"This is a magic thing - who's there? This is Junia, she knows about magic things," says Keziah in the direction of the door.

Bells fade in; Shell Bell's aura fades out. "Hi, Keziah. It's us. Well, most of us."

"And Junia is apparently an alt of my college roommate. That's interesting."

"I'm new, I'm Tab," says Tab. "Is your mom busy?"

"She's with some people but you can still talk to her," says Keziah, "just don't go there."

"I am extremely confused," announces Junia.

"These are versions of my mom from other universes," explains Keziah. "They're all friends."

"I am not very much less confused," says Junia.

"Well, I suppose we're hanging out until Angela can leave with us, so we can answer questions."

"There's an other-universe version of you too, in my world," Stella tells Junia, "only she's older, and not an angel because angels are mostly a here thing. Unless I'm wrong? Glass?"

"No, she looks templatey," agrees Glass, "if you recognize her you're probably not wrong."

"Who are you all? Where are you from? What does it mean for a place to be another universe? How did you get here? Why did you get here? Are you all named Isabella and does that confuse you as much as it does me?"

"You couldn't bring Elspeth, guys?" Keziah says to the peal. "They're like my mom, but from other places," says Keziah. "They're from all different worlds with a bunch of names I can't remember. You can get to other universes with magic doors like the one they made, and there used to be another way that worked better but it broke. They're here to get my mom to do some thing with all of them, I guess. Most of them are named Isabella so they have nicknames and they call my mom Angela so they don't get confused."

"Elspeth is occupied. Harley was in a bad spot."

"...I see," says Junia. "It is good to meet you, Isabella...s."

"We call ourselves Bells," supplies Shell Bell. "It's nice to meet you, too. Did anyone brainphone Angela? Are we waiting so we don't surprise her or something? Keziah, is your dad busy too?"

"As far as I know he isn't," allows Keziah. "But we've been in here for a while." She flicks the music machine off.

[Hey Micaiah,] says Aurora to everyone in the room plus Micaiah. [Will anything delicate be disrupted if we brainphone Angela right now?]

[Depends what you mean by 'delicate'. Hi! It's been a while!]

[It has! If the brainphone's not public she probably has more trouble than some of us reacting to multiple conversations at the same time, is the thing.]

[Yeah, I carry on three or four conversations as a matter of course but people know what's going on if I suddenly frown or smile or whatever.]

[She's with the Jansai. Better leave it for now.]

[All right. Please let us know when we can talk to her. After this we're going to see what happened to the welcoming committee. In the meantime, a new Bell has an alternate time-sync solution which she'd like to plug in if that's all right.]

[Yeah, go ahead. Hi, new Bell!]

Tab winks up to the spaceship and plugs in the Kersible. [Hi to you too! I'm Tab.] And she's back with the others.

[Cute name. What's your story?]

[I'm from this world that Harley accidentally Sueported to, that's how everybody found me was they were looking for him. I named it Gift. Harley did not have a nice time in it, unfortunately.]

[That's sad. What happened?]

[We've got an alt of Chelsea, and the world was already taken over with her as an instrumental part of it for hundreds of years before I was born, by the Gift Libby. He landed right smack dab in front of Chelsa.]

[Wow. Yeah. That's bad. Is - is he okay?]

[He didn't look great, but he's in Aurum again with Elspeth and he collected an adorable puffy creature from Chronicle to hold on the way.]

[A poof. My eldest has one,] supplies Glass.

[Aww,] says Micaiah. [Okay.]

[He also kept Sueporting into increasingly inhospitable locations to get away from Chelsa, such as, lastly, the sun,] adds Tab, [but I have the impression he preferred it, so. Gift had a local Joker called Corona, too, but he's in Aurum at the moment.]

[Currently his ongoing residence there hasn't been negotiated. Speaking of people in Aurum, I will talk to Nathaniel about coming back here after we've investigated the welcoming committee, but it's been almost sixteen years in Aurum and he might prefer to stay at this point.]

[How's he doing?]

[He has been living an unremarkable life on an asteroid the Joker terraformed for him with the vampire who mated to him. He hasn't turned, at least so far.]

[Aww,] says Micaiah. [That's cute. Is he happy? I bet he's happy.]

[He seems so, yes.]

[Good. I'm glad. My angel's out of her meeting now,] he adds, and conferences in Angela. [Hey guess who came to visit!]

[Oh! Hello, everyone! What's going on?]

[We're collecting all of us - except Sarion who desperately needs the alone time what with Aianon and Ansharil having got stranded - to go see what went wrong with the welcoming committee. And time-sync the worlds, which is now done for here.]

[Keziah's friend Junia is an alt of my college roommate Janine,] Stella adds.

[I'll be along in just a second. Am I the last you're picking up?]

[Yep. Oh, and new Bell here is Tab.]

[Nice to meet you.]

Angela appears.

Micaiah appears too, and hugs his angel, because when would he ever not do that?

"There are a lot of people in this room," observes Junia, from a small corner of it.

"We'll be on our way soon. Micaiah, you coming along or staying behind?" asks Shell Bell, reaching for the door again and flaring her aura.

"So, um, those are my mom's alts," says Keziah. "I have one too! At least one. Some of them could have had two children since the last time we saw them and then I would have more."

"I do not think I can concentrate on the Third Angelic Rite any longer," Junia says consideringly.

"That's okay," says Keziah, laughing softly.

Junia smiles tentatively back.

Micaiah grins.

"Um, I can answer questions," Keziah adds, "Mom and Dad have been telling me about all those people half my life. Dad and Dars might remember them better than me though since she was older when we saw them last."

Junia glances at Micaiah.

"See you guys later," he says cheerfully, and off he trots.

Keziah's wings flutter a little.

"...I do not especially know where to start," says Junia, glancing sidelong at Keziah.

"...Once upon a time there was a mysterious door," says Keziah, turning pink as she recites a bedtime story she heard before she knew it was true. "It was supposed to lead to a hallway, but it did not. Instead, it led to a place in the center of everything, everywhere, that could touch doors so far away that no one from nearby knew they existed."

"It's just how my mom used to tell the story before she told me it was true," squirms Keziah, blushing fiercely. "Um, and then the protagonists of the story who later turned out to be Mom and Dad went through the door, and they met - Amariah first, she wasn't in the group you saw. And Amariah keeps her soul in a talking owl and she has a flying tree branch instead of wings and she can do magic - not the kind we have, a kind she gets for being a witch which is a thing in her world."

"A flying tree branch?" says Junia, fascinated. "Does it fly because it is magic?"

"Yeah. There's magic in a lot of worlds, and it all works different. Mom has - like - sort of two and a half kinds - two kinds that do a lot of things and one kind that only does one thing - or, no, there's also a magic language she knows but she doesn't use it much - and there are more that aren't as easy to share around."

"What are all these kinds? Which is the one that does only one thing?"

"The kind I use is called minting, and it makes little wish coins that you can spend on wishes," says Keziah. "I don't make them, I just get them from Mom and Dad. There's also enchanting. And she can make people immortal with the kind that only does one thing."

"That sounds extremely useful," notes Junia. "How does it work?"

"The immortaling one? I haven't tried it, but, I don't know, if I was out and I got struck by lightning - then I'd just - be okay instead of dead, it would reset me."

"Wow," says Junia. "How does the making people like that work?"

"There's a person in another world who can make people able to do that, and all the people who are my mom can."

"All the people who are your mom," Junia repeats. "This is extremely strange, have I mentioned that recently?"

"Yes," giggles Keziah.

Junia grins at her.

"They're Bells. Me and my alt decided to be Griffins - she has a pet one and I would too if magic wasn't secret. That was when we were seven, I don't know, maybe we'll think of something better now. Dars and her alt couldn't think of anything and the last time there was a Bell party Ariel and Pen were too little to go and there weren't more of them anyway. There might still not be. Depends how many Bells who have alts of my dad - those're called Jokers - have the right number of kids."

"It's all so - bizarre," says Junia. "Why are there alts of different people? Are there alts of everyone's parents and their parents' parents and so on back along into forever? How did all these people meet each other despite not being exactly quite alike?"

"All the Bells have the same parents. I don't think the grandparents match as close. I don't know why there are alts at all, though. I'm not sure what you mean by the last thing?"

"Parents," says Junia. "You have a set of parents, and your parents each also have two parents, and so do theirs, and so on. And each of those pairs of people met somehow or other and decided to have children, with or without the intervention of the divine, but mostly without, on the whole. And for there to be another you, there has to be another of your mother, and another of your father, and another of each of their mothers and fathers - doesn't there? And how can all those people come together just the same even living in entirely different places and - and Isabella's an angel, but none of them were - why does this work so that people who are together in one universe tend to be together in all the rest?"

"Oh, not all of them are," says Keziah, "some of the Bells are with other people and some of the Jokers aren't with Bells either. Also templates don't just work by parents, they only mostly do - there's a Joker who was made out of magic by some people and doesn't really have parents at all."

"...there is a Joker - that is a one of your father," says Junia, putting this together. "There is a Joker who was made out of magic by some people. There are worlds where people can make other people out of magic?"

"Yes. A lot of worlds are really strange."

"I am beginning to see that," says Junia.

"The one who said she had one of you at home is not from the world with the talking animal souls or the one where people can be made out of magic, though," says Keziah. "Minting is from there and sometimes people have magic powers - supposedly I should have one of those by now, but if I do I don't know what - but nothing else that weird except for more technology and they don't live on one of this planet. Nobody lives on one of this planet but us, actually, it is not very popular."

"I wonder why that is," says Junia.

"The most popular planet is this one called Earth. There's one in this world but no one lives on it anymore. The whole ancestors-had-a-lot-of-wars thing goes really far back."

"Goodness."

"Yeah, except in other worlds they didn't have quite the same thing so there are still people on Earths in all the worlds that have Earths. And no angels, except there's a different kind of thing called angels that aren't like us much at all except sort of being shaped alike in the animal-souls world, and they aren't very nice."

"In what way are they not nice?"

"Well, most of them worked for a god who wasn't very nice. The one of my mom from there had to make them stop doing what they were doing so she could save some people."

"Ye-e-es."

"I am confused," says Junia.

"- Um, there is a god there. And there's another world with a bunch of them but they aren't that good and one of them is bad. There aren't any most places though."

Junia looks at her.

"Um."

"You seem to be leaving things out," says Junia.

"Yeah, I just didn't realize till now that I'd left this stuff out and now I'm trying to - figure out how to not leave it out."

"Take your time," she says, and waits.

"How does it not?" says Junia.

"It just - doesn't?" says Keziah. "Um, there is a thing that is Jovah that does weather and stuff, just - it's not a god thing, it's another kind of thing."

"What kind of a thing is it, then?" says Junia. She is confused, intrigued, focused, but not necessarily disbelieving.

"It's - Mom told me stories about the kind of thing when I was little so I would know what she was talking about later - it's called a spaceship? It's an - enclosed - giant - boat - thing - that goes in the sky, up where there's no air - you know how if you fly really high there's less air, if you go high enough there's none, and this is a kind of boat that can be there and move around there. And there's a machine on it, a smart machine that can hear and - make it rain and stuff."

"How do you know?"

"Well, Mom told me, and I've seen it and talked to it - but it'll talk differently soon because now all the Bells are going to try to fix Jane and she's another machine but she's smarter than the spaceship and she sort of absorbed it and when she's working she talks through it instead of the voice it had before."

"I do not understand this well enough to believe it," says Junia.

"I can't take you up there by myself because Mom isn't sure I won't teleport in front of people if she lets me be able to," says Keziah. "I don't know how else to explain it."

"Maybe I will wait for your mother, then," says Junia. "Will she be a very long time coming back?"

"I don't know. It depends. Probably not all that long?"

"Okay," says Junia.

"Or Dad can do it too."

"Is your dad good at explaining? Or can he go to the... airless sky boat?"

"He can go to the spaceship, I mean. He's also kind of good at explaining though." [Dad, I'm trying to explain Jovah to Junia and I dunno how.]

[Aha,] says Micaiah. [I'll be right there.]

"He's on his way."

"Because of magic?" she guesses.

"Yeah, we can all talk to each other from far away. Mom will put you on the network too if you want."

"There seem to be a lot of things that only your mother can do."

"Dad can do them all, but mostly Mom does them," shrugs Keziah. "And the others of mom can do all the same things."