Sherlock voices no objections, nor does she think any.

"Hi," says Shell Bell with a very Shellish sigh.

"I love you," says Sherlock.

"I love you," says Shell Bell. "Well. Now I'm all neatened up - Tony, can you try for a door so I can write some extremely urgent notes in the Bellbook?"

Sherlock hugs her again.

"Of course."

[Yeeeeee-es?]

[It's Shell.] After a fashion. [I left the door - and I don't know if this one is at the same time, or not, because I'm not quite as I was when you last saw me, so it might not have stayed put. I'm sorry.]

[It's fine,] he says cheerfully. [I had a little adventure.]

[Okay. Did you happen to look up Nathan while you were there or did you have another reason for wanting the door? Golden resurrected him the way Sherlock resurrected me and he may have split the same way.]

[What I did was - when I found my live self - we merged. It took an evil, but I'm both now, mostly the live one because she was a lot saner. Does Nathan, or at least this one, want to do that?]

"What happened? Shouldn't any amount of time she spent in Milliways or wherever be nothing on this end?" asks Timer.

"...Back together, like...?"

He presses his hands together, pulls them apart. "They split..." together again, "they merge."

"...Well, there's a thought, but while I'd welcome being a vampire again and miss Kerron quite a bit and have no strong objections to resuming being stuck exclusively on you, I don't think Nathan's going to want to share an identity with a version of him who -" Airquotes! - "'cheated on you'."

[Would he? Why?]

[Why don't you guys talk to each other,] he suggests into a conference call.

[Hi, Nathan, I'm Shell Bell, I don't think we've met. Have you been all right here? Why don't you think your liveling would want to be you?]

[Hullo, Shell Bell, I think he'd be torn to pieces over the fact that I've spent the last century comfortably enough, unmatebonded, enjoying myself with miscellaneous ladies of Downside instead of remaining loyal to his mate in spite of the fact that he'd see red if he knew I'd touched his mate.]

The Joker grins and snuggles up.

[...That seems like an obviously silly thing to think. You two could customize the merge, you know, I'm mostly Bell and not Shell. Would he mind not thinking like that anymore?]

[Not sure. I don't know if that would work, anyway, mate bonds are impervious to magic.]

[Obviously not completely,] Shell Bell points out. [You had one and now you don't. Maybe there's room around the edges to make yours - his - work more like Alice's does.]

[I'd like that,] the Joker contributes. [Seems like the least awkward way to get to love both of him.]

[Well, babe, if you ask him, he'll fold like a napkin.]

[Do you want me to pull you out, then?]

[Up to you, sweetheart,] he says, kissing Timer's cheek.

[Put some clothes on, babe. Shell Bell, you could just open the door to here even after you fused?]

[If I don't think about it, it's Atlantis, but I concentrated and I opened the door to my Downside apartment without too much trouble. You'll be able to visit friends of yours here through Milliways. And the place isn't going to be like it is, anyway, me and the other Bells are going to destroy that sadistic ruinous setup.]

The Joker grins and spends a square off Timer's chain to dress himself.

The Joker kisses his cheek and teleports them to Shell's place.

"...What happened to your scars?"

"Guess."

"...How long did I leave you here for, that you found time to die?"

"Oh, measured in hours, no very lengthy holdup, he's just efficient," says Timer. "He's not out of his grace period yet, he's skipping out on a sentence with Jasmine. Do you know if torching works out of Downside?"

"It works - and fuck Jasmine, I hope it bothers her for a thousand years that she can't find you - let's go."

"By the way," he says as he steps through the door, "mere hexes won't give me my minting back in a permanent way - did you dodge that with an evil? Could you gimme a hand? I can make the coin."

"I did my merge with an evil. I haven't torched since, but I did mean to keep all of my magic as it was, and the coin went. If you give me a star to try, and an evil if that doesn't work, I can do it for you. Although maybe I should consult with Golden first, as long as we're going to your world."

"Sure," he shrugs.

"You've probably got a better shot than I do at getting a door to Aurum, babe," Timer says.

"Are you coming, Sherlock?" Shell Bell asks.

"If you need me to."

The Joker gives Timer a quick hug and tries the door.

"I'd like the company, but I don't need it," says Shell Bell, "Elspeth gets doors very frequently and I won't have to stay much longer than I feel like."

"Ahhh, hello, Aurum," sighs Nathan into the doorway.

"...Hello?" says Elspeth, who found the door in the first place. "What's going on?"

"I'll stay behind, then," says Sherlock.

"I found an extra Nathan! Can I keep him?"

Shell Bell kisses Sherlock's cheek and steps through the door to Aurum. "Hi, Elspeth, we haven't met, I'm Shell Bell. There's a glitch in resurrection-with-evils called Downside. I need to talk to your mom, and the Joker and this extra Nathan need to talk to the Nathan here."

"Probably best if Kerron's not there to witness the explanation, and possible attempts by Nathan to relieve me of the burden of intact bones," adds Timer.

The Joker squeezes Timer's hand fondly.

"Mama - and Nathan - are both in the throne room. Rosalie has all the wee ones for the next while," says Elspeth, "Kerron included."

"Thank you," says Shell Bell.

"You wanna take us there," he asks Shell Bell, "or should I?"

"Hello," says Golden, not particularly surprised - presumably Elspeth notified her of the arrivals. "What's all this, then?"

"All this," says Shell Bell, "is a glitch in resurrection-with-evils. There is an afterlife, it is shit, and it does not let people who arrive there go, even if you pull on them very hard - you get forks, instead. I folded back into myself. I'm both."

"I died," the Joker adds, "but I'm fine, sweetie, look," and he taps a pentagon from Timer and teleports directly into a hug with Nathan.

"You died?" breathes Nathan, hugging the Joker tight and otherwise not moving.

"Well," says Golden. "That obviously needs fixing."

"Yeah."

"It does."

"It's not bad always for everyone," Timer volunteers. "I was fine. But then, Shell Bell would've been fine if her dead version had kept her magic. I had mine. Kept me out of the way of torturers and - such."

"Torturers? That's a class of people you need magic to avoid? Oh, for the love of - even ordinary worlds need serious repairs, Shell Bell's was worse than most, and she comes in saying it's shit, I'm inclined to believe her, but -"

"It's very, very bad," says Shell Bell quietly.

"Sweetie," says the Joker. "I love you. He's you, so I love him too. I don't wanna lose either of you, and I don't wanna make trouble between you the way it would if I hung around with both of you all the time. Shell and Bell got sewn up and they're just fine. If you're okay with it, and it works so you don't hate yourself afterward or anything, then I want you to."

Meanwhile, Golden and Shell Bell have relegated their exchange of information about exactly how Downside is shit to the brainphone.

"I think it'll make us both happier," he says softly. "You know, I joke about how you'll have to get used to me, but I see how it hurts you to know what a slut I am and I don't want it to, sweetheart, I love you."

"I am not at all confident that even an evil will be able to edit a mate bond," Golden says.

"Not the core of it. Just around the edges. The joined-up Nathan would still have it - like Alice has one - but it wouldn't come with the... monogamy clause."

"If it can do even that, that's unsettling," says Golden, "but I suppose whether I find it unsettling or not doesn't make it more or less likely to work. Joker, you're supplying the evil?"

"They should spend a little while working out a balance of the two of them. I'm mostly Bell and not Shell most of the time. We didn't want her memories to outweigh mine even though there were more of them."

"Yeah, I'll come up with the coin. Shell Bell, you wanna hit me, or should I wish up another one'a those agony beam gadgets?"

"Do you need ramp-up or can I just slam you with a hundred thousand?" Shell Bell inquires.

He grins and makes a beckoning gesture. "Go for it."

Bam. Unflavored. She holds for six seconds or until he says "when", since they'll want more than one for the merge as well as (possibly) the perma-minting.

He never bothered to wish himself another bandolier, so the coins appear directly in his hands, one two three fourfivesixseven before Shell's six seconds are up. He offers the whole handful to Golden.

"Thank you." (Covert declawing.) "Shell Bell, you've done a merger, perhaps you should also do this one." She wishes all but one evil onto her own bandolier and offers the other to Shell Bell. [I declawed it.]

"I'll stick around long enough for them to have their parameters worked out and then I'll do it, sure," agrees Shell Bell, tucking the evil onto her chain for the meanwhile.

...The Joker hugs Nathan.

"You could put it - away, like I did with Shell's less pleasant memories," says Shell Bell. "Of which there are terribly many. They're all accessible if I want them. They don't intrude if I don't expressly invite them, and they're muted, a little, at a sort of emotional remove."

"I think that's enough to go on," says Shell Bell, "unless you've got anything you need to leave out explicitly from one or the other of you - I had to get rid of some nightmares, some trembling, that sort of thing."

Wish.

Nathan takes a while to adjust. (He spends this while hugging the Joker, though.)

"I love you, sweetie," he says, snuggling up. "You okay?"

"I'm fine, babe," says Nathan. "Kind of weird to have been a hundred years since I died one way and a few months the other, though."

"I don't know. It probably doesn't take an evil by a lot? I wished for all of the magic I had before the merge, and torching, and I got both, one evil."

"Torturer's control has to go, and so does the power the judges have to hand it out like party favors," Shell Bell says promptly. "Some reasonable ground rules need to happen. We need a system to repatriate people to where they belong if they want to go back to their worlds or other worlds and will behave like people and not like - like Downsiders sometimes start behaving, torturers or not. We need to empty the catacombs so people aren't in limbo until some miserable self-righteous shit of a judge gets around them. We're probably going to get attention from upstairs - we need to check out Upside too, maybe it's bad in its own ways - and we need to be ready for that, we need supplies of stars and evils, we might want to see if there's another level above that if we can talk any of our respective helpers into trying, we need several of us on the ground and one or two hanging back in Milliways ready to bail us out if she's too much to handle. If she is, we need a way to just funnel people out manually and process them somewhere other than her turf. It would be good if we had a system of interworld travel that was under our own actual control, though, so we should experiment with that, see if it's something we can do with coins."

"If you wanna throw a lot of pain around, I'll catch," the Joker offers.

"You're clearly equipped to be an evil factory. Are you sure you want to try for a next tier?"

"Only one way to find out!"

Golden shrugs. "Well, Shell Bell, you're the one with the agony beam."

"Do you want a ramp-up when the endpoint is ten times the minimum for an evil?" Shell Bell asks the Joker.

"Sure," he says amicably. "Sweetie, pick me up? I like it when you pick me up."

Nathan scoops him up and holds him tight. "You sure about this, babe?"

"Mmhmm," he says, leaning his head on Nathan's shoulder.

Golden averts her eyes.

He curls up in Nathan's arms, smiling and nuzzling him contentedly, and accumulates a pile of evils in his lap. Occasionally he wriggles, as though trying to get comfortable, although comfort is of course not remotely on the menu.

At Shell Bell's chosen rate - which she sees no reason to adjust - it takes three minutes even to reach one million.

"Can you talk?" Shell Bell asks, holding still at one million exactly.

"Yeah," he breathes, and emits another barbed nine-pointed coin. "Mmmm'm I there yet?"

"Yes. Say when you're done."

Million drops to zero as soon as she can tell what word he's emitting.

(She's not like the torturers Downside, who've heard stop so many times that it's permanently lost meaning -)

"Golden, do you want one of the - what should we call them? There's not one for everybody."

The Joker presses his face into the side of Nathan's neck and whimpers softly, his arms tightening on his lapful of evils hard enough that some of the points draw blood.

"Babe," murmurs Nathan, "I got you - babe - you okay?"

"I have no clever naming ideas," Golden says. "You can hang onto all of the nine-pointed ones until we have a complete expedition put together and can discuss strategy, by which time more may have been accumulated, from the Joker's alts perhaps. I will take a few of the evils." She does.

Nathan hugs back, snug but not breaking. "Good."

"You're not even boosted for that, are you," murmurs Shell Bell wonderingly. "I wonder if even Eights could do that."

"Bet you she could," he says with a grin.

"I'm not," Shell Bell says consideringly, "sure how she'll react to our disassembling Downside. I don't mind disappointing the torturers, but she was nice to me."

"She take your sentence?" Nathan asks. "Mine too."

"Yes. She did. But I wish I'd waited longer to find a contractor. A torturer who likes to keep long term pets got me before my grace period was even up and someone who only wanted to hurt me for nine hours would've been a better rescuer than none at all."

"Well," says the Joker, "that depends on who, doesn't it?"

"I was assigned to Chainsaw. I don't think, by reputation, he'd have been inclined to keep me as a pet for - I haven't counted it up exactly and I didn't have enough access to timepieces to know for sure even if I did count days, but I'm pretty sure it was on the order of twenty-five years. Undoubtedly it would have been horrible, but I still had most of my memories after the first time Voice tortured me, even the second and third and fourth, it took a long time for me to get as wrecked as I did. I wouldn't have thought of it as being better. But it might've been."

"Might have," he agrees, and leaves it at that.

"That reminds me," says Shell Bell, making eye contact with Golden. "I think you probably understand this more than any of the others do - but you need Edward and it's not just because of the mate bond. I'm sure turning hurt more than anything Voice did to me. I only had a human body to feel it with. But I was all by myself except for Voice. It made a difference."

Om nom nom, delicious mate about whose loose behavior he is no longer conflicted!

Ooh yes. Don't think he didn't notice Nathan being all serene about the Joker whoring out his mint powers like that. He loved jealous Nathan, but he loves okay-with-it Nathan too, he really really does.

The Joker will just have to give him tummy snuggles.

They are appreciated. With kisses.

Oh good.

"Want me to wish your tummy better?" he inquires between kisses.

"Mmmhm."

He kisses the afflicted tummy and spends a shiny new triangle.