"I see," he says. "That's... fascinating on several levels. Does 'mortals' imply what I think it does?"

"Well, in my case, it does, but our alt Angela kept saying 'mortals' too and she just means people without wings and boasts no special lifespan herself, so good on you for asking. Witches live until we - well, there's not an exact understanding of how it happens, but it looks like barring death by violence we live until we're too bored or too lonely."

"Not a bad deal," he muses.

"Well, it means that we tend to last until we've gone through about four husbands, which takes a few centuries but not literally forever. I'm just planning to find a way to make my boyfriend immortal instead."

"Good luck," he ventures.

"Oh, I'll be able to do it. We have these devices -" she gestures to indicate the size. "That dispense objective truth in complete - sentences, so to speak, although it has to talk through symbols, they're really not very well designed, and the device says I can. I just have a research project to complete first."

"...Now that sounds useful."

"It is! Unfortunately, I've tried it outside my universe and the functionality's not portable. When questioned back home they say they run on 'dust' that isn't anywhere else." She shrugs. "Still very glad I have them. Well, I have one, my boyfriend has the other. He's an intuitive reader and he's much better at communicating with them than I am, so he wanted his own. There's only six in the world but two were lost; I found the first with a spell and he asked it where the other was."

"Remarkable," murmurs Giles.

Amariah grins at him.

He smiles back.

"Do you want any conveniently consequence-free spells on you or your house or whatever, as long as I'm loitering in this world and you're helping my counterpart here?" Amariah inquires. "The whole set I gave Bella includes four protective tattoos, which take a while, but if you wanted to skip those it'd only take a couple hours to go through all of them. I have tea tree oil and stuff left."

"That... would be very generous of you," he says, surprised. "Yes."

"I don't mind. I have time to kill, and Bells without their own magic can use all the help they can get. I mean, maybe she'll meet Stella or Shell Bell her first time through Milliways and whatever I do will be redundant, but maybe she won't. Here, I've got a list I wrote for Bella." Path pulls the paper out of her bag for her, and transfers it to her hand; she unfolds it and hands it to Giles.

"Enh, it's a bunch of spells, but they only add up to so much," demurs Amariah. "Even Golden, let alone Stella or Shell Bell, would be more help than me. If Bella wanted to undergo a species change. - Golden's world has a different kind of vampire than this one. A dramatically superior and less inherently problematic kind of vampire, sounds like."

"That's not saying much," he mutters absently.

"Golden's kind of vampire - I haven't met Golden in person, I've read Stella's notes about her in the guestbook in our shared room in Milliways, but according to the notes - Golden's kind of vampire is immortal, has no inconvenient allergies, can go weeks without eating, don't sleep, are almost physically indestructible short of fire and even then Golden's survived being pulverized to bits and then set on fire twice, and they are way, way faster and stronger than the vampires you have here. And they have perfect recall, and enhanced senses, and they think fast enough to process all this stuff plus the super-speed, and on top of all of that they are super pretty. The only drawbacks are that they mate for life and that's really serious business, female vampires can't get pregnant, and they feel pretty thirsty a lot of the time - but Milliways sells synthetic blood that they like just fine and Golden has her R&D department reverse-engineering it. And Golden managed to have a kid anyway, egg-harvesting before she turned."

"I'd rather have Stella's magic, really. It's kind of fucked up, but it's easy to hack that," says Amariah. "Besides, I don't know if Golden-vampires would be able to turn a non-human like me in the usual way and I don't think I'd wanna be a test subject."

"Stella's magic being...?"

"Wishes. She can make nearly arbitrary wishes, and they come true," says Amariah. "The fucked up part is where wishes come from, but she's got a copy of my boyfriend for her own, and that template is all over it. I'll spare your librarian sensibilities the details of what they are all over."

"Thank you very much," he says dryly.

Juliet snickers.

"We are a fascinating bunch," asserts Amariah.