"...I think the traditional way for Bells to get coins out of our helpers involves something called an 'agony beam'," says Juliet. "Although Angela supposedly sings for hers. But if you wish to be vulnerable to holy water I'm not gonna stop you."

He laughs.

"I'm going to perfect-recall myself so I don't fumble any of these details when I pull off the merge," Juliet says. And she spends a hex on it - and it won't go. "Weird," she mutters. "Uh, Sherlock-over-there, are there any notes on being dead interacting with installing superpowers?"

"If you want them to persist through the aforementioned regeneration, you need an evil, but you can load quite a plateful onto same. So you might want to think up a nice stack. Perhaps give yourself temporary perfect recall while you think about it."

"All right. I do remember seeing a Chart Of Suggested Uses For Hexes in there." Hex. "Ah, there we go, that's lovely. Hmmm."

"Do you want to staple your Slayerishness back on?"

"I still have the autopilot. I don't think I want to spawn a new Slayer every time I do something that resembles dying. I'm already going to want to give the one I've undoubtedly called up a heads up before the Watchers find her," says Juliet disgustedly. "So the only parts I'm missing that I want are the speed and the strength, which, yes, I do believe I will help myself to, along with the other popular Bell standards."

"Which are...?"

"Well, I'll want to check the book again - if I need an evil to get anything to stick, I can't just edit the powers later if someone's come up with convenient revisions to the designs - but in brief, I'm gonna be able to fly and teleport and turn invisible and regenerate and go without sleeping and detect lies - at will, off by default so that ordinary smalltalk isn't awkward - and endure pretty arbitrary weather conditions comfortably and I'll have the agony beam and I'm going to speed up my brain and I'll take a few layers of armor against assorted magical attack."

"Sounds lovely."

"Let's steal a few," says Sherlock. "Teleportation is convenient. Flight is fun. Invisibility is mildly redundant but fun nevertheless. Regeneration likewise. Going without sleep is an excellent idea. Lie detection would take all the fun out of things, but we can leave it off when it's not important."

"Do you need an evil for that too? Golden only gave me three. Or will it work if we stick them to this one -" She indicates the nearest Sherlock - "with hexes, of which I have a number, and then just incorporate that in the merge? Shell Bell ought to have written about that, if her dead version didn't have any magic."

"She did; it will. Are we appropriately well supplied?"

"If not, do please hand me a hex when you are finished giving yourself an agony beam."

"I have a fair number of hexes -" Juliet counts. "I have thirty-two hexes."

"Enough to be going on with."

"Yes." Pause. "Tony, how terribly confused are you?"

"Uh, actually I'm following pretty well," he says.

"Oh, good. Sherlock, are you done with the book yet?"

"The book and I have concluded our business."

Juliet makes herself a square just for the novelty and summons the book from across the room to catch up. (Snuggling with vampire-Sherlock all the while.) "Okay, I'm glad I thought to check this before stacking up some powers, apparently version one of teleportation had no safeguards against appearing with somebody not in a state to be appeared to," she says mildly. "Shell Bell invented a patch, though - oh, she was visiting a one of you when she came up with it, Tony - and she's got a revision to some of the defenses, that makes sense after she got killed by that nuke - and of course I want to be able to add nodes to the brainphone network, I'd almost neglected that - and -" She closes the book. "I think I'm all set to evil me some powers, unless anybody has last-minute suggestions or somebody wants me to be able to read their mind like Stella and Shell Bell do theirs or what have you."

"Do we want dear Juliet reading our mind?"

"I don't know, do we?"

"Well, which state is the easier to change our mind from later?"

"You can certainly always tell me to stop. Neither Stella nor Shell Bell leaves theirs on all the time. And apparently Shell Bell has to ask her Sherlock to slow down the adjustable brain speed thing in order to be able to catch more than half of what's going on anyway, if she hopes to work in real time. Or we could design the power backwards - projection instead of inspection - and stick it to you before you consolidate, and then you can change your mind at will without having to rely on my ability to suppress my curiosity - although I don't know if that will work with me, because mental opacity. Or," she shrugs, "you'll be making the evils anyway - I won't object if you ask me to remove it, or decide you don't want it now but want to go ahead and incorporate it later, as long as it's understood that not adding it with my first batch will take a separate evil."