"If I ask nicely, then yes."

"Okay. That's good. But unless she can do it now, or, you know, before you go home, I still have to come along at first. Packlessness is not a joke."

"A short visit to another universe isn't a huge deal," she says, not without a certain amount of irony. "And no, we left all the big coins at home, to appease your very safety-conscious princess."

"Yes," Libby says fondly. "Yes you do."

Orfeo grins. Elena groans and mutters under her breath.

"I'm youngest of four," says Orfeo agreeably. "Born during the Volturi control of the wolf population, in the Volterra village; our dad's a wolf and my and Elena's mom is his imprint. So I'm half-Quileute half-Italian. We stayed there even after Her Majesty took over but when I activated me and Elena joined the Imperial pack to have more stuff to do. I run the village paintball games - it's not a big deal, Chiara can take over - and I have field medic training but it's only applicable for wolves and you shouldn't set me at a hurt human, and I can speak Italian natively, and I won yellow gold in the Ultra Olympics for wolf division wrestling once, and white gold in mixed middle division long-distance swimming twice. I'm on the holiday decoration committee. I make really good risotto. I'm decent at chess and great at knowing which way is north and lousy at singing."

"I don't speak Italian," Libby says thoughtfully. "I should learn it."

"I mostly just use it to talk to Mom," says Orfeo.

"It's nice sharing multiple languages with somebody, though. Me and my aunt speak English, German, and French."

"I know... maybe a few hundred words of French, and I could probably fake more than that if I had to," muses Orfeo. "There's a stationary branch of the Imperial coven in Québec so I hear it in my head and we go there sometimes, but I've never systematically tried to learn it. I don't know a lick of German. Except, like, 'ja' and 'heil' and 'schadenfreude'."

Libby giggles. "Not a bad start. You can learn them with magic when I take you home," she offers. "Although I'm not sure it wouldn't be more fun teaching you the long way."

"It sounds like you do a lot of stuff with magic," he observes.

"I didn't use to. Then Bella happened," she says, smiling. "And now there's a palace on the moon, a rapidly expanding city on Mars, and little things like installing a whole language in somebody's head are starting to look comparatively trivial."

"Huh. What do you do while she's doing all that?"

"My specialty is personnel," she explains. "When I said I had a lot of friends, I may or may not have meant I run an extensive international organization full of useful people of all varieties. Not unlike your empire, from what I can tell. Whenever Bella needs someone to run the Mars immigration office or her magic bank or something, I find the right person for the job."

"Cool. That doesn't sound like something you'd just fall into, how'd you get into this?"

"What kind of math?" he says, with the air of someone who just about knows that there are kinds.

"Lots of kinds. I'll spare you the boring incomprehensible details." She grins. "Unless you like boring incomprehensible details, in which case I can tell you all about infinite-dimensional vector spaces."

"Well, I wouldn't listen to anyone else talk about infinite-dimensional vector spaces, but," he shrugs.

"I'm sure between the two of us we can come up with a subject that you like on its own merits. How about motorcycles, do you like motorcycles? I have a motorcycle."

"I like motorcycles," he agrees. "Can't have one because we move around the world all the time, but I learned to ride one anyway; there's some stashed in some of the imperial garages."

"I'll get you a motorcycle," Libby decides.