"I don't mean partly, I mean maybe," he says. "I have a working mental picture, I just don't know if it's sensible or not."

"Okay. Why might it not be sensible?"

"I'm not clear if people have 'fits' in the sense I'm picturing," he says. "I mean, single ones per person even setting aside the fine details, anyway. Maybe I do, but if you don't have werewolves, that's not something you're usually using as a guideline. And if people have fits, I'm not sure what 'putting' them there would mean, and I'm coming up with weird guesses that involve more physically picking them up and depositing them places than you probably use."

"Huh," says Orfeo. "It probably wouldn't have occurred to me to call that sort of thing 'fit' but it's cool."

"It's not that I believe every single person has exactly one spot they're meant to go," she says. "It's not like a jigsaw puzzle, it's more like... a mosaic. I have this field of coloured rocks in front of me and every single one is a different shape, and I can see that if I move this one over here it'll fit in way better than it does where it's sitting. Except that people are obviously a lot more complicated than rocks, and their 'shapes' change over time. Like you, for example. If you'd never laid eyes on me, you definitely wouldn't fit best in my universe. But you did, so now you do, and we have to figure out how and where."

Orfeo nods. "Well... what else do you need to know?"

"That's the tricky part. Sometimes I don't know what the thing I need to know is until I know it. So really I just need to know you as well as I possibly can—your sister, too, if she comes with us, because then I need to find a fit for her too. But bringing us back to the reason I started saying all this in the first place, I don't get anything out of overriding you on preferences like naming hypothetical future children. That's exactly the kind of thing where if you had an opinion, I'd want to know about it and take it into account."

"Oh. Well, I haven't thought about it, but I can, if you want me to," he said, furrowing his brow. But he looks vaguely confused by the entire idea. For some reason "imprint" and "mother of his children" are not snapping together much less hypothetically than they ever did before. "I don't think Elena will want to stay, if she doesn't have to," he adds. "She likes video games. Moving to 2005 would be hard on her."

"In that case, I hope we don't need her to."

Orfeo nods solemnly. "This is probably really hard on her. She sees herself like a buffer between me and the world. Our half-sisters tended to pick on us and when our parents didn't catch it, she'd wind up defending me - and then the role of our sisters was played by 'everything else in the world', later on, when we were all a little more grown up."

"This may be a pipedream, but I'm still hoping to find a solution that doesn't leave anybody actively unhappy."

"Tunnel between the worlds?" Orfeo suggests. "Can your sorcerer-empress do that?"

"We've never tried. Another thing to put on the list of experiments."

Orfeo nods. "So... what's it like, not having any wolves or vampires around? I've lived around and in packs, near covens, all my life..."

"Good question," says Libby. "I could ask the same thing in reverse. My aunt's an ingot, so I have been generally aware of magic all my life, but I never actually met a non-aunt magical person until much later."

"...Okay, going by comparisons to movies and stuff... I assume everybody I meet can live forever if they have the least interest in doing that. I divide relationships into 'fated perfect eternal' and 'doomed'. I grew up referring to myself as though I were a baby dog instead of a baby goat and so did most of my friends. People around me don't get sick. If we get injured, it's over with in a week, and that's if we were seriously mauled and shot full of venom just shy of killing us. Within a pack, the silent treatment is not an option - telepathy is not optional. Wolves are at the bottom of the mental totem pole among the supernaturals until you get down to some pretty thinly bred hybrids, but compared to people I see on TV or that I've interacted with while out in human civilization, I think we might really be quicker or something - I'm not talking myself up personally, but they don't seem to operate on the same time scale, and that makes sense, we move faster than them. I'm not used to adults aging, and it weirds me out to see movies made by the same actor ten years apart. Everybody around me at home is buffer and prettier than random people I see in Oslo or wherever. No one complains when it's time to move furniture for some reason. My friends are all on liquid diets or capable of demolishing supposedly family-sized packages of anything for morning snacks." He pauses. "Does that help?"

"That helps a lot, actually," says Libby.

"Great," he says, grinning at her.

"Yeah," Orfeo says. "I don't remember this part, but when I was really little, the sense of community was magically enforced. The Princess tore the fake parts of that down as part of the takeover, but there was a lot left, and after all that time people were used to it. It stuck. I don't think I want to claim we're Communists or anything - we use cash, Jake's in charge of our pack and Becky and Rachel are in charge of theirs, and we don't go around calling each other Comrade. But someone has to be really determined to not be involved with us to get to the point where we wouldn't all swoop in to support them if they needed it. That's another reason Elena wouldn't really want to go to your world. She's used to all these people and hasn't got an astronomically higher priority."

"That's a nice thing to have," she says. "I wouldn't want to take her away from it unnecessarily."

Orfeo nods. "So hopefully you can fix the packlessness issue, or it turns out it's a nonissue for imprinted wolves."

"Hopefully one of those," she agrees.

"Have I mentioned I'm glad you speak English?" Orfeo remarks suddenly. "My dad was only barely starting to learn Italian when he met my mom, and to this day she's nearly monolingual."