[There are fewer of all the other templates - except attached templates, like, all of us Bells have parents - so probably a combination of the two.]

[The way you say that makes me think there are templates for whom parents are optional.]

[There are! One of the Jokers is a magical construct. Also there are some clones floating around.]

He just laughs.

[Siblings also vary; one of me has a fraternal twin sister, the rest of us are only children. Jokers occasionally have little brothers - those don't usually turn out well.]

[Meaning they turn out worse than the Joker? That I have to - never, ever see.]

[We call them Voices. They're - different, and not as easily adaptable as Jokers are. And if they're rescued early enough, they can turn out okay; Angela's Joker has one and he's - okay. But they can get very bad.]

[How many cities do they terrorize?]

[They do kill people, but they're less theatrical about it. Our primary exposures to them apart from Angela's okay one has been the one who found Shell Bell Downside and decided to take her home and torture her for twenty-five years. There was also the one who kidnapped Rose's husband and gave him brain damage; she killed him.]

[Well, that's... charming,] says Ripper. [Twenty-five years? I suppose that's not long to a dead person.]

[Yeah. She was down there for way more than that total before she found a door out.]

[Sucks to be her,] he says sympathetically.

[She's okay now. Although her girlfriend felt pretty awful about not having known she needed help. Because right after she got assassinated, said girlfriend resurrected her, only the problem was that back then if you did that it just forked the resurrected person, so there were two of her. They merged later.]

[It is,] he says after a moment, [weird that you know someone who has been assassinated.]

[We actually get assassinated a fair amount! I'm just an ordinary car crash victim, but Shell Bell got nuked by a political rival, people have tried and only just barely failed to kill Golden twice, somebody who didn't like Juliet got his hands on a wish and killed her, Aegis's spaceship got shredded by a local superweapon, Cam was nearly suffocated in his sleep by the evil deity-thing I mentioned. Also, if you want to count it, at one point we killed Sarion on purpose because we were trying to solve a problem she had that could conceivably have been solved by sending her through Downside. Didn't work, though.]

[...What the hell kind of a problem is solved by dying?]

[The "till death do us part" kind. Her thing with Ansharil and Aianon involved involuntary mind-reading, and that tops the list of ways to break Bells into non-functional shells of our former selves - Shell Bell got broke too but it took way longer her way. We were trying to get Sarion out of the dragon bond thing. Eventually we hauled in Stella's magic-seeing guy and got him to design a patch for it, once it turned out that the dragonbond snapped back into place as soon as we woke up Technically Dead Sarion.]

[Well, that's... I have no idea what to think about that,] he admits.

[Sarion is better now. Cam designed her an assistive version of our standard perfect recall, based on his magic notebook but without involving another personality, and she had some recovery time, and now she's doing the whole curing-diseases-setting-up-ground-rulesed-colonies-recovering-endangered-species Bell thing.]

[Nothing like a happy ending,] says Ripper.

[Well, except that now her beloveds are stranded here and can't get to her. But yeah.]

[Her - beloveds?]

[That's what she calls them; it's a dragon bond thing. For a while they didn't have names at all and then they let Sarion's mom name them.]

[...Okay then.]

[What?]