"I'm not complaining, I like our mana color."

Matilda grins. "What's your mana colour?"

Bella shrugs and casts the first spell she thinks of. "Safety." It makes her glow in the relevant color. "It's not so much a single color. Me and Brilliance have our wishcoins in that color too - and Lexi's is peachy-looking - but his shift around and mine don't. Joker coins tend to shift, Bell coins glow solid colors if they have native magic that protects them from mindreading and stuff and interesting-looking but non-glowy coins if we don't."

"Interesting," says Matilda. "I wonder if mana colours and coin colours match across the board."

Bella spends a square to get a counterfactual-coin for Matilda.

"Is that mine? It matches our combined colour," she says. "Interesting."

"Yeah, it is. I haven't gotten around into making anybody else a mage yet, although I'll happily run this test on anyone you want to present me with. Glass will probably want to get maged eventually, when we get in touch again. She maxes out the Bell-magic-geek parameter. If you find any more stray Devices after Jane's back up maybe we can introduce them to her."

"Mana colours are usually single unchanging colours," she says thoughtfully. "Is it the same way for coins? What's Glass's coin colour?"

Bella conjures up everybell and everyjoker's coin color, and as an afterthought the Sherlocks' and Tonies' too, in a neat chart. "That one," she says, pointing out the fragmented stained-glass. "So far no one's basic coin color has changed, although obviously," she gestures at the Joker coins, especially Kas's, which shifts through scales and skin and feather patterns, "that's not always saying a lot."

"Interesting. No, mana colours are never that complicated. Even simple things like your rainbow pattern are pretty rare. I wonder what Glass's mana would be like."

"We will be able to find out soon enough. I'm pretty sure Glass would do way more than tweak her genetics to get access to a new kind of magic, and near as we can tell magery is just genetic - we had Jane sequence all of us a while ago. The tested Matildas match; I assume you match except the mage thing, I'm on-template apart from that."

"I think I'd like to meet these people."

"I bet. You'll be on the guest list when we have a yay-Jane-is-back party."

"Oh good."

"Unfortunately that could be a long time. Jane syncs up the passage of time when she's on; when she's not, all bets are off. Last time Rainbow - that's what I named this world - only lost a couple hours, but some worlds were out for more than a decade."

"That sounds inconvenient."

"And that's just Belled worlds; a few of the other worlds we have contact with were gone for way longer. Fortunately, I am immortal."

Matilda raises her eyebrows. "Please, tell me more."

Bella laughs. "I can make you immortal too, I don't even need a coin for it. There's this afterlife, it was connected to seventy-something worlds when we first found it, I never got the exact figure. Including Golden's world and Shell Bell's and Juliet's and Pattern's, but nobell else's to start." She points at the relevant coin colors. "Shell Bell got assassinated. She wound up there. It was really bad. I'll spare the details unless you want them. Anyway, eventually, she got a door to Milliways out of there, and when we found Aegis," she points at glowy copper, "and Aegis brought us Jane, we were able to assemble everybody and basically covertly assault the place. I say we but I wasn't in the peal yet, it was just these ones -" She gestures at some coins. "And they found Pattern, who died when she got hit by a car and didn't have any magic affecting the situation the way Stella and Golden did when the same thing happened to them. But they got caught. Then they struck a deal with the afterlife's admin, who let them install Jane to basically run the place and does us favors, including letting us get and distribute the thing that dead people do instead of dying when they suffer lethal damage. If anything gets through my miscellaneous defenses thoroughly enough to 'kill' me, I go up in theatrical flames and reset in a healthy state a second later. It's called 'torching'."

"I would like to be immortal, please," says Matilda. "Adularia too."

Bella snaps her fingers. "Done and done."

Meanwhile, Lexi and Persica are quietly magephoning, and Persica has consented to be incorporated into a conjured necklace. "You should do my Peachy too, Bella," says Lexi.

"Peachy?" laughs Bella. "Sure, she's all set."

"Thank you, Master's Sister," says Persica.