Milliways lurks.
Today, it is lurking outside a particular coffee shop when a particular mathematician decides to step out for some air.
Libby pauses on the threshold, looking amused, and then enters the bar and closes the door behind her. Knowing this place's sense of humour, she'd give it sixty-forty that she is about to meet someone who is in some way relevant to that conversation, and twenty-twenty out of the remainder that she will instead meet someone so thoroughly distracting that she forgets what she and Bella were talking about.
The girl's eyes, when she opens them, are familiar-looking.
"I cannot wait until we invent this," she says, half to her companion and half to her beverage.
"Empress," Elspeth says. "Are you the sort of person who'd know about vampires if you had them? There were plenty around during 2005, just not quite so organized. But they were hiding, and you're not a vampire, so no one can tell you without risking getting killed if you have the same kind and the same previous government and stuff."
"Gradually," Elspeth says. "Under the Golden Empire people who know things can tell individual other people - not shout it from rooftops or anything, but they can tell anyone they want, and people can come to any of our capital sites and get pamphlets -" She seems smug about the pamphlets - "and apply to get turned, if they like. The idea is we don't want a traumatic overnight revelation, just people going about business as usual plus vampires as vampires become relevant to them. Would you like a pamphlet?"
Bella's initial false start and ultimate success is described next, and it refers the reader to Introduction to Supernatural History, Part II for a description of how the Empress cemented her reign and what events have occurred in the supernatural world since then, as well as more historical tidbits about the two kinds of werewolves.
The pamphlet is concise, readable, very attractively laid out and lavishly illustrated with photorealistic drawings and photographs (distinguishable by caption). If Elspeth made it she has much to be proud of.
"She is," agrees Elspeth. "She doesn't come here much, even though this stuff is great, though." She raises her bubbly golden beverage. "I should bring home a case... assuming the bar'll let me... maybe R&D can work faster with something to reverse-engineer, and it'll be nice for the Golden Day party."
"But you don't have wolves, his kind I mean, so the rest of the explanation wouldn't make sense," Elspeth says. She digs out and proffers 1B, "Introduction to Werewolves". "Skip to section three unless you're interested in how he can become enormous and furry, and how he's telepathic," she says.
The last sentence sounds dead of vibrance, and shifty, and wrong, though in any other context it wouldn't have been remarkable. The extra quality to her utterances just won't stick to that sentence. Her name is definitely not Lisa.
"Yep," agrees Elspeth. "And I can push memories or compositions or feeds of my own senses at people, talk silently, simulcast translations in any languages I know which is most of them, and, if I have a human to put them in, I can 'resurrect' any of the vampires I have backed up in my head - I don't do that last one much, since we don't usually want to, you know, squeeze humans out of their own heads, but it's been appropriate a few times."
Elspeth hands over a PRPR-1-ENG and a 1-A: Introduction to Vampires.
"Or not easily convinced you have information you don't? I could rapid-fire a lot of information at you, but I try to avoid doing that with humans - my brain runs in higher definition than yours. It can be problematic. When I talk with words there's less misdirection, but not more content."
"I guess my question is something more like: do you increase your information density by having more things to say and packing them all into the same message, or by communicating the same things in ways that tend to lead your audience to more not-necessarily-related conclusions?"
"I do some of the second thing, but more when I'm working at it - I can figure out some information I don't already have, by figuring out what it would make sense to say, because it makes sense to say things that will cause people to understand true things. But that's clunky and doesn't work very reliably. I haven't experimented a lot with improving my verbal density. If I need to be faster, I dispense with talking. I don't often have to quickly say a lot to a human."
"Then the person who's not a vampire is not affected," Elspeth says. "It's very sad for the vampire and pretty awkward for their mate, and we have to be watchful to make sure the vampire doesn't do anything drastic. Wolves tend not to do that, fortunately - they're not as possessive about it, although if their imprints are in danger they will definitely do something about it." Jake pats her on the head.
"Manufacturing a medical emergency, or doing something coercive to get their mate turned, or just biting them themselves and turning them without anaesthesia - basically, the object of a rejected vampire mated to a human is to get their mate turned so everything will be nice and symmetrical. If they mate on a hybrid instead and that can't happen, they just go kind of... stalkery."
"It ranges from disconsolate pining - harmless - to suicide - legal, especially under the circumstances, although we do try to encourage people to wait a year or five in case their mate comes around - to harassment and pestering and trying to find any means they can of bringing pressure to bear - sometimes legal and sometimes not, depending on how overboard they go - to various combinations of forgery, carefully calculated degrees of assault to try to force turning either to save life or reverse disability, kidnapping, that sort of thing - not legal at all."
"It wouldn't be a random vampire. The relationships usually work out, even when one party stays not-a-vampire, if they give it a chance; they're people who are suited to each other. And we do protect vampires' mates who don't want to. But sure, you don't have to come home with me." She shrugs and downs the rest of her golden bubbly and orders another.
"Well, also by species a little bit, in the sense that vampires don't seem to mate to werewolves and werewolves don't seem to imprint on full vampires," Elspeth says. "At least unless someone changes species after the fact; both phenomena are very durable once established. I'm not otherwise sure what you mean. It's not like interspecies relationships are doomed or always a bad idea or anything except that you should avoid getting attached to someone who hasn't mated-slash-imprinted but still might."
"Not everybody seems to have mates at all - there are vampires who've been around for thousands of years who don't have them, and there's a witch who copies powers who's repeatedly tried a precognition power that showed its own witch her mate right away, and the copier wasn't shown anyone. So whatever's going on, it's not for everyone," shrugs Elspeth.
"Oh, she's very smart, and kind of paranoid but people did keep trying to kill her for the longest time, and she loves me and my dad to bits, and she's careful about being ethical with all her power - she put my grandpa Carlisle in charge of the ethics of the R&D department and if you knew my grandpa Carlisle you'd know that means she takes not being evil very seriously. She doesn't like being interrupted. She raised me by herself for five years when we thought my dad was dead and she was the most devoted mama anyone could ask for. She's got a lot of... psychological resilience, I guess? Most vampires who thought their mates were dead would just fall completely apart - they'd go for a futile, suicidal attempt at revenge or turn into apathetic zombie-types or go outright insane. Mama managed to function and bring me up to maturity. She cares about knowing where all her mental moving parts are and making sure they don't break or go the wrong way."
"If you could get through me or Jake in a serious - however unlikely - attempt to do me any harm, that's the relevant threshold," Elspeth says. "Mama's convinced that Milliways is safe, but all bets are off in a world. Other relevant people are tougher to hurt than I am."
"I mentioned that I can learn things about other people by seeing what makes sense to say. It doesn't catch everything, but what it catches is unrelated enough to what people want caught that Mama considers it a fine first-pass check - you'd still have to get past my dad or Maggie to stay welcome in our world for any length of time."
"There's always next time," says Jake.
"Informative and very reassuring!" says Libby. "I guess I should explain. My world has some people with native powers not unlike witchcraft, and my aunt's is a personal shield that she keeps pointed at me because she's an incorrigible worrier. Proof against anything from bug bites to neutron bombs, if you believe her."
Elspeth laughs. "I'm kind of like both my parents, backwards. My dad reads minds. My mama's mentally opaque - no mental powers work on her. If she tries very, very hard she can let me or Dad in for short periods of time, though. I used to work on her all the time until I developed an offensive branch to my magic and then her shield shut me completely out. And I encourage everybody to read my mind!"
"It was interesting what happened, actually, if you don't just focus on how awful it was," Elspeth said. "The vampire memories in the payload were the strongest, and when the humans who'd been wiped looked into the mirror, if they saw a sufficiently similar face to a vampire who'd been backed up, they 'recognized themselves'. That's how we got John and Didyme, and we used the phenomenon ourselves to salvage some good out of the other victims too."
"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."
"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.
"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."
"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."
"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?"
Elspeth laughs again. "I could explain it to her - unless yours is a witch too, and would block me too even if I never tried to hit her with anything with side effects?" Elspeth shrugs. "But I'd sure think it was strange if someone brought me my future kid from another world whose dad I'd never meet."
"It's my fault," he says. "Right after she got blasted with the memory payload I said something that pointed out to her that she had pretty up-to-date memories from her dad in there. She remembers... their honeymoon and stuff." He taps Elspeth on the shoulder and her hands come down from the sides of her head. "For whatever it's worth," Jake adds, "I find Bella's rulership pretty satisfactory and I'm not an imperial princess."
Elspeth giggles. "If your version of Mama isn't an unusually productive mint but knows at least one, why wouldn't that one be the ruler of the world, I wonder," she muses. "I suppose they could be bad at making wishes? Or not want to rule the world, like Siobhan." Pause. "Do you know a Siobhan? She goes with Liam if you find one of those."
"Siobhan just wants dominion over Ireland and she doesn't even do anything with it besides keep an eye on the vampire population so it's all people she likes," Elspeth says. "If you want to matchmake based on who's mates in my world you may as well take notes, but Maggie and Gretchen are probably just a funny coincidence - wrong country, wrong time, wrong hair color."
"I don't know much. Human memories get faded like crazy after turning, so I don't have much from Dad. Grandpa saw her... she did look something like you, but older, old enough to have a seventeen-year-old son, and sicker, and not the beneficiary of modern medicine. I can't really compare voices because she was dying of the flu the entire time and didn't sound great. But her name was Elizabeth and her maiden name was Kirsch."
"Grandma," says Elspeth experimentally. It doesn't sound particularly true or particularly untrue. "I don't think I have enough to go on to do that. Oh well. The only thing I know she did was figure out that Grandpa Carlisle would be able to do something to save her son and tell him very fiercely to do so. He couldn't do anything for her even if he'd wanted to turn an extra person, because she died when people were looking, but Dad he was able to wheel out and save."
Elspeth picks out a series of images - one blurry, unclear one from Edward's childhood, where the ages would be more closely matched, and three from Carlisle's observation of her. And a picture of Edward, before he got so sick, when he was still human, for kicks.
"So maybe you're going to help your counterfactual-daughter-in-law take over the world," giggles Elspeth. "Here's my dad's biological dad. It's not a great picture since he died of the flu the next day, but I dunno, do you think he looks like husband material?" A picture accompanies.
"He named my dad after himself?" Elspeth suggests. "...Dad's lingering impressions of him were that he was smart and authoritative and principled, the sort of person relative to whom Grandpa Carlisle's fathering would seem like an improvement but not a completely different sort of relationship?"
"I take it I can't do both? I mean, if possible I'd like to get away without mentioning Milliways because it's bizarre and unverifiable. But since I'm planning to install her as ruler of the world, she has much higher access to my secrets than she did half an hour ago."
"Well, if she's having coffee with you she must find you personally tolerable, so you have a leg up over, say, Addy the Imperial Factotum who she personally can barely stand and who has to stay within Dad's mindreading range eighty percent of always and top me up with all her new memories once a month to make sure she's not hiding anything in the other twenty percent. You won't have to do that if she likes you and you can convince her you're on her side, which you probably can if you actually want to make her empress of the world. But if you don't tell Mama stuff she'd want to know that's relevant to her, if you even delay much, she will figure it's because you don't trust her to behave appropriately with the information and she will think it's likely that you'd think that because you have information suggesting your goals don't match. And then she has to consider you maybe-an-opponent." Pause. "You haven't attacked anyone she likes, have you?"
"I don't know if she considers me to have attacked anyone she likes," says Libby. "I did briefly kidnap someone out of the middle of a conversation with her, in the interest of preserving one of those secrets I'm going to end up telling her anyway. Actually, while I'm here, what's your assessment of how your mother would behave if she knew how to dodge the otherwise heinous consequences of using the most powerful magic in the world?"
"She'd... do that and then use it? Probably in quantity if she could get it? Mama has R&D working on scaling space colonization in ways that take advantage of vampires not needing spacesuits, and reproducing our anesthetist's magic so we can turn more people, and defensive anti-weapon technology of various forms so we don't need to worry so much about governments deciding to nuke us, and she throws money at charities that are doing things like getting clean water to Third World villages so more people can live long enough for us to get around to them. Also she's got people working on this stuff," Elspeth hefts her glass, takes a swig, "but yours probably will not find that a necessary project. In our case it's taking the place of a truly staggering amount of animal slaughter, but at least we're now working in conjunction with slaughterhouses that can use the meat and not just the blood so we're not hunting wild megafauna and damaging ecosystems."
"She wants to fill the universe with a society of vampires and hybrids and some werewolves, although she's not taking any personal interest in managing the werewolf population," Elspeth says chattily. "Well, mine does, yours probably just wants to soup up humans and send them every which way. She wants everyone to be immortal and safe and do interesting things."
"Anyway. Can mint magic do lie detection? Even temporarily? Because then she'd believe you about Milliways, if she can do that and you offer to let her. And then you can just tell her everything and offer to help her take over the world and tell her what you want."
Elspeth collects her substance, lifting it far more easily than a girl her size should be able to lift that much liquid, and impulsively hugs Libby goodbye with her other arm. "It was lovely to meet you. Good luck helping Mama take over your world."