A few hours later, Brilliance says by magephone, +I fixed it! No more access codes. My functions are all mine.+

+Good.+

+Love you,+ he adds.

+I love you too.+

+You can come snuggle me now if you want.+

She does want. Pop! Snuggle.

"...Meaning?"

"Meaning I haven't locked you out," he says, and kisses her.

Kisses kisses.

Nibble. +Sure - you're sure you're okay, after...?+

+I'm okay. Well - I'm not, like, okay, I'm still kind of fucked up over the whole thing, but I love you and I wanna do nice things with you. I'm okay about you.+

"I love you," he sighs.

"I love you too."

Gentle lazy fingerpainting, thin prickling lines crisscrossed where she draws, little kisses of fire where she presses her lips to his face and throat.

It's perfect. He loves her so much. She should know how much! So he shows her.

[Hi! What's up?]

[One of the devices we recovered from the Flame said she'd like to meet your sister.]

[Cool. Can you find us where we are or should we meet you?]

[I can find you where you are, if you don't mind me teleporting in.]

"Okay, cool."

[We're all set.]

"The only device either of us have had social contact with before is Brilliance, who I think is pretty unusual," says Bella, "how does this usually work?"

"It varies. I had an easy time of it deciding to work with Adularia, because I'm one of the only mages she's ever met who has the power to wake her up. She's an old model and she needs a bit of a boost to get going," Matilda explains. "That, and she likes me."

"What color's your mana, Persica?"

"Adularia's was pale blue and mine was dark blue and we met in the middle," says Matilda.

"We have no idea what Bella's was before she met Brilliance, and now they match," giggles Lexi, patting the little peach. The little peach glitters.

"I'm not complaining, I like our mana color."

Matilda grins. "What's your mana colour?"

Bella shrugs and casts the first spell she thinks of. "Safety." It makes her glow in the relevant color. "It's not so much a single color. Me and Brilliance have our wishcoins in that color too - and Lexi's is peachy-looking - but his shift around and mine don't. Joker coins tend to shift, Bell coins glow solid colors if they have native magic that protects them from mindreading and stuff and interesting-looking but non-glowy coins if we don't."

"Interesting," says Matilda. "I wonder if mana colours and coin colours match across the board."

Bella spends a square to get a counterfactual-coin for Matilda.

"Is that mine? It matches our combined colour," she says. "Interesting."

"Yeah, it is. I haven't gotten around into making anybody else a mage yet, although I'll happily run this test on anyone you want to present me with. Glass will probably want to get maged eventually, when we get in touch again. She maxes out the Bell-magic-geek parameter. If you find any more stray Devices after Jane's back up maybe we can introduce them to her."

"Mana colours are usually single unchanging colours," she says thoughtfully. "Is it the same way for coins? What's Glass's coin colour?"

Bella conjures up everybell and everyjoker's coin color, and as an afterthought the Sherlocks' and Tonies' too, in a neat chart. "That one," she says, pointing out the fragmented stained-glass. "So far no one's basic coin color has changed, although obviously," she gestures at the Joker coins, especially Kas's, which shifts through scales and skin and feather patterns, "that's not always saying a lot."

"Interesting. No, mana colours are never that complicated. Even simple things like your rainbow pattern are pretty rare. I wonder what Glass's mana would be like."

"We will be able to find out soon enough. I'm pretty sure Glass would do way more than tweak her genetics to get access to a new kind of magic, and near as we can tell magery is just genetic - we had Jane sequence all of us a while ago. The tested Matildas match; I assume you match except the mage thing, I'm on-template apart from that."

"I think I'd like to meet these people."

"I bet. You'll be on the guest list when we have a yay-Jane-is-back party."

"Oh good."

"Unfortunately that could be a long time. Jane syncs up the passage of time when she's on; when she's not, all bets are off. Last time Rainbow - that's what I named this world - only lost a couple hours, but some worlds were out for more than a decade."

"That sounds inconvenient."

"And that's just Belled worlds; a few of the other worlds we have contact with were gone for way longer. Fortunately, I am immortal."

Matilda raises her eyebrows. "Please, tell me more."

Bella laughs. "I can make you immortal too, I don't even need a coin for it. There's this afterlife, it was connected to seventy-something worlds when we first found it, I never got the exact figure. Including Golden's world and Shell Bell's and Juliet's and Pattern's, but nobell else's to start." She points at the relevant coin colors. "Shell Bell got assassinated. She wound up there. It was really bad. I'll spare the details unless you want them. Anyway, eventually, she got a door to Milliways out of there, and when we found Aegis," she points at glowy copper, "and Aegis brought us Jane, we were able to assemble everybody and basically covertly assault the place. I say we but I wasn't in the peal yet, it was just these ones -" She gestures at some coins. "And they found Pattern, who died when she got hit by a car and didn't have any magic affecting the situation the way Stella and Golden did when the same thing happened to them. But they got caught. Then they struck a deal with the afterlife's admin, who let them install Jane to basically run the place and does us favors, including letting us get and distribute the thing that dead people do instead of dying when they suffer lethal damage. If anything gets through my miscellaneous defenses thoroughly enough to 'kill' me, I go up in theatrical flames and reset in a healthy state a second later. It's called 'torching'."

"I would like to be immortal, please," says Matilda. "Adularia too."

Bella snaps her fingers. "Done and done."

Meanwhile, Lexi and Persica are quietly magephoning, and Persica has consented to be incorporated into a conjured necklace. "You should do my Peachy too, Bella," says Lexi.

"Peachy?" laughs Bella. "Sure, she's all set."

"Thank you, Master's Sister," says Persica.

Matilda grins. "I'm glad you two like each other," she says to Lexi and Persica.

"Fun fact, so far I'm the only Bell we've found with a sister," remarks Bella. "The others are all only children."

"Interesting. Do other templates vary in number of siblings?"

"Jokers sometimes have little brothers. Who are usually bad news - Angela rescued her brother-in-law but the other ones we know about are serial killer types, one of them was part of the awful that was Shell Bell's time spent as a dead person. The others are onlies. I don't know if the other Matildas have any siblings; I get the impression it couldn't possibly matter less to them if they did. Some Tonies are twins with their Sherlocks, the others are singlets who clone themselves and get Sherlocks, except this one never got around to it," she points at Iron Man's coin color, "and this one is a solo Sherlock. And of course Bells have varying numbers of kids, who, when they have the same other-parent, also are alts of each other, and Angela has four and Rose two last I checked."

"I have a brother," says Matilda. "I haven't spoken to him since I was six. Sometimes I forget he ever existed."

"That could easily be true of the other ones too," shrugs Bella.

"It probably is."

"We haven't found any lone Lexis, but of course people haven't known to keep an eye out for as long," says Bella.

"A Lexi without a Bella would be weird. But it's already pretty weird that there are Bellas without Lexis."

"I wonder why," Matilda says musingly. "Why all this. The templates, the varying numbers of siblings, all of it."

"Glass knows stuff. At her Bellparty she was looking everybody over with one of her aura features, right, and saying things like 'I think I'm gay because my Sherlock and Tony are girls!' and so on. That's not really, like, explanatory though."

"It's a start."

"It's a cool party trick, anyway. Rose used to have a cool party trick but now we can all do it; comes with enchanting - enchanting works through mindscapes so we can check out our own and other people's and see what they look like."

"Mindscapes?"

"Yeah. Do you want me to have a look at yours? It does not constitute mindreading all by itself or everybody at Rose's first party would have declined. Well, all the Bells anyway, that's a thing with us."

"What exactly is a mindscape?"

"A visual representation of your mind. Mine is actually the rainbow-sand planet, right now - I don't know what it would've been before I saw the place. A lot of people just have houses they used to live in - Lexi has our mom's house - but Bells tend not to fixate on those."

"All right. I bet I know what mine is," laughs Matilda. "Is there a way you can show me?"

"I can look at it and conjure up an illusion, sure."

"Go on."

Peer.

It's a mansion. An old, pretty, cheerfully decorated mansion.

Illusion!

"Yep," says Matilda. "Jenny's house."

"Might be the same for the other Matildas, I don't know. The Sherlocks and Tonies all match the others in their sets where applicable," she adds, "which is cute. Except Glass's set have slightly different focuses in their forest that they are princesses of."

She laughs.

"You want to see everybody?" She looks around the room. "It'd be crowded for full size illusions but I could half-size 'em and they can all float."

"As amusing as that would be, I think I'd rather meet them in person when I get the chance."

"Okay. With any luck it's a short outage. I have better coin output than average and a few of the Bells without Jokers lean on me for larger coins - and Brilliance is the only person who can do the ten-pointers. They have some, but if they're stranded too long they might run low and have to cut corners on important Belling."

"You made yourself a verb," Matilda observes.

"We did. It's the whole curing-diseases-resurrecting-the-dead-playing-politics-ushering-in-post-scarcity bit we do when we get our hands on decent magic."

Matilda giggles.

"Oh, and colonizing space, we also do colonizing space."

"Space has been pretty thoroughly colonized in this universe."

"I don't see anybody living on the other planets in this solar system. Do you mean just conventionally habitable space?"

"I mean that if you take the goal of 'colonize space' to be 'put humans on more planets than Earth', which people on Earth tend to when they're discussing it theoretically, it has been done. There are something like a thousand inhabited planets across all the dimensions we know about, and plenty of room for expansion."

"Well," says Aurora. "This is gonna be interesting. Anyway, I'm also motivated by alleviating crowding on Earth itself. And any other crowded planets I run into."

"What's gonna be interesting?"

"Belling in a world with lots of humans all over the place. Amariah's looking at something a little similar because Alethia's a worldsheaf too, but if any of her subworlds have the tech or the magic for space colonization absent her help I haven't heard about it. I think Angela's universe has other human colonies besides the one she grew up on but she's being very leisurely about ascending on her home planet, I don't think she's touched anything else yet. Aegis's world has some aliens, and humans are just starting to colonize. Syntropy has aliens too, in addition to all the talking trees-and-stars-and-cats-and-stuff. Juliet's got to deal with several thousand species of demon. But everyone else is pretty much looking at the contents of the planet they started on as far as anyone knows, so this exact setup is new. I get to be a template for the next Bell in the situation 'unbeknownst to Earth, there are humans all over the place'."

Matilda laughs.

"Brilliance wasn't able to tell me a whole lot about the whole interdimensional civilization situation, he didn't have a great vantage point. What's it like? Why'd Earth get left out even after you joined up with the TSAB?"

"Left out of what?"

"The interdimensional civilization thing. It's not common knowledge and so far none of the miscellaneous presidents and prime ministers I've talked to knew magic existed. I didn't know till I met Brilliance."

"Well... yes," says Matilda, "exactly. Earth has hardly any mages. So of course the TSAB doesn't bother the rest of them; they're not going around creating dimensional disturbances."

"Is magic not common knowledge among non-mages in general? Is the TSAB just a free-floating enforcement organization that isn't associated with some kind of more civilian governance?"

"We're based on a planet called Mid-Childa. But the governing authority of Mid-Childa is vastly smaller than the jurisdiction of the TSAB. You know, come to think of it, I think Earth might be the only planet with a large enough population of non-mages that it's feasible for them not to know about magic. It's much more common everywhere else."

"Huh. Well, I'm gonna fix that," shrugs Bella, "do you want to, like, appoint a liason to help me not mismanage mentioning TSAB-relevant things to the general population? Bells are good at lots of things but it seems generally a good idea for us to outsource heavy PR and diplomacy when we can."

"Fix... what, exactly?"

"Magic not being generally known. I'm not just pulling a Stella - she visibly terraformed Mars and put a sign with her email address on it in front of the probes when NASA flipped - I'm working with Earthly authorities on presentation and timing, might as well throw in TSAB authorities too. I mean, it's obviously possible to be a mage and not know it for at least seventeen years," she gestures at herself and Lexi, "so you might find yourself with more to do Earthwise than you currently have unless you just want to leave it all to me?"

"Leave what all to you?" she asks patiently.

"...Let me back up some. I'm going to go public on Earth as soon as I have a strategy. About magic, about my interest in doing useful things with it, about the availability of the Rainbowsand planetary colony. Now that I know that there is a TSAB, it's probably going to come up in conversation too. I don't know what your first contact policy is like for large planets rather than individual mages who happen to have been harassed by pirates, so I am inviting your organization to have input towards and/or participate in that segment of my going-public."

"We don't really have a first-contact policy for large planets; it hasn't come up. I'll pass it on to some people and see what happens."

"Okay, thanks. Earthside politicians move slow enough that I don't expect to be on TV in the next month anyway."

"Politicians everywhere."

"Rose ignores hers, but she mostly has low-tech monarchs. Golden usurped a shadow government and inherited all their spooky influence. Glass was already married into royalty when we found her. Me and Pattern and Stella and so on have to deal with," vague gesture, "Earth stuff from scratch. Well, Stella has a Libby - and Pattern imported one and Golden resurrected one, but imported and previously dead Libbies don't come with sinister networks so I'm not sure how much use the latter two get out of theirs. And Juliet has one but Juliet's working on demons before human stuff."

"What is a Libby and what sorts of sinister networks do they usually come with?"

"A Libby," says Bella, adding a purple cluster of coin colors to the chart, "is this template of whom we know four. In Aurum she's Golden's husband's biological mother; she hasn't matched up with the correct guy to get copies of Golden's husband anywhere else, though. Which is kind of a pity because Golden's kid is awesome. Anyway - you know what, I should probably actually check Rainbow for a Libby. I wasn't expecting you, maybe there's one of her too." Port?

The teleport fails.

"Can't port to her right now, but there could still be one who's in the bathroom or something," shrugs Bella. "I'll try brainphoning later, that's probably a better idea anyway. Anyway, they are really good at figuring out what people are useful for. They make good personnel officers."

"Sounds handy."

"Quite. Stella and hers didn't make such great first impressions on each other, for a while it looked like they were going to be nemeses, but then her Libby met Golden's daughter Elspeth in Milliways and Elspeth sold her on Bells being awesome."

"It's getting a little hard to keep all these people straight."

"This is one of the many reasons I enjoy having perfect recall! Would you like some?"

"My memory is good enough for most purposes already."

"Okay," shrugs Bella, who doesn't really understand turning down superpowers but isn't in the mood to argue about it.

"I'm gonna go outside and set up a barrier and play with Persica's nifty special effects," says Lexi, hopping to her feet and waving at Matilda. "Thanks!"

"You're welcome! Have fun!"

"We will!" And off she goes.

"There's a standard suite of Bell superpowers - periodically updated when somebody comes up with something good or modifies something already in circulation - but perfect recall might be my favorite. It has some really stiff competition, too."

"Such as?"

"Teleporting, the defense wishes - one of those pirates shot at me a hell of a lot before Brilliance told me to let him go and deal with the cause instead of the symptom; I didn't feel a thing - the brainphone, flying. Plus torching, but that's not so much a suite thing as its own checklist item."

"Well, I can already both fly and teleport," Matilda observes. "The brainphone is awfully handy. I wouldn't want to casually wish myself perfect recall because I have no guarantee that it would be enough of an improvement on the status quo to be worth the change."

"If 'whatever the Bells are doing' doesn't suffice you could design your own, it's a hex either way," shrugs Bella.

"I might just do that."

"Lemme know when you have something."

"Will do."

"What's the structure of the TSAB like? How big is it?"

"...Which you're asking because...?"

"Curiosity. If you don't wanna tell me you don't have to."

"I have a lot of discretion but not quite that much."

Bella laughs. "Can you tell me what your co-workers have been told about me?"

"Well, I took responsibility for the fact that your partner is an immensely powerful weapon. No one was really that interested in you."

"Took responsibility for the fact that he's a powerful weapon meaning?"

"Meaning, the higher-ups wanted to know if he was likely to destroy any planets, and I said no. So if it turns out you want to play Death Star after all, I'm on the hook for it."

"Me and Brilliance are agreed on no planet-destroying, so you're safe."

"Good to know."

"Left to his own devices he would probably mostly eat ludicrous amounts of pie. I'm more the do-gooder type."

Matilda giggles. "He eats pie?"

"He eats everything, he is very into gustatory experience, one time I walked into the kitchen," she waves a hand kitchenward, "and he just had this stack of pie plates, he's bottomless, he just turns food into mana."

"That is precious."

"I know, right?"

She nods firmly.

"When I met him he had never tried any kind of food, I gave him some random leftovers and a banana and he was over the moon about it."

"Awwwwww."

"He's very cute."

"I can tell!"

"Anyway, I assume you are very busy, I don't want to tie you up talking about how cute it is that my boyfriend eats a lot of pie if you have other things going on and only meant to drop by for ten minutes to see if Lexi and Persica got along."

[Excuse me?]

[Oh! Cool! You exist! Hi. Uh, I haven't had to explain magic-and-so-on from scratch before, where do you want me to start?]

[Your name would be nice.]

[Bella,] laughs Bella.

[Where you know me from, next.]

[I don't know you. I have met four alternate-universe versions of you and only just now thought to check to see if this world had one. And it does!]

[How are we currently communicating?]

[It's called the brainphone, it is made with offworld magic. It also has a text channel, busy messages, and conference calls.]

[What exactly do you mean by 'offworld'?]

[I mean, there are lots of worlds and worldsheaves - universes and collections thereof, not planets - of which this one and the dimensions that it is possible to reach with local magic is only one sheaf, and I have been to some more of them and met people from more still.]

[And these people included alternate-universe versions of me? Who made a good enough impression on you that you then decided to see if you could dig up a local copy?]

[The four of you work for four of me. There are more of me than of you so far, though, although I don't know if anyone else has actually run sweeps of their worlds for copies, the others ran into theirs through more coincidental means.]

[And what is it that you do?]

[Have you noticed all those bewildered newspaper articles about oncologists being able to take simultaneous vacations all of a sudden? Among other things, but I think that made the biggest media splash.]

[I mean in the context of me working for you. What is it that you do?]

[Oh, the other Libbies are on the books as personnel officers. Bells take over the world, is the concise way to put it - there's nuance, some of us don't actually do that, but that's the basic idea.]

[I see. Maybe now you'd like to explain what you mean by 'magic'.]

[Do you even know about the local kind? Stella's Libby and Juliet's James knew about their local kinds. Pretty sure Slipstick knew about her original world's too although she's since moved worlds, not sure about the Aurum one.]

[Assume that I don't.]

[I'm going to take that as a "yes, I had my suspicions, but I feel like seeing how much you want me to know". Or possibly a "yes, my aunt is a mage, but...". Okay, well, local magic exists, there are people who have mana capacities and can do magic; I'm one of those, but I lean on it less than my offworld kinds lately. Apparently the word for us is "mage". There are also artificial Devices of intelligence levels varying from "amoeba" to "smart human" who can do or help mages do magic. I know less about the local system than I'd like because until the other day the only people I knew who had any were me, an equally underinformed sister, and a Device whose info is four hundred years out of date, but I recently found a Matilda-template in the Time-Space Administration Bureau and we've been talking, I bet she'll give me books on it if I ask nicely. Would you rather have this conversation in person?]

[Not particularly. I'm actually kind of busy right now. Go on. What can mages do? What can you do?]

[If you're busy we can talk later. Around the time I met the rest of me I had managed to conjure sweet potatoes with the use of mana. Also does flying, miscellaneous destruction, defense, conjured nifty magical girl outfits, teleportation, some stuff in the category my Device calls "matter manipulation", I need to ask Matilda for those books to give you any more details. My offworld magic to a first approximation does everything. Although I probably shouldn't resurrect any dead people until the interworld computer network's emergent intelligence wakes up again.]

[I'm not too busy to talk, or I wouldn't be talking. So with your approximate omnipotence, you take over planets? And you're, what, looking to hire me to help?]

[Maybe. I mean, maybe you are unlike the other Libbies and do not wish to be somebell's personnel officer. Just thought it was worth looking.]

[If you came bearing another Libby to back up your claims, I would find your offer a lot more tempting.]

[I can't produce one right now because Jane is down, and she's the one who does on-demand interworld travel. Unfortunately, she also does interworld time synchronization. This has happened before, although then the error message she threw was a lot less worrying; it could be hours or years before she comes back, I got lucky last time but some other places were spun off for over a decade. The old-fashioned way involves an interworld bar that appears according to thus-far-unfathomable whim. If you open a door and it goes to a bar instead of where it was supposed to go, have a look in the backyard and you'll see the Belltower; you could go in there and leave a note saying that if Stella, Juliet, Golden, or Pattern happens to see it you'd appreciate them forcing the door to Rainbow to introduce you to one of your alts. I'll let you know if I find a door, too.]

[Thanks for the tip.]

[No problem. I can produce, like, illusory displays of all four of them, and mostly-secondhand information and snippets of conversation therewith from talking to other Bells about them, and common knowledge about the template from the Friends Of Bells book we maintain, but I haven't made close personal friends with any.]

[By all means, produce those things. But not right now. Say, tomorrow?]

[Sure, whenever, I don't sleep and I don't have any meetings until Thursday.]

[You don't sleep,] she repeats.

[Yeah. Standard Bell superpower that gets slapped on with everything else cool when we get access to the offworld magic. I can sleep, I just usually have better things to do.]

[You know what would also make your offer more tempting? If I could get some of this lovely magic you're throwing around.]

[You just want me to standard-no-sleep you? I can do that.]

[That would be nice of you.]

Hex. [There you go.]

[Pleasure doing business with you.]

Bella snorts. [I can be freer with this kind of magic than most of my alts for reasons I'd rather not get into at this point in our relationship, but you will eventually run out of freebies like that except for the part where as far as I know you live on Earth and I'm on an Earth-improving spree.]

[And the magic in question is not easily mass-produced...?]

[Depends on what you mean by "mass" and "easily".]

[I mean, it wouldn't be feasible for you to produce enough of whatever magic wand you just waved at me to do the same thing to the entire population of Earth. For example.]

[I don't have seven billion of the thing I just did. I could do the entire population of Earth by using a bigger magic wand which can do more at once, but it would be kind of hard to get everyone's permission to magically mess with them in that way.]

[I would like to know more about these magic wands.]

[I'm sure you would. They're not wand-shaped.]

[Go on.]

Bella laughs. [They're wishes,] she says, [how's that?]

[I'm sensing a hint of evasiveness.]

[Yeah, I mentioned I haven't actually gotten to personally know the other four Libbies? I know you can probably be on board with my projects, but since I don't have a Libby Who Is Someone's Personnel Officer available to send to your house with a gift basket and literature on how awesome Bells are, and since I know sometimes Libbies have done slightly sketchy things before being in the employ of miscellaneous Bells, there is some evasiveness. Not a lot, I'll tell you most stuff, but I will not be telling you about what happens in place of a mommy wish and a daddy wish loving each other very much this very minute.]

[I see. So you're afraid that I will get some of this magic power and then use it to oppose you. That suggests to me that either you don't know me very well, or I should be opposing you already.]

[I honestly can't think how you'd get ahold of a copy without coming into contact with more of me and therefore more of you. But I have just explained that I don't know you very well. I don't know the template except by hearsay and snatches of party chatter, and I know nothing about how on- or off-model you may individually be because you have chosen not to tell me and I have chosen not to violate your privacy. Bells vary a lot. Libbies vary too. One of them married a template who has more than once been found necessary to kill. One of them had some seriously unsavory spying behavior. As far as I know the other two have been unobjectionable, but one of them died during the Spanish Flu and the other one was like sixteen when located by her corresponding Bell for template-unrelated reasons.]

[And you'll notice that I am not currently opposing you.]

[Yes, I appreciate that.]

[Good.]

[Do you want to tell me anything about yourself or are you enjoying this thing where I muddle along based on having passing knowledge of several of your alts?]

[If you have anything more than passing knowledge, I'm sure you can guess why I might be reluctant to start divulging any kind of personal information to somebody I only met ten minutes ago.]

[You're supposed to be spectacular judges of character. I guess I wouldn't necessarily have heard about it if it only works in person or something.]

[I am a spectacular judge of character, but I'm not a magical one. I need something to go on. And yes, talking to somebody in person helps.]

[Well, perhaps we will have a less cagey conversation tomorrow when you are not busy, then. In the meantime you are free to ask me things that aren't the one or two things I am slightly wary of telling an unfamiliar Libby.]

[Tell me more about your plans for world conquest, then. That's always fun.]

[How much of the curing-diseases-unendangering-pandas-vanishing-landmines activity have you seen in the news? I wanna know where to start.]

[Assume I know nothing. It's not true, but it'll make your explanation more complete.]

[Okay, well, I'm not going public yet but that doesn't mean I'm being discreet. I went through some lists of diseases and rendered them nonexistent. I'm currently debating what kind of consolation present to send to doctors whose jobs have been rendered irrelevant; for obvious reasons just conjuring piles of money for each one would be problematic, and they can't just all retrain as nutritionists or something. There are a lot more salmon in the Pacific Ocean now; I'm reading up to avoid damaging the ecosystems I'm trying to patch for other species, except on my mom's birthday I unendangered pandas. They might still be technically threatened, but there are a lot more of them now. There are no more lurking landmines in Southeast Asia. And I have presented myself to all uncontested world leaders, been shot at a few times, and ultimately convinced them all that shooting at me wouldn't get anywhere and they should talk to me instead; we're in periodic meetings about how to present me and my open-ended offer to the world, and so far as I know, it hasn't leaked, although I will not be stunned if six of your friends have been eavesdropping and told you something.]

[Did you not think of looking for me before inducing world leaders' bodyguards to shoot at you?]

[I did not. I told you, everyone else found applicable Libbies organically. Golden's one is her mother-in-law. Juliet's succeeded her at a mystical destiny thing and Juliet went to warn her without finding out who she was until she brought her to Milliways and Stella ran into them and was like "aww you found a tiny Libby". Now that I have discovered that it is sometimes necessary to look for Libbies I'll tell the others as soon as I can and I'm sure we'll all run sweeps for known templates.]

[Well. If I was going to work for you, the first thing I'd do would be to find you some qualified diplomats.]

[Yes. Please. Qualified diplomats would be awesome. I am not even the most diplomatic of Bells and even he is not all that diplomatic.]

[I'm getting that sense. Well, we'll see. I assume, perhaps incorrectly, that you're not in such dire straits that you can't wait until tomorrow to benefit from my expertise.]

[Yeah, nothing dire. It's not like getting shot at is a problem except insofar as it's a sign that something has already gone wrong. And for the record I didn't just unexpectedly teleport into anybody's office. Although I almost did that with you, which I gather would've been almost a worse idea. The ones who shot at me were like "yeah, visit at such and such a time" and when I showed up there was an ambush waiting. Very unfriendly.]

[Yes. Suddenly teleporting into my presence when I don't know who you are is not a friendly gesture. I'm glad you didn't do that.]

[Yeah, I guess you were in the bathroom or something, it's good that Shell Bell came up with that patch for the power before anyone had an embarrassing incident.]

[There was a time when you-plural were in the habit of teleporting to people without first making sure they weren't 'in the bathroom or something'?]

[It never actually happened like that. Stella designed the original power, and she was almost invariably teleporting to places where if there was anybody there she'd talked to them first. The kind of magic in question isn't very good at plain information - it can give different results contingent on facts but it's not so great at just having us know stuff unless we pick out a sensory modality and everything, and it didn't occur to her to have her superpower just stop working sometimes. Shell Bell figured the bathroom thing wasn't a problem because it doesn't land us near enough people we're looking for to land us in a small room. Then she had a close call with a Tony she was looking for who later informed her that he had a very large bathroom, she fixed it, by the time I met the peal it had been patched for a while.]

[That's lucky.]

[Yep.]

[For future reference, please don't teleport to me without explicitly warning me first.]

[Yeah, sure, my sister's easily startled that way too.]

[And I mentioned the brainphone does busy messages, if you ever want me to bounce off for some reason you can put one up.]

[Noted.]

[Anything else you want to know now instead of later?]

[I don't think so. I'll talk to you again when I am less busy.]

[Okay, later.]