Juliet's full of questions but she can't tell if Sherlock would prefer to field them or not.

[Yes?]

[What hints? What did she say? What did she do, before...?]

[Oh, she trash-talked you for a while, and then she suggested we had better things to do than talk, and I declined, and she tried to argue me around.]

[Christ.]

[Yes.]

[I don't suppose any of the trash-talk contained worthwhile insights.]

[Not especially, no.]

Snuggle snuggle [I love you] snuggle.

[I love you too.]

"The gist of the book," Golden says, mostly for Tony's benefit, "is that there are a bunch of us - I'm the vampire one, but a different kind of vampire from the ones in your world, and there is also an angel one and a witch one and a Martian-of-sorts and the Slayer over there and Shell Bell who does not have such a convenient descriptor, and unknown numbers of us who've yet to find this place, although there's a space soldier one whose friend made some notes about her for us. Some of them have Sherlocks and Tonies, more of them have instead instances of a template referred to as 'Whistles' to our 'Bells', and I'm the odd one out - there is a Whistle in Aurum, but I had to import him; my husband is of different extraction entirely and is called Edward."

"...Okay," he says, "that is... a little weird."

Sherlock snorts.

"There are also several of you without accompanying Bells, just as there's the Whistle who was available for import," says Golden. "I suspect that there are substantial numbers of most people, and most people simply are not interesting enough for Milliways to visit them. My daughter finds it often. At least one Jarvis, and possibly the copy of that one that now lives in Juliet's world, can make doors appear at will. Other people have to wait. Milliways has been showing up for Shell Bell since she was very young, but only with sharply limited frequency. The distinction Bells have is that we are particularly interested in coordinating. Hence, the Belltower. Amariah and Shell Bell made it, although as far as we can tell, Stella and I met first - we just didn't know there were going to be so many, whereas Shell Bell had been mistaken for our alts for some time and knew to expect a crowd."

Sherlock continues to read the book.

"Is 'Bells and Whistles' supposed to be as adorable as it sounds?"

"It was Stella's invention. Whistles don't like their given names. She had cause to invent a nickname for her boyfriend. It is now, within her empire, his legal middle name, and it's spread from there."

"Our Jarvis can do doors to Milliways anytime, too," Juliet murmurs, lifting her face from where it's buried against Sherlock's shoulder to speak and then putting it back.

He hugs her some more.

"It's really adorable," says Tony.

"If you like that sort of thing. I'm not the biggest fan of Whistles. The first time I met Stella's boyfriend, he threw a tantrum in my throne room, and the one I imported is what amounts to retired from a life of terrorism, although he's been very well-behaved since moving to Aurum and a fair fraction of my staff have worse records. I believe Angela's version is pleasanter, though I've not met hers, nor Amariah's."

"...A tantrum like, what?"

"One of my bodyguards, Allirea - I don't tend to use them much anymore, now that I have coins, but they were once very necessary parts of my organization - has the power to be supernaturally unobtrusive. Those of us Bells blessed with mental opacity, which is all of us from worlds with magic plus the space soldier, can see her and continue to think about her unimpeded even after having been around her while she's deploying this power. And so could Stella's Whistle. This bothers Allirea. It was very hard to get her to agree to work as my bodyguard instead of arranging to not be on the same continent as me ever again, and she was, until I minted, one of the very most valuable members of my staff. And she's touchy about a handful of things. I have to pretend she doesn't exist most of the time. And she objects in principle to nicknames - she's the only person who calls me Isabella. She could probably have done without asking Stella's Whistle's original name, except that he could see her. And then, while Stella and I were trying to figure out a way to placate my employee and her boyfriend at the same time, Allirea was pestering my mind-reading husband for the information, and Whistle was swearing and contemplating setting things on fire and generally acting like the world was coming to an end. I'm hardly proud of how Allirea acted either, but that doesn't make his reaction particularly mature."

"...Do you have any idea why he was swearing and contemplating setting things on fire?"