"It's probably a good thing one of us is an elf or we'd have an absolute disaster of a time trying to arrange any sort of diplomacy with them," observes Golden. She has not made a cup; she does not drink... tea.

"It's only - that I can understand both of you with perfect clarity and I might be the only person who could do it."

"Man, I might be, like, slightly helpful if we were all trying to talk to witches, but yeah," snorts Amariah, "no question policy is probably the most stunningly unBellish cultural feature one could invent if one were going out of one's way to do it."

"I'm sure one could come up with some kind of particularly insidiously perverse anti-epistemology if one were really keen on it."

"We slot into all kindsa cultures from military brat to angel to Vaguely France," says Aegis, "I'm not surprised Sarion managed a compromise of sorts."

Magania sips her tea and continues to smile.

"It was not a particularly elegant compromise. Rania sometimes chides me for baldly stating that I do not know things. Perhaps I would have eventually learned the layers of indirection that are considered more seemly, but I cannot imagine that spending much time in the company of other Bells will lend itself to this development."

"That's your mom, I guess?"

"Yes. My parents are called Rania and Cariel."

"Bell standard is Renée and Charlie - short for Charles - but there's some variance," says Juliet.

"My mother is called Rinnah."

"Mine's Ranata."

"Ranae," says Shell Bell. "And my father's name is Sharles, I think it's a corruption of Charles, but he goes by Shark instead of Charlie."

"...'Charlie' is longer than 'Charles'," Liselen points out.

"It's a diminutive," Golden says.

"Also for some reason a lot of Renées marry some guy named Phil who mine doesn't seem to have even met," says Cam. "After divorcing when we're little."

"I'd say it's Forks, but mine are one of the set. I'd say it's Earth that does it, but Shell Bell and Amariah are technically from Earth, even if they're weird Earths."

"My Renée just died when I was a child. I have been thinking of fetching her up again; I really should set aside a few days to reacquaint myself with her and do that."

"I am sorry for your loss," says Magania, from behind her cup of tea.

"Magania would like to know how you would go about doing that," Sarion says helpfully, giggling.

"Okay, so, the jewelry we have, the Janegems," says Aegis, "hooks us up to my sort-of-a-daughter, Jane, who does interdimensional travel, and one of the dimensions we can get at is an afterlife, which doesn't work for everybody," she points one finger each at Amariah and Cam, "but works for other places, either they were already like that when we got there or we've added them since, and we didn't like how the afterlife was being run, so we went and got the administrator to let us and Jane take over, and now we can get dead people from, y'know, participating worlds, whenever we want."

"Three and a half of us are technically dead," adds Shell Bell.

"Is there any- I mean, we have been known to jump people out of the usual queue in response to personal requests," says Stella.

"I will," says Magania, "consider this."