"Likewise! I've been here a few times, and me and Shell Bell, who is not here today, are the founding members of the Belltower, which is a place for alts of us and our friends to hang out, but this is Angela's first time and she's from a weird world that I don't fully get yet, so she's reeling a little," Amariah says chattily. "You looked surprised when you walked in - first timer?"

"My world is weird? You have an external owl-shaped soul!" says Angela, but she's clearly teasing.

"I am indeed a first timer," he says. "And enjoying myself so far."

"You didn't bring your Tony with you. Do you have a Tony?" Amariah inquires. "The other two have them - they're both boys even though Shell Bell's Sherlock is a girl."

"I—did," he says. "I believe I have already mentioned the gang of vampire assassins."

"Oh - oh dear," murmurs Amariah. "I'm sorry." Path hoots sympathetically.

"Thank you."

"What about Jarvis?" she asks tentatively. "Only one of the others has one of those - but I met him, I went to their world briefly..."

"Also assassinated. At which point I killed everyone responsible, fucked off to California in search of a compelling reason not to set myself on fire, and found my dear Juliet, who does the trick pretty well. And now you know the story of my life, more or less."

"What's Juliet's story? I'm a witch and I have an artifact that cryptically dispenses objective truth and I'm working on taking over the world with that and ritual magic. Angela's an angel and she's trying to be a good person so her god will appoint her Archangel. Stella, who's not here today either and I haven't met her but she signed the guest book, colonized Mars and is already calling herself Empress, and Shell Bell is well on her way and she's met Stella and Stella can give out her ultra-powerful sort of magic, so Shell Bell's probably done taking over her world by now too. And Stella has reportedly met a vampire - although not, I think, your kind - of us who is an empress also. It's a trend."

"Juliet's story is several thousand years old," he says, "but a brief sketch: my world is overrun with all sorts of nasty bitey creatures, of which vampires are perhaps the most numerous but by no means the only. A long time ago, some collection of magic-wielding people with bizarre priorities decided to dump a lovely package of superpowers onto a teenage girl and make her fight off the nasty bitey hordes for them, with the superpowers then passing on to yet another teenage girl when the first was inevitably killed in the line of duty. Juliet is the latest such person; they're called Slayers. I am currently acting as her bodyguard and martial arts instructor in the hope that she will live past twenty-six, which no other Slayer has ever done."

"Yes," he says immediately. "Please."

"If this is your first time here," Amariah says, "then you won't know - the place has a time-distortion effect and if everything goes normally you'll leave at the same time you came in. So there's no hurry, but if you haven't been here before you also don't know how routinely you find the door... Jarvis -" She pauses, assessing his reaction to the mention.

He doesn't react visibly, just waits for her to continue.

"...Could open a door with perfect reliability, but everyone else is stuck with some amount of chance. My boyfriend finds this place every couple of months; I've never found it on my own yet. Shell Bell used to wait a year or more sometimes, between door-finding; her Sherlock gets better results and her Tony can sometimes get it on purpose but the other Tony couldn't and I don't remember about the other other Sherlock. We don't have stats on Angela or her boyfriend - he's an alt of mine - yet. And Stella didn't leave notes about her and her friends - Stella's boyfriend is also an alt of mine - but she did mention that she told Bar to give a Belltower key to the vampire us's daughter because she's here a lot and her mom isn't. My point is, I could wind up stuck in your world for a while, will I have a place to crash or should I see if Angela will buy me a hammock with her credit bracelets and hang it from my cloud-pine somewhere up in the sky?"

"I am currently sleeping in a refitted crypt. There are probably more available. If you would prefer a hammock, by all means acquire one."

"A crypt. Ah-huh. Am I liable to be shot down or something if I hammock in midair? I imagine your world doesn't have my sort of witches, or at least not exactly."

"At the risk of further mockery about my world and my educational background and so on," says Angela, "why would anyone live in a crypt, and what is a vampire?"

Angela startles when his face changes, although she recovers faster than she did when Petaal shifted shape. "That's..." She doesn't seem to know whether it would be rude to say whatever she had in mind. "I am learning a lot today," she says vaguely instead.

"If there is some danger of my being observed and subsequently harassed there are spells for that, I just need to know if I should cast them," Amariah prompts.

"Yes, sorry," he says. "You might not have trouble in some places, but I would take the precautions if I were you. In Sunnydale there is always the chance someone will decide you'd make a nice midnight snack, floating in the sky or no."

"Notice-me-nots, check. Remind me to get some tea tree oil from Bar before we leave," says Amariah.

"Will do," he says.