"One of me did wait until she was twenty-three, but she had a bit of a setback with the previous rulers of her world, she didn't have such nice magic to work with," says Bell. "And if you'd said that to her, given that she still looks seventeen, she'd raise one eyebrow like so -" Bell demonstrates - "and say that she's in her forties, so you've only made a lucky guess that I am in fact nineteen as of recently. So what? I'm doing a dramatically better job than the last dictator. He was evil. He propped up a system that had teenagers killing each other on live national television for populace-quelling and fun and profit. Your alt was on the show, so was his sister, they both won but they had to kill all the other contestants to get out alive."

"Yeah. I wasn't on it, I got picked in the lottery once but my district had this system to train particularly - likely-looking kids to go, so everyone else would be safe and they'd have a reasonable shot," shrugs Bell. "But anyway. I'm glad I didn't wait to take over the world until I was the right age for an empress. I was ready to do it when I was thirteen, if I'd had what I needed then. I probably could've done it younger, but thirteen is when people started recognizing me in Milliways and saying I looked like any of various Her Majesties, and then I knew I could."

"That is a shit deal," he says.

"Yep." She pauses. "I wonder if you have an alt of the last president here, too. There were two other worlds that had yous in them and also had hims. You never cloned yourself, did you? In my world you've got a twin, she's called Sherlock, but in the others you clone yourself when you're twelve and get alts of Sherlock instead, only mine's the only one who's a girl."

"...No," he says, looking at her a little strangely, "I have never cloned myself."

"Did you even think about it? But anyway, clearly alts don't all come together since you haven't got a Sherlock - I've met a Sherlock without a Tony but he had one originally, his died and his Jarvis too but then another Jarvis copied and another Tony installed the copy in his world so he'd at least have him, he was a wreck about it, the matched sets are all really close... Anyway, the last president of my world was named Coriolanus Snow but he had a different name in the other two worlds, Obadiah Stane."

"We had one of those," says Tony, with a closed-off tone and expression.

"You got rid of him? Good. They're trouble. In at least two worlds he killed your parents."

"In this one," Tony says flatly, "he almost killed me."

"In another world he actually did kill you, and Jarvis, and turn Sherlock into a vampire, and in mine there was the whole being an evil dictator and also really fucking creepy prostitution backroom deals, and yeah, it's a bad-news template. But hey, all the ones I know about are gone now. What's the thing in your chest?"

"What's it for?"

"Keeping me alive," he says, lightly, like a brush-off. Except not at all.

"...D'you want me to fix whatever it's protecting you from?" she asks.

"What? I'm not going to hurt you. If I wanted to hurt you I wouldn't ask permission."

"Okay, on this planet, that is not a reassuring thing to say," says Tony.

"Sorry," says Shell Bell, spreading her hands. "I can leave whatever-it-is alone, you seem to have it under control with your arc reactor, it's very decorative and everything."

He snorts.

"But, you know, even though you're not my Tony, you're recognizably a Tony, and it would be sad if whatever-it-is killed you, and I can almost certainly help."

"What... would you, hypothetically, do about it?"

"My magic works around wishes. I take a wishcoin, I wish for the problem to be gone, if it doesn't work I try a wishcoin with more angles on it, if the seven-pointed star doesn't work I can't do it but I bet if you're fixing it with a little glowy thing I can fix it better with a pentagon or a hexagon. The wishes are pretty smart but not all that smart, so if the problem is at all complicated you probably want to actually tell me what it is first. If, hypothetically, you wanted it taken care of," she shrugs.

"It's not that complicated," says Tony. "The reactor powers an electromagnet that keeps tiny little pieces of shrapnel from entering my heart."

"So if the shrapnel just disappeared you'd be fine, or would that be a bad idea? Because that's just a square." She bites her cheek and appears a square in her hand.