Wings are conspicuous! They draw attention. Ike's attention is drawn.

"Hi!" says Ike. He is not really sure how to go on from there.

Lucas reads his nametag. "Isaac. Now that's a name I know how to pronounce." (He pronounces it with an accent, but he pronounces it.) "Apparently not everybody picks their baby names out of the Librera, off Samaria, who knew?"

He giggles. "Other worlds are like that! I have an alt named Icarin. But he is not here because his parents don't want him traveling to strange universes by himself."

"This place definitely qualifies. I did not quite believe Grandma and Grandpa's stories about the Archangel-Elect and all her faraway friends till I actually got here."

"I'm told they're not usually so, um..." He gestures helplessly at the living architecture. "...Giant plant floating in space... ish?"

"Is that what - I was not even told that part," laughs Lucas. "In space? A plant in space."

"Yes! Have you been outside? It's very - space. Out there. Where I have been."

"No, I've been staying indoors, someone told me there's big - scaly things, flying around in the airspace out there. I do not know what they are or how to politely find out."

"They are dragons!" says Ike. "They're local. And friendly. I haven't met any, but my sister has and she got along fine. My sister can fly," he adds as a partial explanation.

"So can I," laughs Lucas. "Your sister would... probably not be an angel, so why can she fly?"

"She can fly because she's an ithue!" he says. "Ithuetse can sort of shapeshift. Val makes herself wings. It's very pretty."

"Huh, that sounds convenient if she can just make them when she wants them. I can't ride horses, the wings spook them. Or swim."

Ike peers at Lucas's wings. "Ye-es," he says, "it does sort of look like swimming would be difficult, especially if those aren't waterproof. Actually, of the two of us, Val is the only one who can swim. We both sink like rocks, but she can grow fins."

"They're okay in rain," says Lucas. "I can fly in a storm just fine - more comfortable to go above the clouds, but I don't have to. In the water, though, there's just no way to fold them up so they don't wind up with more water on top of them than under them and then they'd drag me down. I haven't tried it, this is my engineer grandpa explaining it to me."

"Hmm," says Ike. "Weirdly, it makes less sense after the explanation. But I think I still have sort of a mechanical intuition for it... I mean, wings aren't designed for swimming, not that kind anyway, you are not made of penguins."

"Made of what?"

"Penguins! They're a kind of bird that lives in very cold places and swims instead of flying, so they use their wings as flippers."

"I'm not sure if we have those."

"You might not," says Ike. "Wow, that's weird. I mean, worlds without approximately three thousand species of demon I can understand, but I don't know what to do with a world without penguins."

"Maybe we do and I just haven't heard of them? I think we're missing a bunch of common animals, for - some reason."

"Interesting! I wonder why. Do you have a bunch of common animals that the rest of us don't, or are you just generally undersupplied?"

"So far I haven't mentioned anything except angels and gotten a 'we don't have those'. Uh, horses? Cows? Cats? Rabbits? Chickens? Hawks? Mice? Doves? ...Salmon?"

"Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes," says Ike. "That's really interesting. What do the rest of us have that you don't?"

"Penguins, apparently. Demons. Dragons, I guess, if those are an animal? We also don't have that vaguely goatlike thing I saw wandering around with a single antler or whatever it was coming out of its forehead."

"That would be a unicorn," says Ike. "I don't think we have unicorns in my world either. I also don't think we have dragons, but I wouldn't be astonished if I found out that we actually did have one or both of those."

"Also I definitely don't know about any animals that live in my world but not on my planet," Lucas adds.

"And your planet... is not Earth, right? So actually if you have an Earth in your world and you don't live on it, it would make a lot of sense if your planet had some subset of Earth species, because whenever humans made the trip in the first place they probably brought a bunch with them but it would be really difficult to bring every single species on Earth to some new planet. There are a lot."

"Yeah, the planet is just called Samaria. So is the main continent. It's not as confusing as it sounds."

"It sounds moderately confusing," says Ike.

"It's usually pretty easy to tell from context. If you're sailing to Samaria, you mean the continent. If you're taking a spaceship, you mean the planet. If 'Jane' is helping then you mean the world."

"Contextual distinctions!" says Ike, giggling.

"Yeah. Maybe eventually the world will get renamed, I don't know, the Archangel-Elect is in charge of that."

"Which is sort of weird," muses Ike. "I mean, not that I know any other good ways to do it, but it feels like naming entire universes should be a slightly more democratic process. Or at least more collaborative."

"What does 'democratic' mean?"

"Um, a way of making decisions where everyone has an equal say in the outcome," he says. "Roughly speaking. I could explain more but then there would be politics and that is not my area of expertise."

Lucas thinks about this. "But how does it work?"

"By approximation, most of the time. People decide on a bunch of options for something and then everyone says which one they like best and the option with the most support wins. It gets more complicated with more people involved."

"Yeah, it sounds it. Why would that be a good way to name worlds?"

"It wouldn't necessarily, I'm just not sure the way they're currently getting named is better."

"Yours has a kind of funny name," says Lucas.

"Yes. Sunshine. Because our vampires catch fire in it," says Ike. "I feel like we probably have better distinguishing characteristics than that."

"What would you name it?"

"I'm not sure," he says. "And there's the whole rest of the family to consider, too - they named Apollo and Helios after the theme. I think our most obvious distinguishing characteristic is probably all the different species of demons, and I'm not sure how to turn that into a name exactly, but if I could I would probably like it better than 'Sunshine'. Actually, come to think of it, I wonder if there is a name for our worldsheaf already in some local language? Thousands of species of demon makes for a lot of languages. I will ask Juliet to find out."

"Juliet's... one of the Archangel-Elect's alts? I'm sure I've seen a list at some point but I don't have it memorized."

"Yes! She is the one from my world. There are a bunch more but I also don't have the list memorized. One of them is a boy," he adds, blushing slightly.

"A boy one? I don't remember hearing about that, wow."

"His name is Cam and he is very pretty."

"...Hmm," says Ike, in response to that huh.

"...Uh, I didn't know alts worked like that."

"Alts do work like that! Cam is extremely friendly," says Ike. "I could introduce you to him if you want."

"I haven't even really met the Archangel-Elect. I'm here because she's friends with my maternal grandparents. One of her from another world seems like a step beyond that."

"You keep, uh, blushing."

"Yes," says Ike, blushing harder. "Yes I do."

"...If you don't want to say why, that's fine."

"It is not particularly a secret or anything, but if I say it I might not stop blushing for a week, so I think I will not."

"Um, okay."

A red-haired girl with a strong family resemblance to Ike happens to be passing by. She says helpfully, "They had sex," and then keeps walking.

Ike blushes harder. "Thank you, Val," he mutters.

Ike continues to blush.

"...And that's not a secret," Lucas clarifies.

"It is not a secret!"

"...At home," says Lucas, subdued, "it would be a secret."

"Things of that general nature have to be a secret in some parts of my world too," he says. "But where I live it's mostly okay."

"...When I was a kid, Isabella suddenly made it legal for two men or two women to get married, if they wanted, in her province, and about a third of the people I knew thought she was being bribed by Jansai to make it easy for them to find - people who would, um, take the bait."

"...The bait being... marriage, and the Jansai's interest being...?"

"It didn't actually happen very much, crime in Bethel has been way down, but people thought they wanted to know who to avoid doing business with or who to send their violent teenagers after or something."

"Happily, I have my sister to deal with violent teenagers for me. Even more happily, she almost never has to."

"That sounds useful."

"Val is very handy."

"I have three sisters and two brothers. They're all mortals, though, and none of them would be of particular use against violent Jansai teenagers."

"I only have the one, but she is good at dealing with violent people. Mainly by hitting them until they go away."

"Yeah, I suppose that would be the way to do it. I've never actually been in a fight, partly because everyone knows better than to pick one with an angel, which is just as well because I'm not as confident as conventional wisdom that I'd be able to make any use of angel strength."

"I think I know what you mean," says Ike. "Val is not any more physically equipped to hit people than I am, at least when she's not using iethat, but mentally it's no contest."

Lucas nods. "I mean, I suppose I know the thunderbolt prayer too, but nobody uses that, which is probably why no one has noticed that allegedly all of those requests have to go through Isabella now."

"...What, um, is the thunderbolt prayer?"

"It's a song. If you sing it - at home, anyway, on the right planet - then you get a thunderbolt, aimed where you called it to. I don't think anyone's called one since the accident at Cedar Hills, and the last time one was called on purpose it was almost two hundred years ago when the Archangel Gabriel destroyed Windy Point."

"...Someone called one by accident?"

"Yeah, when you're learning the song you're supposed to stop in the middle, sing something else, then pick up with the rest. Somebody forgot."

"Oh dear," says Ike.

"That was before Isabella inserted herself between the singing and the actual thunderbolts, of course."

"Do people know she did that? I guess you said they didn't. I wonder what happens when someone tries one and it doesn't work."

"I'm not sure. Nobody knows she did that except people who know the rest of it about Jovah being a spaceship she's the captain of and so on."

"Sounds very science fictiony," says Ike.

"...Whatever that is, I'm not sure we have it?"

"You probably don't, and I am really not sure how to explain," he says.

"I have this sense that Samaria is missing out on a lot of stuff."

"If you want," says Ike, "I could give you some science fiction books, and then you will know what they are."

"...In Samarian? I'm not magicked into the common language here, I think there's some kind of effect on the party itself."

"I am absolutely sure that is a solvable problem," says Ike. "Someone could put a similar effect on the books, for example."

"I suppose. I don't think I understand to what extent magic is - available. I don't have any, the Archangel-Elect has lots, other people seem almost random in how much of it they have and whether any of it might be used in ways I'd ever notice."

"Well... I wouldn't just generally expect to be able to get books with translation magic on them, but given that we are at a Bellparty, I am very sure that there is someone here who is both willing and able to do that and the only potentially tricky part is finding them and asking nicely."

"Okay. Even if the language thing is handled, will I be able to make any sense of the stories?"

"Potentially. Some more than others. But good science fiction explains itself pretty well."

Before Lucas can reply, Glass wanders by, pauses, points at Lucas, says "Green," and moves on.

"Glass can see things about alts and stuff. She discovered earlier that apparently everybody here is in one of two groups, and the Joker came by and named them 'purple' and 'green'. I'm purple. We don't really know anything about them except for who's in which ones, and that people who are alts of each other are always in the same group."

"...Okay. That's very strange."

"It is!"

"So she's just going around, pointing at people, naming colors."

"We have just seen inarguable evidence of that, yes."

"Okay then. This is a really strange party. The previous contender for weirdest party I've ever attended was the one where everyone was drunk and singing bawdy lyrics to the tunes of masses."

Ike giggles. "It doesn't really compare, does it."

"It doesn't! Even though the songs were highly entertaining. This is - nobody at home who isn't here would get it."

"That," says Ike, "is definitely a feature of Bellparties."

"Have you been to a lot of them? Since you know - at least two - Bells personally?"

"This is actually my first one! I have heard about others, but I did not go. And I met Cam here," he adds.

"Oh. And you have alts and everything."

"I do! I have two alts. But I only really know things about one of them."

"Why's that?"

"The other one is not in contact with any Bells or anyone Bells know, so all we know about him is that he is in Gift and lives in Toronto and has a Val. And was dead. But then they brought all of Toronto back to life, which included him because that is where he is from."

"...The fact that people can have been dead in the past tense, I'm still not used to."

"It is unexpected!" he agrees.

"My mother was - I'd almost call her apologetic - every time she told me a new tidbit about the multiverse. She finds it all overwhelming. She's not even here."

"My mother and my father live in different subworlds of the Sunshine worldsheaf, so their tolerance for extradimensional shenanigans is fairly high," he says. "They might even come to a party someday."

"...Worldsheaf."

"This is complicated."

"It is! It is very that," says Ike.

"How did you get used to it?"

"...Science fiction, mainly," he says.

"How did that help?"

"Well... what science fiction is is more or less stories about other worlds. Just ones the writer happens to have made up. Things like 'what would it be like if people lived on the moon', or 'what would it be like if people lived on flying trees in a huge cloud of air with no gravity', or even 'what would it be like if there were a whole bunch of different universes where things turned out differently than they have in this one'. The science part means mainly trying to answer those questions using things we actually know about how the world works instead of things we make up about how it might."

"Those sound really interesting, actually. Without being as intimidating as the actual flying tree."

"Yes! I really like them," says Ike. "And having read plenty of that stuff made me a lot more prepared for the, um, actual flying tree." He gestures vaguely at the actual flying tree in which they find themselves. "So to speak."

"So you didn't feel all dizzy when you got dropped into it, huh."

"I did not."

"My grandmother had to catch me, it was embarrassing. I don't get vertigo when I'm just flying."

"Awwww," says Ike.

Lucas blushes and looks away.

"Aww, no, it's okay, I have had embarrassing vertigo too!" says Ike. "When I was a small child I could not ride any kind of moving vehicle without it!"

"...Did you often have cause to - are those things common in other worlds? I hate them, they're not as bad as a skittish horse but they're miserable to travel in."

"Various kinds of moving vehicle are extremely common in my world, and they are mostly not miserable as long as you're not a small child with spatial orientation issues," he says.

"Well, they're probably designed to fit you. There's fewer than two hundred angels and we can fly, so no one bothers making sure the vehicles have room for a big set of wings." He checks his surroundings, then unfurls one wing to its full six-feet-and-change span. "What kind of spatial orientation issues?"

"What's a train?" Lucas asks. He looks at his wing, like he expects to find a bit of spinach between a pair of feathers, then looks at Ike looking at the wing, then holds it in place for a long moment before letting it re-fold.

"A train is a kind of vehicle that runs on rails and usually goes much faster than the kinds that use roads."

"Huh, I don't think we have those at all."

"Then if I had grown up in Samaria I would probably have had a much less nauseous childhood!"

"Probably! Vehicles are mostly for cargo, anyway. People get around on horses for everyday still. Unless they can fly, or know people who will pick them up and can fly."

"I know very few people who can pick me up," says Ike. "Well, more now that I know a bunch of people who are magic. But I mean, unassisted humans generally can't."

"I could pick you up," says Lucas, almost casually.

"I am heavier than I look," says Ike. "My bones are mostly iron."

Lucas looks him over. Almost casually. "I could pick you up," he repeats.

"I am not sure I believe you!" says Ike. "I demand empirical testing."

"Eee!" squeaks Ike. "I am surprised and delighted!"

"You are heavier than a regular mortal your size would be, but not four times heavier or anything," grins Lucas. "I'll admit I probably couldn't carry you and your sister at the same time even with a basket or something."

Ike giggles. And, since he is scooped and all, hugs Lucas.

Lucas laughs; he's already using his arms, but he's got wings! Swoosh. Now they are around Isaac.

Isaac is surrounded by fluffiness! "I feel very snuggled," he says.

"Let me know if you get too warm. Angels are. Warm, I mean."

"I have noticed that. It's nice," he says.

Lucas grins. "It's so we can fly at high altitudes and not freeze."

"That's convenient!" he says. "Convenient and also cuddly."

"Yep. Although not all the mortals know about it, so if we stay in inns or things like that the fire's usually piled way too high in our rooms and so on. The angel holds are too cold for mortals and they all go around in long sleeves and extra layers."

He giggles.

"Well, Cedar Hills isn't that cold, since it's at ground level," amends Lucas. "But I live in Monteverde."

"I do not know what either of those places is like!" he says.

"Monteverde, and the Eyrie, where the Archangel-Elect leads the host, are carved into mountains, lots of chambers and it's a long walk if you want to take the stairs. Windy Point used to be the least accessible of the lot, but then the Archangel Gabriel destroyed it and built Cedar Hills instead."

"...For... reasons?"

"Oh, it was a den of wickedness, all of its angels were dead, half on Mount Galo and half because the previous Archangel Raphael had poisoned everybody who wouldn't go with him to Mount Galo." Pause. "Mount Galo is the first thing the spaceship everyone thinks is a god smites if we don't sing the Gloria every year, and that year the Windy Point faction wanted to skip it to prove divine impotence so Raphael could keep power instead of handing it off to Gabriel."

"I take it that did not go as planned."

"Nope. Spaceship exists, spaceship really does smite Mount Galo if we don't sing, a bunch of angels from Windy Point and some of their mortal friends were up there and they all died, it took a long time for the angel population to recover."

"That is sad," says Ike, snuggling up.

"Well, yes," says Lucas, adjusting his wings around Ike, "but if Raphael had stayed in power we'd still have slavery and so on, so."

"Ye-es. It's sad that he poisoned a bunch of people and then got a bunch more killed trying to play chicken with a spaceship," says Ike. "It would have been much better if he had just not done any of that."

"Yes. That would have been an improvement."

"Yes," says Ike. Snuggle snuggle.

"All happened hundreds of years ago, anyway." (Snuggle.)

"True. Plenty of sad things have happened in my world too." Snuggle! "They should quit that."

"Seems to be the - Bell manifesto, doesn't it?"

"Yes. That is a good thing about Bells."

"That and these interesting parties they throw."

"Those too!" (Snuggle.)

"Oh, she came to our house because she was looking for part-demons using magic."

"Why?"

"Bell reasons," he summarizes. "I guess she wanted us to introduce her to our Sessiaki relatives and show her around Siathe and stuff. Which we did, and it was okay."

"I have... no frame of reference at all, for being half demon and being able to show a Bell around a place she hasn't been."

Ike giggles.

"I mean, angels are relatively exotic, there aren't that many of us, but the Archangel-Elect lived at Monteverde for a year once working with Linus - he's the current Archangel."

"Juliet was the Slayer for a while - that is a legendary sort of thing to be, among demons anyway. Now she's just meddlesome. But in a good way!"

"What's a Slayer?"

"A... magic... legendary... person. There is one of them at a time and she has superpowers and beats up evil things."

"Are there any Bells whose own worlds don't frame them as special according to local - ideas of specialness? I heard somebody saying that the one who's hosting this party is a saint."

"I suspect that in cases where they are not already special in some way, they arrange to be," says Ike.

"Yeah, there's that," snorts Lucas. "I'm not actually sure if Isabella was already going to be the next Archangel or if she arranged it."

"Well, what's the difference?"

"The spaceship does what she says now, but it used to pick Archangels by itself," explains Lucas. "I don't know if it had picked her out before, or if she had to tell it to pick her."

"Oh. Yes, there's that," he says. "You could always ask, I guess."

"It would be a kind of presumptuous question! And I still don't really know her."

"I could ask Juliet," he says.

"Would she know? I'm not clear on how much they talk to each other about that kind of thing. Also there was something to do with time going on that I don't understand."

"If she doesn't know, I'm sure she can find out!"

"Okay then."

[She was a likely candidate but her probability hadn't gone up enough to be announced until she interfered. Why?]

"Huh. Kind of between the guesses."

"Yep!" says Ike.

"I have no idea how the spaceship used to pick them, though. I mean, it picked Raphael."

"So clearly whatever way it picked them had problems."

"Yeah. Most people are pretty happy with Isabella succeeding Linus, though."

"Good!"

"Yeah, it'd be messy if there were a lot of disagreement about it. She's made some unpopular choices but Bethel's been doing really well with her leading the Eyrie host, so people are optimistic."

"Unpopular choices?"

"Well, after people realized she didn't make the marriage amendment because the Jansai were paying her, there was some opposition to that."

"Oh," says Ike, unhappily.

"Yeah. And I'm not very good about following the details of economics, but I don't think all of that was popular either, and she's married to an Edori so people who don't like Edori aren't thrilled with her."

"What's an Edori?"

"They're this - culture. Most of them live on Ysral, the smaller continent, now, but there are still some on Samaria. They wander around, even more than Jansai do. They pronounce Jovah 'Yovah', I think they have their own language, they don't believe in marriage except apparently the angelico-to-be was fine with it."

"Oh. And there are people who don't like them?"

"Back when we had slavery they were the ones who were slaves. The Jansai in particular don't get along with them too well."

"...I see," says Ike.

"Also they look different. Isabella's husband doesn't because the Edori adopted him, but mostly they're kind of distinctive. Darker, by and large."

"Is, um, Angela's husband a template of some kind...?"

"...I don't know? Maybe? His name is Micaiah."

"That might be vaguely familiar. Or not."

"He's -" Lucas can't gesture, as he's holding Ike. "Tall, a little taller than me, and he's got curly brown hair about to his shoulders? And they have four kids, all angel daughters."

"I think that people Bells have kids with are mostly templated... I guess it doesn't matter that much. But I'm curious."

"I could ask my grandmother, she might know."

"That sounds like a sensible solution!"

Lucas nods, and tilts his head, and says, "She says she vaguely remembers that they were called something to do with jokes for some reason."

"Jokers? I think Jokers. I don't really know very much about Jokers, except that Cam's boyfriend is one and they are most of the reason why Bellparties come with large rooms for people to have sex in."

"There's - here? In this plant? Seriously?"

"Under the main floor," he says, beginning to blush again.

"Oh."

Ike continues to blush!

Lucas looks at the floor, and blushes too!

Blush blush blush. Snuggle? Blush.

Snuggle. "I'm probably coming off like some kind of uptight prude."

"Um, not especially," says Ike. "Not any more than I am."

"...I wasn't getting that from you at all. Blushing doesn't count."

"Not even if it's a lot of blushing?"

Lucas shakes his head.

"Well. Okay," says Ike. "But I don't know, you didn't drop me or anything, you just said 'oh'."

"It would be very bad if I reacted to being startled by dropping people!"

He giggles. "Yes. And you weren't sufficiently horrified to drop me on purpose. So."

"I wouldn't do that."

"Aww," says Ike, snuggling him.

Snuggles!

"Val would probably drop me, if I was really annoying her and I was only four feet off the ground," he says, laughing. "You are nice! I like you."

"Eh, I'd probably drop my little brother under the same circumstances, but I like you and he mostly gets on my nerves."

Ike grins and snuggles him.

Snuggle snuggle.

Snuggle snuggle.

"- Um, let me know if you want me to put you down, at some point. Because my arms aren't going to get tired for hours."

"I will do that! But probably not soon. You're very snuggly."

Lucas fluffs his wings happily.

Ike snuggles him. Because he is so snuggly.