"It gives me what you might call moral feelings, I suppose."

"Like?"

"Well, at the moment, without outside influences I would rather starve than eat a human. That was demonstrably not the case before."

"There is that. Part of me wants to point out that us outside influences exist, but maybe you'd rather not count on that."

"At the moment, if I were permanently deprived of all the people who make up those outside influences, I would rather starve than do much of anything. Also, I can't starve."

"I don't want you to starve. Or unpleasantly fail to starve. Or have to be alone. Or," she sighs, "hate yourself."

"And yet, here we are."

"I don't know what my opinion on having a soul would be without a soul."

"Because the last time you didn't have a soul and were thinking about getting one you didn't anticipate this side effect. Right." She sighs, chews her lip thoughtfully.

"Yes. The soul transition seems to have all sorts of unforeseen effects."

"If you had it to do over again what would the two of you have done?" she wonders.

"I have not the faintest fucking clue."

"Well, there goes that avenue of inquiry, I guess," she sighs.

"Indeed."

"Now I'm trying to figure out what would've happened if I'd had to come to some kind of agreement with - her."

"Under what possible circumstances?"

"Thought experiment type circumstances," says Juliet dryly. "I haven't troubled to think of any."

"The circumstances matter, I'd think."

"Yeah. It's a different situation anyway," sighs Bella. "Thank goodness."

"Happily yes. I wonder how much of my reluctance to get rid of my soul is the irrational fear that it will turn out differently the second time."

"...That's not completely irrational. It does depend on why it worked so nicely the first time, and I think we've only got speculation, there."

"Well, that's fucking lovely, then, isn't it," he sighs.

"Not to put too fine a point on it." She sighs. "I can think of, like, hack movie plots, but not actual reasonable plans."

"Hack movie plots?" he laughs.