"Now they decide if they want to have a soul, or not, and whichever one has the correct box checked in the metaphorical form wishes - or tells me how to wish, maybe - for the tweaks they want to make it a good compromise, like Golden suggested?" says Juliet. "Unless there are other points of potential disagreement."

"I, of course, prefer the end result to have a soul. And I prefer it to be stuck in place as thoroughly as we can make it, although my intuition is that if I am the base template for the merge, that will be the case regardless."

"Since you are, in a sense, my soul," Sherlock agrees. "No objection. And you make a better template than I do in any case, since you're closer to the point of divergence."

"So tell me of these 'perks'," says Sherlock.

"Well, for starters, I don't hate myself nearly as much."

"Self-loathing is basically unproductive. Mostly. I don't know how anybody who wasn't a me would turn it into something actionable, anyway."

"Speak for yourself," Sherlock says wryly.

Tony hugs him.

"Do you get much use out of your self-loathing, then?" inquires Juliet.

"Until I met him," he says, gesturing to Minus, "I would've said I'd never get anywhere without it."

"Well, now you know better. Do I take it that's not a keeper, then?"

"Indeed."

"Heh. What else?"

"I don't believe we need to adjust your base willingness to kill people or do generally nefarious things."

"So glad we agree."

"Are you still going to want my permission to kill Arthur Mallory, then, or will leaving him in police custody be fine? Only it may be a bit difficult for Charlie to press the full set of charges, when my corpse has mysteriously vanished and I'm trying reclaim my identity, what, an hour later, and even just the kidnapping part involves things that don't officially exist... I suppose they could get him for kidnapping Giles either way. Unless Watchers have legal pull."

"I am still going to want to kill Arthur Mallory, but I will not actively seek to unless it is practical for other reasons. Which is more or less identical to the situation as it stands."

"All right then. I guess I'll have the tools to do whatever I want with him, anyway, if I don't like the look of the default." Juliet looks at her bandolier, stocked with all sorts of glassy color-flecked coins and some smaller ones in glowing gold. Experimentally, she nibbles on her lip. She gets a triangle in luminous indigo. "Neat. What do yours look like?"

He bites his lip and produces a smokily translucent grey square.

"I'm in favour of keeping all the salient benefits," he says cheerfully. "But - immune to sunlight, I think."

"My form of being dead apparently comes with a highly convenient mechanism for immortality," volunteers Sherlock. "If we layer that with the vampirism we shouldn't need to patch more than sunlight and crosses, and that only for convenience."

"Holy water?" asks Juliet. "And what, pray tell, is this new form of immortality we have?"

"We can't die; in otherwise fatal circumstances, we briefly lose consciousness and regenerate on the spot with the help of some illusory fire."

"Holy water," says Sherlock, "sounds like an excellent way to get coins."