"Mm... you're pretty much right about that," he says thoughtfully. "They do throw parties whenever they find another one. Huh. I hadn't thought of that before. Us Jokers, if you leave us alone together long enough, we end up in a permanent slumber party. But with more sex."

"Well, of course finding more of us is worth celebrating, it's more resources to share and more stuff to do," says Bella. "All good things. And a chance to show off and meet each other's friends. It's funny that you go by Jokers," she adds. "When Brilliance was split up - did he tell you about that? - the part of him that had his personality in it was the jokers of the deck."

"It is funny," he says cheerfully. "You're right about that."

Bella leans back in her chair. "You could maybe," she says, "tell Lexi - or for that matter Brilliance - whatever you're thinking about telling me, and get their help deciding whether I should know," she suggests.

"Hmm," he says. "Good idea."

"There anything else you can tell me how Bells-and-Jokers usually work?"

"How 'bout the time Alice and Stella had a fight?" he offers.

"That does sound interesting, yes."

"Mkay," he says. "So, when I met Stella we didn't get along too well. Long story short, she decided I was dangerous, which I was but I'm not so much now. She introduced me to Alice anyway, and me'n'him went up to my room - you remember I said I go to Milliways in my dreams?"

"I do remember that, yes."

Bella nods, slowly. "She probably agreed to do that unless there was some kind of emergency elsewhere," she says, "right?"

"Mhm," says the Joker. "So there I was with Alice again," his aura shows them cuddled up under a blanket that probably did not appear in the actual scene, "and I told him what was up, annnd he got very upset."

"...Why?"

"Well, she'd been talking to him when she was gonna go do it," says the Joker, "and she just said she was going into somebody's world for a bit, didn't say why. And even though it didn't happen that way, I could have just disappeared and never come back, if it'd turned out I couldn't get back to Milliways from there. And he only woulda found out I was dead whenever she bothered to let him know. And he loved me."

"So the problem was that she didn't warn him - not that he somehow didn't know who he was with and realize that sticking a dangerous person on an asteroid was exactly the kind of thing she'd do?"

"Yep. So y'know, not that I expect it to come up, if you're ever gonna do something that might kill somebody Brilliance loves, make sure you don't blindside him with it."

"...Okay. Is he likely to get in my way? If I ever do have to?"

"Not if it's one of us," he says. "And I don't know who else he'd love that you'd be trying to kill."

"Okay."

"And Alice asked Stella not to do that again and she said yes," he adds. "And then they were fine."

"Well, that's good then. Any similar pitfalls I should be on the lookout for?"

"Mm, don't think so. I'm pretty sure you can figure out all by yourself that he doesn't like people trying to control him," says the Joker. "None of us do, but he's got it bad even compared to baseline."

"Yeah, he made that exquisitely clear," Bella says.

"Mmkay. Then I think you're fine," he says.