"He's—different," says Alice. "I dunno how different. More different than me or the Joker. He's still us, but he's... I don't know, happier? Maybe that's the wrong word. He's been happier, for longer. He's had it better than we ever did."

"How'd that happen, or wasn't there much swapping of life histories?"

"He ran away from home way early. Like, when he was ten or so. And he fell in with these people called the Edori who're like... an entire society of me. They go wherever they want and fuck whoever they want and have fun and love each other."

"An entire society of you," repeats Bella. "Well, that certainly sounds... friendly."

"They are! I'm pretty sure he's had more sex than I have, and I used to be a whore!"

Bella bursts out laughing. "Oh wow. Okay then. Angela seems so repressed I don't think she'd have been so comfortable with a standard-issue Whistle, anyway, but maybe a happier one with a fitting cultural background she already had a chance to learn about is close enough to work."

"And he steals stuff, but he's trying to stop 'cause she doesn't like it. He's never killed anybody. I don't think he even would," says Alice, like it's almost inconceivable. "Well, if he really had to, probably."

"Huh. So I guess there's a... Whistle spectrum, with him on one end labeled "benign" and the Joker on the other. I'm not sure how to order you and Kas in the middle there though. Haven't met him yet."

"Micaiah did. He's between me and the Joker," says Alice. "If you have to line us up like that."

"I don't have to, but it's an interesting exercise. What d'you know about Kas secondhand to put him there, then?"

"Blew up his parents."

"That'd do it, yeah," acknowledges Bella. "I take it Micaiah's are alive and well? If he ran away that young they might not even have gotten caught like your dad eventually did."

"Angela went back and found them. He has a little brother," Alice says, shivering slightly.

"Oh yikes. What happened with the little brother?"

"They've met. He's... not a me," says Alice. "He's really not a me. The most me thing Micaiah's seen him do is saying thank you to Angela after she said he didn't have to."

"But Angela got him out somehow, he's not still there," Bella clarifies.

"Yeah. Yeah, she did."

"Good. I was half-worried she'd come up with an explanation for why Jovah must have put him there for a reason or something. She's really very thoroughly religious. It's kind of unnerving."

"If she ever said that, Micaiah would fuck right off," he asserts. "He's still that much of a me."

"He took it pretty quietly when she said Jovah didn't want them to have magic powers," Bella says doubtfully.

"Can you seriously not figure out by yourself how those things are different?"

"I can figure out how they're different. But we have us some good magic powers. If she cares enough about abused children to find and rescue one she happens to hear about, she must be doing some serious throttling of her natural instincts to not seek the ability to find and rescue more of them besides that."

"...I guess," he says.

"I'm still working out a ground rule for that that I can implement on Earth for a Cygnus present and still fall under the only-obviously-evil-people-will-object criterion," says Bella. "Unfortunately, there is enough mainstream controversy about what constitutes child abuse that I haven't thought of one yet, and I'm not out of diseases to cure." She sighs.

"I love you," he says comfortably.

"I love you too," she replies, pressing a kiss to his temple.

It is now snuggle time.

"Hi!" says Stella. "You're probably Kas, am I right? And Petaal."

"...Hi!" says Kas. "Yeah, that's us. Which one are you?"

Stella's wearing her crown. It has the star sapphires, although since they are magic star sapphires they radiate in seven directions instead of six. "Guess," she says, tapping it.

"...well, you're probably an empress of something," he says slowly, "but it's not like that narrows it down..."

"I'm Stella," she laughs. "Stars, Empress of the Stars, hence the crown design. Golden's is gold, Shell Bell's is all ocean-themed, your Amariah's entry mentioned something about permanent ice."

"Is Amariah around?" Stella asks.

"...Are you okay?"

He wrinkles his nose slightly. "Do you care?"

"I asked, didn't I?" She sits down opposite him. "What's wrong?"

"I'm not gonna hurt you," she says, sitting back and blinking. "- Is it the coins? Are you scared of Shell Bell now too?"

"...The asteroid thing?" hazards Stella. "Alice isn't afraid of me. He was mad for a while but not afraid. Micaiah wasn't either. Why are you?"

"Alice is the one who's fucking you, I'm pretty sure that buys him a pass," says Kas. "The worst thing Micaiah's ever done to anybody is steal their wallet and run away laughing."

"Is Amariah tolerating you doing nasty things to people?" asks Stella. "Because that seems unlikely on the face of it. Although I still haven't met her directly."

"I killed a guy for her," Petaal pipes up, with a defiant flutter of her wings. "And I'd do it again."

"And Amariah killed a guy for Shell Bell, Golden killed somebody who hurt her particularly badly, the fact that I've never personally found it necessary doesn't mean I can't see the occasional necessity for people with fewer resources than I have," says Stella. "If Amariah wanted you to kill a guy I'm pretty happy to accept the explanation that this was the best idea."

"Well, I'm still scared of you," says Kas, looking away. "Maybe I shouldn't be, I don't know, I didn't decide to be, I just am."

"Do you want me to leave you alone?" asks Stella doubtfully.

"I don't know," he sighs. Petaal flutters her wings again.

Kas and Petaal are at the same table; Petaal is viscacha-shaped on top of the pile of cards, and Kas has his arms around her and his face buried in her fur.

She could always ask him. He hasn't gone anywhere. He's just over there snuggling his daemon.

"The Joker was killing people. He likes this masked vigilante type and that was how he was getting her attention, was terrorizing their city. And there wasn't - I could have laid down all the ground rules of Mars on that world, and as long as I wasn't sticking around to babysit him and patch holes, he would have found something else to do that would've been distinctly not-benign. I have my own world to babysit, but I found someone from his who let me in to - sequester him. The asylum wasn't going to hold him; he told me as much himself. I did not have another way to keep people around him safe. But I did make sure that he could still visit Milliways in his dreams, from the asteroid, before I left." She shrugs. "You've got a Bell. You don't have to kill anyone to get her attention. She's got enough projects to keep her fascinating for an eternity. And if you go some manner of glitchy and become dangerous anyway, she can take care of it, I don't have to. No one on the Joker's world was going to be able to do anything of the kind. No magic there."

"At the time? I was pissed off. But that wasn't why. I told him well before I got to the point of being pissed off that this was the plan, if I found a way to his world. It's sad, when I think about it now. He could've been like my Alice if things had been different."

"...And that's what's sad?" says Kas. "It's sad that he's not a different person?"

"It's sad that things turned out that way, that he's not safe to have in a population center, that the masked vigilante he had his eye on never even slightly got what he was about, that he's unhappy about the asteroid, that all the relevant people and events fell together this way and not some in happier configuration," says Stella. "Maybe that adds up to it being sad that he's not a different person. The multiverse doesn't have to be fair. Quite possibly some people are just net sad, net incompatible with others being happy, net doomed to leave their environments less pleasant than they were. The people the Joker killed don't get to be anyone anymore because they are dead."

"He'd be just fine in a population center of other Jokers," says Kas. "He's a sweetheart to us."

"Yeah, well, the one time Alice tried to visit him he got trapped in his mindscape, I thought Alice was dead, and I ultimately had to mount a hazardous rescue mission," scowls Stella. "Maybe one day if enough Whistles collect here I'll force the door for you all and you can all have a party on the asteroid or something. But he was not born in a population center of people just like himself. He was terrorizing ordinary people whose only mistake was living in a city that attracts people who like to take it apart."

"Who're you pissed off at?" he asks quietly.

"Human psychology." She sighs.

He smiles crookedly. "What's that supposed to mean?"

She shrugs. "Can you think of a place to put the Joker where he'd be happier and not dangerous? I can force the door, I've done it before. I guess I could see if he wants to go Micaiah's route and follow the Edori, Alice said they sounded like an entire society of Whistles and then Angela would be around and she's got coins now, if that turned out to be a bad idea... I'm not out to punish him. That's just not what I'm about. I just don't prioritize his comfort over anyone else's life."

"There's nowhere better than dead you can put any of us where we won't be dangerous," he says. "Unless you mean something way different by 'dangerous' than I do."

"What do you mean by it?"

"Dangerous is something we just are," he says. "We don't have little rulebooks in our heads telling us what we're not allowed to do. We just do what we want, whatever that is. So if you want it to be a rule that we can't hurt anybody, you have to either put us where there's nobody to hurt, or kill us. And being where there's no other people is one of the worst things that could possibly happen to us."

"Whether it's a rule doesn't matter. What matters is that it doesn't happen."

"I'm gonna live forever," says Kas. "Of course I'm gonna hurt somebody someday. I won't even have to mean to. There's just too much of forever for it not to happen."

Stella triangles away a burgeoning headache. "The it that has to not happen is not all forms of hurting all people forever. It's hurting people who ought not to be hurt. I don't care that you blew up your parents or that Golden set the woman who mind-raped her daughter on fire or that Amariah assassinated the president of Panem. Those people were not innocent. Would I slightly prefer it if, say, Golden had had the ability to strand the relevant mind-rapist with her mate somewhere? Sure, but she didn't, so execution was reasonable."

"If I meet her, I'll mint her and give her starter coins, and it's a reasonable bet that she'll start reading your mind, which should help," says Stella.

"What if we don't want her to?" says Petaal.

Blink. "Don't you?"

"Well. That sounds like something you should be working out with her, not me," shrugs Stella. "I trust her to have her own world under control."

"That's what I mean when I say we're all dangerous, though," he says. "I think."

"Alice doesn't live on an asteroid," points out Stella. "I have an emergency mint-gone-rogue containment protocol, which is designed to work on him, but I don't really expect to need it. For him, anyway, there are other mints. There are levels of danger. Anyone can -" She fumbles for an example. "Make a poor driving decision and hit someone with their car. Slightly fewer people will successfully resort to violence to rescue their girlfriend. Neither of those things is a problem. A tiny subset of people blow up hospitals to get the attention of a masked vigilante."

"Oh, if you just don't want him blowing up hospitals, put him somewhere there's no Bat," says Petaal. "All the really big showy stuff was for her. And you don't fall in love like that too often."

"I'm sure the Bat would be thrilled to learn that the terrorist attacks were all her fault," says Stella. "What do you think would happen if I dropped the Joker off in Angela's world on that continent full of Edori?"

"I don't know," says Kas. "He might like it. He might not. He wouldn't start blowing up Edori."

"That's good, because they sound like very friendly people and I would not like to be responsible for their exploding."

"Thank you."

Petaal lets out a butterfly-sized giggle.

"Am I still scary?" she asks.

"Boo?" attempts Stella.

Petaal giggles again, fanning her delicate wings.

"The daemon thing is very nifty," remarks Stella. "I wonder if I'd have an owl like Amariah's, if I had one."

"I bet not," says Petaal. "Not unless you were a witch."

"What d'you think I'd have instead, then?"

"Path wanted to be a firefly," says Kas. "Or a dragon."

"Ooh, a dragon," muses Stella.

"Looks like," Stella agrees. "I take it all these possibilities for what a daemon winds up as - mean things? Correlate with things?"

"They mean something about who you are," says Petaal. "I never really got that. But I guess that makes sense, because we asked the alethiometer and I'm never gonna settle."

"Do you know what her version of Charlie and Renée have? It doesn't say in our book."

"Her dad's a wolverine," says Petaal. "I don't think she said about her mom."

"A wolverine, huh. It's surprising that your world's wound up so recognizably similar to mine - I'd expect all this daemon-having to affect the course of history very sharply - but then again I suppose similar worlds isn't that much more of a surprise than there being versions of me and Whistles in worlds that are any amount of dissimilar."

"It's weird that you call us Whistles," Kas muses. "I mean, it makes sense from you and it's kind of cute, but it's weird."

"Well, you don't have name consistency even to the imperfect extent that we do," says Stella. "Alice's middle name is Whistle because I used that for a code name to refer to him anonymously and gender-neutrally when I thought I was having coffee with my nemesis, even though I turned out to be having coffee with my future personnel officer."

"I tried it once to see and I can only force the door to places I've been before," says Stella. "But that still means I could get you and Alice and the Joker all together now, if that's enough for a quorum."

"It'd be a start," he says. "D'you want to step into our world for a bit so you can go there later?"

"Sure. If I step into your world I might as well also contact Amariah so we can meet each other and presumably I can dump some coins on her," says Stella.

"...You were unclear about whether I still scare you," Stella says.

"Yeah," says Petaal.

"Mightn't that be relevant to whether it's the worst thing or not?"

"I want to anyway," says Petaal.

"...Okay. Do you need me to break it off if you seize up, or anything...?"

Petaal nods her small fuzzy head.

Stella pets her very gently. "Feels like mindreading," she remarks aloud.

"Does she know what mindreading feels like or is it that obvious a comparison?" Stella's still gentle with Petaal, after a startled flinch at the shift under her hand; she doesn't know much about how this works and is erring on the side of caution.

"It's that obvious," says Petaal, closing her eyes and making happy little hm-hm noises.

"Ah." Pet pet. So soft.

"Mm," says Petaal. "Aren't I cuddly?"

"You are. What kind of creature are you? Or doesn't it really exist, like the dragon?"

"I'm a viscacha," she says proudly. "They're really real. And really fluffy."

"No kidding they're fluffy. You're like an overstuffed rabbit plushie crossed with the concept of huggableness."

"Amariah said so too," giggles Petaal.

"We are very much alike," laughs Stella.

"You are!" says Petaal. "You give nice pettings."

"I am glad to hear it." Pet pet pet. "You wanna take me to your world so I can meet Amariah?"

"Sure," she says contentedly, and nuzzles Stella's hand, and hops back across the table into Kas's arms. He hugs her for a moment, kisses the top of her head, and then stands up.

Stella follows after him. She floats.

Petaal turns into a brightly iridescent snake and loops herself around Kas's shoulders as he opens the door.

Stella steps out into a strip club in Rio, takes in the Portuguese signage with tolerant amusement, and puts Amariah and Kas both on the brainphone network for a conference call. [Hi, Amariah! Guess who!]

[...Stella?] guesses Amariah. [Goddesses all, did Kas bring you back? Oh wow.]

"Hey, count me in here," says Petaal.

"Sorry," says Stella, and she includes the daemons on the network too. [Yep! Are you in the middle of anything? Can I come teleport you to the door here in - some Portuguese-speaking country?]

[Yeah - absolutely - I'll tell Metis I'm going to the bathroom - we can talk in Milliways and she won't notice how long I'm gone,] chatters Amariah. There's a silence. [Okay, now.]

"Hold the door?" Stella asks Kas lightly, and teleportation occurs.

Teleportation and counterpart-hugs!

Kas holds the door.

Amariah gives him a kiss as she sidles through it.

Stella doesn't give him a kiss, but she goes in too.

"Her too, really?" laughs Amariah.

"I was surprised when she asked earlier, too," says Stella.

"I like you," says Petaal. "You're okay."

"A truly glowing recommendation. I'll put a plaque up in Moonstone Palace. 'Petaal Thinks I Am Okay.'"

Amariah giggles. "I'm glad you're getting along," she says. "I was a little worried."

"So were we," says Kas. "But it turned out okay."

Stella teleports them all to the Belltower, which is still empty. "You do want to get minted, right?" she asks Amariah. "Angela turned me down. Shell Bell invested a little more effort into convincing her and managed it, but it is apparently worth checking."

"Oh yeah," says Amariah. "No question."

Kas grins fondly at Amariah.

"Him too?" Stella asks, aiming her thumb at Kas. "...Actually, I have no idea in what way minting will or won't carry over to your daemons."

"Him too, please, and," Amariah shrugs, "we'll test it, shall we?"

"It'll be an adventure!" chirps Petaal.

"Minted," says Stella, pointing at Amariah, "and, minted." She points at Kas. "I wanna know what colors you get."

"Testing," shrugs Stella. "It's not like I'm short on hexes." She mints both daemons.

"Trippy," says Stella.

"No kidding," Amariah agrees.

"Soooo," says Petaal, "what's this I hear about an agony beam?"

"Oh yeah, I should have one of those," says Amariah.

Stella tosses her a hex.

"Yeah, Alice felt they were important distinctions," shrugs Stella.

"I think we should have sex right now," Petaal declares. "Stella, want in?"

"No thank you. And I'm not sure I wanna stick around if the conversation's going to stall for the next however long, so, real quick -" She makes them each a bandolier, with some starter coins on Amariah's, and quickly private-brainphones the star secret to Amariah. "Kas, Petaal, don't use stars unless Amariah tells you what I just told her and which not even Alice knows, stars are evil, they'll eat you up and not in a good way," she adds aloud. "Maybe I'll come visit you guys later. I can force the door - Amariah, that's a star, it'll go anywhere you've been before, or at least I think that's how it works."

"Oh!" exclaims Amariah. "I've been to Juliet's, I can mint Juliet!"

"If it turns out to work every time instead of being Milliways-obstinate, then yeah," laughs Stella. "You guys have fun. I'll write this up and then I'm heading home."

Petaal turns lion and headbutts Amariah gently toward a bedroom door.

Amariah goes where ushered, giggling.

Stella waves, and writes very fast, and leaves.

"Let's make hexes," Petaal says cheerfully, shifting male-angel as soon as there is a closed door between her and Stella.

"Okay," says Amariah. "Flavor choice?"

"Something sharp," says Kas.

"Yeah," agrees Petaal.

"Oh well," Amariah sighs. "Home? Well. This strip club? And a teleportation power?"

"Yeah. Those," says Kas, grinning a little.

Teleportation powers! Strip club! Teleportation!