"In the Joker's room. Alice teleported them there, or I'd have the room number or whatever is used here. Maybe the Bar would tell us. Why? Would that help?"

"It would be hard to interfere otherwise, wouldn't it? Even... hypothetically," says Roberta.

"If I can't even teleport to just outside the room I'll be about twice as alarmed as I am right now," Bella says. She flickers up and down, and, yes, there are conventional doors off conventional hallways, plenty of patrons have to get around by walking. "I can do that much. I can take passengers. But Alice doesn't want to listen to me, the Joker certainly won't, and I don't see his shrink or his Batlady anywhere. Well, maybe the shrink is here and I just don't recognize her, I don't suppose you know who she might be?"

"I don't think I have a reason to. If things get bad up there again, and I teleport you up and conjure you a bat costume and whatever else, will you try to draw the Joker out?"

"Can you conjure the suit without having seen it?" is the first thing she wants to know.

"Unless you've got some magic preventing mine from consulting your brain, or you have a bunch of different suits and don't know how to distinguish them," Bella says.

"Oh, sweetie," he murmurs. "You sure?"

"Well," Bella says. "This could be sooner rather than later. But they're fine for right now."

"Mmmkay," he says, kissing Alice's forehead. "Since you asked."

"Right now Alice is exhibiting the ability to form preferences," Bella says, "and the Joker is exhibiting the ability to abide by them. The fact that the preferences in question are disturbing was never in question. It will not be necessary for you to break down the door until and unless Alice can no longer form or enforce preferences."

"Oh, I don't trust the Joker as far as I can throw him, and I haven't even bothered adding super-strength, so that would just be aikido trickery if I did decide to throw him," Bella says. "But it doesn't matter whether he's got fucked-up reasons for doing what Alice wants as long as Alice is still in a position to want those things. My problem is that I know less about Alice's psychological tolerances than I do about his physical tolerances and he won't let me check with him conversationally. So if it no longer looks like he wants the things and stays put anyway, while this could go under 'Alice likes things he doesn't like' - it could, he's twisted like that - it could also go under 'Alice does not like things he doesn't like but he's paralyzed'."

The Joker presses Alice down into the bed and drags the knife slowly along his hip, tracing the scar that isn't there.

"His telepathic answering machine told me to fuck off," Bella says. "However rude that is, it's also clear. I'm only going to ignore him if I'm farther out of my comfort zone than this." She pauses. "On the other hand, if you asked me for a suit right now for what could be unrelated reasons and managed to get his room number from the bar I would not dream of denying such a harmless, trivial request or of interfering with your freedom of movement."

"I'm surprised the two of you are even here at the same time, then," Bella says, staring into the middle distance glazedly as all her attention is on another channel of vision.