"Yes," says Aedyt. "Yeah, that's - yeah."

"You want me to explain myself? I think my reasoning's pretty well known, but maybe you haven't happened to hear it."

"I've heard Mum's version," says Aedyt. "I think I want yours."

"What's his version?" inquires Stella.

"He never says why exactly, he just says he doesn't blame you and lets me guess the rest."

"Hmm." Stella taps her foot. "Okay - keep in mind that at this time all I knew about alts was that Golden existed. Me and Golden have the exact same childhood except that some of her father's old friends are werewolfish and mine has a different set - other than that there are no discrepancies. The only difference was, she moved to Forks and she found vampires. I moved to Forks and found wishcoins. It's a standard setup - Pattern moves to Forks and finds a killer van, Aurora moves to Forks and finds a Device, Juliet has Sunnydale instead but she moved at the same time for the same reasons and found vampires of a different sort. And then there's the variants, but I didn't know any of that, I only knew there was me, and there was Golden." She sighs. "And there was Alice - and there was the Joker."

Aedyt nods.

"And I liked Golden from the start. We get each other. The Joker, on the other hand, was an unpleasant surprise. Keep in mind that at this time I also didn't know about Downside. And if I had, it might not have helped much, because we hadn't revamped it yet and there were no plans in place to do so. To the very best of my knowledge at that time, killing someone was condemning them to permanent oblivion. I didn't know that a bit later we'd find lots of other Bells, Pattern among them, and take over the afterlife, and have Jane, and that Pattern would be able to set up a program to resurrect every single person your mum ever killed, among others. To the very best of my knowledge, I was sitting at a table with someone who - if only he'd had a slightly different history - could have been my boyfriend, or just like him anyway. And this person had killed a bunch of people and had utterly no intention of stopping, because he wanted a certain someone's attention."

"That must've sucked," she says sympathetically.

"Yeah. I was not thrilled. But he was in another world, I didn't even have mine under control, and, you know what, there are lots of murderers running around, I don't spend my time individually bringing them each to justice. He's not Hitler, he's not even a prerevolutionary Aurum vampire, he's a theatrical terrorist. So," she shrugs, "I figured he was not my priority. I couldn't get into his world anyway, right, I might as well be sociable as long as we were hanging out. I introduced him to Alice." She pauses. "How G-rated do you need this story?"

"I am aware that my mother has had sex," she says dryly.

"Well," says Stella, "I don't know if you know this, but several Bells with Jokers read our respective Jokers' minds. I'm one of those. And when my boyfriend went upstairs with his scary murderous committed-to-a-mental-institution alt, I figured, so what if I'm weirded out, I need to know what's going on. And then guess who sits next to me at the bar while I'm staring into my beverage hoping to hell that I get my Alice back in one psychologically unharmed piece? Because as I've mentioned - this was all I knew about the template. I didn't know he'd be fine. I didn't know the Joker would take better care of him than he did any of his happily admitted-to murder victims. Guess who sits next to me."

"...Batsy," says Aedyt. "Batsy sits next to you. Because of course she does."

"Yeah. Out of costume, at the time, so I didn't know that it was her. But we start talking, and I explain why I am looking at my beverage in this way, and what do you know, my dining companion is from the Joker's world. She does not have anything reassuring to say. So now what I know about the template is that there's my boyfriend, and there's the Joker, and what I know about the Joker is not good and corroborated by another source who really does not like him."

She nods again.

"And then Alice starts having traumatic flashbacks and he puts up a busy message when I try to talk to him and I discover that I cannot yoink him out of that room with any coin I have on me."

"Ouch," she murmurs.

"Yeah. At that point, your mom was officially my problem, officially had my attention, relatively smalltime otherworldly terrorist or not. And I'd already told him, if I ever found myself in his world, I would put him on an asteroid." She sighs. "And who should be sitting next to me but someone who could door me to his world and thought that sounded like a fine idea?"

"Yeah," says Aedyt.

"So she held the door, I terraformed an asteroid, I put the Joker on it, I woke him up, I put him back to sleep, I woke him up again, he said he got to Milliways and therefore did not require me to hang around supervising the consumption of hemlock, I left. Then I had a fight with Alice because I didn't warn him first, but that's probably not the part that interests you."

"Well, I haven't met Alice, either," she says. "Just heard about him. Mum was going to show me off to the whole deck, but—" she waves vaguely in the direction of the stairs.

"Yeah, that happens," says Stella. "They'll emerge eventually. Probably. They were all out a minute ago determining what to do with the baby one, but then they went back up again."

"...There's a baby one?"

"One of the worlds that got away from Jane produced a suspiciously familiar name born to a suspiciously familiar set of parents," says Stella. "We talked about it, Elspeth kidnapped him and is going to bring him up."

"From what I've heard about Mum's childhood - good call," she says. "Why the princess?"