Nathan wandered off while his mate was distracted, and is currently making a curious circuit of the party main room all by himself.

There's a couple of familiar faces over there! One of them is slightly more familiar than the other.

"Hi, Eights! Hi, Anna!" (Vampire speed and eyesight means he doesn't miss a beat checking the latter's nametag.)

"Hey, Nathan," Eights says cheerfully, hugging him.

Hug! Eights gets a friendly broken rib for her trouble. "How're you doing?"

Awww. Nathan is such a sweetheart. She hugs him tighter, then lets go. "I'm awesome. How're you? How's the boyfriend?"

"He's doing good, having fun reuniting with all his alts and meeting the new ones. You been up to anything neat?"

"I have no tears for him," snorts Nathan.

"Have people been generating tears for him for other reasons?"

"Before your time," says Eights. "He's had some pretty good reasons to be miserable. Not in the last several thousand, though."

"Well, that's a long time."

"Hey, I'm centuries old, but even with my stint Downside counting I don't approach millenia."

"You will eventually," says Eights.

"Yep. Pretty good deal."

"So have you heard about the dragons?" says Anna.

"I have heard that there are dragons. One of them is an alt of the Joker."

"One of them is an alt of us," says Anna.

"That sounds interesting!"

"What's to be scared of? Even if she was going to chew you up and swallow you I wouldn't expect that to be terribly off-putting, considering."

"Oh, y'know, what if we don't have anything to say to each other, the usual," says Anna.

"The pair of you seem to get along just fine."

"Like you, except a dragon, is I think the idea. I don't know that I'll be very helpful; the pair of me, when there was a pair, were a fork and we still didn't get along that well till we merged."

Eights pats him on the arm.

"But we got that handled and now I'm fine. And I don't think either of you are mad at your dragon alt for putting the moves on your boyfriend, am I right?"

"No," snorts Eights. Anna giggles.

"So you are quite without my problem."

"Very," they agree simultaneously.

"Has this one got a Chainsaw-alt associated with her?"

"Yeah," says Anna. "Sandy's met him. He's an elf. They haven't met each other, though."

"Huh, an elf. I don't know what conclusions to draw from that."

"He has pointy ears and doesn't like questions," says Anna. "And he's a lot like Sandy but less happy."

"Aww."

"Which kind of makes him the opposite of Chainsaw," says Eights. "Thankfully. I think one Chainsaw is enough."

"I could not agree more."

Eights smiles fondly at him.

Glass appears. "Green," she says to Nathan, "and, purples."

"...Eh?" says Anna.

"Sorry - I've discovered that templates fall into one of two categories, which we're calling 'moieties', one green, one purple. You guys are purple. Nathan is green. Jokers are purple, Bells are green, I haven't sorted everybody yet though."

"I haven't checked him yet. Also, we don't know what, if anything, these categories mean."

"Well that's useful," says Anna.

"Isn't it just? I can go check Sandy real quick if you're curious."

"Yes please," says Anna.

"The Bells mostly seem to mint people who'll work for them. Or date them, in some cases."

Glass reappears. "Sandy's purple, and surprisingly unfazed about having me appear to him and suddenly name a color."

"Yeah, templates are all within the same moiety. I actually started noticing this when I spotted two people whose templates are not identical but are unusually close together, standing near each other. What about you not being a Bell?"

"Uh," says Glass, "in this particular case I'm not aware of any reason not to except a vague nervousness about her hanging out with Chainsaw, but in general don't just up and mint people without checking with some Bell, in your case Stella will usually be handiest."

"And you can mint her, as long as she's not going to mint Chainsaw or give him coins," says Glass, "but that's her, in particular. Don't just mint all your friends."

"What are you on," says Anna. Eights becomes minted.

"Did Stella actually hire you without warning you about not minting people?"

"No," says Anna. "Which is why I find it weird and kind of insulting that you're telling me it's okay to mint Eights but I shouldn't do it to just anybody, like wanting to mint my alt who has spent more time being a Downside contractor than the Bells have collectively been alive somehow means I'm going to start flinging hexes at people I pass in the street?"

"Some templates vary more than others and Bells are holding some information that doesn't necessarily percolate to everybody for assorted reasons. And I don't know you and Stella's not here, and I can't tell by looking if your algorithm is 'she asked nicely' or 'if one member of a template is minted they all should be' or 'I felt like it' or what you said."

Glass shakes her head, shoots an apologetic look at Eights, and moves on.

Nathan takes a couple steps following Anna, waiting for Eights.

She starts walking as soon as he does.

"You guys okay?" he asks, once they're all moving as a group.

"Annoyed but fine," says Anna. Eights just shrugs; she seems unaffected.

"Minting has got a lot more casual over time. When Golden imported the Joker it was this complicated negotiation with a precog and Stella."

"Well, and the Joker was under some kind of suspicion at the time, wasn't he?" says Eights.

"Stella had stranded him on an asteroid for terrorism."

"That's a kind of suspicion!" says Anna.

"Sort of, yeah."

"Jokers more than some. Now new Jokers are minted as a matter of course, but I'm not actually sure how much of that is because the Bells couldn't stop the minted Jokers from doing it if they wanted to."

"I don't know. Do you think she does?" He scans the visible dragons. "Have you guys got a template color scheme?"

"Then - maybe that's her?" he says, pointing.

The indicated dragon circles closer.

"Hi!" calls Nathan. "We think you might be their alt!"

"Ooh," says the dragon. She lands on the edge of the platform. "Hi! I'm Arianna. Who're you?"

"Well, that sounds like a suspiciously alty name, Arianna."

"How come yours doesn't fit?" she asks Eights.

"I used to be an Anna too, actually, but then I died."

"You don't look very dead," Arianna observes.

"Dead people don't, if they hang out with the right people."

"More weird other-world magic stuff?" she guesses.

"Yep."

"There's a lot of that going around."

"Can't argue with that," laughs Anna.

"Are you minted?" Nathan inquires of Arianna.

"Yeah!"

"All right, then there will be no further arguments with Bells about that, I guess."

"Probably not," Eights agrees.

"Although isn't there another one of you in Gift? I didn't hear much about the details."

"Well, Gift is currently plagued by a Chelsea alt."

"Chelsea was an Aurum-dwelling vampire witch - like myself, but the similarities end there. She worked for the government that Golden usurped by using her magical ability to make people like each other or stop doing it. The Gift one has the same power, amped up."

"...ewwwwwww," says Arianna.

Her alts both nod agreement.

"Whereas I'm guessing your Gift alt would say 'hey! that's my favorite person you're talking about!', so."

"Eventually, I assume, the Bells won't tolerate her being a permanent fixture too calmly."

Eights shrugs. "In that case, I can wait."

"Wait to do what, mint that one?"

"To meet her in general."

"Ah, yeah."

Eights shrugs. "Somehow I don't think it's going to be that long. At least not by my standards."

"Probably not. I don't see the Bells rendering Chelsa torchable or anything."

"So fifty or a hundred years, not that big a deal," says Eights.

Nathan chuckles. "Yeah."

"It's weird hearing that from a human," says Arianna.

"Species has less to do with longevity all the time."

"I'm getting that!"

"I was already potentially immortal, but practically speaking no vampires have cleared four millenia."

"Pff. Small change," Eights says fondly.

He elbows her. (Maybe another rib will break, maybe not!)

No more than a crack. She giggles.

Arianna looks speculatively at them.

"What?" asks Nathan.

"Didn't that hurt?" she says.

"Yeah," says Eights.

"Looks like!" says Anna.

Nathan laughs. "You're not the only template that does it, either."

"Which other ones?" says Arianna.

"Jokers, most notably. I think the Bells who don't have those get their Sherlocks to help, although I don't think it's that extreme in those cases. Stella has Sandy working for her as a mint, I'm not sure whether in his case that's a template thing or an individual trait."

"Debatably a template thing," says Eights. "Chainsaw could swing that way, but he wasn't gonna try it while torturers were still a thing. Too easy for something to go wrong. Is it just me or are a lot of these people purple?"

"You know what, all of those people are purple. Huh."

"That seems like a weird thing for templates to cluster around!"

"Does it?" says Eights.

"Well, I don't have any better ideas, but yes, it does."

[That does seem to be a trend. It's not a perfect trend, though. Matildas are purple and as far as I know that's not a trait they have.]

[I wouldn't know; I haven't met one.]

[I'm going to finish sorting people, but after that there'll be a list generally available and we'll see what we can see.]

[All right,] she says agreeably.

"What's the verdict?" inquires Nathan.

"Well, what would the greens be clustering around, non-masochism?"

"There's not necessarily an opposite to every possible thing that some people can have in common," says Eights.

"Well, it's just that there's only two kinds. If there were an entire rainbow it would make more sense, but a bifurcate division..."

"I don't think it's the only difference, but it definitely seems to be a difference," she says. "Anyway, do we know for sure that every single person in every single universe is one of those two things? We only know it about people Glass has looked at so far, and that's not a lot, in comparison."

"Well, no, I suppose she's only checking the party attendees, but we weren't sorted for green-or-purple-moiety-membership ahead of time. She discovered this phenomenon today."

Eights shrugs.

"It's a mystery, apparently."

"Yep."