"Okay. It would've been weird calling you by my girlfriend's name anyway," says Shell Bell. "Can I be your friend? All my loved ones are immortal."

"I would love some tea."

"Come in, then."

In she comes. "This has been the weirdest day of my - existence," she says, correcting from 'life' at the last moment. "And it's competing with the day I received supreme magical power and declared myself the Empress of Atlantis. I liked that one better."

"I'd imagine you would," he agrees.

"All my magic is gone now. I keep tripping and I can't fly and my memory's slippery and I can't make any wishcoins."

"I've never met anyone here with magic," says Strat.

"The place probably strips it from anyone who's got it as they come in, I guess. My world didn't have magic to begin with. I got it from an alt of me from somewhere else."

"That might explain why it didn't last," he says.

"You think? Maybe. I hope my other alts are cleverer about their defenses than I was. I walked right into a nuclear explosion. I was probably atomized instantly, I don't remember it hurting or anything." She sighs. "And then, I'm not sure but my best guess is that my girlfriend resurrected me, and there's a live copy of me walking around back home and they don't even know I need to be gotten. Because I have a very small, very nicely furnished apartment, and my girlfriend wasn't there when I looked her up so she's probably not a mournful suicide like my guide thought."

"She could just as easily be delayed," says Strat. "I'm told that happens. In the several thousand years since my death, I have yet to find anyone I knew in life."

"It's possible. But I don't think she'd leave her twin brother alone, especially since there's a very good chance she could pull off the resurrection and it's something she'd certainly try."

"You'd know better than I would," he says with a shrug, and puts the kettle on.

"It's basically good news. Means my empire's fine and my girlfriend and her brother aren't devastated. My parents'll probably never find out. And even if I had a much bigger place suggesting that much more mourning happened, distributed amongst at least four people and not cut off instantly when she resurrected me - I still wouldn't expect to see them again. They have no reason to believe this place exists and try to follow me here. They'd still be immortal." Pause. "Can you remember anything about being alive? I badly miss my perfect recall, I need to get some paper and write everything down..."

"I am a little lucky, in that respect," he says. "There are books about me in the library. They don't get everything right, but - enough."

"Biographies or something? Were you famous?"

"Moderately."

"I wonder if there are any biographies about me. This place seems at least as temporally twisted as Milliways, so maybe I can see what's going to be written about me even though I only just died, I'm pretty sure being an Empress makes me famous enough to warrant at least one book even if my guess about resurrection is wrong and I have an extremely brief tenure."

"There may very well be."

"I will look for that next time I'm at the library. What were you famous for?"

"Trivial things."

Shell Bell takes that as him not wanting to talk about it. "What do you do with yourself now, then?"

"Contractor," he says. "Was the address not a clue?"

"I'm new," Shell Bell reminds him, "and don't have perfect recall anymore. But that shouldn't surprise me, I guess, given how I knew to look you up."