A while after the Jokers have their conference about being everybody's porn, Brilliance wanders out of the orgy chambers with the vague notion of finding Aurora.

Aurora is over here! She has just finished up touching base with Lexi, who has discovered that riding a unicorn isn't infinitely fascinating if the unicorn doesn't happen to wander near the conversations you want to participate in and is now on her own feet, over there, investigating some Tony.

"Hey, you," says Brilliance, hugging his Bella.

Hugs! "Hi."

"Oh. Well. That's probably my fault."

"...Fault?"

She waves a hand. "Causal responsibility, I didn't mean to imply, like, a value judgment."

"It would've happened eventually without you," says Brilliance. "He kind of needed not to be one. He just didn't know it yet."

"If he needed to not be one I'm kind of surprised his native magic thingamabob didn't just completely shut down the process."

"I don't think his power knew," says Brilliance.

"Why did he need it? I mean, Stella's reasons turned out to be partially sketchy, but didn't he know what vampires were and how they worked first anyway?"

"The sketchy reasons are why he needed not to be one."

"How does that work?"

"Because it just - he was okay with it in the first place because he asked her if the sketchy reasons were her reasons and she pretty much said no," says Brilliance, frustrated. "That shit matters, you can't just force somebody to be in love with you forever, there's lots of ways it can be okay to turn somebody into a vampire, even one of us, there's parts of it he liked, but he couldn't stay one when he knew that was why."

"...Uh, I'll tread carefully, and I agree it was sketchy of her, but unless she outright lied to him, and given that all the features of vampirism are a package deal and there are plenty of other reasons to want the other parts, doesn't that just about boil down to penalizing her for having the wrong thought cross her mind? It would've been good to bring it up, it sure seemed like she had been misleading in some way, but - like, if she literally just thought he would have fun turning, if nothing else about it occurred to her except for basic safety checks, if she did not notice that particular thing that she was inclined to identify as a perk - then it would've been fine?"

"...I'm not sure," he says. "It's - well, it's not complicated exactly, but it works the way we work, not the way you work. I think... as long as she was going to think about it the way she thought about it, then someday he was going to have to stop being a vampire. And maybe even if she wasn't. And I wasn't there, but if he asked her a question and she made him think the answer was something it wasn't and that's why he was okay with it, I don't really think any of us would care whether you'd call that lying or not. It's still not okay."

"Okay." Pause. "Does Jellybean know about how Bells define lying, because Cam's got that aura..."

"I don't know," says Brilliance. "I don't think it matters that much. How you define lying is not the problem, the problem is that tricking somebody into agreeing to something they wouldn't agree to if they knew the whole story is a really shitty thing to do, especially when the something is big enough to change how your whole mind works."

"I would not have Charlie's permission to skip off to uninhabited planets with you if he knew the whole story," Aurora points out. "I mean, you could say that he wouldn't be entitled to stop me regardless, but I am technically a minor child under his custody and the fact that he does not have the wherewithal to prevent me isn't relevant to whether it's his business. And obviously that's a smaller issue than changing someone's species, but the general 'tricking' thing..."

"You don't make any sense," says Brilliance, wrapping his arms around her waist and dropping his head on her shoulder.

"I make sense to me," Aurora says.

"You don't make sense to me. I don't understand why - I don't understand anything about this weird thing you have with Charlie, where you pretend we're not fucking so he won't tell us to stop, but if you know he would tell us to stop and you're not stopping then why would it matter if he did?"

"As long as he hasn't actually said it," Aurora says, "then I'm not actually defying him. What he has actually said is we can't be in my room with the door closed. So we don't do that. He hasn't been more specific - he doesn't even want to be, he doesn't want to produce a list of actual things he doesn't want done, he doesn't want to live with me demanding to know why and having a long pseudolegalistic argument with him, he mostly feels like it is the duty of the fathers of teenage daughters to usher them into adulthood without any practical understanding of sex. He hasn't bothered to update his model of the world that says that people have sex in bedrooms and not on uninhabited planets they teleport to, so that's what the rule is about. If he changes the rules so it's actually about something I care about being able to do - well, it'd probably depend on how he tried to justify the rule, he's decent enough not to attempt anything serious by pure fiat, especially since I could move back to Renée's anytime and he probably suspects she'd be fine with it. But anyway, things would become so much less pleasant in my relationship with Charlie if that had to be an actual conversation we had. And I will not actually lie to him - I will not tell him 'Yes, Dad' if he lays down a rule that I'm going to ignore. So that rule would turn into a mess. I am avoiding that mess."

"That is weird," says Brilliance, "but I think it's mostly weird because of my trust issues, so whatever, not the point. I forget what the point is. Do we still care about the point?"