"But if you had a magic system where you could do your own detail work that'd do it?"

"I don't know, what do you mean by detail work? We have a magic system, it's kind of shit," he says.

"I don't know, I just have the standards. Enchantress, mint, stack of utterly Bell-typical wished powers, I was going to copy Sarion's elfmagery but the unicorn over there said that would be a bad idea. But if there was some magic system as fiddly as the laws of physics and not actively awful like the Sunshine worldfamily magic is would you like that?"

"Maybe, I dunno, I guess I still wouldn't feel like it was mine," he says. "...Which the laws of physics totally are, of course."

"Are they really."

"Yep."

"Extravagant Christmas present? A kickass find on your most recent archaeological dig? Inheritance? Built them yourself out of spare parts?"

He giggles helplessly.

"Ah, I see, you annexed the laws of physics, stuck a flag in them, and gave the natives smallpox."

"That is terrible," snorts Tony, "that is a terrible joke, also isn't that what you guys do to your entire universes?"

"Stella's the only with an actual flag design, and Mars had no natives," says Pattern, waving a hand. "Golden and Shell Bell are revolutionaries against unjust governments, Angela plans to take office in a manner perfectly typical for her planet, I think Aegis actually plans to try getting elected, Rose is licitly a marquise by marriage and if she's annoyed her monarch yet I haven't heard about it, Amariah's doing diplomacy to witch clans, Cam and Aurora and Sarion haven't taken anything over yet, I guess Juliet is being sort of annexy but I'm taking a leaf out of Stella's book except for Mars read Saturn."

"Okay, sure," he says. "Like, I don't think it's bad necessarily, I just definitely get the impression that you guys are kind of proprietary about your worlds."

"We talk about jurisdiction and not stepping on each other's toes and so on, and we do feel entitled to name them, but that's pretty much just to cooperate more effectively. If Sarion never recovers enough to take care of her world, she'll let us help. If Golden's husband kicks it and she has to abdicate in her daughter's favor, we'll help Elspeth. We don't have it worked out yet what we're going to do about worlds that haven't got Bells in when ours are running smoothly. Especially since it's not impossible that the other worlds will have Bells crop up in them later. I have no clue what we'd do if we found a very small Bell, come to think of it, it's not impossible, Shell Bell found Milliways when she was six."

"...Or, like, a world that's doing fine without you guys," Tony suggests, "I'm pretty sure that's theoretically possible."

"Yeah, sure, one of those we'd want to, like, talk to it, set up trade and a Janepoint and so on, but we wouldn't have to run it if it was really fine and populated by happy peaceful immortals."

"Do you know what you'd do if somebody popped up in one of your worlds who was better at running it than you are?"

"Would probably depend on the world and the other person. If somebody popped up in my Origin who was honestly a better person for the job, I'd probably move, there's like seventy worlds hooked into Downside with no Bells, I checked them, I could go set up there. If somebody showed up who could do all our jobs put together better than us, we'd, I don't know, read a lot, get kind of antsy, I'd probably start looking for a boyfriend on purpose around then."

"A boyfriend to, what, distract you from the excruciating boredom of not running a universe?" he teases.

"Yes!"

He laughs.

"I mean, perhaps I could've settled into something less grandiose if I'd never met the peal, if I were just stuck in a nonmagic world and didn't know there was anything else, maybe I'd go to med school or do engineering like you, I don't know, but now it'd be such a step down."

"That's cute," says Tony. "And possibly unhealthy. But cute."

"Which part of what scenario here would be unhealthy?"

"Uh... it would kind of suck if you couldn't deal with not being world dictator or whatever?"

"We need things to do. We can entertain ourselves, to a point, but I want to accomplish stuff, not just mess around."