"I don't completely understand that business. I saw Pathalan, and Petaal, but I'm not - at all - sure what to make of them."
"They're external souls," says Juliet. "Alethia seems to feel very strongly that people should have them, so if you go in unprotected you'll get one, and it's a star to not. That's how Ivy happened - she was on purpose - and Minus had Steph, for a while, but she was miserable. Sherlock self-loathing problems. I never got to meet her."
"...Is that not universal? I guess yours doesn't have the usual reason or the unusual reason..."
"Oh," she murmurs. "There it is. I didn't know. It's only a little bit, next to some of the others... Oh, honey."
Steel spreads her hands.
"It doesn't trouble me very much," she says quietly.
"Mine didn't have it for a while. When he didn't have his soul. And then he took it back, and I tried when I did the merger wish, to insert the soul without the self-loathing, but it's apparently impossible, as Steph illustrated - either that or I wished it wrong, because the coin went, I don't know - and now he's attached to keeping the soul, even though..." She shrugs, looks at her feet.
"If hugs helped appreciably I'd be all better now," says Juliet wryly. "It's him I'm worried about; I'm going to go on being intermittently upset till something gives."
"It's a very insistent attractor," murmurs Glass. "It prefers to disguise itself with normal causality. When it can't it will hang around anyway. I'm not sure if there's a way other than - brute causal force of some kind - to make it go."
"Minus didn't have it, for a while. There's nothing preventing that. It just takes - drastic measures, apparently soul-removal is at least one way, I can't see if there are more."
"My husband has a little problem with that, but I don't know how closely the manifestations resemble each other; he's not a Sherlock."
"He avoids these parties. He's not fond of being around people who closely resemble me without being me. Cam is all right, though. If you decide to tour the world and Alice gives you the all-clear regarding wolves and unmated vampires you might encounter, you could meet him if you so chose."