"Sue." He grins. "It's short for Suicide Watch."

"Oh goodness," laughs Isabella. "Who named you that, or did you pick it yourself?"

"My friend Aegis," he says. "Her name's Bella Swan and she looks like you. Are you her mom?"

"I - no. I'm not her mother. Her mother and my mother are similar like she and I are similar, though," says Isabella. "...How old are you? I take it you've never been here before?"

"Nope, never," he says cheerfully. "Similar how?"

"This is a weird little restaurant that moves its door around by magic," says Isabella, "and it gets visitors from all kinds of different worlds, and a lot of those worlds have near-copies of some of the same people in them. I'm one of those copies of your friend, I guess, and there are several more of us, and there are several of you, too."

"...There's more of me?" he asks. "Who'd go around making those?"

"Well," says Isabella. "I don't think anyone is setting out to copy you, but - alternates like that do tend to have - similar parents. Are... yours safely out of the picture?" she asks.

"I don't mean to pry. But the version of you from my world left home when he was a little younger than you - I think, you never said how old you are - but the others I've met didn't leave so soon, and I don't think it was good for them."

"I go to Battle School," he says. "In space. I won't see my dad again until I'm at least sixteen or so and probably by then I'll be able to kill him in my sleep."

"I won't," he adds, magnanimously. "Unless he tries to hurt me first. No point otherwise."

"Perhaps you should avoid seeing him even when you are sixteen," suggests Angela.

"I will if I can. But I don't know what's gonna happen," he says.

"I suppose. You don't have any younger siblings, do you?" Isabella asks anxiously. "The one of you from my world - his name's Micaiah, he's upstairs with another one of your alts - he has a little brother. But he's the only one we know of who does."

"Nah," he says, shaking his head.

"Okay. Good. I'd take you up to meet your alts but they're..." She settles on: "Busy. When they're not busy you can meet them. And when my alt is done with her conversation you can meet her too if you like."

"Busy doing what?" he asks brightly.

"Perhaps you can ask them." She is completely willing to fob this one off on Micaiah and Alice. "I can read Micaiah's mind but I am not doing it right now."

Sue giggles.

"You are very cute," Isabella informs him. "But I'm sure you knew that."

"Not really," he says, still giggling.

"So you already know your version of me, I take it. That's unusual. The others of us Bells - that's what we call ourselves as a group - who have yous at all don't meet you until we're seventeen or so."

"We met at Battle School," he says. "Maybe you don't have one of those."

"My world definitely doesn't. I don't think the others do, but I could be wrong - if they have them, though, they didn't attend."

"It's where the IF takes all the smartest, viciousest kids in the world to teach them to win wars," he explains.

"...Viciousest?" (She is not correcting his grammar. They are not even actually speaking the same language.) "And what's the IF?"

"It stands for International Fleet. They're the whole world's army, to defend us against the buggers."

"...Which are? I really am from another world, Sue, you're going to have to explain a few layers back anything you want me to understand."

"Okay," he says agreeably. "About a hundred years ago, giant bugs tried to invade the planet. We fought them off, they invaded again, we fought them off again, and now we're trying to get ready in time for round three."

"...Now I'm wondering if my world is a future of one like yours," muses Angela. "Our history says that our ancestors were carried away from a warlike place to settle peacefully and simply on the planet I live on. But there was nothing about giant bugs in particular. Which could mean that my history isn't yours, or that the part about the bugs was omitted."

"Lucky ancestors," says Sue. "Don't ask me about the history thing. I'm not that kind of psychic."

"Are you some other kind of psychic?"

"I'm a not-quite-a-telepath," he says serenely. "Why?"

"I don't think any of the other Whistles - that's what we call your template - are psychic. Alice has a power, but it's not a telepathic power. A lot of Bells are born with a power but it's consistent when we have it - and me and one of the others we've met so far just don't."

"You know lots of me, right?" says Sue. "Is consistent the first word that comes to mind?"

"In some ways? Absolutely. Not in all, of course," laughs Isabella. "So I guess this is one way in which you're inconsistent, along with names and such."

"...How are we consistent?" he asks interestedly.

"Well," says Angela. "You look the same - Bells mostly do too, but so far we haven't encountered any Whistles who are actually a different species, while half the Bells who are entered into the guestbook in our club room upstairs are not humans. My deviations from template are the most visible, though," she adds, waving a wing. "The parents - are consistent. I don't know how many of you share birth names, because I haven't been so rude as to try to ask for anyone's besides Micaiah's, but there is likely some matching there. You like populated areas." Is that enough to avoid having to conspicuously say I'll tell you when you're older? She hopes so.

"I'm a mutie," he says. "Technically that means I'm a different subspecies. Is there anything else?"

"Those of you who appear in worlds with Bells tend to wind up attached to them," she offers. "I'm engaged to mine." (Is that distracting? She hopes that's distracting.)

"You will most likely be able to figure it out later," she says levelly. "Or perhaps you can get Micaiah or Alice to tell you; they'll know if they'd have liked to be told, I suppose."

"But I wanna know now," he coaxes.

"Well, can you tell them what the thing is that you're not telling me so I'll be sure they're telling me the right one?"

"I think they will consider it laughably obvious, but if it turns out they don't, I will inform them privately."

"Okay," he giggles.

"In the meantime, look, there's Stella all through with her conversation over there - We're all mostly called Isabella or variants of that, but for here, we choose nicknames. Mine is Angela," says Angela. "Stella, look what I found!"

"What'd you fi- it's a baby Whistle, oh my word," says Stella.

Sue beams at her with maximum cuteness.

"Oh my word. Can I hug you?"

She scoops him right up for a hug. "You're so cute, you're a little prepubescent Alice. Where'd you come from, what are you called?"

"He's Sue," supplies Angela. "He comes from someplace called Battle School, which is in space, and he's already met a Bell there."

"Apparently you guys know two more of me and they're upstairs somewhere but Angela won't tell me what they're doing," he says, with utmost innocence, as he freely and affectionately hugs Stella back.

"They can tell you themselves when they're through," says Stella, implacable in spite of snuggles. "If they think that would be a good idea. I can tell Alice to hurry up, if you're impatient, but he might ignore me."

"Of course he'll ignore you," snorts Sue.

"If I tell him there's an adorable itty-bitty Whistle in Milliways who wants to talk to him? Enh, even odds," says Stella.

"Yes, she didn't mean literally telling him to hurry up," laughs Angela.

"Better than even odds, really, he showed up smart quick that time I stuck my head out the door to introduce him to Ghosty."

"Giving direct orders doesn't work well even with typical people, outside a crisis, and especially if the order sounds impatient, but if one wants a Whistle to do something there are certainly ways to make that something likely," says Angela serenely.

"Depends on the something," caveats Stella. "But not keeping an itty-bitty Whistle waiting is a relatively easy something."

"Wouldn't it be nice if your Bell - Aegis, is that how you pronounced her nickname? - were here too? We could complete a set," says Angela to Sue. "...But come to think of it, I don't remember hearing the door open. How did you find your way here?"

"...Angela, I can't pastwatch in here, but - the door didn't open?"

"...No. I don't think it did. Unless you've been here hours and just didn't make yourself noticed until now, Sue...?"

"Sue, pardon me for what is about to be a rude question please, but are you by any chance locked up or stranded on an asteroid or anything like that right now? Where by right now I mean not at this moment but where you last fell asleep?"

"Oh, you think -" Angela cuts off, and she too waits for Sue's reply.

"Huh? Yeah," he says, blinking at Stella. "Why?"

"There's one of you - not one who has a one of us to match, one we just met on his own - and he doesn't use the door," says Stella. "He just dreams about this place and shows up. I think you're dreaming right now, which is important to have figured out because it means we definitely should not try to visit you. That doesn't go well."

"Why, what happens?" he asks.

"My Alice went for a jaunt in the Joker's mindscape, didn't come home for a week, usually time at home does not pass while you're in Milliways so I thought he was dead, eventually I was able to rescue him but I think if I hadn't been able to force the door or hadn't had Lazarus with me to tell me how to do it he could've been stuck there forever. We now know that forcing the door doesn't always work, because Amariah tried it and got nowhere - and she was trying to go back to a world she'd already seen. None of us have been to yours before at all."

"Oh." He laughs. "I wonder if you got stuck in my head, if I could push you to Aegis."

"Even if that's something you could do, I don't think I want to be there either. I would be happy to help her in whatever her projects are but I do have an empire to run at home."

"I didn't say I wanted to try it," he snorts.

[Awwwwwww,] says Alice.

[He's very curious about what, exactly, you and Micaiah are busy with. We have told him that he should ask you guys and now he's impatient. Can I get an ETA?]

[Well, right now we're snuggling,] he says cheerfully. [Give us a minute to throw some clothes on and make out a little.]

"I thought you said the rest of me weren't muties," says Sue. "How'd you talk to him?"

"Magic!" says Stella. "Some worlds have it. Mine's one of them. Mutie - is that short for something?"

"Mutant," he says. "I could talk to the other me too, if I'd met him before or knew where he was."

"Interesting. Is Aegis one too?"

"I bet we can guess what she does, if she is," says Angela.

"Yeah," he says. "...Wait, neither of you guys is wearing an exo. Do you not need 'em?"

"...An exo? What's that?"

"We call the power mental opacity and of six four of us so far have had it one way or another... I second the question on the exo? Is that also short for something?"

"Exoskeleton," Sue explains. "Aegis wears it so her body does what she wants. She says when it's not on it's like she's made of bricks."

"...Is that because she's too used to having it, or did she get dealt a worse helping of clumsy than the rest of us?" Stella wonders. "Until I got magic I couldn't walk across a flat surface without finding something to trip on, but there was no technological solution proposed."

"I'm not sure if I was born less clumsy than the usual Bell or if the wings just help me keep my balance. I've always been able to fly straight, but I'm certainly wobblier than the next angel walking... Amariah's the same way, she's always been better in the air."

"Aegis flies, too," laughs Sue. "In zero-g. She's great. She's the best soldier in Battle School."

"Zero-g," says Angela blankly.

"Remind me to conjure you some physics textbooks," Stella tells her. "So your world's high-tech enough to give accident-prone kids nifty exoskeletons? That's neat, mine's not there yet."

"Not everybody," he says. "Just her. 'Cause telepaths can't touch her. Anybody else, if a nasty telepath got hold of 'em they could override the exo and take over their body. But not Aegis. So she gets to have it."

"So she does have mental opacity like the rest of us - but the rest of us who have it all have magic. Your world doesn't? Except insofar as 'mutant' powers count? Which it sounds like perhaps they should, but sometimes the line blurs a little."

"We don't have magic, no. Just muties." He grins. "That's a bad word, by the way, in case you couldn't tell."

"Noted."

"...The polite word for it is 'mutant', then?"

"And, because it would really bother Angela if that were not the case, is there by any chance some ultra-politically-correct term that people use when they're trying to sound fair-minded?"

He laughs. "Nobody tries to sound fair-minded about muties."

"Well, you can say 'gifted'," he says. "But actual mutants find that insulting."

[...yes.]

"What word does Aegis use?"

[Do you have a revised ETA or are you on your way now?]

[Yeah, we'll be there in a sec,] he says. Distractedly.

"She says mutant," says Sue, amused.

"All right then, mutant it is."

He grins.

"Alice and Micaiah should be down any second now," she adds.

"You're all so cavalier about bad language," muses Angela.

"Yes, and you're the odd one out. The rest of us don't have deities who care if we swear," says Stella. "Hell, Amariah named her Whistle after one of her goddesses, if that's not blasphemy I don't know what is, but I don't think the original minds according to her doctrine. You, on the other hand, associate swearing in full generality with people who also fail to take your somewhat more smite-happy deity seriously."

Micaiah teleports down, spots the hug in progress, and decides to join it.

"This is unutterably precious," declares Stella.

"So cute," agrees Angela.

Micaiah somehow ends up holding Sue for a moment when the hug splits apart. He sets him down again and ruffles his military-short hair.

Sue stays attached, wrapping his arms around Micaiah's middle.

"Hey, Sue," says Stella, "since you're here - and since we can't safely meet Aegis in person ourselves - do you want to come have a look at the Belltower guestbook and write in some placeholder notes about her?"

"Sure!"

"I don't mean exactly the format, but I mean that's the other example of someone writing about about a Bell who hasn't had a chance to do it herself," explains Stella, peering over his shoulder. "You probably at least want to identify yourself as a Whistle, even if you don't put anything else about you in."

"You can do that if you want," he says.

She shrugs. "Okay."

"Why don't you want to, Sue?" asks Angela.

"'Cause I don't," he says inscrutably.

"I feel so enlightened."

"Are you going to tell Aegis about this place?" Stella asks.

"Oh, she'll probably figure it was just a dream if he does," says Angela.

"Sure I will," he giggles. "It's an awesome dream."

"I can just see it. 'Hey Aegis, I had a dream where I met two more of me and two more of you, and they were paired off and one of the pairs was even engaged and pregnant, and one of the yous was an angel and the other was a space empress who lives on Mars, and they had me write about you in a book in a room they keep for copies of you and their friends to use!'"

"If Aegis knew there was a bunch of her, she'd want a room for all of you to meet in and stuff," he says. "She'd love it, I bet. Especially your crown, it's pretty," he adds, in Stella's direction.

"Of course she'd want a room for all of us to meet in. She's one of us, and we wanted it," says Stella, grinning. "Well, Shell Bell and Amariah started it, but same difference. You like this crown? I think there's a page of all the crowns extant in there, plus Amariah's prospective design for when she finishes her project."

"Hers she made out of magic rock I found," he says. "In the game. Not real magic rock. She doesn't have a real crown."

"Maybe she'll fix that when she's a little older."

"Or not such a little bit older. I'm willing to wait my turn," says Angela.

"Sure. But I don't think Aegis lives in a theocracy," says Stella.

"Nope," Sue confirms.

"In which case the pattern is that she'll take over the world after locating some treasure trove of applicable resources - maybe local, maybe not," says Stella, "maybe a combination - Amariah could've done it without my minting her but she'll be faster this way, Shell Bell needed the boost."

"Obviously," says Sue. "She's gonna take over something, that's for sure."

Stella laughs. "Is it that obvious, that young? I don't think I started talking about it until I was at least thirteen, and I wasn't particularly serious until I found my first wishcoin. But I suppose I didn't have close friends, growing up. I moved a couple times, I was too introverted."

"I have had close friends and have never moved, and everyone who knows me know I want to be Archangel," says Angela wryly.

"Well, look what she did to the game," he says. "Empress of the bird people. I'm even building her a castle."

"Bird people," says Angela, amused, fluffing her wings.

"Lots of people play games where they run stuff," says Stella. "Why's that such good evidence?"

"'Cause she's the only person in the whole school who got an empire to run," he says. "And she took to it like it was the best thing ever."

"Some kind of adaptive game, figured out she'd like an empire and gave her one? That's cute."

"I think I might need to visit some other Bell for a while and get accustomed to the world just so I can have a prayer of knowing what you're talking about more than half the time," says Angela.

"...Hey," says Sue, "if you're magic, can you give me wings too? For a bit?"

"If we do that, and you wake up before we undo it," says Angela, "I'm not sure what would happen."

"Yeah, even if we make it explicitly temporary... you could wake up and your mindscape could expect you to have wings, which might not be temporary because Milliways fucks around with time, and then you'd go around with phantom limbs until you came here again, and we're not guaranteed to be around to fix it."

"Or something. I'm not sure it's safe."

"I wanna fly, though," he says.

"Little bitty Whistle, I am a magic space empress who invents new superpowers for herself like some people buy new socks. I don't have wings. Doesn't mean I can't fly. You wanna do it my way? I'm faster than her anyway," laughs Stella, aiming a thumb at Angela. "And then, worst case scenario of that is that you wake up and you can fly, no phantom limb issues."

"I'm not a little bitty Whistle," he asserts, pointing at Alice and Micaiah, who are watching all this with fond amusement. "They're great big Sues."

"I'm not hearing a yes or no on flying sans wings," says Stella.

"Yeah, I wanna fly!"

"There you go," says Stella, performing no visible action whatsoever. "C'mon, this place has an outside." And she lifts two inches into the air and drifts towards the door.

Stella giggles and tows him to the back door.

Angela follows after them, looking forward to stretching her wings.

When they get outside, Sue abandons the hug and rockets up into the sky.

Angela offers her arms to Micaiah, if he wants to be carried, although she doesn't just scoop him up as he's in the occasional habit of growing his own wings.

Stella zooms into the air herself, catapulting herself into balletic spins and laughing.

Micaiah decides to be carried this time. He snuggles into Angela's arms.

Alice follows Stella and Sue.

Sue chases Stella.

Angela can't keep up with any of this, but she can go aloft and hover and kiss Micaiah on the forehead and begin to sing. Not a prayer, but a ballad.

Stella, meanwhile, leads Sue on a merry chase. Their flying power's the same, so their speed is equal, but her reaction time's better; she's the zigzagging antelope to his sprinting cheetah.

Well aren't you a little surprise, he pushes back, and cheerfully lets Sue direct him on a coordinated mission of capture.

And Sue's reaction time catches up to both of them.

"What kinda brain steroids are you feeding my boyfriend, Sue?" laughs Stella, turning the race into a straightaway where her head start will keep her at the front regardless of anyone's mental horsepower unless Alice starts cheating with extra coins or teleportation.

Stella decides to go up, and get a better look at the bar's outside that is apparently self-contiguous like that.

The direction change from ascent to dive is enough for Alice to catch up significantly. With Sue directing him, he tracks Stella's progress from above the canopy, and that's enough to get him closer still. But his occasional forays down to her level don't do him any good in closing the final gap.

[Remember playing hide-and-seek in Karachi?] asks Stella fondly.

[Yeah,] he says, laughing. [I love you.]

[Deal,] he says, and unlinks from Sue, and twists around to kiss her.

"Hi!" he says. "I just had the most amazing dream. I met two grown-up-ish versions of you and they had a room where all the yous could hang out and write each other notes about stuff. One you was an angel and the other one was an empress. And they were both dating grown-up versions of me. Then we all played tag in midair."

"That is a very weird dream," comments Aegis. "I'm supposed to make a full recovery, skip the battleroom for a few days, and Nina can now only palm into one of the girls' bathrooms so I'm just going to use the other one."

"Good," he says. "Is it okay?"

"Is what okay?"

"Using the bathroom she can't get to."

"Yeah. The one she can get to is farther from my barracks and from the battleroom, it's only near classes and won't usually be as convenient for me anyway."

"Good," he repeats, nodding.

"Yeah. And if she tries anything outside the bathroom," shrugs Aegis, "I can fuck her up." Pause. "In the dream, how did the wings work with the exo, or was it one of those dreamy things where it was there and it wasn't and you think you can get a clear mental picture but you can't produce any details?"

"They didn't have the exo," he shrugs. "I asked them about it and they said maybe they're not as badly off as you without it, but they couldn't get one where they're from, anyway."

"They had backstories and everything? Man, you get more complicated dreams than me, mine just have baby elephants that are also my cousin who I don't even have and then we're on a boat all of a sudden, shit like that."

"Backstories," he says, "and magic. And huge fluffy wings."

"Ooh, magic. Cool magic?" asks Aegis, stretching her arms out in front of her and extending all her fingers and then relaxing again. She likes being able to move.

"You said they didn't have exos," she points out. "I'm sure I'd hold very still whenever I could if I knew I could crack my skull open by twitching the wrong way."

"They were magic, though," Sue counters. "And they were you. You telling me the first thing you'd do with magic isn't make yourself work like you've got the exo on all the time?"

"I would," says Aegis. "I'd work better than that. But - I dunno, were they magic since they were five?"

"Dunno. I don't think the angel one was. Not sure about the other one."

"This is a silly conversation," observes Aegis. Then, undeterred, she says: "Did you just call them the angel one and the other one? What about the ones that were you?"

"The other one's boyfriend could fly like she could, and I think he was made of stone or something, but he looked like he could be an older me," he says. "The angel one's fiancé was normal amounts of squishy, and he couldn't fly. Or he liked having her carry him more."

"Made of stone?" asks Aegis dubiously. "And she could pick him up? Was she magic-strong too?"

"Wouldn't surprise me," shrugs Sue.

"Huh. Do you usually get such vivid complicated weird dreams? With such funny stuff in them. I mean, even if we grow up and the orientations shake out right and we still like each other and don't just want to be friends, the Westermarck effect dooms us right there, and you dream not one but two pairs of us together."

"I'm not doomed," says Sue. "You can be doomed if you want."

"You know," she says, "I'm not sure where I want to be in seven years. I guess the IF count on that, so they can just be the most convenient thing to do after we get out of our secondary schools and we're allowed to go if we want to."

"The yous think you're probably gonna take over the world," offers Sue.

"That sounds messy. I could run for Hegemon, but it's an empty title, and even a harmless kind of mutant like me would have a public relations nightmare anyway. And the military record doesn't help much unless I actually engage and splat some buggers first."

"You could stick to your game people, then," he says, grinning. "Until you graduate and can't play the game anymore."

"I'm going to ask for my save file and see if I can set up my own server of it or something," Aegis says. "I don't want to lose all my work, that would be really sad. Unless I grow up and decide everything I've been doing is stupid kiddy stuff, I guess, but I don't think so."

"Could you even run that thing? It must take a shit-ton of computer."

"We're accumulating pay here and we'll be able to use it when we're sixteen. I guess it'd depend on how expensive it was, though. I'd still ask for the save file. Storage is cheap and then if I ever come into more money I could see about starting it up again."

"Maybe my mom'll pay for that, too," he jokes.

Aegis giggles. "Do you even write to her? Half the kids I know don't bother to write to their parents anymore. I still write to mine - and I get lots of letters, especially from Renée - but I could see the appeal of quitting."

"No, why would I?"

"So you could go on having grounded expectations like that she might buy presents for your school friend? I don't think I'd expect that from anyone I hadn't talked to in years."

"No way she wouldn't throw some spare change at me if it made her look good. Especially to herself."

Aegis blinks. "Uh, okay then."

He cocks his head. "What?"

"I dunno, that's an awfully confident character condemnation for someone you last talked to five years ago?"

Sue shrugs. "It's true."

"How do you know she isn't different now or only acts like that around small children or something, though?"

"Just do," he says.

"You weren't even manifested then, you can't say you read her mind or anything."

"Wonder if I could push her right now," he muses. "See how she's doing."

"Have you tested your range?" asks Aegis curiously.

"Not really." He grins. "Should I?"

"I can't believe you didn't! You've had the powers for years! Yeah, try to push somebody on Earth," laughs Aegis.

"Did you try a few different places? Or don't you know enough people? It's a big planet and we don't know what part of it we're looming over."

"I know my mom and my dad, and I'm not touching my dad."

"You didn't have neighbors or any classmates in kiddie school or anything?"

"Not that I know them," he says. "It's been a while. I wouldn't even know how to look."

"Huh. Okay. I had some friends in school, but I guess I only really know my parents, likewise."

Sue shrugs. "Yeah, see?"

"But how well do you have to know them? You barely looked at Qiaochu before you pushed him that one time."

"I have to know how to find them," he says. "Which means I have to be looking at them, or know them really well, or remember them from looking at them before."

He pushes Yeah?

Testing. I can turn it on and off on purpose. You're going to graduate before me, I wonder if we'll be able to talk without the teachers reading all our messages if we do it like so? If you don't know your range?

Maybe I can work on it, like I did on my link limit, he says optimistically.

I think I can hear you knocking by default and the birdbirdbird thing is only necessary for actually letting any talking happen, says Aegis. So yeah, that won't necessarily involve complicated suspicious-looking syncing up.

"You know when they're gonna let me out?" he asks idly, pushing wordless affection.

"No idea. It wasn't on the public data."

"Guess I'll wait, then," he shrugs.

He smiles fondly at her and pushes, Sounds like fun.

The game is really, really smart. They must pour a hell of a lot of server resources into it - there's never lag, there's never glitchy graphics, I've never heard of an exploitable bug except for the existence of a tunnel that only I'm fast enough to reach. And it's creative, too. I wonder who wrote it.

Good question, he muses. Lemme know if you find out.

Will do. Pause. A hundred years ago there used to be all kinds of science fiction - it's so dated now, but I like old books - all kinds of science fiction with computers who were people. And we kept making smarter and smarter programs, and they keep not being - people. As far as we can tell. The fantasy game is smart, it can make me villages full of critters that act like people, but you couldn't push it if you tried.

A smile flickers across his face; he pushes fond/derisive amusement. Do you want me to?

Sure, why not? Can't hurt.

Weird!

No shit!

It's so - big. Are you location-dependent? Can you - I dunno - push with a bigger 'hand', get more of it in one go instead of reaching for a small point? It does seem to all be on the station.

I don't think location and size are really... things, to the part of my power that does linking, he muses. I can link people I've linked before without even looking for them. Huh, maybe range won't be a problem with us after all, unless you get so far away I can't see you birding at me.

Even if you can't see me "birding", I think I default to being able to tell that you're knocking unless I'm - scared or something. It seems to matter what I'm thinking about you at that moment and I can slide it by birding.

Why 'bird', anyway?

To remind myself that you're not some random telepath, or some kid I've talked to half a dozen times, you're the bird in the game, and I know you and I like you.

Aww, I like you too.

That must be why you're building me a castle, says Aegis merrily. (The merriness doesn't show on her face; she's closed her eyes now and looks like she's on the verge of dozing off.)

I'm building you a castle because castles are awesome, he retorts.

If that was all, wouldn't you build you a castle? she returns with a purely mental smile.

I don't want a castle, he explains serenely.

Why not? They're awesome.

He snorts. "See ya."