"Who murdered you?"

"A Watcher who was supposed to test me by taking my powers and locking me up with a vampire, and got pissed off when I both passed that test and resented having had it administered. He's currently in lockup awaiting trial and extradition negotiations for other miscellaneous crimes; I arranged not to be legally dead so alas he cannot be tried for killing me."

"Sucks," says Val.

"Yeah, the Watchers pretty much suck as an organization. I have arranged for them to be unable to find my successor."

"Smart move!"

"Thank you!"

"Anyway, so what exactly did you wanna talk to Mom about?"

"There's a reason I'm starting my diplomatic tour with the species that don't like to eat people," Bella says dryly. "But I'd like to know more about the state of Siathe, and the state of Sessiaki integration - which is apparently pretty decent - and if there's anything I can do to help out, and I'm also going to be hiring, and I see no particular reason not to hire demons if any demons should care to apply especially since it's going to be way easier to explain all the magic stuff to the one population than to humans at large, so I want to know a good way to issue job ads when those come up. If the Sessiaki are on friendly terms with any other species I wanna know that too, so I can sort of stepping-stone my way around instead of just teleporting onto everybody's doorstep and knocking."

"Well, don't let us fool you, it's not like Mom can walk around town with her face showing," says Val. "She's kinda shy on Earth, you know, 'cause of the scales."

"I could fix that if she wants," Bella says. "Goodwill sort of gesture."

"...Fix what, exactly," says Val.

"I have very open-ended magic powers," shrugs Bella. "Could do it a bunch of ways. Suppressible illusion? Minor shapeshifting power? Small field of nothing-to-see-here? I am open to suggestions."

"...maybe."

Bella shrugs. "Or not, whatever."

"It would be kind of a big deal," she says. "For us, apparently not for you."

"I can't afford to do it for literally every Sessiaki. Well, not quite as casually, anyway, it'd have to be a big automated thing, it would be hard to make exceptions or customize anything. But one, I can do, and this one happens to have my attention, so, we can talk about it."

"Not a lot of Sessiaki want to live on Earth," says Val. "Even Mom doesn't, she just visits sometimes."

"Is that because of the cosmetic awkwardness or just a preference for the comforts of home?"

"Uh," says Val, "I'm assuming you don't want to move to Siathe, but do you have a reason for not wanting to or is it just that you don't have any good reasons to do it?"

"I know almost nothing about Siathe because the books available on Sessiaki and related topics are not very good. Moving there would be pretty meaningless, I don't really need a permanent residence since I don't sleep and teleport most places I go and conjure stuff I need on the spot, and I was thinking of designing myself a palace on Mercury though I haven't gone and built it yet. Why?"

"My point is that most people don't need a strong reason not to move out of their home dimension to a strange planet inhabited by a different species, it's just kind of not something that comes up."

"Well," says Bella, "yes, but she's got family here, so I didn't think this was the standard case."

"Oh, sure," she shrugs. "For Mom, it's because she gets tired of not being able to go outside. And she misses her friends. I just don't know what it is for everybody else."

"I meant about her in particular, not about the general population. Although my long-term plan does involve more freedom of movement for every sort of sociable creature in the world, and people do pack up and move house to distant places sometimes, I know a guy who followed his boyfriend from one world to another."

"Were they the same species?"