"Interesting," says Steel. "Does it need solving?"

"Well, otherwise we won't know why it's happening," laughs Golden. "It doesn't seem urgent for any practical reasons."

"Do you suppose that's the kind of thing her aura-sense can do?" wonders Juliet.

"I think there is one obvious way to find that out, and no obvious downside to trying."

"Yeah, fair enough. Hey, Glass!"

Glass appears and kisses her wife and says, "What's up?"

"There are some odd regularities in how various languages are magically translated into one another and we were wondering if you could shed light on the subject," says Golden.

"Uh. Hm. Say some of the words?" Glass asks.

"Witch, witch," says Juliet, switching between languages, "wizard, wizard, sorceress, sorceress."

"And you only just noticed this because the local language has words for those things and isn't English. Hmmmmm." Glass nibbles her lip, closes her eyes. "Witch, witch, witch - There might be a - no, I can't really make sense of it. I'm still figuring out how I work now."

Sherlock kisses her anyway.

Kissees!

"What were you going to say? I promise not to take it as an irrefutable fact of the multiverse."

"I was going to say, meta-language," says Glass, "but I have no idea what that would mean."

"Can it not just be essentially a coincidence, deriving from the fact that the kinds of magic user in question don't have direct counterparts in the various worlds but the magic chose to translate the terms anyway?"

"Nnnno, I think it's not that - not on the level I'm seeing through aura, anyway, that might be what we'd find on a causal level. There's some sort of reason wizards get the same terminology as Cam and witches the same as Amariah or Golden."

"There's witches on my world too," Juliet adds. "Just, I'm not one."

Glass nods. "And it wouldn't be just as good to call them sorcerers-in-my-language, and when you pentagon the language you know that, and Milliways knows that."

"Do we trust their judgment?" wonders Steel.

"I'm not at all sure. It doesn't seem to be making any egregious mistakes?" offers Glass. "...I think there's a reason we have all-male wizards and Amariah has all-female witches, I think we'd never find the reverse case but I don't know why."

"Interesting again."

"Those words in English do have some gendered connotations, in those directions," muses Juliet. "I think in my world it's technically gender-neutral, anyone can learn the magic, but women are somewhat more likely to use the word 'witch' - I don't know for sure, I haven't met many of these people in person and my written sources are not overwhelmingly reliable."

"There isn't another word for the phenomenon in English on Aurum, and among people who are clued in to it being a general phenomenon - which is most people without their heads in the sand, at this point - it's gender-neutral, but historically media of various sorts which has fictitious varieties of magic-user gender-biases the words like that."

"English, or some distilled meta-version of it, could easily be the metalanguage I'm hypothesizing," says Glass.