"It means he wasn't setting out to hurt me. That he was just careless. It's different. It means I can't just scream at him, stab him somewhere squishy, and dump him and have done with it. It doesn't hurt less, it just means the hurt is - undirected."

"...Is stabbing a usual method of expressing displeasure in your, er, culture?"

"Hm? Yes, actually, I mean I wouldn't do it under normal circumstances but I'm pretty sure if I wanted to dump him he'd rather I get a good hit in first than not. Or maybe he wouldn't. It's been sixty-six years, what do I know."

"...The reason I'm in school for therapy is because I have the ability to perceive and interact with the mind. Is there anything you want done - I have taken no actual classes on therapy per se but I know the subtle arts okay."

"...can you perceive and interact with my mind? Through the opacity?"

"I can tell you're there, which means I should be able to do some things, although you could hedge me out in ways I'm not familiar with that don't affect my ability to detect that you're a mind at all. I can't tell that some of the others are minds, but yours must be lighter-duty or operate on a different wavelength."

"...I don't know if I want you to do anything, but I'll bear it in mind."

"Okay, so - putting on my completely unqualified therapist hat - it sounds like there are separate problem-bundles here - there's the girl, what's her name? - and there's what Kas did - and there's the fact that you've been gone a long time and there will be fallout in your relationship. And you can have feelings about any one that don't translate in obvious ways to the others."

"- I don't know. He called her 'button'. He probably did not literally name her Button. Fuck if I know, maybe he just let her go without a name altogether, didn't the Joker persistently call his kids 'munchkin' and 'pumpkin' and let Nathan pick their names, maybe single parent Jokers will literally refer to their children by nicknames forever if no one gets in the way." She starts fishing around in the postcards, looking for one with the kid's name.

The first one that comes to hand just says, Helen baked a cake today!

"Helen. He named her Helen. I wouldn't have named her that. I guess it's better than Button."

Celo decides not to express any name-related opinions.

"So," says Aether slowly, "if things had gone as they should've - if, um, Materia hadn't broken Jane - then there's a meaningful sense in which you'd still have the chance to have this particular child one day, but a lot of things about her situation would be different. And all of those things are reminding you about how things didn't go as they should've."

"Yeah. Are you reading my mind a little bit or are you just a Bell?"

"Just a Bell. I won't read you past being aware you're a mind unless you ask me to."

"I dunno if anybody mentioned it but I've got a reading thing too and it's vagued all the way out," says Celo. "I read sexualities. Yours at this detail level is 'probably straightish'. For, you know, complete information and stuff."

"...Thanks for telling me," blinks Amariah.

"I should make a note about that in the Bellbook or something, maybe."

"Thilanushinyel unicorns do something a little similar - they don't have control over the detail level, though, it's all vague enough we don't mind - and nobody's bothered noting about them," shrugs Amariah.

"I can get even vaguer than I used to, since I got my aura," says Celo, "and that was pretty vague already. But anyways, enough about me."

Amariah hugs her knees tighter. Path hoots softly.

Aether shifts her weight uncertainly, then also takes a chair.

[Sue's free to attempt porting lessons,] Jane reports to Celo and Harley (and also Elspeth and Aether and Amariah, since they are in the relevant rooms).

"So - you don't actually have any advantage over generic Bells unless I want you to poke my brain, huh?" Amariah asks Aether after a silence.