[Hey, Matildas, where are you? Is this a good time for the remaining Bells to get Wellsprung?]

Assorted Bells accumulate! They bring or materialize books, or assume the faraway looks of people receiving reading material from Jane.

The little room gets slightly crowded. Matilda solves this by expanding its interior volume while leaving the exterior unchanged. The three Matildas combine to levitate the assortment of Bells.

Floating Bells float floatily. "This is a cool magic system," asserts Aether.

"It really is!" says Matilda.

Etty appears last of the un-Wellsprung Bells, and then they're all there: Stella, Golden, Amariah, Angela, Aegis, Pattern, Rose, Sarion, Aether, Tab, and her.

The Matildas double-check that nobell's feet are in contact with the ground, even out their contributions so that each one supplies a third of each levitation, and then open up their conjured laptops.

[Whatcha doin'?] says Alice to Stella, a few minutes later. (Alice is presently cuddling with Queenie.)

[Getting floated to acquire yet another sort of magic.]

[Ooh. Is it fun?]

[Not all by itself. We're reading.]

[Can I come keep you company?]

[Sure.]

He kisses Queenie, acquires clothes, teleports to Stella, and gives her comfy midair snuggles.

Snuggle!

Oh, hey, Matildas. He wonders what happened to that other one he met that time.

Three Matildas shake their heads.

"Okay, then we're missing one. Alice, how come you never mentioned you recognized them? I wasn't paying enough attention to the read at the time to recognize her. I figured it was a name collision."

"...What? Like Strat?"

"Yeah, I guess," says Alice.

"...We've all read the book," says Matilda, "it doesn't exist in our worlds but I found it in Milliways when I was six - are you saying she was actually from it? Our lives have plenty of similarities but also some obvious differences. Like being set in Lyndonville instead of Probably England."

"She was definitely Probably English," says Alice. "And she'd read the book too."

"...Can someone catch me up, here?"

"There's a book called Matilda in my world about a little girl who comes from a shitty family and gets magical powers. One time I met somebody who seemed to pretty much be the girl from the book, and we talked about stuff for a while and it was pretty great and I never saw her again."

"And now it seems like she's our alt, except that we're only mostly like the girl from the book and she's at least a little bit more like her than we are."

"So she's the Strat to your other-Sherlocks, or something. I guess that's not the kind of thing Glass would see unless she had her handy to look at? I wonder if Shell Bell can find her world if Alice stands next to her or something."

"I haven't read the Matilda book, though I did read some Holmes stories - but that's two templates discernibly book-related, are we just assuming Milliways cross-contagion and timefuckery or what?"

"How would we find out? Unless Glass sees something, how do we figure out what the books have to do with the Matildas? Resurrect some world's Roald Dahl and interrogate him? It's not necessarily something he'd know; Sherlocks converge on their template without their books when they have to."

"I've always thought of it as just an interesting coincidence," says Matilda. "The sort of thing that seems perfectly reasonable when it happens at Milliways."

"...I had that book when I was a kid. It had daemons in it. So do the Sherlock Holmes books. Maybe books have templates and modify to fit their worlds? Or can be templates, just like intelligent species?"

"Maybe everybody should bring me copies and I should insta-read them to see how many little textual differences there are?"

"I imagine Glass would have mentioned it if she could see templateness or metacausality hanging around written media, but it could just be a gap in her aura."

"Has Glass ever perceived the templateness or metacausality of an inanimate object?"

"No. Which, come to think of it, is already known to be a bit odd because so many worlds have duplicate planets and cities and so on in them."

"Sounds like a gap to me," says Agent Honey.

"Okay, so you have alts who are books, apparently, and we have another Matilda to look for. I didn't have this book when I was a kid, is it any good?"

"It has definite charms."

"It made me cry," volunteers Alice.

"Okay. I wanna read the version with daemons, that sounds entertaining." Aegis conjures up a copy of Alethia's version of the story.

"What would our daemons be, if we had them?" wonders Matilda.

"The book doesn't have an opinion, the character's too young to be settled."

"Huh," says Amariah. "Human daemons happen at home, but they're not at all common."

"Do they mean anything in particular?" wonders Matilda, banishing the illusions.

"Do you want the positive stereotypes or the negative ones?"

"All of the above, of course," says Agent Honey.

"Intelligence, literal-mindedness, it's one of about forty daemon types associated with being a bad driver - my information is out of date but I think there was actually a supported correlation with asexuality. Personal isolationism, or self-sufficiency, depending on whether you're talking to someone who approves of introversion."

"That's about par for the course with daemon stereotypes, yeah."

"Which ones?"

"So you're not asexual? Because Glass has been trying to pin down what purples and greens have in common besides looking purple or green to her metacausality-sight and one thing that keeps turning up in purples is bisexuality, but reportedly you're purple."

"...Has someone been theorizing that we're asexual before it came up just now?" wonders Tilly.

"I was suspending judgment, given you're all single and asking Celo would be hypocritical."

"I wonder if the ones of you who are books do the same thing," giggles Aegis.

"You're welcome to ask one," says Tilly.

"Pffff."

"How are my magical properties?"

"I wonder what causes the different results. You can't tell?"

"There's theories at home," says Matilda, "but I don't think they apply very well to the situation at hand. You're really unlikely to vary that widely in relevant personality factors, for example."

Rose laughs a little. "Yes, rather. Maybe when we've all got as much of this magic as we're going to something will make itself obvious."

"Maybe!" she says agreeably. "Or maybe Glass will get something."

Rose nods. She swaps her book for one on Wellspring magic. When Tab leans in her direction, she waves it to within Tab's aura range momentarily and then goes back to reading it.

The next Bell to be lowered is Amariah.

"Huh," says Amariah. "Glass-Rose-me isn't an obvious lineup of any characterstic."

"You've got about the same properties as Rose," says Tilly, "but your perception is a little higher and your entanglement a little lower. It's not a big difference; a less sensitive reading might not even pick up on it."

"Huh," says Path.

"Of the three of us, Amariah's native magic is the one that affords the most advantages in detecting magic," observes Sarion thoughtfully.

"What would explain your better entanglement? If my information's in-date between elfmagery and enchantment even you prefer the latter for most things, and you and Rose were about the same age when you got your respective things."

"It's hard to say."

"We'd have to Wellspring a lot more witches and elfmages and native enchanters before we could say that your native magic system has an effect," says Matilda. "Although it's an interesting idea and very plausible."

"I wasn't an elfmage when I was young, but I did practice small magics," muses Sarion.

"I think this theory predicts that I'm next."

"I've barely practiced magic, and not for long, and Glass says it works for anyone just the same as long as they're in Lake when they try it," says Etty. "I don't know what this does to the theory."

"Nothing informative. Cam's got plenty of magic and he got it when he was fifteen and he's - not as good as those of us who are now in contact with the ground, right? And Juliet's world is Wellspring-compatible to begin with and we're beating her too."

"There's nothing saying that a lot of this isn't just plain noise," says Matilda. "We really don't know a lot about how Wellspringing interacts with templates. I guess we'll know more in a while, though."

"I hope it is noise, this theory here predicts that me and Angela and possibly even Aegis get nada just like Shell Bell."

"I haven't actually gotten the rundown on what these statistics mean," Aether mentions. "I can guess based on the names, but what are the details?"

"And meanwhile Sunshine and its siblings were infested with enough demons that some of them got to it first."

"Yes," says Matilda. "And it seems like they went the opposite direction from Wellspring - in Wellspring, the available patterns are so overwhelmingly positive that it's hard to use magic destructively. In Sunshine... they seem to have it the other way around."

"If I understand correctly, we now have Wellspring patterns and not Sunshine ones."

Sarion nods. She swaps her book.

"Well, that's my ambition right there, unsurprisingness." New book.

After that comes Tab, whom the Matildas declare to be part of the same group as Stella and Juliet.

"If Golden's next I'd guess opacity would have to do with it."

"Opacity could still have to do with it," Aegis says, celebrating not floating under someone else's power anymore with a backflip and then zero-g-aura-ing her way back into a more self-powered float. She opts to read up on Wellspring magic on a desk instead of paper.

"Even if we assume I count, now, Glass has no such thing."

"But not as little as Shell Bell?" says Pattern.

"No," says Matilda, "not as little as Shell Bell."

"Well, that's something, then."

And then Angela, and last of all Golden, both with similarly tiny-but-not-quite-functionally-worthless amounts.

"How fortunate that we don't expect this to make or break any practical projects."

Matildas shrug.