"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.

"Cool," says Celo. "...Sorry, did I distract us from talking about our helplessness in the face of the perverse cosmos?"

"The point is this is just a perverse little corner of the broader cosmos, and 'hubris' is relegated to fiction as a concept there," says Amariah. "Aether will be much happier. She should probably shadow one of us for a while to get used to the idea that Bells can do the things that Bells are wont to do, though."

"...You're a field," Cam says to Celo abruptly. "A garden. Do you transplant?"

"...Oh."

"...Well, you can go away from it, though, right? You went to Milliways before. Do you need to be in your garden a certain amount or can you just go wherever as long as you have enough sex, because, I mean, there are ten and three daemons of you. Plus Nona apparently."

"...Fucking at Milliways does help my field... so far," he says dubiously. "I don't know if it'll always work that way, I don't know if it'll work if I go through to another world, I don't know I won't just suddenly die if I stay extraplanar too long."

"This world is such bullshit," says Aegis.

"Maybe you can room at Milliways, and Aether can hold the door so you can go check your field occasionally..."

"Cheating," says Aether, shaking her head, "that would be cheating."

"I hate this fucking place."

Celo shrugs. "I'm willing to try visiting other worlds, anyway."

"Yeah, 'course you are, but - I dunno, you don't look torchable, maybe your field would if we looked at it, maybe the admin could make it work regardless? I dunno."

"Or he could stay and Aether could go and they could see each other as Milliways allows," says Amariah. "There's options. I just - maybe you can just be a mental healer clamping down on every third thought you have, but you could do more than that, Aether."

Aether squirms.

Celo hugs her.

Hugs.

Snuggles.

"Would that be really bad for you?" Aether asks Celo. "If I went off somewhere - somewhere nice - and you couldn't stay there?"

"If the door cooperates."

"Should one of us be on opening-lots-of-doors duty?"

"Yeah, probably - where are there a lot of doors one of us can open without attracting unwanted attention?"

"I want to suggest Emily, I can talk to her for you and she can probably line up all the doors you could possibly want - Emily is an aware building," Aether says.

"Oh, that's even better than just a long underused hallway, aware buildings are totally sometimes able to help with doors, Jarvises can do it. Except the Yggdrasil one because he's never had a door open in him before, but if anyone's ever opened a door to Milliways in Emily, there's some chance she'll... Is this also cheating, excessively regular, blah blah?"

Aether shrugs. "I don't know anything about it, but I can ask her."

"Who wants dooring duty first?"

"I'll take it," shrugs Aegis. "C'mon, Aether, introduce me to Emily."

Aether gets up and shows invisible-Aegis out of the room and to Emily.