Alicornutopia

It's substantially needs-of-thread but if the network is conscious, "notices" downtime really promptly, or has a feature of particular reliability, I'd usually let it sync.

To me it seemed like the difference was whether the underlying connection method could be expected to reach across worlds. Like, if Effulgence didn’t have Milliways and instead everybody was connected by Sueport, Jane would still be able to talk to other worlds. My cellphone would not, so I don’t expect it to keep time synced between the worlds either.

Yeah that's a factor too.

My network notices downtime promptly and is considered critically reliable, but wouldn't ordinarily be expected to reach across worlds (can't do so much as Mars)... I'm getting a sense that it's "technically no, but could go yes on needs-of-thread."

For Skin Deep–style runecasting, how big are runes usually drawn, and what sort of precision is required? Are there runes that have complex shapes that can only be drawn accurately when larger than usual?

I ask because in Incandescence they are discussing whether or not there can be an infinite number of runes, and that only makes sense if they can require arbitrarily tight precision (which they shouldn’t if they just require ruler and compass to draw) or there are some that can only be drawn at arbitrarily large size. Or I suppose if it takes the caster’s intention into account to some degree.

Kappa and I cash runecasting out differently, so Superluminal and Incandescence/dragon!May-and-or-Phix-sandboxes have different systems. In my case, I imagine the runes as being pretty simple; there might be handwriting limitations on drawing them neatly small, but there might also be limits on drawing them neatly large. There could be infinite runes if the ones in common use are simple and you'd have to derive complicated ones from complicated ones and nobody's gone that many layers deep into runespace; but I don't in fact imagine there being infinity runes or even more than maybe tens of thousands tops.

In "Tale of Two Hells," people are able to get Bar to give them all catalogs with titles starting with, like, "Zhq" (I don't remember the exact string). Bar's said she can't give them "all published works of Bells" because she can't identify althood without seeing the people in question. Could they request "all published works of people named Maedhros", given the template uncanny-name-similarity, and use that to search for alts/Ardas?

It'd get them name collisions. Also I'm not sure Maedhroses habitually write things that count as 'published' for Bar's purposes.

Okay, so go for Feanors (research papers) or Maglors (music) and use their full-names-which-I-can't-remember-right-now-freaking-Elves. If necessary, further refine by "contains the following common Quenya words," since Quenya is mentioned to match across Ardas and most things will presumably contain the Quenya for, like, "and" "the" etc.

(Okay, so I suspect the answer to this quickly becomes "that's not a fun story anymore.")

They still can't do anything with the information. Hoping someone wanders through the door is currently their only method of interworld transit; they've got worldleapers but are unwilling to instantiate them lest demons make them; the final stage in their interworld travel process is stable portals made from a device that's too intelligent to be conjurable, but they still don't have targeting on which dimensions they visit. They could confirm there are lots of Ardas, but that's it.