"I do, in fact, know more about both my wife and my kingdom than you do."

"So what's it matter what I think? I'm not gonna step on Glass's toes whatever she winds up doing."

"It matters because this is only one of many kingdoms in one of many worlds, and I am sure it is not the only one that is being adequately governed."

"The outright usurpers among us are Golden and Shell Bell. Both the governments they deposed killed innocent people routinely. Rest of us are orthogonal to politics, space colonists, taking power more naturally," she raises a hand, "or doing diplomacy. Or whatever. I don't think Sarion's settled on a strategy, she's been repairing her brain, she'll probably do something soon, she seems mostly better to me."

"In which case," Sherlock says dryly, "it seems odd to predict that Glass will usurp anything."

"Is there some secret number of times I have to say that she totally might not do that which will placate you?"

"I already know she is not going to do that."

"Then I don't get what the problem is."

"Clearly you do not."

"...Are you gonna explain?"

"I'm not sure I can."

"Would Glass get it? Because I bet she could explain it to me if she did."

"She might."

[Hey Glass, your wife is confusing me!]

Glass appears. "How so?" she inquires of Sherlock.

"I questioned her about her troubling assumption that you are going to overthrow my mother and she does not seem to comprehend the scope of the problem."

"Wait," says Glass, "why is there such an assumption? I'm not going to do that." She thinks for a moment. Then she says, "Aegis, I moved here. On purpose when I was about your age during Marianne's reign."

"I didn't know that," says Aegis indignantly. "You didn't write in the Bellbook yet."

"It is a problem that the first assumption, absent special circumstances, is that a Bell living in someone else's kingdom will conquer it as soon as possible," says Steel. "It is a problem that that is viewed as the default course of action."

"Most of us don't live in kingdoms. There's Glass and Sarion and Rose, that's it, Rose is ignoring monarchs and Sarion's been fixing her brain so we don't know yet what her plan is. Angela's got a theocracy with term limits she can wait out, Shell Bell overthrew a technical democracy and Golden a shadow oligarchy thing. Amariah has some clan queens around but she didn't marry one's kid and live with her and I don't think they work like human queens anyway. The default course of action is to find leverage and haul on it. It's just, what that leverage looks like changes world to world."

"I don't have a detailed plan yet, but I'm going to resemble Rose more than anyone, I think," says Glass firmly.

Steel shakes her head and kisses her wife.

"Well, yeah, I didn't know you moved here," says Aegis.

"I'm not going to overthrow the king of Linderwall either!"

"What, seriously, you lucked into adequate hereditary monarchs, like, everywhere?"