"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.

"Brilliance is shaped like you when he's being a human, but he's also a deck of cards and a staff thingamabob sometimes," says Aurora, "and he was made by some people, who were seriously shitty, to have a lot of magic and destroy planets with it, which he was not on board with. And he attaches to a sorceress - me - in some way that I do not fully understand, but we have some magic privilege sorts of things with each other, like, this classy dress I'm wearing, that's a thing devices do is outfits. Not wardrobes, just specific magical-girl-type outfits called Barrier Jackets and this is mine." She tilts her head. "He sort of is also the Barrier Jacket, but not in a lot of detail, he said." But she pets the material of her skirt anyway.

"Awww, that's cute," says Kas.

"He's kind of skittish about it because the people who made him were so shitty, but we're managing," shrugs Aurora.

"People who make Jokers usually are. We deal."

"Do you usually have to spend four hundred years hopping around the universe in deck-of-cards form unable to pay significant attention to anything but not blowing up whatever planet you're visiting because you've got a control program installed after having only coincidentally escaped attempts at torturing you into being an obedient weapon? Or, not that exactly, but I was really hoping that was worse than the usual, because it's bad."

"...I think the other new one's the only one who comes close," says Kas. "You'd have to ask them which one's worse."

"For reference, we think Shell Bell's got the lousiest history of us, I think that holds even versus Sarion, but Sarion's competitive, so's Golden for a bit of it, but Sarion's got a trickier fix ahead of her and Golden was patched as soon as she found out her husband was alive, everybody else has had lesser or briefer shit happen to us. You?"

"...I think I'm basically untraumatized. I mean, the preventing Brilliance's control program from destroying the world when it turned out to have possessed Lexi was bad, but it didn't last long and I didn't find out Lexi was involved till it was over."