"What I don't get is how she knows so much about us. We haven't had any contact with this world before and Aether - no offense, but this place really has stunted your growth, even if she knew about templates I don't think she could learn much about Bell regularities just by spying on you, even if she were doing it a lot."

"Maybe there's - another peal? Connected in some not-Milliways way, or through Milliways but with points of contact we've managed not to run into, and Callahan knows them?"

"And they met Callahan long enough for her to have a good sense of Bells and didn't invite Aether to join the party? This world is toxic, but Aether isn't, we can haul her out of here and set her up someplace sane."

"Maybe they didn't know Aether was here?" speculates Celo.

"When we found Downside and I brought Jane to the party we checked several dozen worlds for Bells. We found Pattern checking Downside for 'em. I guess this could've happened a while ago and they weren't able to set up any good persistent monitoring? How old's Callahan?"

Celo shrugs. "Who knows? I'm not even totally sure about her species. She looks human, but she doesn't look all human."

"So maybe old enough that she met Bells a while ago, and if this place isn't amenable to monitoring, which I entirely believe, maybe Aether was born since then." Pause. "I wonder why Bells who weren't trapped in her world would give her the time of day?"

"Maybe she's nicer to them," says Celo. Then he reconsiders. "Actually no. There is just no way I believe that."

"Maybe they could beat her up," snorts Aegis, "maybe Juliet would've been able to get her to talk."

"I literally cannot conceive of somebody beating Callahan up," says Celo. "I'm sure it's happened at some point, but I can't imagine it."

"If she's a human, Golden could beat her up. Juliet's just louder about being able to, it's in her aura."

"Assuming Golden works here. Or Juliet. We're lucky we work here. Insofar as we do."

"Sure, in fifty years or so Aether will have Nice Sane Unbelled World all sorted out," shrugs Cam, "and we'll have met more Bells and accumulated more stuff and maybe we can all circle back to this world with something bigger than it is in the peal's collective ammunition. She didn't seem impatient to me."

"Nice Sane Unbelled World," muses Aether. "And I can just - do things, and then... science?"

"You remind me of me when I learned magic existed," laughs Cam softly. "Yeah. Everywhere else, science."

"Maybe we should just forget Callahan," Celo sighs. "I dunno. I still think she wants you to kill something big."

"If we touch this universe again later it will be because we can kill whatever stops it being plausible to kill big things," says Amariah.

"Which of us grew up in military school, again," says Aegis absently.

"...Do you guys not come from worlds where legendary figures are hard to kill, isn't that the definition of a legendary figure, do you just not have any?"

"Hard to kill, yes," Cam says. "So hard to kill that causality stops working to cheat so you fail at killing them, no."

"Not even necessarily hard to kill," shrugs Amariah, "I almost killed Alethia's god by accident."

"Peace barely has legendary figures and they go down as easy as anybody of the relevant skill level. My Sue beat the shit out of Mazer Rackham one time."

"Who's Mazer Rackham?" asks Celo, predictably.

"Won the war before the one me an' Sue won. Figured out how the buggers worked, took out one ship, disabled their whole fleet like that," she snaps her fingers.