[Of course it was,] says Queenie. [Did you like the food? Did you like the flowers? Did you like the view? Did you make out with him?]

[I liked the food and the flowers and the view,] says Bella primly.

[I bet you made out with him,] says Queenie. [Isn't he delicious?]

[I decline to comment.]

[We didn't discuss it. I guess we should.]

[Guess so,] Queenie agrees.

[Yeah?]

[So, Queenie wants to know if we're "doing the exclusive thing", and I do not currently have something to tell her.]

[That... is a good question,] says Ripper. [A very good question. Do you want to come talk about it?]

He opens the door and greets her with a hug.

Hug!

She comes in.

"'Keep up with' meaning...?"

"I manage my own feelings, a lot," Bella explains. "I think non-exclusivity would generate feelings that would require management. They might not be bad but they seem likely to be intrusive."

"...well," says Ripper, "I don't want to date anyone else, but if sleeping with Queenie is an option, it's an option I want to take. Queenie and Ghosty and so on," he amends.

"It's not a dealbreaker," says Pat.

"That's encouraging," he snorts.

"Hm?"

"Nothing. Sorry. I'm having trouble imagining what kind of intrusive not-bad feelings you think might come up."

"I think that when I do my processing for the day, it will keep coming up, and I'll process it, and it'll be fine, and then it'll be back again the next day. Just sort of - an extra mental errand to run. The majority of Bells wind up dating people who need to be polyamorous, and work it out okay, but I don't think it would have been any of our first choice."

"Well - tell me if it gets annoying, all right?"

"Okay."

He smiles.

"Thanks," she adds, smiling a little.

"I don't think I'm liable to do either thing."

"Suits me."

"Oh, but," she adds, snapping her fingers, "did Queenie tell you where coins come from or do I need to explain that to explain this thing?"

"Queenie did tell me where coins come from."

"So, sometimes coinmaking is a cooperative activity, I have this thing called an agony beam," says Bella, waving a hand, "it's not anything but a way to get coins for me, but the Jokers, they enjoy it as Jokers are wont to do."

"Jokers do do that," he says, grinning reminiscently.

"It is a thing with them, yes."

"Stella designed it and it's part of the standard powerset now; it delivers the eponymous agony in integers of units called 'triangles', pretty much any flavor you can think of. I don't think just on general principles I should be handing out general-purpose ones that you could use on anybody, but one for use with Jokers I don't see why not."

"...What, but yours works on anyone?"

"I have lots of abilities I wouldn't hand out without knowing someone - or at least their template - really well. I carry around ten-pointed coins."

"Nnno, that's not quite where I was going with that," says Ripper.

"Oh. Yeah, mine works on anyone."

"Well, that's good to know," says Ripper.

"Is it?"

"Yeah."

"Noted."

Ripper grins.

Kisses?

Definitely.

Good, because kisses are nice.

They are in separate chairs. Bella would rather be in his lap right now.

She can easily remedy that if she likes!

And lo, it was done!

A lapful of Bella! Just what he wanted.

A snuggly lapful of Bella. Kissing him.

She is! She is pretty much always nibbleable, at least when she is already in his lap. He will learn this.

Mmmmmmnibbles.

Yes. Mmmm. Nibbles are very mmmm.

Ripper is also pretty mmmmm, and if she unmelts long enough to do any things she will take advantage of this fact.

As soon as she shows some indication of wanting to mmmm on him, he takes off his shirt.

Nibble, nibble, nibble.

Mmmmm.

Yes indeed.

It's nice how they are both such tasty people, isn't it?

She might just do that. It will be good to have a complete map.

That is only to be expected. Ripper appreciates her thoroughness very much.

And then snuggles?

Oh, does he have competing plans he'd like to share?

That sounds promising!

It does, doesn't it?

Don't tell anyone, but he might be going over certain areas more times than is strictly necessary.

That is good to know.

One would certainly hope so.

Mmmmm, snuggles.

Mmmm.

"I could get used to this kinda thing," giggles Bella.

"Mm," Ripper says agreeably, nuzzling her ear.

She giggles.

Nuzzle-snuggle-hum.

Cuddle-squeeze-purr.

She makes a vague hand-waving gesture. "This entire class of thing."

"Hm?"

He shrugs.

Snuggle.

Snuggle. Kiss!

Ooh, kiss.

Yes. Kiss.

It is a bit later when Bella tells Queenie, [We are not going to be dating anywhere else but we're not doing sexual exclusivity.]

[Works for me,] Queenie says cheerfully.

[Thanks again,] Bella adds.

[Noooo problem.]

So that's that, it would seem. Back to work!

[If it just works on you guys, that's fine; on general principle I don't think it should do for arbitrary targets.]

[...mmmmnot quite what I was thinking,] says Queenie. [Arbitrary consenting targets work for you?]

[Yeah, that works.]

[Great,] she says cheerfully. [So we're gonna borrow your boyfriend for a while now.]

[Have fun.]

[You betcha!]

Bella presumes that fun will indeed be had. She goes back to sorting her list of dead people, and makes a catacomb-like structure that will hold them all on the far side of Titan from her palace.

Her boyfriend is borrowed, and returned in good working order several days later.

[Sure!]

Pop. Knock, knock.

Hug, kiss! Shirt-wearing is not such an advantage in the general case, but for ice skating it could be important. She conjures a pair of skates that will fit him behind her back and then dangles them by their laces where he can take them.

Kisses! She's not in much of a hurry.

Good. Because kisses.

He giggles.

She conjures herself a pair of skates, kisses him again, and sits in midair to put them on in place of her boots.

"Showoff," he accuses. He has to sit on a bench.

"Unabashedly so," she laughs. She gets her skates both on, and floats, waiting.

Ripper puts on his conjured skates and wobbles out onto the ice.

Of course! Especially because it turns out if he pulls her down with him she laughs and kisses him.

Eventually she hauls him up again, and they skate on.

Whee!

Whee! Bella starts trying to skate backwards. It's pretty hard.

Ripper decides to complicate matters by chasing after her and giving her a kiss.

That complicates matters sufficiently that down they go! It's okay; Bella's invulnerable. Kiss kiss.

Ripper is not invulnerable, but eh, what're a few more bruises? Kiss!

[No thanks,] he says, very cheerfully.

She giggles, insofar as she can without breaking the kiss. [As you like.]

Mmkiss.

Mmm. She's on the bottom of this particular pile-up, so it's a little harder to extricate herself and carry on skating. She will stay put till Ripper is done.

...He is kind of having fun with this 'making out on ice' thing, with Bella as a nice warm comfy insulator!

And the ice doesn't bother her! What a suitable symbiotic relationship.

Eeeeeeee.

Okay, Bella's a good insulator but she's not perfect. It's chilly down here. Ripper attempts to climb to his feet.

She scoots out of his way and does her best to help.

That is obviously the only reason he would ever hold her hand. Not because she can warm up his chilly fingers or because it feels nice or because he likes her, certainly not.

Ooooh. Nibbles.

She isn't uncomfortable with the cold; that doesn't mean she doesn't feel it. "Eep!"

"Sorry," he giggles, and kisses the affected area.

"It's okay," she laughs.

Kisses?

Kisses!

Kisses.

As many as he likes.

Really? Because he likes many.

Then many he may have!

Awesome!

Many many many.

His chilly fingers are warming up some more.

That is more comfortable for both of them!

Yes it is!

Mmmm, comfort.

Mmmmmmm.

Skating!

And maybe a little less falling this time.

Maybe a little. The skating part is fun too, after all.

Maybe after all this skating they can find somewhere more comfortable to fall.

What an interesting challenge! Bella's all for it.

They are getting better!

No complaints.

Bella continues to be extremely nibbleable.

Ooh, cartography.

Yes. That is the answer.

She laughs, rolls over onto him, and snuggles up. For warming purposes. "One of these days we might need to try actually making it to a bed of some sort."

"You wouldn't be cold in one," she points out, idly tracing shapes on his chest with her fingertips.

"Mmmm, true. Are we done skating? You could teleport us to a bed."

"Your place or mine?"

"Depends. How nice is your bed?"

"Very. And no one will chide us for not knocking if I teleport us directly there."

He snorts and kisses her.

Ripper takes off his shirt, and then everything else for good measure, and snuggles up.

What a fine idea. Off goes everything else currently being worn in this bed.

Slightly shivery snuggles!

Ripper is all in favour of pretty much any way in which Bella would like to warm him up.

Then he will find her plans satisfactory, presumably!

"We should do this more often," he announces, some time later. "The ice skating, and the you tasting like sweets, and the sex. Definitely the sex."

"Okay." Snuzzle. "It'll be easier to schedule dates if you don't mind if I quietly take care of empire stuff by brainphone. I don't like to be unreachable for more than an hour or two at a time."

"...I would sort of rather you weren't empressing during the sex part?" he says. "But the rest of the time it's fine."

"Do you have any plans for the sex part to last more than an hour or two at a time?" she inquires archly.

"Should I not?"

Snuggles. "Oh, maybe. Some quiet day when nobody I should avoid snubbing is asking me to obliterate Israel or curse their wayward grandchild or eradicate pornography from the Internet."

"Can you not just tell people to fuck off when they do that?"

"I can when it's some random nutcase, it's a little harder when it's the king of Saudi Arabia."

"Mm, remind me not to become an empress," he says, cuddling up.

"Don't become an empress," advises Bella, chuckling.

Kissing one is highly recommended!

He would be the first to recommend it.

Kissing rock stars: also recommended.

Ripper sighs.

"There's no longer an issue with covering it up, I can wake him if there's someplace for him to go," she adds. "Anybody whose requesting person doesn't concoct such a place still gets waked, I can always put them on Saturn, but I figured I'd ask you first."

"Honestly, I didn't even like him that much," he says. "I'm not really sure if he has family."

"I suppose the department that's handling all the other dead people will look into it, then."

He shrugs.

"Why were you moping so much about him if you didn't even like him?"

"I didn't like him, but I still watched him die," he says. "And I felt sort of responsible. Not for any good reason, but it's amazing how much that doesn't help."

"Now you've got me wondering if I should go identify myself to the various people who saw me get hit by a car. I'm not confident they've all connected the dots."

"Maybe you should."

"...Especially the guy who was driving the damn thing, I should have thought of this earlier."

"He'll be okay in the long run. Everyone'll be okay in the long run. That's my job."

"Yeah. But he still died," says Ripper. "And I still saw it. It didn't look fun."

"I bet it wasn't. Wasn't fun how I did it either, and I'm fine," she says encouragingly. (Nuzzle, nuzzle.)

Snuggle hug.

Snuzzle. (Discreet brainphone with J removing Randall from the special processing list so the regular staff can get to him whenever they get to him.)

"Yeah, I'll look him up - probably worth having the conversation in person rather than brainphoning him out of nowhere, though." She kisses the corner of Ripper's jaw. "And I will be sure to knock, too."

He laughs and kisses her.

Kisses! These do not even slightly discourage her from continuing to treat the knocking thing as a running gag.

That is not even slightly the point of them.

That is good.

Door open. Kiss! Snuggle! Shirtlessness!

Oooh, those are some of Bella's very favorite things!

"C'mon, you have to see this," he says, taking both her hands and gently towing her inside after a decent amount of kissing.

"Okay! Let's see what you've been up to."

"Ooooh. I love the colors."

"And then she did something entertaining?" hazards Bella.

Bella laughs. "You are too cute." She kisses his temple.

The next few pictures, during which he gives up completely on controlling his laughter and starts flinging handfuls of rose petals at the camera, are indeed pretty fucking adorable. Ripper grins and hugs her.

Hugs!

"I like this photo set," says Bella happily.

Bella bursts out laughing. "You're making me wish I'd supervised the shoot, this is hilarious. Can I peek?"

"Go on then," laughs Ripper.

She leans her head on his shoulder, and closes her eyes, and peers into the past.

"Queenie is heaping you with petals and Aianon is making those red flowers. Looks like you were mostly talking by brainphone, though, and I don't catch that."

Bella snickers. "Here we are."

"I was expecting more creativity," giggles Bella.

"They were just fucking around," laughs Ripper. "Why, what would you have said?"

"I didn't say I could do any better," Bella laughs.

"Why not?"

"I don't have the correct brand of shamelessness, I think."

He laughs and kisses her.

Kisses! She is quite shameless within the domain of kisses.

In the past, Queenie did indeed get more creative, and that is approximately when Ripper started throwing petals at her. She dropped the camera; they implemented a few of her suggestions, to vocal approval from Aianon and Ghosty.

[The photo shoot has been temporarily abandoned, in the past,] giggles Bella. [I think I'll stop watching.]

[Yeah, we did a lot of fucking in between takes. I hope you're not surprised.]

[I am not surprised. It would be a sort of unpleasant surprise. Please don't spring it on me if non-Jokers are added to the circle of interest,] she adds.

[...Meaning what?]

[If you want to have sex with someone who isn't me - in specific - or a Joker - anybody from the template - please let me know first.]

"Is that a weird request?" She leans her head on his shoulder again.

"I don't know. A bit. But not a bad kind of weird, just - " He laughs softly. "What was it you said about extra housekeeping?"

"Sounds familiar," she laughs softly. "Extra prompt to do a value-neutral thing."

"Ooh. Consider them added to the circle of interest," he says, grinning. "Which ones?"

"Cam and Amariah. Stella's a maybe, everyone else is probably a no."

"Why is Stella a maybe?"

"I haven't discussed this with her, but she's got a something going on with Lazarus, her magic-seeing guy, and the only other ones of us who are engaged in anything other than Cam and Amariah's strictly casual activities with more than one person are with Sherlock-and-Tony sets. ...Did that make sense? I mean that there seems like there's, Cam and Amariah who have primaries but don't stay put to speak of, and then on the other end of the spectrum is, like, Golden, but most of us are sticking with one person or a Sherlock and the accompanying Tony, and Stella displays nonstandard behavior in that sense."

"...It makes sense now that you've explained it," he says.

"It's kind of fun mapping out all the ways Bells handle any given thing, especially when you throw in the confounder that once we meet each other we tend to copy each other's strategies for anything and everything. When Aurora hit the peal she went around the entire Bellparty asking everybody except me and Golden how they dealt with polyamory."

"No, she concluded that everyone but her had special circumstances at work, accidentally uncovered some kinda unsettling things about Stella's relationship with Alice, and wound up finding her own special circumstance."

"...Are these the sort of unsettling things that make good gossip, or no?"

"It might actually make more sense to hear the story from one of the Jokers. I know Stella's side of it but most of the unsettlement was Alice's. The basic idea was that Stella surprise-turned Alice into an Aurum type vampire, on the grounds that this hurts beyond the ken of mere mortals - awesome Christmas present for a Joker, yeah? - and this comes with some adjustments besides hurting intensely during the transition, and she and Alice didn't communicate well enough about the significance to each of them about the 'eternal mate bond' feature. And the way Stella explained all this to Aurora made Alice kind of skeeved out and he went and torched away being a vampire."

"...What is an 'eternal mate bond'," Ripper wants to know.

"Exactly what it sounds like. Aurum vampires mate for life and they take it really, really seriously. It does not go away. It is matey and bondy in nature. Usually monogamy is part of the package, but that didn't happen to Alice. Aurum werewolves do something a little similar but unidirectional and it's only male ones."

"Ouch," says Ripper. "I can't begin to imagine."

"There are some pretty bad corner cases, but the typical case is a couple of vampires being adorably devoted to each other," says Bella.

"Forever," he says. "Immutably forever. Maybe I'm just thinking too hard about the corner cases."

"It does go away if you stop being a vampire, which can be done via torching or just going through Downside."

"Well, that's... nice. Still. Remind me not to be a vampire."

"Don't be a vampire," says Bella. "Also, maybe don't go to Aurum, because vampires can wind up mated to people who are not themselves vampires, that being the source of most of the awful corner cases. Golden has a precog who checks out visitors, but she's not perfect - I mean, she's really good, but people's decisions can throw her off, so if you meet anyone she didn't see you meeting there's a chance."

"Right. Never going to Aurum," he concludes.

"Vampires who aren't mated already don't show up to Bell parties," Bella adds. "Except Addy showed up to one, but she isn't allowed anymore, and they're pretty sure she can't mate anyway, and I don't think Golden would hesitate to kill her on the spot and retrieve her out of Downside and not bother to turn her back into a vampire, if she did anyway."

"...Who in fuck is Addy, then?"

"Her title is Imperial Factotum. Her witch power - those are random magic powers people are sometimes born with or get when they turn, in Aurum - is to copy other witch powers, so she's handy, but she's also kind of amoral and creepy."

"Yeah, tell me about it," snorts Ripper.

"Yeah, Golden would have killed her after she usurped the previous vampire government if her husband couldn't read minds and make sure Addy wasn't doing any more amoral-and-creepy-things."

"What kinds of amoral and creepy things did she do...?"

"On top of the part where all vampires besides about a dozen of them ate humans on a regular basis before Golden took over and she was one of those? Addy really likes copying powers. They taste like things to her," explains Bella. "Before the previous vampire government found out that she existed, she sort of wandered the earth, finding witches, checking out their powers, tutoring them in making them more interesting, playing with them, and then moving on. The Volturi - that's the previous government in question - then threatened her into working for them, and her primary job was to copy and use the powers of witches who they couldn't threaten into working for them. They kept those witches in small pieces in the basement, since keeping vampires in small pieces doesn't kill them. And in her spare time Addy badgered Golden's daughter Elspeth into working on making her own power more interesting, more than she wanted to work on it, and when Elspeth tried to stand up to her Addy sent her off to get tortured by the witch whose witchcraft did that."

"Euhhhhhhh," says Ripper.

"Yeah. The fact that she's so interested in getting to taste powers makes her pretty easy to control, though. Golden doesn't really need her any more, since she has coins and enchanting and so on, which creates some tension, but - we're not big on revenge, us Bells, so as long as Addy behaves going forward and doesn't inconveniently mate to anyone who'd rather not be mated to she's probably just going to carry on as she has been."

"Yeah," says Ripper. "...Now I'm just imagining Rayne as a vampire, I should stop imagining that."

Bella sporfles. "When Jane's back I'll tell her not to send him to Aurum, shall I?"

"Yeah, good plan."

"Elspeth's witchcraft is really cool. She's basically so good at telling the truth that it's a superpower."

"...That doesn't sound like a useful superpower."

"You wouldn't think so, but it's great. She can do it without talking if she wants, across a long range, really fast, with nested explanations of context for everything she's saying. She can do simultaneous translations into any language she knows. Sometimes she just randomly says things that are true that she has no way to know. There is a distinct, definite difference between when she says true things and false things, so you can tell if she decides to lie, which she only ever does as a demonstration of this difference anyway."

"Weird," says Ripper.

"It's also weaponizeable! And it was usable in that form as a sort of faux resurrection even before Aurum had access to Downside. If she gave a human too many high-fidelity vampire memories, it was not a good day for the human's continuity of experience, and it became possible to convince the human that they were one of the vampires whose memories they had. Elspeth didn't wipe anybody herself - Addy did that. She also had all these memories in the first place because of Addy. There was another witch who copied the entire life histories of anyone he touched, and Addy touched him and then broadcasted everything she had with Elspeth's power later to a bunch of people, including some human bystanders."

"...That's a nasty kind of resurrection," says Ripper.

"Yes. It was kind of a mess to sort out once there was access to Downside to be had, but it got sorted out."

"What happened to the... extras?"

"Magic," says Bella. "Downside had the - this'll be easier to explain with an example - one of the people Addy blasted 'recognized herself' as a dead vampire without help. The human was called Paola and the vampire was called Didyme. Didyme's mate was still alive and the resurrection was high-fidelity enough to satisfy his mate bond, so they were all happy together and Didyme made nice with Paola's family insofar as she could and so on. Then, Downside was available, and as far as Downside was concerned, Didyme was dead, and Paola was the person who was going around calling herself Didyme. So the admin heard the entire story, imported the blast memories in the walking-around individual from since the blast into the dead version and took them out of the live version, and had a live vampire-bodied Paola and a dead human-bodied Didyme. Didyme went home, got turned over again, I don't think I ever heard if Paola in particular decided to go through Downside and be human again or stay a vampire but she got the option and a heap of reparation money."

"Magic," he concludes, shaking his head and smiling.

"Yep. Isn't it great?"

"Better than the alternative, I guess. Anyway, want to see the rest of the pictures?"

"Yes."

After the one where Aianon is pretending to nibble on Ripper, there is a long stretch of obvious silliness - first Aianon tickles him, and then they play-fight. Well, mostly play. Some blood is spilled. But everyone is laughing about it, so it can't be that bad.

Bella giggles.

Bella traces her finger along a former site of a mark. "I guess they patched you up before they left."

"I'm not even sure," he says. "It was all very collaborative."

"Is that all the photos?"

"I know that these weren't Photoshopped, and my instinct is still to declare them all obviously Photoshopped," comments Bella.

He giggles.

"Aianon's very photogenic, but not as much as you." Nuzzle.

"And I don't even have wings or a tail," he laughs, and kisses her.

[Would I look better with wings and a tail, you think?]

[Oh, I don't know,] giggles Bella, [it would probably depend, and they might just get in the way.] (She illustrates where they might get in the way. It is a hands-on demonstration.)

It would sure seem to be that time! He did say that last set was, well, the last set.

It was. Now there are no more pictures of sexy dead naked Ripper to show her, and if she wants more sexy naked Ripper she will just have to content herself with the live version.

A more than satisfactory substitute.

He'd certainly hope so!

Bella herself is not substituting for any sexy photo shoots (there have been some, for press purposes, but all clothed and businesslike), but here she is regardless.

And Ripper is very fond of her, no matter what her photoshoots are like.

Oh good. She likes that he is fond of her; this is fitting and nice.

Allow him to demonstrate his fondness!

She will so allow.

In which case, he will so demonstrate.