Aurora has been abandoned by Cam and Jellybean, so she goes looking for Amariah.

Amariah is over here! With Path the Don't Touch Me Shoulder Owl too.

"Hey," says Aurora, and she summarizes her difficulties. "So far the consensus seems to be that I should read Brilliance's mind, but - you don't read yours, do you?"

"I do not," agrees Amariah. [Hey sweeties, you wanna come meet Aurora for a bit?]

"How come you guys don't have mindreading set up?" Aurora asks.

"Didn't ever feel like it, I guess," shrugs Kas.

Amariah reaches out to scritch Petaal. "It hasn't been a problem for us."

"I can imagine - well, not in much detail, but approximately imagine, looking in on Brilliance's thoughts and finding something staggeringly unassailably special to the point where everything else is a triviality. But I have no idea what you're doing."

"There's that," says Amariah, "although it's not - I'm not sure. I can think of key events but they're not timed right to be causative instead of just emblematic. Like, I know I'm intensely important to my sweeties - they separated to save Path, to a first approximation humans just don't do that..." She taps her chin. "...It could have to do with my parents. They're still together and they shouldn't be, everybody else is divided between divorced and happily married. Maybe I have something un-standard installed about lack of - relationship freedom."

"...Lack of relationship freedom meaning what?" says Kas.

"Oh, Aurora's having more than Bell standard trouble adjusting to nonmonogamy," says Amariah, "so I'm thinking aloud about that a little."

"Your parents are - stuck somehow and that's bad and you don't want to be stuck or to get anyone else stuck?" Aurora hazards.

"My mother's a witch like me, and witches in general are keenly aware of human partner mortality. As long as Ranata likes Charlie, she can't bear to leave him, because then he'd die at some point without her - I don't even have my afterlife figured out yet so I can't reassure her on that - and she'd never have the chance to change her mind. I don't have this problem because I have pretty much always considered the correct solution to be to research immortality. Which I successfully did even before getting minted."

"I am awesome! So, maybe that's why I'm off-baseline on comfort-with-poly? It's not even just a matter of whether I need to mindread my sweeties to know they love me - I also sleep around more than a standard Bell, I need to give Cam a spin one of these days, I have this habit now of testing boys out for the rest of us. And that has nothing to do with reading anybody's mind, it's just fun and I see zero benefit to choosing not to have that kind of fun." Amariah nibbles her lip. "I wonder if you'd get much mileage out of talking to Golden. She's got to have some model of us in her head; she can't pull it off because, vampire, monogamous-as-hell husband, etcetera, but she's got a monogamous Bell's perspective on the poly ones."

"I guess I'll try her," laughs Aurora. "I ought to meet everybody anyway, right?"

"That's the spirit. I got in on the ground floor of the Belltower, it must be kind of overwhelming to get pealed and find yourself one of a dozen, huh?"

"Being one of lots is fun," Kas contributes. Petaal nods her small fuzzy head.

"I'm glad no one's trying to, like slow-drip all the new stuff into my life lest my head explode, but it's a bit much, yeah," laughs Aurora.

"We might need some kind of procedure for slow-dripping when there are still more of us," says Amariah. "A smallish welcoming committee to go through the Bellbook with the new Bell and so on. And then a party."

"The Bellbook?"

"Goddesses all! You haven't even been to the Belltower, have you, you've never left this world, you don't have a Janegem - we need some kind of checklist," mutters Amariah. "Jane, the book, please?" The Bellbook appears before her and Amariah catches it out of the air and hands it over.

Aurora reads the entire book, and then she writes in it.