"You know," she remarks, tipping her head at the door to the orgy chamber, "it occurs to me that you'd be pretty popular in there."
"D'you think so? I'm not as friendly to the general population since I got vampired up again. Only so much editing the theoretically uneditable mate bond would take. I am happy to bite pretty much arbitrary people, though."
"I think the extant data we have on alts of mates is that the Emperor finds them disturbing and Alice is Alice. Oh, and other Alice appears to find hers perfectly unalarming and Orfeo has no special reaction to alts of his imprint insofar as that's data. I suppose I may as well see where I fall on the apparent spectrum."
"I'm sure Jokes can keep them off you if you turn out not to approve," she says, patting him on the arm. "C'mon."
Is this a good time to visit the heap of Jokers?
Nathan is amused by the airlock setup.
He looks for his Joker among the many.
But only one of the great big sprawling pile of kissing, snuggling, various-other-things-doing Jokers looks up and waves at Nathan with a call of, "Sweetie!"
(At some point since he went in, he's put his scars back on. That makes him one of two who has them. He was in the middle of making out with the other one when Nathan walked in.)
"Hey, babe," says Nathan. "The munchkin's down for the count."
Nathan consults his interest in this practice. Yep, there it is. Snuggles. Ungentle vampire snuggles, because he's pretty sure nobody in this room is delicate enough to care if he accidentally breaks something by going too fast, too strongly.
As Eights predicted, the rest of them pile on, except for Sue and Alice who are busy with one another at the moment.
Nathan is pretty comfortable with this. Alice is probably still technically a newborn and could do some careless damage, but nobody else in the room appears at all likely to accidentally render him uncomfortable.
When the Joker is (temporarily) done kissing Nathan, the other one with scars inquires, "Do I get a turn?"
"A turn at...?" inquires Nathan archly.
"Well, if you're so keen on it," he says, and he seizes and repositions her rather casually. "Any dreadful things happen if you interact with venom?"
Then her kisses might be a little nibbly.
After plenty of nibbly kisses, this alt pulls away to curl up with the Joker and another one—same shape, no scars—snuggles closer to Nathan and bats her eyelashes.
He's pretty comfy with the girl-shaped ones. If the boys who aren't his start sidling up he might have residual hangups about that. Kiss kiss, anyway.
Apparently the Joker has been gossiping, or they can just tell, because although Kas and Micaiah are part of the general cuddlepile neither of them seems interested in soliciting kisses. And there's another female-shaped one who's curled up next to Sue and Alice, apart from the crowd but still touching Kas; she must be Petaal.
She must, but Nathan's not going to approach her, he heard the explanation when Kerron was looking her over for potential petting earlier. He has three Jokers to kiss. He finds this a fine number.