"Well," says Juliet, smiling. "Renovated, anyway. Welcome to Sunshine."

Shell Bell waves happily at the nearest camera.

Jarvis laughs.

Sherlock looks sharply at Tony.

He shrugs and grins.

Slowly, Sherlock grins back.

"What?" Juliet asks, glancing between the two of them.

"This is the first time I've had a voice synthesizer capable of producing laughter," says Jarvis. "Tony installed me here with a few upgrades."

"Oh, nice," says Juliet. "Congratulations. So how do you like the house?"

"It's a little smaller than I'm used to," he says, "but very charming all the same."

"Can you open doors to Milliways from here, too?" Shell Bell asks.

"Yes, of course. Would you like one?"

"I - not this second, I have to give Juliet all the squares - Juliet, where do you want to keep them?"

"Here's probably safest for most of them, and a little string of them to keep on my person all the time," says Juliet, "so I can quit stuffing them into my socks, which is uncomfortable."

"We don't have to say goodbye right now. We can come to Milliways with you, write in the Bellbook, see if there's a better-equipped mint around to render all your irritating square-making unnecessary," says Juliet lightly. "But even if there is - and especially if there's not - I really, really appreciate it."

Tony gives Bell a hug.

Bell hugs him back. "So, you've got all my squares," she says over his shoulder to Juliet, "if we meet yet another unminted Bell I'll have to go stay with her for a few weeks and give her squares too," she adds ruefully, "and if we're lucky we find a minted one. You should probably go to Milliways a lot now that you can whenever you want, improve your chances."

"Now that all the squares are boxed up, we should probably just go now, no point waiting," says Juliet. "Even if Tony wants to stay a little longer than Shell Bell does, doors-at-will make things much more convenient in that department."

Jarvis opens a door.

Bells go through it.

Tony hesitates, hugs Sherlock, then follows them.

Sherlock comes last.

"Oh, look -"

"I don't see an us..."

"Not an us. A Sherlock. Or maybe a Tony but I think a Sherlock, there, see? Sherlock!" calls Shell Bell brightly in that direction.

"Hi! I'm Shell Bell and this is Bella but we call her Juliet 'cause there are lots of Bellas and this is another Sherlock and this is a Tony - they're not a matched set, Tony and me were visiting Juliet and this Sherlock. And my girlfriend back home is another Sherlock too. And her matching Tony is not this Tony, but another one who is also in my world, and you guys need your own Tower to coordinate about nicknames in, really."

"All of that," agrees Juliet, amused.

"You have a soul," Sherlock observes. "How'd you manage that trick?"

"With difficulty," he says dryly. "What's it matter to you?"

"Oh, stop it," he says, irritated. "I'm doing well enough without one."

"Yeah, don't be a dick," says Tony.

"All right, all right," he says.

"Oh, are you a vampire one too?" Shell Bell asks. "I can't tell at all, how can anyone else? Let alone tell about the soul?"

"By rights I should have been able to tell he was a vampire from across the room. I'm hexing that up first thing when I get minted," Juliet mutters. "But I second the question about the soul. Amariah had her explanation, what's yours?"

"He smells like a vampire, and he doesn't breathe except when he needs to speak," says Sherlock. "And he has that familiar look of contained self-loathing."

"I remember what it was like when my soul was missing, and your Sherlock looks like he feels like that," says the other one.

"What happened in which world to make you want your soul back and mine to not?" Juliet wonders.

At "contained self-loathing", Shell Bell flies in soulful-Sherlock's direction and holds her arms out in an offer of a hug. "I know you don't know me, but I know one of you, and I love her very much," she says.

She hugs him as comfortingly as she knows how.

Juliet waits until this has gone on for a bit before saying, "So no one knows the answer to my question?"

"Sorry," he says, letting go of Bell. "No, the resumption of my soul was prearranged."

"That sounds complicated."

"It was."

"Do you still have your Tony? And your Jarvis, if you had one to begin with?" asks Shell Bell anxiously.

"Yes," he says. "Safe and sound."

"I don't," says Sherlock, not that the other one doesn't know that. "But this stray Tony has kindly installed a Jarvis in a spare house that Juliet's Watcher bought us."

"You're a Slayer?" he says to Juliet.

"Yep," says Juliet, tossing her hair. "But my template, when we appear in magical worlds, has this tendency to resist all forms of mental intrusion, up to and including the prophetic dreams and the vampire-sensing in my case. So I'm like four-fifths of a Slayer."

"That sounds inconvenient," he says lightly.

"Not as much as you'd think. Help train her," Sherlock suggests.

"Gladly."

"Ooh, cool, double the Sherlocks double the sparring partners. Backyard?" Juliet asks, grinning. "Shell Bell, you wanna write our notes for me? You've got your eidetic memory and a speed boost that applies more to handwriting anyway."

"Can do," says Shell Bell. She ruffles souled-Sherlock's hair and then teleports up to the Belltower.

"Shall we, then?"

"Let's."

"I need a notebook and pen, I didn't bring one, and it'd be a waste of a square," says Juliet, "one sec." She stops at the bar, procures both, and then goes with the Sherlocks to the outdoors area, sets her writing materials down, and stands ready.

Sherlock delivers a very short explanation of the repeated-sequence training technique, and then waits a beat.

They attack in perfect tandem.

"Amazing," murmurs Soulful.

"Isn't she?"

"Slayer instincts are so amenable to what us Bells do best after - before? - besides ruling worlds," says Juliet merrily, after meditating over her newest little change (namely: if she has any significant amount of one Sherlock under her power she can swat the other one with same) and shutting her notebook to hop up for another round.

The first time she exhibits this heuristic, Sherlock giggles.

"Hey, in a long fight, no point beating up on my hands and feet and elbows more than I have to," she giggles back between ducking punches and delivering a kick to whichever Sherlock is handiest.

"Wise words," says Sherlock, hitting back.

Duck and roll and sweep and mime-stake and she can concentrate on the other one. "Thanks very much for your help, by the way," she tells him.

"A pleasure," he says cheerfully.

Juliet attempts to finish him off with a mime of throwing the stake. "My best guess is that would've hit, am I wrong?" she asks.

"Not sure."

"It could have hit," says Sherlock. "But if he were me, he could have dodged."

"You just know my tells better?" Juliet queries.

"And it's harder to dodge an imaginary weapon."

"Well, I could get something non-wooden, I suppose, throw my pen at you," she giggles. "Nah, the balance is wrong - okay, I guess stake-throwing is a live-fire exercise. Let me patch a couple rough spots and we'll do this one again and I'll handle that part some other way."

He nods.

She gets through that sequence, and the next one, improving almost as fast as she did the first time she started sparring with Sherlock and modifying her instincts in this way - with him alone her progress slowed down as low-hanging fruit was picked, but now apparently there is much more. "Now we just need to find a third vampire or otherwise durable Sherlock to join the party," she says, after meditating over another edit. "I'd get amazing. Maybe Shell Bell should stick her head out the door humming to herself for several hours to see if hers will wake."

"If she has not already gone home," says Sherlock.

"I think Shell Bell would drop by to hug us goodbye before going home. It hasn't been that long, she could be a while writing up notes or she could've run into somebody. But it would be about as unfair to make her stand there for hours as it would be to insist on breaking her arm."

"...Would breaking her arm have some beneficial effect of which I am unaware?"

"Oh. Shell Bell and a few others of us, but not me, have a form of magic native to Stella's universe, and it involves converting pain into wishes, which is really convenient if you have a masochistic significant other, which is also a fairly common Bell commodity. Different amounts of pain produce different size wishes. Shell Bell can make squares - she made me a whole lot of squares while she was visiting - but she'd be very unhappy about having to make a pentagon by, for example, breaking her arm. And she certainly can't make a hexagon, which is what it would take to turn me or my Sherlock into mints. A pentagon would be enough to wake up Shell Bell's Sherlock and get her to teleport in for some happier coinmaking, but I'm not going to torture my alt for magic."

"I see."

As if summoned, Shell Bell appears. "All written up," she tells Juliet. "Are you folks having fun?"

"Oh, yes."

"Well, there was no one in the Belltower, so I think I'm going to go home," says Shell Bell, "but first a proper goodbye, hm? I've already been to bid Tony goodbye." She holds out her arms to Juliet, and gets a hug, and then she turns to the soulless Sherlock; presuming this also yields an embrace, she offers one to his souled counterpart.

Hugs all round.

"Bye all! I'll see you later if I do and remember you always if I don't!" says Shell Bell, and she teleports to the door and lets herself out and goes straight to where her sleeping Sherlock and her sleeping Tony are being their sleeping selves and joins the pile.

"Another round?" says Sherlock to Juliet.

"Of course," she says, and she's improved enough that she takes offense this time as self-handicap and education-rounding.

Meanwhile, Shell Bell determines by brainphone that there is nothing urgent going on in Atlantis, and settles in for a one-hour nap once she has found a comfortable spot curled up behind Sherlock and with her arm over both twins.

Sherlock snuggles back against her in her sleep.

For certain values of "meanwhile", meanwhile, Juliet spars with Sherlocks. It is tremendously educational. "Hey, with-soul - is there something else I could call you to distinguish you from my Sherlock? He's 'Romeo' until something better comes to mind, to match my 'Juliet' - how constrained is your time here? Or for that matter not-here? You're useful."

"My time is not particularly constrained," he says, "except by my desire not to be outside when the sun comes up."

"Plus and Minus," Sherlock suggests whimsically.

Sherlock laughs.

"Sounds like fun," says Plus.

"Jarvis would love the company," says Minus.

"You are an endless delight," says Minus.

"I'm in," says Plus.

Juliet grins. "I'm gonna run up and check the Belltower and see if there's anyone there, or anything new written in before Shell Bell's notes on me and her, and then we can all go to Sunshine?" she proposes.

"By all means."

"Harsh luck," says Minus. "Sorry, love."

"Oh well," grumbles Juliet, and she takes a last glance around the bar for familiar faces, finds none, and heads for the door.

"Welcome back," says Jarvis. "I see you've brought friends."

"We're calling them Plus and Minus - Minus being the native one. I can make more progress sparring with the adjusted difficulty level and Plus has a flexible schedule," Juliet says. "Plus, this is the local Jarvis."

"Hello," says Jarvis.

"Hello to you too."

Laughing, he puts his mouth to the cut.

"Oh, uh." She declines eye contact. "The dietary staple here is microwaved animal blood, I'll nuke an extra jar for you tomorrow evening."

"Thank you," he says. "Very kind."

"I think I'll go get a lot of trigonometry problems wrong and crash for the night," says Bella. "With Shell Bell gone I guess that means walking home again. One escort or two?" she asks, glancing at Plus.

"Two," shrugs Plus. "While I'm here, I may as well be useful."

"Oh, I should warn you," says Juliet. "I have covered the town in lots of hidden crosses. Do they bother you as little as they do Minus or will that make the walk unpleasant for you?"

"...I can see why he likes you so much," he says. "No, it won't trouble me at all."

Bella giggles, and out they go. "Bye, Jarvis," she adds before shutting the door behind her.

It's a quiet walk. Minus takes the opportunity to hold Juliet's hand the whole way, while Plus is presumably lurking along somewhere nearby.

"Don't go near the porch," Bella thinks to inform Plus when they approach her house. "Sunlamp bulbs and a motion detector, you see." She kisses Minus goodnight from a safe distance.

"I don't have the faintest dream of a clue."

"Found an alt of Sherlock in Milliways. Not Shell Bell's, and not the one who matches the Tony who visited either - they've both gone home now, by the by, Jarvis is all installed. An unrelated Sherlock who is also a vampire but this one has a soul."

"...How'd he come by that?" inquires Giles, adjusting his glasses.

"Some manner of pre-arranged... thing. He still has his Tony and Jarvis, so I imagine they were involved. You can come by and see if he'll tell you, this evening. I'm doing sparring in place of fire wand while he's visiting because I can make unusually good progress with the both of them."

"I think I will."

"I'm making steady progress on the wand, though," Bella says, pulling out the demonology text of the day. "Did you ever ask Sherlock - we're distinguishing them as 'Minus' for the local and 'Plus' for the visitor - did you ever ask Minus your question about how he came by the number twenty-six?"

"No, it slipped my mind."

"Oh. Well, I asked him. He followed a Watcher around for a while is how. It wasn't you, and the Watcher's fine and never noticed that he was there."

"That's... reassuring," is the word he chooses after a moment.

"Compared to the source being you or the Watcher not being fine, or compared to Sherlock having learned the maximum historical Slayer lifespan some other way?" inquires Juliet.

"Yes."

"Ah," she giggles.

He smiles dryly.

Studying happens, and study hall ends and classes happen, and more studying happens, and then Bella says, "Well, I presume you remember where the house is, as you have been there before and also technically own it."

"You presume correctly."

Her phone beeps. "Well, if you show up any time after sunset you can come watch me sparring with two Sherlocks and try and guess which is which!" she says cheerfully, and off she goes.

The sparring's already underway; Bella's worked her way twelve seconds into a one-minute sequence and barely manages a "hi" when Giles walks in between all the ducking and parrying she has to do to keep up with a set of Sherlocks.

It takes about twenty minutes - including four pauses for written revisions - before she gets all the way through the sequence and pauses to catch her breath and sip from her water bottle. "So, this is Giles," she says, "Giles, one of the Sherlocks is Plus, and the house is now Jarvis instead of just a regular house."

"Pleased to meet you," Jarvis contributes.

"Er," says Giles, adjusting his glasses. "Yes. Likewise."

"If you can tell the Sherlocks apart, do let on now, so I can stop trying to avoid giving you clues," laughs Juliet.

"You're the local," he says, pointing.

Minus laughs. "What gave me away?"

"The clothes," says Giles.

Juliet looks Minus up and down. "I don't think that's the same outfit he had on last time you met," she remarks.

"It isn't."

"Bells seem to trend towards default clothes. That's witch silks for Amariah and that leather flying outfit for Angela but the rest of us wind up in jeans and t-shirts, and eventually, when appropriate, crowns on top," says Bella. "I wonder why you have different styles."

"Because my better half is boring," Minus says fondly.

"In what conceivable way is having a soul supposed to render one's taste in clothes boring?"

"I dress closer to how we used to," says Plus. "Apparently not having a soul makes one more inclined to wear silk and leather."

"Wonder why," says Juliet, reaching out to pet Minus's shirt. (It's soft.)

"Haven't the foggiest," he says, leaning into her hand.

"Well. Another sequence?" proposes Juliet, and without particularly waiting for an answer she turns her hand on Minus's shirt into a throw. (It's not like it's tactically useless. She can play bait, let vampires think she's not wise to them, and then surprise!)

Also, the giggling has a negative effect on his combat-readiness.

"Congratulations."

"Thanks. I think I can smooth it out, though, let's do that one one more time."

But so's she. She wins again, but she needs another smoothing round to correct for his improved start, and then she's smooth.

"Brilliant."

She tires out, after a few hours. "How'm I doing, Giles?" she asks, flexing worn-out arms. "Is it okay if I drop the 'mister'? I don't usually call my friends Mister anything and it'd be weird to call you by your first name."

"Yes," he says, "Giles is fine. And honestly, I have never heard of a Slayer who became this good this fast."

"Ooh, cool, I'm ahead of the curve," says Juliet merrily, "even spending half time on the fire wand. I'll be a terror if I pick up any witchcraft."

"Witchcraft, you say?"

"Yeah? Apparently it has many drawbacks, but if I don't get minted I don't think there's going to be any other way to accomplish anything big efficiently. However good I am at hitting stuff, I only have two arms and two legs."

"I have some databases that could be of use."

"Ooh? Do tell. Your magic similar enough to the resident flavor?"

"As far as I can tell, with limited local information, yes."

"Do you do magic or just have info stored?"

"Mostly the latter."

"Mostly," she says, intrigued.

"Mostly," he repeats.

"I've been informed that actually doing magic is highly dangerous - attracts bad attention, sometimes causes less than benign entities to make shit up instead of doing the requested spell, may eat one's brain - how do you mitigate those risks, or do you just live with them and use magic sparingly?"

"I don't do invocations," he says. "And as far as I know, in my world there is no general risk of brain-eating. Unless I misunderstand you somehow."

"Magic addiction," says Bella. "Sorry, I sometimes adopt turns of phrase and then forget who knows them. I can't do invocations myself, it's a brain opacity thing, the deities-and-or-demonic-entities don't seem to be able to tell when I invoke them."

"Aha," says Jarvis. "Lucky you."

"Are you even, like, constitutionally subject to addiction-in-general? Or is that not a problem on your neighbor-world? We should name it. Jarvis, you wanna name where you came from?"

"As far as I'm aware, I am not subject to addiction in the first place, and if necessary I could modify my processes to counteract the effect," says Jarvis. "Is there a naming convention in place?"

"Bells have been naming our worlds pretty much according to whim or, where applicable, imperial theme. I called this one Sunshine in spite of Minus's charming suggestion of Hell-Orifice. Shell Bell's from Atlantis, Golden from Aurum, Angela from Samaria, Amariah from Alethia, Stella from Eos, and we don't have a name for the world that has the one of us who's ten and was written in by her Whistle yet."

"May as well call mine Sunshine-Two," says Jarvis.

"Oh, don't let's number them. If they're similar enough to warrant group naming it could be Solar or Sunlight or Helios or something."

"I can't help thinking that after a few of those, it will be hard to keep them all straight."

"I don't think numbers are an improvement, there," Bella says.

"Helios, then, if you must."

"Helios it is."

"What's mine, then? Apollo? Ra?"

"Whatever you'd like to call it, although we are doing a sort of a theme so something like that would be ideal. I wonder why there's this entire family of worlds with the same kind of vampire and magic and whatnot. And Sherlocks everywhere. No two Bells are from worlds more similar than both being Earths at around the same time."

"We Sherlocks do seem to cluster more closely," Minus agrees.

"Except Shell Bell's, who's as far off from you guys as Shell Bell is from me. Farther. Nonmagical world, she's a girl, she's actually her Tony's twin, there's no Jarvis. Weird."

"True," he muses.

"Maybe one day Alice will make Stella a coin so big that she can unravel all the secrets of the multiverse, and she'll share," snorts Juliet.

He laughs.

"Anyway. Jarvis, since you are effectively immune to addiction and you don't do invocations is there any further reason for you to be cautious about magic-doing?"

"Not especially, but it is a little more difficult for me because I have no way to manage most of the physical requirements."

"Is collaborative casting a thing?" Juliet asks.

"Not universally."

"What does that mean?"

"It means it is varyingly possible, with varying effectiveness, across the different traditions I have researched."

"Huh. Well, that's something to look into. Giles, do you know anything about it?" Bella asks.

"Enough to support his analysis."

"Mkay. Well. Time for me to go home and decline nouns until I can't keep my eyes open," says Bella, and she heads for the door.