"Minting, you get hurt and you make a coin and then you can fix whatever hurt you and you're done," he says. "Enchanting, whoever's casting the spell needs to use somebody as a channel - if it's you, it hurts and you might lose control of the spell and kill yourself; if it's somebody else and they're into it, it'll hurt them in a way that sticks around afterward, and there's just not that many people willing to let you give them chronic pain problems so you can do nifty magic; and if it's somebody else and they're not into it, it'll give them nasty brain damage." He grins. "Us Jokers are all over channeling, of course."

"That," says Bella, "is a mean magic system. Why bother channeling, willing channels or no, with coins available? Does enchanting do things coins can't?"

"Mmyep! You couldn't wish up a nifty enchanter's aura like mine," he says, flaring a little so that suddenly he is the most fascinating thing in the room and every emotion he projects - amusement, friendliness, a gentle affection for Brilliance - is visible with crystalline clarity. "Gotta get those the hard way. It's why all the Bells did it, pretty much. Everybody's aura is different, but you can't tell what it's gonna be until you get it. The Bells mostly look all powerful and stuff; the Jokers mostly get get what I just showed you, along with," there is a cheerful little drumroll, "soundtracks."

"...Oooh."

"It's fun," he says. "I'll channel for you if Nibbles here doesn't wanna."

"...Nibbles?"

Brilliance snorts.

"Well, lookit him," says the Joker, gesturing to Brilliance and the depleted jar of jelly beans.

"I suppose. Is picking up an aura something I can do without meeting the rest of the gang?"

"Yeah, hex'll give you enchanting and pentagon'll make you good at it, and it doesn't take much more than a couple days to pick one up if you spend those couple days doing nothing but enchant. Got a free weekend and a planet you wanna colonize? I don't think anybody's done Neptune yet."

"I'm kinda fond of the Planet of Colorful Sand, actually, although I have no idea where, astronomically, it is, or if that's even a meaningful question given the dimension thing."

"It's not," says Brilliance. "Different dimension."

"Wonder what size coin it'd take to conjure a planet," says the Joker. "An evil, I bet; it took more than one star to terraform Mars. But if you want a planet of colourful sand, you can have one."

"No, I mean, there already exists a planet of colorful sand, if I decide to colonize space I might want to start there."

"Mhm," says the Joker, "and I mean, if you wanted to copy it and put one in your solar system, you could."

"Oh. That seems like overkill. There is already such a planet, and I have to use magic to get to any planets that aren't Earth anyway. Unless a teleportation power I wish myself with a coin won't let me dimension-hop like Brilliance does?"

"No idea," says the Joker. "But I don't know why more Bells don't conjure their own planets. What's it matter if it's overkill? Coins are cheap with one of me around."

"I might someday design one or more planets, it's just nowhere near my top priority," says Bella.

"Well, yeah, but there's a bunch sitting around you can copy and that way you get to colonize one and leave the other for the astronomers to coo over. Or do you just not like astronomers?"

Bella snorts. "I have no strong opinions about astronomers, I just don't think cooing-over is what planets ought to be for."

"What's that s'posed to mean?"

"Like, I have some sympathy with conservationist arguments that are about stuff that's alive. Save the whales. But I don't feel any inclination to save the barren wasteland. If people want to study why there was a barren wasteland there, they should be able to do it while there's people putting in swimming pools and zoos. They can work with illusion models or something, I'm not heartless, I'd help them out, but entire duplicate planets with nothing on them taking up space just so astronomers can ooh and aah offends my aesthetics."

"It's a big universe," says the Joker. "There's room."

"You just recently informed me that death is probably a temporary condition. I'm not confident in any long-term ceiling on the population."