"Coffee with a new acquaintance. She went to the bathroom, I went outside, outside turned out to be Milliways. I'm really not sure where to file it."

"You get the thing where it's not been more than thirty seconds when you go back, right?"

"Historically, yes. If this turns out not to be one of those times, I am definitely filing it under inconvenient."

"I imagine your acquaintance might be confused."

"I bet she would be too. And I don't think confused is her favourite state."

"I don't think most people like being confused. Hm. If you don't have vampires, then if you ever had a my dad he presumably died in 1918, but you could have a my mom. She'd be seventeen or eighteen in 2005, depending on what date," muses Elspeth.

"So I should be keeping an eye out for megalomaniacal teenagers?" she jokes. "Possibly so I can lend a hand?"

"Maybe! She makes a very good empress of the world," Elspeth says. "In my world by the end of 2005 she'd faked her death and was wandering North America, but if she hasn't encountered any vampires or werewolves I don't know what she'd be doing. Maybe she'd finish high school, in which case she'd still be there at any point in the year apart from summer break."

"So, probably not in New York, then."

"Well, I don't know. She might have gotten impatient and gone to college, a year early. She never got around to it in my version."

"So, maybe in New York."

"Maybe. I don't think she ever thought about where she'd have gone to college if she'd gone. She certainly doesn't have time for it now; she just fits in reading between ruler-of-the-world crises and small allowances for personal time."

"That implies a lot of ruler-of-the-world crises."

"The world is big," Elspeth says. "If Mama has a flaw at ruler-of-the-world-ing, it's that she's reluctant to delegate. Like, Grandpa Carlisle can approve anything R&D might want to do, but she can overrule him if they appeal because she's a little more flexible and outranks him, so sometimes they appeal. It'd be easier on her if she let him have the last word, and it wouldn't affect that many cases, and if something really important came up people would find a way to go around him and ask her on a case by case basis anyway, but." She shrugs.

"That sounds like a pretty big flaw in a world dictator, but as flaws go, not a bad one."

"She tries to set up systems that can implement her judgment without her being personally involved. It just takes more than she's had to get all the kinks worked out, but they are smoothing over time - she's only gotten involved in determining whether someone got to turn or not once in the last year, and it was someone she knew. Otherwise she's gotten to the point where she'll trust my department to run smoothly and there isn't an appeals process that formally goes up all the way to her."

"Is there a story behind that intervention, or was it just a case of quiet nepotism?"

"She told me not to pass his application. She disliked him personally and wasn't sure if he'd have any red flags that would show up on the form."

"Oh, dear," says Libby. "My faith in your mother's empressing abilities just took a hit. Well, it depends what she disliked him for, I guess."

"She had a job when I was a kid, and he was her boss; I don't know exactly what he said to make her dislike him and I didn't ask, but apparently she didn't want to invite him into the vampire community," shrugs Elspeth. "We do have to turn away or delay a lot of inoffensive people just to control the vampire population growth and not overload the people who handle anaesthesia during turning, and he didn't have any bonus features that would have guaranteed him an in, so I didn't think it was a big deal. She doesn't do this at all often - mostly when she was more involved she'd have me prioritizing witches she wanted particularly much or making sure I knew so-and-so was our cousin or whatever. It's not like she can never stand people she doesn't like. She doesn't like the Imperial Factotum but gets along with her for work purposes."

"That does sound a lot more reasonable," she acknowledges.

"The Imperial Factotum is the copy witch. She makes herself very useful and very easy to keep happy and well-behaved, so Mama overlooked things like that time she had me tortured," Elspeth says lightly. "She had to overlook a lot of things as long as people were credibly going to be decent going forward. At the time she took over the world, she and Grandpa Carlisle and two people she'd personally arranged to turn were literally the only vampires alive who'd never murdered anyone."

"A little bit happier than you'd be if it was my mama," Elspeth says. "You'd be basically okay with it, although exactly how much might depend on how she got there and some details... Happier with her at the job than anybody else you know, though. Who are you having coffee with?"

"My universe's version of your mama," she confesses.