sun King and Moon Queen were the entities who existed in the world in this way instead of only one of those or zero or more or different ones."

"By 'existed in the world in this way' you mean...?"

"Why is there something instead of nothing? The king and queen made it. Why were there those in the first place though?"

"My information on this is not very direct, but the impression I have is that the void had... minds coming to exist in it and then being swept away again... and the King and Queen happened to hang on unusually long and interact with one another and observe that they both preferred to continue existing, and they ended up being the first ones to create a world. It could also be that they were genuinely the first minds the void produced, but I find the other explanation more intuitively satisfying."

"Huh. Are any new ones happening? Do you think it kidnapped people before there was a world to land them in?"

"I think, but can't confirm directly, that I would notice if another world existed or came to exist in the void, and I have noticed no such thing; I haven't noticed new minds coming to exist there and I'm not sure whether I would. I also think, but again can't confirm directly, that anyone could go out into the void and try to create a world there, and they might succeed but would be far more likely to be irrevocably destroyed. I know for a fact that the mechanism for pulling people here from Earth is entangled with the world in a way that means it couldn't have existed in that form before the world did; the void could have had a separate mechanism for doing the same thing without a destination world, but I don't have any information suggesting that it did. The King and Queen were definitely not of human origin."

"Did they set up the kidnapping thing?"

"No; it seems to have arisen on its own."

"Do you think all worlds made from void would share fundamental properties dissimilar from Earth?"

"Yes. I'm very confident that one of the common threads would be the respective degree and kind of influence that creators, outsiders, and locals would have on such a world. I'm not sure how the residents of one void-world would interact with a different one, but my best guess is that they would have less influence on it than someone from outside the void entirely but more than someone from within the world itself. And I think, a little less confidently, that world-creators going visiting would not find themselves much different from their residents in that regard."

"I think I should add a section in the specs about interactions between worlds. Seems like part of growing, you mentioned growing."

She nods. "That sounds like a good idea. Do you have any preliminary thoughts on what such a section would look like?"

"- I have wide error bars about what other voidworlds would be like. Like, I kinda wanna go make one once I am done speccing things, but other people who had very different opinions might have done so."

"I'm not sure I follow; what do you mean?"