Aurora's headed for Juliet, now, who already has her boyfriend on hand.

"Hey Aurora, what's up?"

"Uh, I set out to learn how Bells handle nonmonogamy and I'm less than evenly thrilled with the curriculum, but I guess that only makes it more essential to pick up, huh."

"And what have you learned so far?" inquires Sherlock.

"Mindreading is recommended, but apparently doesn't necessarily finish the job, depending on individual template instance," sighs Aurora, "and most of us have extremely convenient special circumstances."

"And now you are here to assess the Bellish reaction to sluts of a different feather?"

"If that's how you want to put it, yeah, I mean, Brilliance obviously comes with that installed out of the package, it's the Bells more than the significant others I'm trying to figure out here."

"You could have Amariah test-drive him for you," says Juliet.

"That's - no, I don't think that's necessary, although it's been made very clear I had better not form an opinion about it if they decide to do it anyway."

"Well, no - I think Amariah would discreetly steer clear if you wanted her to - and even in general you can have opinions, you just can't expect them to do anything or land frictionlessly."

"I tend to welcome opinions, even," says Sherlock. "Although mine is of course not the most immediately relevant preference."

"Yeah, like - the paragraph uttered when we had our non-monogamy conversation started with the words 'unless you object', and to me that made a big, big difference," says Juliet. "I don't think that's what you're looking at with a Joker. I think the closest you're going to get is 'unless you want me to ineffectually pit myself against a fundamental part of my identity till I wind up breaking your heart anyway', which, you know, not a grand start to a relationship. Also our non-monogamy conversation happened while Sunshine's Tony was being dead and we were having a visit from another one, and I would have felt like a tremendous heel interposing myself there."

"So I recall," says Sherlock. "And I do think I would've had some trouble if you'd objected to Tony, but you did not, and here we are."

"I also had Shell Bell reassuring me about the ability of Sherlocks to effectively divide your time between Bells and Tonies," says Juliet. "I was willing to trust her on that one."

"Her I haven't talked to yet."

"She got," says Juliet, "a surprise that narrowly escaped qualifying as being cheated only by the barest of technicalities. And she fetched up okay."

Sherlock snorts.

"They're seriously adorable," adds Juliet.

"I've heard. So basically your mechanism for dealing relies on things that don't apply to me, again. Grand."

"Common theme, is it?"

"Utterly. I'm not even trying Aegis because she met hers when they were six. Amariah has unique parental example. Angela was particularly motivated. Cam was, until he started reading Jellybean's mind ten minutes ago, 'not as serious as the others', which whatever it means going forward means that he has as part of his basic equipments a capacity for less than serious relationships. Rose and Beast spent months with no company besides each other. Stella was apparently closest to feeling like I feel and she wound up doing something creepy that I would not and possibly cannot duplicate. I'm not even touching the question of Sarion because her circumstances are so blisteringly special that she was ninety percent braindead when the peal found her and we still don't know what's going to happen in the longer term."

"Ugh, I know, poor Sarion, she's not even together with hers anyway and even if she gets good results later no one will blame you for not wanting to condition your brain into blankness like that."

"Was not even considering it, the idea makes me want to puke, I'm frankly impressed that she could do it even to save the world."

"Well, the unicorn your sister's riding around on apparently can communicate with something called the Wild Magic about upcoming apocalypses, so she did have the world-ending thing on good authority, I guess."

"Even still. You guys don't do mindreading, right?"