"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.

Matilda grins. "I'm glad you two like each other," she says to Lexi and Persica.

"Fun fact, so far I'm the only Bell we've found with a sister," remarks Bella. "The others are all only children."

"Interesting. Do other templates vary in number of siblings?"

"Jokers sometimes have little brothers. Who are usually bad news - Angela rescued her brother-in-law but the other ones we know about are serial killer types, one of them was part of the awful that was Shell Bell's time spent as a dead person. The others are onlies. I don't know if the other Matildas have any siblings; I get the impression it couldn't possibly matter less to them if they did. Some Tonies are twins with their Sherlocks, the others are singlets who clone themselves and get Sherlocks, except this one never got around to it," she points at Iron Man's coin color, "and this one is a solo Sherlock. And of course Bells have varying numbers of kids, who, when they have the same other-parent, also are alts of each other, and Angela has four and Rose two last I checked."

"I have a brother," says Matilda. "I haven't spoken to him since I was six. Sometimes I forget he ever existed."

"That could easily be true of the other ones too," shrugs Bella.

"It probably is."

"We haven't found any lone Lexis, but of course people haven't known to keep an eye out for as long," says Bella.

"A Lexi without a Bella would be weird. But it's already pretty weird that there are Bellas without Lexis."

"I wonder why," Matilda says musingly. "Why all this. The templates, the varying numbers of siblings, all of it."