"Who's that?" Bella says, sticking her head out the window. "And you're a minute late, your blood's gone cold."

"Well," says Amariah, "that answers the mental opacity question very handily. Hi! I'm an alternate version of you from another dimension! I'm Isabella Amariah and you can call me Amariah for non-redundancy. Sherlock's been calling you Juliet, can I do the same?"

"This is going to be an interesting conversation," says Sherlock.

"What's going on?"

"Sherlock can't hear me," says Amariah. "I've got a spell on that prevents anyone from noticing me. You're immune! Congratulations. Can we all go back to Sherlock's crypt so I can take the spell off? He doesn't need the blood anyway, my boyfriend let him bite him not half an hour ago."

"...Sherlock, she says you're not hungry and we should all go back to your crypt?" says Bella.

"Both very true."

"It won't," says Amariah. "Too many of us to keep straight in the interdimensional hub, so we're all picking nicknames. Me, Shell Bell, Stella, Angela, and Golden hasn't picked a nickname officially but Stella's met her and that's her guess, and Sherlock supplied Juliet for you but you could go with something different."

"Okay, that's a lot. How exactly did you find Amariah, Sherlock?"

"Stepped out of my crypt, and instead of the usual graveyard I found a bar," he says. "Amariah spotted me and said hello."

"Shell Bell is dating a girl version of him," says Amariah chattily. "I've met that one, her Tony, and another pair where they're both boys. This one doesn't have a Tony anymore, which is terribly sad - At any rate, I recognized him and said hi before I realized there was something the matter with his soul. Oh, by the way, my owl is my soul. Don't touch him. His name's Pathalan."

"You can tell by looking that there's something wrong with his soul? That is so unfair, I am supposed to have vampire detection powers," grumbles Juliet.

"I'm a witch - I can't teach you, we're a species, not an academic specialty - and therefore magically sensitive. I can tell by looking that you don't have a Pathalan of your own. Which is still weird to me, but I'm getting used to it. And I could tell by looking that Sherlock's soul is not only internal but also weird."

"Internal souls," mutters Juliet. "It never occurred to me to store mine any other way. Seems like a liability."

"It rather does, doesn't it?" agrees Sherlock.

"It can be," says Amariah. "But I'm much less dependent on notebooks or whatever for self-sorting than the others are - well, Shell Bell does audio recording and some of them have perfect recall now, but I mean barring that - because I can talk to Path, and he knows me inside and out."

Sherlock leads them both inside and waits for Amariah to become noticeable again.

The easiest way to break this particular spell is by screaming at the top of one's lungs!

"Ahhhh why would you do that?" asks Juliet, clapping her hands over her ears. She of course notices no difference.

"Because now I can hear her again," says Sherlock. "Thank you."

"Oh. Okay then."

"Should've warned you," says Amariah apologetically. "So! I can do magic. I'm not as nigh-omnipotent as Stella or Shell Bell now that Stella has shared with her, but I can do some stuff. And I can catch you up on all of us Bells, in case you don't make it to Milliways yourself any time soon, too!"

"I approve of all of that!" replies Juliet. "What all can you do? I bet you have a list."

"I do have a list!" says Amariah, producing her list. "Six of these are just basic blessings with no interactions and no side effects and I can do them all. Then these ones do interact and you can't have the whole set; I have a guess which you'll want but you know more about the situation than I do. And then there are some protective tattoos, which work very well and can go with anything else I know how to do just fine but they hurt to put on for a few seconds. I only know so many because my boyfriend is such a masochist."

(Sherlock grins.)

(Juliet catches that.) "I take it that's why he let you bite him?" she asks.

"You are correct! It was lovely."

"Good for you, hooray consensual biting," says Juliet. "...Wait, you said Shell Bell is...?"

"Shell Bell's dating a girl alt of Sherlock, yeah, but I'm not dating a Sherlock at all - don't seem to have one, or at least haven't run into one outside Milliways. My boyfriend is a duplicate, though, there's three of him dating Bells and one who Stella dislikes so much that she put him on an asteroid," says Amariah. "We're calling the class of them 'Whistles'. They don't have name consistency like we do. Mine is Kas and his daemon's Petaal."

"Ah-huh."

"I'll just get started on the runes for the universally compatible blessings, unless you object," says Amariah, reaching into the bag of "groceries" she brought from Milliways for the tea tree oil.

"No objections here. Er - assuming your magic doesn't have drastic brain-eating consequences or anything? I've been warned away from the local version."

"I'm planning to sacrifice a couple of rats, a live rosemary sprout, and maybe a crow and a seagull depending on which incompatible spells you pick and whether you want the tattoos," says Amariah. "Other than that no harm will come to any living thing, least of all me."

"I have to wonder where you'll get the crow and the seagull," Sherlock muses.

"I was thinking I'd go back out to the graveyard and summon them. If there's none in the nearest half-mile I can substitute pigeons," says Amariah.

"All right."

Juliet looks over the list. "I think I'm going to go with the set you picked out, with one swap. Tempting as this one about falls is. I'm not clumsy anymore," she says. "The opposite since I activated, really. I'll take the faster healing one instead. I already heal fast, but maybe it'll stack."

"Ooh, nice. I'm not clumsy when I'm flying, but I still trip over things on the ground," says Amariah. "It took me ridiculous extra remedial lessons before I was declared not a clan embarrassment with a dagger, and they had to settle for that because there's no way I'm getting up to merely below average." Oil runes are forming as she pours them in a square on the floor of Sherlock's crypt.

"The differences and commonalities between you all are fascinating," says Sherlock.

"Aren't they though? We also talk in our sleep," volunteers Amariah. "Most of us don't find that out for a while, though, someone has to actually be in the room while we're sleeping. And of course Golden doesn't sleep anymore, and Stella doesn't have to although she can if she wants."

"We talk in our sleep? What do we say?"

"Nothing bad. Nothing even related to our dreams. Completely random words, mostly nouns," Amariah reassures her.

"Shell Bell's Sherlock thinks it's adorable," says Amariah, smirking and finishing the runes. "Okay, you stand here, Juliet."

Juliet stands there.

Amariah conjures a handful of oregano with her cornucopia, and tosses it at her double, and mutters the spell. The runes and the oregano disappear.

"I also think it is adorable," Sherlock mentions.

"Of course you do," says Amariah merrily, retrieving from her shopping bag a canister of salt and beginning another diagram.

"So - what kind of a spread are we looking at here, in... Bells?"

"Well, there's me. There's Shell Bell, who's a human from a nasty little dystopia called Panem, but she ran into Stella and got Stella magic and so I imagine she's got the placed all fixed up by now. There's Stella, who has a Whistle called Alice, and she has the most overpowered magic ever, although it has this one eensy drawback - her magic system converts pain into wishes - so it's lucky she's got a Whistle, isn't it, because he's utterly thrilled to help her with that. Stella left notes in the guestbook about one who we're calling Golden who hasn't been by in person yet. Golden's a vampire - not the same kind as you have here, her kind sound like a much better deal all around I have to say - and she's married to a nonduplicate named Edward and they have a kid named Elspeth and she runs a secret vampire empire. I just met Angela today and she's an angel - I mean she literally has great big speckly wings coming out of her back - and she's kind of a personality outlier, kinda sheltered, I feel like she's editing herself farther upstream than the rest of us do. Which makes sense. She lives in a theocracy and she wants the local god to name her the next Archangel. And she grew up in a childhood of useful luxury, so that's as far as her ambition seems to go at the moment, can you imagine?"

"Useful luxury," repeats Juliet. "Yeah. I could see that being a developmental left turn. What does she get to do that's useful?"

"Angels where she's from fly around and pray for weather, or sometimes medicine or seeds, by singing," says Amariah. "The place otherwise has nearly unlivable weather. And she is good at singing. I'm almost surprised she harbors ambitions that go as far up as Archangel, although I'm not sure if the living conditions for the non-angels are quite where she'd like them to be, so there's that."

"What's the significance of useful luxury?" asks Sherlock.

"Okay, think about it," says Amariah. "We are both selfish and altruistic to the point of near-contradiction. Usually, this results in taking over the world. Golden was a revolutionary, I think Shell Bell's going that way too, Stella's going a sort of sideways route by colonizing Mars first, I've got a longer plan underway but it's definitely on the agenda, Juliet's still in the point in the Bell life-cycle where she's collecting resources and not moving forward on world takeover but I bet it sounds pretty good to her too."

"Not gonna deny it."

"Being the benevolent dictator of the world is kind of the pinnacle of useful luxury, altruistic self-interest, power and service. Empress Bellas are comfortable, they are surrounded by people they like who acknowledge that they are in charge, they get to accomplish all kinds of valuable results for their worlds while also getting to wear elaborate crowns to boot. But we've all done this from a starting point of mediocrity. Most of us have divorced parents; Shell Bell's and mine are together, but Shell Bell grew up in oppressive poverty and my parents have this disastrous on-again off-again marriage. We attend public schools that are only adequate judged against other public schools. I've been half in witch culture, which is better - I get to learn magic and fly and stuff, which I'm good at - but there aren't any real affordances for doing things. Experiencing stuff, sure, I can always hop on my cloud pine and see the Taj Mahal or whatever, but doing stuff out in the world? Useful stuff? Fewer obvious routes, so of course I'm going to just claim the entire planet as my own, piecemeal, and declare the entire thing my responsibility. But Angela..." Amariah shakes her head. "Angela's parents are happily married. She never had to move or split herself between cultures or summer at one parents' house and spend the rest of the year at the others. She has friends, close friends, who she's known since she was born. She's high-status and she can fly and sing and all anyone wants from her is for her to fly and sing. Her god has more to say on the subject of how to live a good life than any of my goddesses do, so she's got an absorbing self-improvement project. She was born with everything she needed to ascend to the highest political office of her land and all she has to do is something she's good at, something she enjoys, something that visibly helps people who need it, under the direction of people she respects. I'm not surprised she wants to be Archangel, but I'm also not surprised she doesn't aspire beyond the standard-issue twenty-year term after the current Archangel is good and done with his."

"World conquest. Oh, what fun," says Sherlock. "Don't tell the Watchers; they'll have kittens."

"Mum's the word. I'm not even at that point in my life-cycle yet," snorts Juliet.

"That just makes you sound like some manner of insect," he says. "A monarch butterfly, perhaps."

Juliet cracks up.

"There's no analogous period spent in the chrysalis," laughs Amariah. "It's a smooth transition from caterbella to bellafly."

...Sherlock cracks up.

Amariah, meanwhile, has finished her next diagram. She summons a rat; rats are not in short enough supply for this to take very long, and when it scurries up to her she seizes it, pulls her dagger, and speaks another poem before stabbing it through.

"If you two are going to be occupied with this for some time, I think I will go and fetch some tea," says Sherlock. "Please don't get eaten while I'm gone; I would be terribly disappointed."

"You said fire works? I can do fire if anyone besides you barges in," Amariah says.

Juliet picks up her laser pointer out of her messenger bag, tosses and catches it, and says, "You go ahead."

He grins at both of them and exits the crypt.

"I have no grounds for flipping. It's not like I'm dating him," says Juliet.

"Oh, I know, but he liked you first, and I bet you like him even if you haven't decided to act on it so far, and while obviously we can do nonexclusivity just fine if we want to it doesn't come standard with being a Bell. So I wanted to make sure you had a minute to process first. Whistles don't come in monogamous; I don't know if Sherlocks do, but it's not default, at least."

"He's back," says Path.

"Yes, with exquisite timing as always," he says, dropping into the hidden room to deposit his stolen tea. "Should I go away again?"

"Not especially," says Juliet. "They're just going on my shoulderblades, I don't even have to take my shirt all the way off as long as it's hiked up in back and held out of the way."

"In that case, I think I'll make some tea," says Sherlock. "Sorry, you can't have any, there's only the one mug."

"Mug of oolong tea," Amariah says, amused, and one appears, floating before her and steaming gently. She takes it from the air, sips, sets it down, and returns to mixing her bayleaf ink for the first of several planned tattoos.

"Cheat," he accuses fondly.

"Cheating is excellent," returns Amariah. "Juliet, lie down, shirt out of the way - idiotic nudity taboos, does it help that he's seen me naked already? no? all right then -" and when Juliet's shirt is out of the way she begins to paint.

"Whatever else you were going to say before he came back from his tea run I don't particularly care if you say it in front of him," says Juliet.

"I was going to add that he comes highly recommended," says Amariah, painting the stem, "but otherwise I said everything I was going to."

"And I heard all of it from when you mentioned that we slept together," he says, "in case anyone was harbouring illusions on that front."

"Thank you," says Juliet.

Juliet hisses when the ink sinks in, but she does hold still.

Juliet endures four more tattoos, lined up rather attractively from shoulderblade to shoulderblade and well under the neckline of all her shirts. Finally they're all done; she sits up.

"Congratulations on your increased likelihood of living past twenty," says Sherlock.

"Thanks."

"I can put a few spells on your house, too, if you want them," says Amariah. "Probably a good idea to wait until Charlie's at work, though. Walking down the street in a weird outfit is one thing, drizzling substances on the carpet and killing pigeons is another."

"And he would be likely to find you confusing. Although at least he probably won't shoot you."

"...Did he shoot you? Why, what were you doing?"

"He was outnumbered by a mob of demons. I killed most of them and scared off the rest."

"Yes, I imagine he would find that alarming."

"I calmed him down after and there has been no further gunplay," says Juliet.

Sherlock snorts.

"You mentioned dagger training. Are you good enough to give me a run for my money so I can get in some practice against two people who don't actually want to kill me at the same time? I'm worried I'm going to fixate on combat patterns that only work for a single opponent and not for a single opponent and their friends and cousins and neighbors too."

"I don't know about an actual run for your money, but I can brandish it threateningly at you if that would help somehow," says Amariah.

"Now that sounds like fun."

"And since I'm not actually good with it, just capable of not cutting off my own fingers, I guess I won't have to worry about getting past you and hurting you, but are you going to be at risk of hurting me? If you're still learning, do you know how to pull your punches? I can do healing spells on myself if it comes to that, but only if I'm conscious and I have an intact trachea to recite verse and so on..."

"That is a risk," admits Juliet. "I don't really have to pull my punches with Sherlock; he's more durable than that. And I don't want to, like, embed a habit of punch-pulling. Sherlock, do you think it would be long-term disadvantageous to have a habit of engaging a primary opponent one at a time and only dodge the next person until the first one is down? Because if that's something reasonable to aim at, Amariah can weave around and be stabby and I can take you down while trying not to get stabbed?"

"It might do you good to have an option of pulling your punches, if you can separate that from the rest of the programming. It's not inconceivable that you may someday have to fight a human who is intent on harming you, yet prefer to leave them alive. As for the dodging... it is not the only good way to engage a group, but it is one such way." He quirks a smile. "Really, what you need is four of me. Perhaps I should advertise in the dimensional hub."

Amariah raises her hand. "I'd like to point out that there are also nonhumans worth leaving alive."

"I can already sort of feed the programming goals, including don't hit that person too hard - I'm just not sure any of the progamming knows how strong I am or how much an unenhanced person can take. D'you think other yous would want to participate even if you could find several of them all at once? Especially if they're not vampires, especially if they come from worlds similar enough to have literally been scared of turning into you? Do worlds even cluster that close together?" Juliet asks, directing the last question at Amariah.

"That does sound like our world," Sherlock agrees.

"You don't appear to be an asshole," Amariah says. "Do you eat people? I'm not sure biting and leaving them alive and well like with Kas counts as eating them. More like tasting. Say, was he tasty?"

"Yes he was," Sherlock says cheerfully. "In the vast majority of cases, turning into a vampire does make someone much nastier than they previously were. I am, as ever, an outlier. And I did eat people for a while, but it's not a sufficient draw to be worth how much it will piss off Juliet, so I stopped."

"Were you at least choosy about it? Golden's husband reportedly used to eat people, but he can read minds, so he only ate bad people."

"She married a guy who can read minds?"

"Well, he can't read her, unless she tries really hard to let him," says Amariah. "Stella makes it sound like at this point he's her glorified radio."

"I only ate boring people," he offers. "That is probably not the kind of choosy you meant."

"Nope, that is not what I had in mind. Oh well. Shell Bell's Sherlock killed twenty approximately innocent people on live national television. My Whistle killed some nasty individuals, even. Also, I assassinated Shell Bell's former president for her, he was bad news." Pause. "Actually, I think he was an alt of someone the other other Sherlock and Tony knew? I wasn't there, but I think they brought him to Milliways with them and then sent him home after Shell Bell screamed and drew her fire wand on him."

"...If that's who I'm thinking of, I've killed one of him too," Sherlock reports with excessive cheer.

"Well, the President's name was Coriolanus Snow, but I don't think they matched and I don't remember the other one's name," says Amariah. "I might recognize it...?"

"Obadiah Stane."

"Yeah, that was it. Shell Bell seemed to think that other Tony liked him but hers emphatically didn't and neither of the other Sherlocks did."

"Anyway, all this talk of who everyone has killed - I'm at twenty-one miscellaneous vampires and I don't have their names - isn't answering the question of whether otherworldly Sherlocks would be willing or able to be helpful even if accumulated in sufficient quantity," says Juliet.

"Any Sherlock from a world like ours would be delighted to train up a Vampire Slayer, especially one as brilliant as you. They might have some trouble fitting me into the picture, but perhaps not as much as they'd think."

"Shell Bell's would probably help if Shell Bell asked her to," puts in Amariah. "They're adorable. You have no idea how adorable."

"We'll see who we can scare up after someone finds a door to send you home through, then," says Juliet. "...How long is that likely to take?"

"Not sure," says Amariah. "I mean, Sherlock found the door once and I haven't found it myself before and neither have you, so he's the most likely to find it again but we don't have a good idea of frequency; we should have some way set up for him to be able to notify me when he does run into it. I can work something out with a saltwater charm if you don't have phones or mine turns out not to get service here. I'm happy to hang out for a while if I have to. I'm not getting meaningfully older, I have a project to work on that could easily take me a year, I'd miss Kas if it took a long time but he routinely fucks off for months on his own anyway, I'm willing to sleep in a hammock hanging from my cloud-pine in the sky, I have a cornucopia so I won't even be relying on you guys for food."

"If you wind up staying here for months I will be so tempted to loan you my clothes and ask you to attend school instead of me," says Juliet.

"Eh, you probably don't really want to do that, I won't recognize your acquaintances or remember what you've been doing in class, and besides, I dropped completely out of my rather haphazard attendance at human school when I was fifteen," says Amariah.

"I do not, in fact, have a phone," says Sherlock.

"Saltwater charms it is. You have a pulse, right?"

"No."

"...Do you breathe?"

"Optionally."

"Okay, then this is complicated but not impossible, I'll add a motion component and you can breathe in Morse code or something to alert me if you find a door. I can find you with a divination if I don't know where you are."

"...How would it have worked if I did have a pulse?"

"I'd put the charm on your wrist or the inside of your elbow, and you'd press on the relevant vein just enough to slow it down, and my copy of the charm would inform me then. These are originally designed to notify people if the other party dies, but you can modify them for more purposeful communication," she says, and she tells her cornucopia to give her salt and a cup of water.

"I see. Fascinating."

"Magic is great! What's the stuff around here like?" Amariah murmurs the thickening charm. She takes the liberty of touching Sherlock's chin so she can tilt his head back to paint over his airway, so the charm will be able to pick up on whether and when he breathes. "Also which way is north from here?"

"I'm not sure yet. Mr. Giles sort of agreed to teach me, but he seems to think it's terribly, desperately dangerous," says Juliet. "I haven't been able to get anything out of a book to work. North is that way, I think." She points.

"Mr. Giles may be exhibiting his crust, but to a certain extent he's right," says Sherlock. "It's fairly well accepted in some circles that merely being a habitual magic user makes you tend to attract supernatural hazards. Of course, in those same circles it's fairly well accepted that being the Slayer has the same effect at ten or a hundred times the magnitude, so if Mr. Giles were operating with all the facts he might have a different recommendation. And then again, I've never heard of a Slayer who was also a witch, so there may be some traditional or actual barrier in effect there."

"What do the spells around here look like? If you've gotten as far as noting that things out of books don't work..."

"Oh, the ones I've found with stuff that seemed benign and didn't require locust wings prepared under the seventh moon of a prime-numbered lunar year or some crap like that all go like, 'Divine Hecate, behold my will, grant me this boon' and so on and so on."

"...And," says Amariah, "can divine Hecate in fact behold your will? Or is it, say - opaque?"

"...good question," says Juliet. "But I heard you invoking all sorts of goddesses."

"I've got mental opacity, but it comes from a birth blessing from a witch goddess," says Amariah. "I don't think they locked themselves out when they gave it to me. And my spells are more descriptive than 'behold my will', anyway."

"Well, that's hilarious," says Sherlock.

"It's annoying," exclaims Juliet. "Now I have to find a completely unrelated school of magic. I think they must exist - some of the nasty curses don't open with anything inviting deities to behold my will so obviously I didn't try those - but wow. Wow."

"It's hilariously annoying," he maintains.

"Okay, fine. So yours is a birth blessing - I wonder where mine comes from?"

"Stella and Golden's worlds both just have people with innate powers crop up sometimes, so Stella's an 'ingot' and Golden's a - well, they call them 'witches' apparently, but it's not the same thing as me. Angela doesn't think she has it at all, and Shell Bell knows she didn't before she met Stella and got magic loot. I don't know about you."

"Do you know exactly which parts of the Slayer package you're missing?" he inquires.

"I have no supernatural senses, and a Power That Is had to visit me in person to wonder why I wasn't slaying anything yet and wanted to know why I hadn't gotten its dreams," reports Juliet. "If there's more, I don't know enough to know it's missing."

"You clearly do have all the physical upgrades, and the battle instincts. That part is interesting. Why that and not the senses, I wonder?"

"Stella wrote that Golden's 'witchcraft' let her daughter communicate with her until her daughter tried to send useful information in a quantity that would have been incapacitating for a while," volunteers Amariah. "Stella was briefly worried that when her Whistle got a brain upgrade, her mindreading would stop working if she didn't boost herself to match because it would've been overwhelming. Are the senses or the dreams - unpleasant? Do they interfere with other stuff? I bet the battle instincts only come up when you're in a fight and then they'd be a strict improvement over whatever you started with."

"I don't know if they're unpleasant, I never had them," Juliet points out. "I imagine they could be. The Slayer package wasn't really designed for my well-being."

"The official Watcherly term for a Slayer's supernaturally acquired dreams is 'the nightmares'," says Sherlock. "So there's that."

"Oh. Yes, I do imagine I'd find that unpleasant."

"And if the idea is for you to kill vampires and such I don't imagine supernaturally sensing them would be a gentle breezy sensation or patterns of dots on a magic heads-up display," comments Amariah.

Sherlock snorts.

"Okay, this is if nothing else a reasonable working hypothesis for why I can't cast spells I've tried and why half the Slayer properties didn't stick to me, but I still don't know where the original opacity came from," says Juliet. "Sherlock, do you know anything about - random magical powers people sometimes have? Is that a thing?"

He shrugs. "It's a vague rumour, at any rate. Doesn't seem to happen very frequently."

"But you've heard of it - what can other people do?"

"Visions of the future. Telekinesis."

"Those are cool," says Juliet. "On balance I think I'll stick with mine, though, I don't want nightmares or for magic to eat my brain or anything."

"Yes, magic eating your brain would be a tragic loss."

"I'd really object," says Juliet, nodding. "Maybe Mr. Giles will be able to help me find something that does work. He did pretty much agree to teach me in between all the dire warnings."

"Let us hope," agrees Sherlock.

When Juliet's done for the night, Amariah gives Sherlock a hug, and then casts the quick verse-and-parsley notice-me-not spell so that she won't attract attention from bad guys, nosy neighbors, or Charlie. She walks home with Juliet and parks her cloud-pine, its hammock, and herself outside her alt's window.

"That's more than I expected," he says as he reclaims them. "Considering the depth of your note-taking."

"I read pretty quickly," says Juliet. "You can look over my notes on them if you want proof they got read, or something."

"I don't plan to be that kind of teacher," he says, with what might be a vestige of a smile.

"What kind of teacher do you plan to be?" she inquires.

(Amariah, meanwhile, is reading through one of the books. Reading a book in a library is not unusual enough to break the spell, and she'll put it right back when Giles reaches for it.)

"I have no idea," he admits. "Well, I have some idea. But 'not that kind' isn't much of an answer."

"It's not. Do you have an idea where we're going to start? Or are you stalling for time with the huge stack of demonological texts?"

"The huge stack of demonological texts is full of crucial, valuable information," he says. "...And yes."

"It depends," he says. "Any spell that invokes a deity or demon—the difference isn't always perfectly clear—runs some risk of the named entity, ah, failing to cooperate. The results of that can be catastrophic, depending on whose attention you caught and how powerful and capricious they might be. Some spells, especially powerful ones, can backfire on the caster if done improperly. And magical artifacts of various kinds can have unpredictable effects. In general, no, magic doesn't do anything unless someone somewhere was trying to use it."

"A lot of the spells I saw invoked deities-or-demons - they're basically the same, really? - but that just pushes the question of how the magic works back one step farther. Do the deities-or-demons do their own magic when no one's bothering them to do someone else's? And what's this about artifacts, let's hear about artifacts," says Juliet.

"Some do; some don't. If you want to know about them, or about artifacts, I can give you more books."

"I would like that," says Juliet decisively.

He smiles tentatively and retreats behind the counter to haul out another armful from his personal collection.

"Did you expect me to need those?" Juliet asks. "For that matter, why did you bring your personal demonology collection, yesterday?"

"I always bring my personal demonology collection," he says.

"To school with you?" Bella asks. "In case a demon attacks you and this is a problem that can best be solved by available reference books?"

"You never know when you might need a cross-reference," he says with dignity.

"Maybe you can read these beautifully illuminated page numbers more easily than I can," she says. "Say, how did you get all these books? Where do demonology books even come from?"

"Private collections," he says. "And, apparently, the Sunnydale High school library."

"Whose private collections? Are you obtaining books from people who are..." She attempts his accent. "Evil in some way?"

He gives her a disapproving look over his glasses.

"Perhaps I should have gone with my first explanation," he says. "Sometimes, when two demonology texts love each other very much..."

Juliet cracks up. "You know, at this point, that explanation for at least a handful of them wouldn't floor me? But seriously, who's collecting these things, who's writing them?"

"Demonologists write them," he says. "And collect them. And occasionally give them up to other collectors, or researchers, or I don't know who else. If it's any consolation, I can't tell you where I found most of the mundane books on my shelves, either."

"How do people wind up being demonologists? Is that the sort of field you can fall into? Perhaps literally - is there a secret demonology department down in a cellar at UC Sunnydale and if you trip in the right place they offer you a scholarship?"

"I can't think of a demonology book off the top of my head that was published in the last four centuries," he says. "So if there is such a department, I'm not who you want to ask about it."

"That explains the archaic language. Lucky I'm up on my Shakespeare and so on," says Juliet.

"Yes, that is lucky," he agrees. "I have relatively recent translations for most of the older and more obscure texts, but if you want to make a serious study of demonology—or magic, for that matter—I recommend learning Latin."

"Is there a Latin class here that I should switch into from Spanish or am I looking at self-study if I go that route?"

"There is a Latin class! I even have the forms," he says. "Would you like some forms? I'm very proud of my forms."

"I would be perfectly happy to switch to Latin from Spanish as long as there's a low-level section available and I won't be flailing in bewilderment," snorts Juliet.

"Fear not," he says, and he produces a form.

Juliet accepts the form. She fills it out. "Do I give this back to you or do I have to turn it in to the registrar or something?"

"The latter," he says. "As a mere librarian I am not empowered to ferry your documents through the bureaucracy."

"Magic," he calls after her, laughing.

"A common complaint," says Mr. Giles.

"Oh well, I was no great shakes at Spanish, and I bet I know someone who'll help me out if I get stuck on Latin," Juliet says, winking.

Amariah decides to take advantage of her unnoticeability and peer behind the desk, where Giles keeps his personal stash of books. She doesn't walk around behind the counter, but she can lean on it and dangle her hand over, with Path clinging to it, and he can read the titles.

"Is it possible to accidentally do spells that way, really?" asks Juliet. "Can you accidentally do spells in other languages?"

"I can accidentally do spells in any language if I speak it in verse and it's clear enough that it's aimed at an effect," comments Amariah, pulling Path back up and putting him on her shoulder again. "I wasn't allowed to read Shakespeare aloud in school."

"It's closer to accidentally activating an artifact than accidentally doing a spell," he says. "A book of magic, or a book about magic, will tend to get... suggestible... with age. And Latin for some reason seems to be particularly, er, suggestive. So combining the two can have unpredictable effects."

"Ask him if it's only speaking or if writing Latin has the same problem," says Amariah.

"Does writing Latin have the same problem? In my own notebooks, or in the - I promise it's not going to happen - event that someone wrote Latin margin notes in one of these?"

"It is, I wouldn't write in old books," promises Juliet. "Should be fine even if I'm telling the Latin teacher I'm a fantasy nerd and doing all my homework exercises about magic to cement specialized vocabulary?"

"I wish I could get my spells to work in writing. Not just automatically, but if I could write them in special ink, maybe, it'd be easier than reciting whole poems. Oh well," says Amariah.

Amariah gets a brief glance and a smile, though Juliet doesn't otherwise acknowledge her presence.

"As long as you don't mix the Latin and the old books, yes."

"Are the books self-aware or anything? Because that would be weird."

"And you'd have to be even more careful with them," comments Amariah.

"And, not that I'm not being careful with your books, but there's 'valuable possession' and there's 'maybe a person' on the scale of whether I can put it in my backpack or not," says Juliet.

"Well, I sometimes sit in my Isabella's bag, if she's flying quickly and I can't keep up or hold on to her as usual," Path says. (He's just as covered as Amariah by the notice-me-not spell.) "Backpacks aren't so bad."

"The books are not self-aware," he assures her.

"How can you be sure?" Juliet asks.

"I can try to whip up a spell to check for it if he doesn't have a good answer, although I don't think I'd better cast it while there's someone in the room, it might break my notice-me-not," Amariah says.

Juliet attempts to disguise her nod as a roll of her neck.

"I have never heard of a book becoming self-aware. I have heard of possessed books, but even those did not have actual awareness except as lent to them by their demonic residents. And none of my books are possessed."

"Do you check for possession on the first Wednesday of each month?" Juliet snickers.

"Just because he hasn't heard of it happening any other way... I'm going to go ahead and whip up at least a verse-and-herb for it when we go back to your house," Amariah says. "Don't nod again, he'll notice you're acting funny."

He removes his glasses, cleans them, and puts them back on.

"You weren't kidding about him having nervous habits," snorts Amariah. She sits down and goes back to looking through Juliet's books.

Juliet doesn't answer aloud, just goes back to her own reading and notetaking.

"Would you mind answering a question for me?"

"What is it?" Juliet asks, twisting around in her chair.

"You can see me?" demands Amariah. Not loud enough to break the spell; someone else might walk in.

Juliet holds very still and waits for Mr. Giles to answer Amariah's question.

"I have no idea what you just said," he says in Amariah's direction.

"...But you can tell that she's there and that she said something," Juliet says slowly.

"I'm sure I cast the spell right. I'm sure," exclaims Amariah. "I was following you around all day, no one saw me -"

"Yes," he says. "Should I not be able to? Who is it? It seems to me that if you know someone who can summon invisibility that well, you have no business applying to a, a dusty old librarian for lessons in magic."

"Is there somewhere less - accessible - we can go so she can take the spell off and we can explain?" Juliet says. "Your office maybe?"

"I don't have one," he says.

"Do people ever come in here after hours besides me...? I guess I'd know better than you would, I've been here longer. Okay. Amariah, do you know any kind of spell to - you know what, nevermind, this is Sunnydale and everyone here has their certificate in advanced rationalization. But please don't break your notice-me-not by screaming this time. Do something else."

"Don't touch the owl," Amariah adds. (This has become its own word, all strung together, she's been in Milliways warning people away from her daemon enough now.) "Um, so, I'm an alternate of the Bella you know from another dimension. I can't teach her magic because my kind only works for my species, but I came here to help her out by casting a few blessings on her, and now I'm hanging around until I can get back home."

"It's... good to meet you," he says cautiously. "How do you two... know each other?"

"Okay, I'll spare your librarian's sensibilities and omit the fine details," snorts Amariah. (This is code for okay, I won't.) "But in the non-fine-details department - the interdimesional hub collects alts of lots of people. I've met three others of us and heard about a couple more beyond that. This isn't even the first one I've visited at home."

"My sensibilities are very grateful," says Mr. Giles. "I've never heard of this interdimensional hub, but I'm well aware I don't know everything."

"If you ever open a door and it appears to lead to a bar, instead of whatever you were expecting," says Amariah, "that's probably Milliways. Right now, no time is passing in my home world at all. When me or Juliet finds a door back in, I'll just visit the room our template shares to make some notes in the guestbook and let myself out, and my boyfriend'll be waiting for me at home like no time has passed."

"That sounds convenient," he remarks.

"It is! So that's what I'm here and why I was following - well, we can just call her Bella, since there's only two of us and I don't even go by that when I'm home. She can see through my notice-me-not just fine. How did you do it, though?"

"I have no idea," he admits.

"Do you have some kind of anti-mind-affecting-magic artifact or something?" asks Juliet.

"...No..." he says slowly.

"Nobody else saw her, or at least reacted to her, and she's been following me around all day," Juliet says. "There must be something up with you."

"Yeah, we know why Bella can see me. Shell Bell or Stella or Golden would've been able to, too," says Amariah. "But you're unexplained. If there's a hole in the spell I should work out something heavier-duty or just find someplace to hide out instead of accompanying her."

"That might be true," says Mr. Giles.

"Well, I could go sit up on a bookshelf and she could recast, and you could see if my Isabella is less noticeable that way," Path suggests.

"Does it not make a difference whether or not I expect her to be there?"

"I'll recast, leave the room, and come back without Path and you say when you think I've done that," decides Amariah. "If you can tell, then it's not him. Dried parsley," she says. She takes the parsley handful from the air, tosses it, and mutters her non-English spell. Then she lets herself out, Path finds someplace out of the way to sit for a few moments, and, after a minute's wait, Amariah walks back in alone.

Juliet studiously refrains from reacting to any of this after the spell is cast.

"Hello again," he says without missing a beat, as soon as she walks in.

"Rats, that's not it then," says Amariah. She holds the door open and Path flies to her arm and she pokes Giles again to break the spell so he'll be able to converse with her unimpeded. "Do you have any ongoing magical - properties?" she asks. "Do you care if I invent a verse-and-herb to check for it if you don't know? My kind of magic is perfectly safe unless I don't want it to be."

"...I won't ask you not to," he says, looking slightly uncomfortable.

"She cast like a dozen things on my yesterday evening," says Juliet. "They all worked exactly like she said they would."

Something glows through his sleeve.

"Can I have a closer look at your left arm before this wears off?" Amariah asks.

He takes off his glasses and rubs the bridge of his nose. "I would rather you didn't."

"Why, what is it?" asks Juliet.

"One of the hazards of working magic," he says. "Particularly, of working magic while young and stupid."

"It... seems to have given you a superpower, so what are the dire and ooky drawbacks?"

"I'm sorry," says Juliet.

"Damn, I wish I could teach my witchcraft," murmurs Amariah, picking up Path from her shoulder and petting his feathers. "Much better deal - what were you doing, then, if you'll talk about it?"

"Summoning a demon to get high." He puts his glasses back on. "And I am now done talking about it."

"I'm really sorry about your friend," says Juliet.

"How in the world does summoning a - right, done talking about it, right," says Amariah. "Well, now we know why you can see me through the notice-me-not and it's not going to be common, I imagine. I hope."

"There are perhaps four other people alive who share this distinction," he says with a gesture indicating the upper part of his left arm, "and last I saw any of them was in London."

"Sunnydale is in California," Juliet supplies to Amariah before Amariah can ask.

"So not near London, then. Okay. Existing precautions adequate."

"Glad that's settled," mutters Giles.

"...I promise never to do any magic that's primarily motivated by recreational psychological side effects," volunteers Juliet tentatively.

"Thank you," he says, looking away.

Right. Done talking about it. Books and notetaking and setting a timer on her phone to get home before curfew.

Amariah works alongside her. They take such similar notes, there's no reason not to divide the work.

Giles watches them with a certain amount of curiosity. Dimensional alternates is new.

"...Do you want to quiz me about my home dimension, or something?" Amariah offers. "I mean, I can also take notes, but she's got to read them to know the contents anyway, it doesn't save as much time as it looks like."

"...You've mentioned that your magic isn't teachable," he says. "How did you come by it?"

"I'm a witch. It's a species where I come from. Sort of, I mean - witches are all women, if we're going to make more witches we pretty much have to find mortals to cooperate, so my dad is just a human. Our sons are mortal, our daughters are witches. I've been doing simple nursery-rhyme level spells since I could talk, although I didn't start learning systematically until I could fly." She has her cloud-pine with her; there's enough scary stuff in this town that she wants to be able to put Juliet on it as a passenger and zoom out of wherever she's at at two hundred miles an hour without having to retrieve it from somewhere. She gestures with the branch. "When I was not quite six."

"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.

"I'm beginning to see that," Giles agrees.

"Bella's always home at sundown, and I'm trying to stick with her, because my phone is from 2013 in another world and does not get service here and I want to know if she finds a door to Milliways," says Amariah. "Should I run and get the ingredients for spells to be added to your person, or would you rather set up a time to do that some other place than the school library?"

"...The latter is probably the wiser course," he says.

"Okay. I'll bring the stuff tomorrow; do you have to stay here until a certain time or can we go to your house after school or something? Bella's place won't do, there's always the risk that her dad will be home earlier than expected."

"No one ever visits my house unexpectedly," he says wryly. "And I can leave as soon as school lets out."

"So you've just been sticking around for my charming company?" asks Juliet impishly.

"Not when you put it like that," he says.

Amariah laughs.

"Oh, sorry. You've been -" cough, fake English accent - "making yourself available for a student with an interest in extracurriculuars in which you have some expertise you are willing to share?" She cleans a pair of imaginary glasses and grins.

Juliet hums to herself and writes a half-word of further notes before her phone goes off. "Time to head home," she says, putting her pen down and packing up. "See you tomorrow, Mr. Giles!"

Amariah parks her cloud-pine in mid-air, sits on it, and follows Juliet.

Mr. Giles watches them leave, shaking his head slowly.

Whoops! Amariah almost forgot to renew her notice-me-not again. She pauses to redo that before leaving the library, and then catches up.

Juliet is home at exactly the right time to put Sherlock's blood for the night in the microwave. Meanwhile, Amariah hovers fifteen feet off the ground, in case any nasties come out in the falling dark.

"Mr. Giles, when he was young and stupid, used to indulge in demon-summoning for recreational psychological effects, and this left him with something on his arm that let him see partway through Amariah's notice-me-not and also a dead friend," reports Juliet, handing over the blood and bending her head to breathe through the fabric of her t-shirt sleeve. "So we had to explain her, but at least he didn't curse first and ask questions later. He wanted to know who or what he, she, or it was and whether we were on good terms."

"What, a history of recreational demon-summoning? I suppose it's lively except insofar as it wound up being anti-lively," says Juliet. "I promised him never to use magic primarily for recreational psychological effects. I half-suspect I couldn't even obtain same, actually, but even if I could it'd be a trivial promise, I am apparently less reckless than Mr. Giles was at my age."

"And tomorrow after school we're going to his house and I'm going to load him up with some of the same protections Juliet got. Oh, and we managed to explain my presence without reference to you, Sherlock - he's not supposed to know about you, I take it?"

"I am a vampire. He is part of an organization dedicated to exterminating us. It would probably be unwise to mention me around him."

"I'm not sure if that will be long-term viable," says Juliet, hefting her messenger bag and starting down the sidewalk. "Is there some set of criteria he could meet such that it'd be okay to reveal you, or are we just going with he-can-never-know! until that falls apart or I stop interacting with him for some reason? Or I could introduce you to him and react to any suspicion by rolling my eyes and suggesting offering you a glass of water with a drop of blood in it. Hide you in plain sight, like."

"Let's say that he can know about me only after he knows you're the Slayer, and only if he seems sufficiently reasonable under those circumstances to deal with the revelation without throwing a fit."

"Okay. I'm hanging on to the Slayer stuff until I learn about his - well, not his day job, librarian is his day job, but until he tells me about his side project, so to speak."

"He was very reasonable about me," says Amariah optimistically. "Took the explanation pretty much at face value, let me cast a divination on him to see why he could see me, wasn't hostile or anything. Even though I'm pretty far-out. Am I less far-out than a non-asshole vampire?"

"Much less."

"To be more exact, he has fewer prejudices about extradimensional witch alts than he does about local vampires," says Juliet. "I think that he could tell that you were there, and that was enough for him to tell that I could tell you were there, but he didn't know what you were, just that I was not alarmed - and there are more nasty things than benign things to explain any given weirdness, but benign explanations aren't as unheard of as nice vampires."

"As the lady says," Sherlock agrees.

"I wonder what it would look like if someone with a daemon was turned into the local vampire sort," muses Amariah. "Not enough to try it, not near enough, but I wonder."

"Yes, I advise you to continue wondering," says Sherlock.

"Believe me, even apart from my basic interest in preserving my personality, I'm especially sensitive to the possibility that it'd hurt Path," says Amariah soberly.

Juliet's heard this story - Amariah's been following her around all day, inaudible to everyone around them, she has all the highlights by now. She nods.

"I expect that it would," he says softly.

There's the crypt! Combat practice time. Juliet ramps up to two-minute sequences, bolstered by all her new blessings, but sometimes they don't last that long due to repeated enactments of Sherlock, Meet Wall, or sometimes Sherlock, Meet Floor With The Slayer Sitting On You Bending Your Arms In Ways They Are Not Supposed To Bend.

Amariah has nothing to contribute tonight; she works on movement-based spells, dancing around experimentally in another section of the crypt.

It is all great fun.