"I can cook," he confirms. "I can, if you so desire, bake you cakes."

"I may desire to be baked cakes. I guess this place has cake-baking facilities, or at least the outlets for stuff if they stripped the place of ovens and so on before the bakery closed."

"Then cakes there shall be. Someday. When we have refurnished the kitchen."

"If you like, I'm not going to complain. I'd find it disappointing to bake a cake I couldn't have any of, but maybe that's just me."

"The joy of baking a cake and the joy of eating it are separate things, and the latter being closed to me forever, I won't miss it any more if I indulge the former."

"If you ever find a mint who wasn't silly enough to get caught in Milliways with no big coins," says Shell Bell, "and don't need to hoard squares anymore, you could probably fix that."

"And all kinds of other inconvenient vampiric side effects. And possibly being a vampire at all, if you wanted," says Juliet.

"On the whole," he says, "I rather like being a vampire. But I'd prefer not to be such a flammable one, if I had the option."

"What d'you like about it?"

"All my misery is circumstantial," he says, "instead of being a fundamental aspect of my personality. And the superpowers are nice, too."

"You could substitute all the perks with minting. Of course, I'm assuming you won't want to treat those size coins like they're scarce, whereas that would be your prerogative if we wound up falling into the same pattern as the other minty Bells."

"Likewise I could patch the drawbacks," he points out.

"Fair enough. You just didn't want to be a vampire in the first place and seem to find much of it irritating, it wasn't obvious that you liked it as a baseline from which to make improvements instead of a mixed bag from which you'd like to take some interesting toys and otherwise and go home to what you were before."

"If I get my soul back, I expect to become a much less cheerful person."

"Why?"

"Because in addition to all my previous doubts about my worth as a person, I will also start to care about all the people I have killed."

"Mine had to kill twenty people on live national television," murmurs Shell Bell. "She is very sad about it sometimes."

"Is that how souls work?" muses Juliet. "I mean - I'd expect there to be some of that but - Golden's vampires don't undergo a personality change, before she took over most of them ate people anyway 'cause people are just so darned yummy, now they don't anymore because she's in charge, I don't think there was an epidemic of guilt about it..."

"Well, Golden's vampires aren't me," says Sherlock.

"I'm aware. You wouldn't be a suitable sparring partner if you were one of those. Golden let me punch her in the face just to see and she just stood there, didn't flinch or anything, and I needed a square to fix my hand." This is an attempt at levity. It doesn't work very well. "Well. You seem to be pretty good at not-killing-people without being plagued by conscience. But I'm kind of worried about what happens if something happens to me, before we find someone to mint me, if I'm not fast enough, if I walk into the wrong nest or start doing magic and try the wrong spell or - whatever. I'm being your external not-killing-people module, last I heard. Maybe Jarvis'll substitute if called for."

"Jarvis will not need to do anything to keep me from killing people. He will merely need to exist."

"And yet," says Juliet, "it is not strictly impossible for him to stop doing that, again."

"And with both of you dead, assuming I don't give up and kill myself, I will probably go back to eating people," says Sherlock. "Is there a reason you particularly care?"

"Well," says Juliet, "yes, as those scenarios all seem to include more death than originally postulated."

"You could go into Milliways and wait there," says Shell Bell. "I don't think my Sherlock or my Tony would mind if I brought you home so you wouldn't be lonely. I don't know about the other pair, or any others that might wander around the multiverse, but if you waited for me and mine I could give you a place to go."