"I get along with my friend swimmingly. I would not be friends with anyone who I expected to blow up the world," Bella reiterates.

"So why don't you think I would get along with your friend?"

"Let's give my friend a code name and flip a coin to pick a gender, as this is tedious," Bella suggests. "How about Whistle. Bells and whistles, yes?" She digs a dime out of her purse. "Heads, Whistle is a guy - tails - All right then. Whistle's apparently a girl for this purpose. And she does have other characteristics besides being practically unlikely to blow up the world, you understand."

"I see. Those reasons being, what, the closeness of your friendship? Or some personal judgment of character that you don't think I'll trust? Because you don't think I'd understand it, or because it's flimsy?"

Alice, predictably, finds this hilarious and delightful.

"I trusted the person who told me so. Both to be telling the truth and to know what they were doing. Your turn."

"That's not what I meant and you know it. But as a gesture of good faith: your guesses are wrong," Bella says testily.

"My guesses don't leave a lot of room for alternate explanations," she muses.

"I'm aware. I'll tell you what you missed - or at least, the accurate thing you missed - if you answer the question I actually want answered."

"That question being...? Who I learned it from, so you can go harass them?"

"I don't necessarily need their identity, unless that's the only reason you believe them. I want your evidence. If I told you that you oughtn't use hexes on the nights of the full moon, because doing so would have unspecified bad consequences, you would want to know why I thought that."

"So my first answer was complete after all. I believe them because I took their word as a trustworthy expert."

"Did they use a star and lose the entire left half of their body?" Bella asks. "Do they have an informative ingot power? Did they derive it from Bible Code? Did they hear it from yet another person? Did you seriously just believe someone's unsupported statement that you should not use your most powerful coins?"

"If they made up the warning, they could just as easily have made up some secondhand horror stories to go with it." She smiles slightly. "On the other hand, maybe you're right and I should spend that seven I've been keeping in reserve. I think duplicating my anti-spying wards across all my friends would be a pretty good use for it, don't you?"

"Wait - no - don't do that - haven't you even got a reason, did you seriously not have a reason so I can just talk you out of caution over coffee by trying to find one, I don't necessarily mean you should use it -"

Perhaps Bella would have done better to make something up from scratch. She touches the rim of her coffee cup, regretting its emptiness, considers ordering another. "Interesting," she agrees.

"So I'm pretty sure you have independent confirmation, because if you'd talked to this person, I'd know."

"I know why I'm wary of stars. I'd like to understand why you are."

"Have I not covered that sufficiently yet?"

"Until I unwisely duplicated a cautionary tale, I don't see how you had any more evidence than stories that could easily have been made up. Sure, now you probably have enough information to justify it. I don't get how you did before."

"They could easily have been made up. I don't believe they were."