"It's really not," snorts Bella. "I'm good in a fight, but I'm much more disposed to cheating than good Slayery sportsmanship."

"Okay," says Val. "I will also take any challenges to single combat that might come your way, unless they're from like, gods."

"If you're that keen on it and the relevant challenges have affordances for substituting champions and my boyfriend doesn't insist on doing it himself, I will consider asking you."

"Cool," says Val.

"You like singly combating people?"

"I haven't done a whole lot of it, but y'know, it sounds like fun."

"Sparring can be fun. Fighting for your life, not so much. I'm not sure where most forms of demonic single combat fall on that scale. But I promise that if you fall in my defense I will fetch you out of Downside."

"Cool," shrugs Val.

Bella smiles. "So, since it's looking like your mom doesn't wanna talk to me, when would be a good time for you to show me around Siathe?"

"I'll ask Ike. We can email you," she says. "Do dead ex-Slayers do email?"

"I do email! I also do telepathy network, do you guys want in on the telepathy network? It's called a brainphone."

"Sign me up!"

[Behold! Also does text channel, busy messages according to whatever algorithm you like, and conference calls.]

[Awesome!]

"Shall I just add your brother now or should I ask him separately, do you think?"

"Ask him separately."

"Do you suppose he's still talking to your mom about me?"

"No idea. He might've got distracted."

"You want to go ask him? Seems impolite of me to go wandering through your house."

"Your brainphone thing isn't, like, contagious, I can't just give it to him myself?"

"Upgrades to how it works propagate that way, this is version two. Permission to add people to the network is separate and since I don't know you that well and haven't even met anybody else of your template I'm not quite there yet."

"...Template?"

"Oh, yeah. So, there's lots of universes, and some people pop up in more than one of them. I'm one of those people. There's ten of me known to, well, us, probably more we haven't found yet, and a lot of our friends and some of our enemies crop up more than once too. If you recur, I don't know about it, whereas if you were a copy of somebody another one of me had already vetted I'd be likely to skip some of the getting-to-know-you that I currently require before handing out magic."

"Gotcha," says Val. "Cool."

"If I do run into another of you I'll see about setting up an introduction, that's always fun. Us Bells have started throwing a party whenever we find a new one."