[Don't all go charging off to break down her door,] Aether tells the other Bells desperately, [please, I'm terrified of her.]

[We could spy on her invisibly, see if we can find anything?]

[That is a worse idea.]

[We have to do something! We can't just stay here forever! The arcane defense was calmly talking about logical paradox like that's a thing!]

[We could just - wait for a door,] says Cam. [Amariah, you visited Juliet for a while...]

[Yeah, sure, but I'd gotten to Sunshine through Milliways on both ends, I knew to expect no time to pass back home - with Jane down and us having gotten here through a door only on the one end it could already have been years! I just got my afterlife sorted out. I have witch queens to talk to and subworlds to explore and trapped angels to visit once a week in case they decide to talk to me!]

[Tough shit,] says Celo. [Look, you're all more or less adults. If you want to go pester Callahan, I'm not gonna knock you down and sit on you until you think better of it. I'm just saying, you could die. You could seriously permanently no-takebacks die. Up to you if you like the risks.]

[I haven't gotten to my afterlife yet. There's billions of people on Syntropy who are disappearing to some unknown fate. Don't think I don't understand the urgency of being able to go home. But, look, they find doors here. We can wait for a door. It could've been years, but it could've been less time than we've spent, too.]

[...If I for-real-forever die Jane probably does too.]

[Ugh.]

[Anyways,] says Jellybean, [there's no indication that how long we spend here matters at all to how long it will have been back home, right? Once Jane's down, it's all up for grabs. She was out for three seconds from her end last time and some of the gaps in other worlds lasted years. ...I guess if it is proportional, that's a big problem.]

[It's probably not proportional, but it probably is monotonic. If we got home now, less time would have passed than if we got home tomorrow.]

[How do we know?] says Jellybean.

[It's the simplest explanation for what Jane noticed about her clocks when she came back last time.]

[Why is it the simplest - you know what, never mind, I don't care,] says Celo.

[What did Scary Fighting Teacher even say?]

[I stayed after class and she asked me if I'd met anybody interesting lately. I said 'like who?' and she said 'like anybody'. It's the same thing she asked me and Bella when we ran into her at Milliways that one time.]

[...She knows about Milliways?]

[Is there any way to interpret that which doesn't make it sound like she wants to meet us?]

[Yeah, there's the interpretation where she's yanking my chain because she knows something I don't know she knows,] snorts Celo.

[Was Jellybean there when you talked to her? Did she notice him?]

[I am not even slightly interested in going down that road,] says Celo.

[How are you even alive, Aether, how did this world not drive you to take your own life when you were five,] despairs Amariah.

[I can still do things! Just not - big things!]