[...Um, Bella,] he says, [Jane broke.]

[Shit, again?]

[Yep. Even worse this time; the terminal just says "error 112358: inferior pattern recognition".]

[...Shit. Well, at least we have no strandees in either direction here. Sucks for the bunch that were just going to - I wonder if that's why, actually. Aegis was with them. Maybe Jane needs her own body or something.]

[Maybe,] says Brilliance. [I wonder if she'd even want one.]

[We will have to inquire. The alternative is apparently dealing with periodic outages or keeping Aegis in a box.]

[Ayep. Which I'm going to guess Aegis wouldn't go for, so since Jane doesn't seem to mind not even having a body, maybe she wouldn't mind having one that lives in the Belltower and doesn't do much.]

[Guess we'll ask her when she comes back. If nobody else thinks of it first.]

[Yeah, I guess. Oh well. On with business as usual. I feel sorry for everyone who was coming to me for spare coins, though.]

[We'll have a whole shitload to spread around by the time everybody comes back, probably.]

[Yes, but who knows how long they'll have to spend being conservative. Especially Glass. I guess she can probably get a lot of leverage combining smallish coins and local magic in creative ways.]

[Yeah, Glass didn't exactly seem like she had a magic shortage problem.]

[It comes down to scalability, mostly, she had all sorts of nifty small things but couldn't easily mass-produce. Oh well.]

[She'll be fine,] he says optimistically.

[Probably, yeah. Oh, well, no sense worrying about it till somebody gets a door. I'll tell Lexi.]

[Love you,] he says, pushing the associated feeling as a long-distance subsitute for a hug.

There could also be a short-distance not-substitute for a hug!

Yay! Best things.

Snuggly lovey happy things!