Golden is chatting pleasantly with Juliet, over here.

Steel is eavesdropping.

"...so I think there must be something weird about how translation interacts with magic, because otherwise there's no reason for whatever Glass speaks to translate a word for particular sort of magic user as 'witch' - hi, Steel, what's up?"

"Oh, do continue."

Juliet laughs. "So Amariah's a witch, and Golden's a witch, and Glass is a witch among other things, and the first two you can explain by the fact that they're both from Earths where English is spoken, but your language - super pretty, by the way - is matching up one of the kinds of magic user Glass is to the same word, and other kinds to other words, and I popped into Milliways for a second to check and started talking to a random person about it and he heard 'witch' in both cases too even when I used your language. It's weird. And Cam's a wizard, which matches word-wise with a kind of magic you have here, too, even though the execution is different, and Aurora's a sorceress but she just made up calling herself that so I don't know how to count it."

"Translation magic is indeed a mystery," says Golden. "I'm not sure how to go about solving it."

"Interesting," says Steel. "Does it need solving?"

"Well, otherwise we won't know why it's happening," laughs Golden. "It doesn't seem urgent for any practical reasons."

"Do you suppose that's the kind of thing her aura-sense can do?" wonders Juliet.

"I think there is one obvious way to find that out, and no obvious downside to trying."

"Yeah, fair enough. Hey, Glass!"

Glass appears and kisses her wife and says, "What's up?"

"There are some odd regularities in how various languages are magically translated into one another and we were wondering if you could shed light on the subject," says Golden.

"Uh. Hm. Say some of the words?" Glass asks.

"Witch, witch," says Juliet, switching between languages, "wizard, wizard, sorceress, sorceress."

"And you only just noticed this because the local language has words for those things and isn't English. Hmmmmm." Glass nibbles her lip, closes her eyes. "Witch, witch, witch - There might be a - no, I can't really make sense of it. I'm still figuring out how I work now."

Sherlock kisses her anyway.

Kissees!

"What were you going to say? I promise not to take it as an irrefutable fact of the multiverse."

"I was going to say, meta-language," says Glass, "but I have no idea what that would mean."

"Can it not just be essentially a coincidence, deriving from the fact that the kinds of magic user in question don't have direct counterparts in the various worlds but the magic chose to translate the terms anyway?"

"Nnnno, I think it's not that - not on the level I'm seeing through aura, anyway, that might be what we'd find on a causal level. There's some sort of reason wizards get the same terminology as Cam and witches the same as Amariah or Golden."

"There's witches on my world too," Juliet adds. "Just, I'm not one."

Glass nods. "And it wouldn't be just as good to call them sorcerers-in-my-language, and when you pentagon the language you know that, and Milliways knows that."