"Nick's outlook is - complicated, let's say." It's all he really can say in a way that would make sense with the context Seth has and without unraveling potentially non-correlative timelines or issues of cross-universal causality, none of which he really wants to get into right now.

"As far as I can tell, he knows enough about the process itself but, uh, there are a lot of variables." He pauses and frowns, considering. "Really a lot. The way it happened turned out to be one of them. I was lucky it was slow enough that there even was time for me to Ascend at all."