"Huh. Well, we all get the same sort of power, just in different ways - Stella and Golden are pretty closely matched but even theirs aren't exactly identical. Did you try the other Bells you met, or did they not think to inquire?"

"Don't remember."

"Fair enough. I wonder how long it'll take Aegis to find her way into Milliways. I wanna meet her."

"She's the best," Sue asserts.

"We do seem to have a knack for attracting companions and significant others who'll assert that about us," says Juliet. "I wanna meet her so I know what makes her different from Bells in general."

"We had a kid together," he offers, as a possible distinguishing feature. "Not the usual way - I don't think she's had sex, and she definitely hasn't had it with me. But it turns out this game we both played a lot ended up turning into a person."

"...That," says Juliet, "is definitely a weird one. Angela and Micaiah are gonna have a kid but I think they produced the happy news in the traditional way. How did a game turn into a person?"

"It's a computer game," he says. "And she's really smart. Her name's Jane."

"So Jane's a... computer-person." Pause. "I wonder if I should introduce you to Jarvis."

"Is Jarvis a computer-person?" he inquires.

"Yep. He was made on purpose, though. The one here is a copy of one from another world, because the one originally from here died and my Sherlock missed him."

"Awwwwww," says Sue.

"Yeah. You might want to consider seeing if you can back up Jane to disk somewhere in case of malice or disaster. Computer-people are not invulnerable."

"...I don't know if that makes sense," he says. "The way she talks, it's almost like she is computers, not just a program running on them."

"Huh, what do you mean?"

"I dunno," he says. "I'd show you, but—" he smiles, shrugs.

"Right," laughs Juliet. "Pros and cons, but on the whole I'm glad I'm one of the opaque ones."

"One time they drugged Aegis to shut down her power," he says. "It was really fucked up. But they backed right up when she told 'em I can link her anyway."

"That is fucked right the hell up," Juliet says. "Who's they? She gonna overthrow them and replace them with benevolent dictatorship Bell-style?"

"The IF," he says. "And she did ask Jane to help her take over the world..."

"Good, good, she's ahead of schedule, then," laughs Juliet.

"Course she is," says Sue. "Because she's the best."

"Amariah explained it in terms of how long it takes to get the relevant resources. I'm sure most of us would've been ready, psychologically, to rule the world from a pretty young age, but most of us don't have the wherewithal to do it right then. Like, I'm a one-of-a-kind superpowered hero person and I still don't think I could pull it off because my superpowers are about punching things and that's not how to maintain a global empire."

"Says you," laughs Sue.

"Well, yeah, says me, how would you take over and keep the world with my resources and nothing else?"