[Wow! Hi, guys! Just about seven years.]

[I observe that Jane is not yet up,] says Steel.

[She's not,] agrees Juliet. [We're here by virtue of Shell Bell's aura. As long as we can't communicate freely and this is the only unJokered universe without at-will, independent access to Milliways, thought we'd drop in and see if you need a coin infusion from Aurora. Or anything else.]

[After this I'm going to see if my aura will get me a door to 'wherever that new Bell was supposed to be from', in which case it'd be nice to have Glass along to take a look at the place and see if she can see what might be the matter that way, but it might not work.]

[Also, what is this pink thing on Shell Bell's head?]

[I strongly suspect it is a fluffbat,] says Steel. [Its name is Sunrise and it belongs to Tanalin.]

[Why don't you come out to the parlor, bat and all? There's not very much point to hurrying, I don't think.]

"Goodness," says Agent Honey. The moonstone pendant around her neck shimmers.

"Hi! Yep, you're a Matilda all right," says Glass. "I also think the girls' friends from Toure-en-Marsh are some sort of template but I haven't seen them before."

"Let's have a look?"

Illusion!

"Oh hey yeah, I have a set of those," says Juliet. "I was going to bring them to a party but it just hasn't happened yet. Ike and Val. Mine're older."

"Templates everywhere," says Agent Honey.

"I think being a template is contagious, actually," says Glass. "Not invariably, but significantly."

"Oh?"

"Yes. You didn't catch it - you were 'already' a template. I think Kanim caught it, though, for all that we haven't found more of him - unless we have?"

"Not so far as I know. We'd've recognized him. Although in other news I have retroactively acquired a slightly younger sister." And she repeats the story of Soph.

"You have such interesting lives," Agent Honey observes. "And fascinatingly varied magical systems."

"I know, right? You've got -" Aura, magicalmagicalforestymagical - "the Rainbow kind, and Wellspring, I guess you stopped there on your way here?"

"Yep. Me and Juliet are in progress for Wellspring, nothing sticking so far."

"I can levitate you too if you want in," she offers.

"Yes, please! I was going to set that up before Jane broke."

Float!

"Yeah, here you go," says Aurora, tossing an assortment in Glass's direction, "were you run down?"

"No, I'm very careful with anything big - I'm just lucky I live in such a nice world. I was able to layer a few hexes onto some of my local magic capacities, which helps enormously, of course."

"I'd be happy to meet Icarin and Valeria if they want," says Juliet.

"I want to learn all about the local magic," says Agent Honey. "And the nonlocal magic, for that matter."

Kanim appears presently. "Why hello!"

"Hi!" says Agent Honey. "I want to learn about local magic."

[Ye-es...?] says Icarin.

[Some of them are here. Jane is still broken, but one of them has the ability to walk from world to world by ordinary doors whenever she likes and she's come with a couple of the others. And another one says she has an Ike and a Val in her world.]

"Well!" says Kanim. "There are many kinds. Witchcraft, sorcery, wizardry, various racial magics, various species magics - those are not quite the same thing, mind - and of course locational magics of all sorts! Where would you like to start?"

"What is a locational magic?"

[Okay, so can we come visit or what?]

"My specialty! The kind that just happens, in places, without people involved in making it, and does stuff. You're marinating in it right now; this is the Enchanted Forest and it is the most magical place in the world. Come look at the Skyvault! It regulates forest magic." He beckons doorward.

[Sure, would you like me to come get you right now?]

"Just a moment," says Agent Honey, and she considers the levitating Bells for a second or two and then snaps her fingers. "Brainphone me if you want to touch the ground," she tells them, and follows Kanim out the door.

[Yes please!] says Icarin.

Glass pops to Toure-en-Marsh, and fetches the twins, and brings them in.

"Aww, middle-school-aged Ike and Val," says Juliet. "My set are nineteen."

"We are thirteen and a half!" says Icarin.

"So it would seem! My set are also only half-human and their hair is not quite so vividly red. What are you guys?"

"Fire-witches," says Valeria. "What's their other half?"

"A kind of demon called Sessiakitsi, on their mom's side. Also 'Ike' and 'Val' are short for 'Isaac' and 'Valerie'. I haven't met their mom, but here's a Sessiaki I have met -" She produces an illusion of the relative-of-some-kind she was introduced to on her tour of Siathe. And then her Ike and Val for good measure. "Hybrids can pass for human except when Val does iethat stuff."

"What's iethat?"

The illusion-Valerie produces glowy tentacles and wings. "That. A certain fraction of Sesskiakitsi and their mixes can do it."

"I can do that!" says Val. "I fell in a magic spring!"

"So I guess now you know why you fell in a magic spring!"

"That is weird," Val announces.

"If you think that's weird, there's also the part where according to the same metacausality-detecting mechanism, I am gay because Sherlock and Tony are girls here."

Val shrugs. That doesn't seem weird at all.

All right then. "I might be able to produce more pronouncements but I think you'd have to actually be standing next to each other."

"If people are curious, I'm willing to open the relevant doors, although I think everyone who isn't in their own world should probably stick by me even though Jarvis should be able to let you out of Sunshine any time - I'm just not sure how to figure the time-syncing when it gets this complicated."

"Well, if we're gonna go traipsing through strange worlds, we should probably tell Mom and Dad first," says Val.

"Probably," agrees Glass.

"Do you want help sweeping for other templates here, meanwhile, Glass?"

"Yeah - who all's worth checking for? Matildas, Libbies..."

"That's a lot of people," Val observes.

"We encounter lots of fascinating people, most of whom turn out to be templates."

"Did you ask your parents yet about visiting Sunshine?" Shell Bell inquires.

"Oh well."

"I don't suppose meeting in Milliways instead of going all the way to Sunshine makes a difference? If you can't leave the universe at all you won't be able to attend future Bell parties when Jane is back. Presuming she comes back."

"She would probably feel much better about it if she had more advance warning and also if leaving the universe was a thing people did more often," he predicts.

"All right then."

"I'd offer to see about bringing Sunshine's set to you, but without Shell Bell I can't easily exit universes without Jarvises and get into universes that aren't mine. I hope Jane is back soon. Glass, it sounds like you've been waiting longer than me or Aurora, let alone Shell Bell who hadn't even noticed when I forced her door."

"Yes, but it hasn't been so bad. I've had a lot to do. I've read through Rose's enchantment library, now."

"We should see about maging you. Apparently I'm a 'mage'," says Aurora.

"What's a mage?" says Icarin. "Is it like a magician but shorter?"

Aurora laughs. "No, I'm precisely Glass's height. It's a kind of magic user from Rainbow. I actually don't know that much about the technical details of using it, because until I met Agent Honey the other day my only teacher was Brilliance, who wasn't really designed for teaching magic. But I assume we can conjure up a library at least as good as Rose's for Glass to play with. You will be hampered by the lack of Device, but maybe Jane will be back soon and Agent Honey can hook you up; she found a stray one that got along well with Lexi."

Icarin peers at Glass and Aurora as though trying to verify the assertion about their relative heights.

"We're all almost exactly the same height," laughs Shell Bell, "except when there's reasons for us not to be - Cam is taller, because he's a boy, I'm a little shorter because I didn't eat well growing up and Rose is between me and standard for similar reasons, Aegis is taller because she grew up in space. And if you count Angela's wings she's got a few inches even on Cam, but otherwise she's like everyone else."

"There's a one of you with wings? What kind? Is she a dragon?"

"She's an angel. They're big feathery wings - she looks like this." Aurora banishes previous illusions and replaces them with an Angela.

"Pretty," says Valeria, and she makes herself a pair of wings with a roughly similar shape - it's hard to see the details on hers, though, with the glowy undifferentiated whiteness.

Bells continue catching up with each other; if and when the duke and duchess's children become bored, Glass ferries them back home.

"No, it wouldn't," Glass says, squinting, "I think you'll all catch it like fire, it's sort of attached to you as a group - how much did I get?"

"I'm not completely solid on magic-seeing yet," says Agent Honey, peering back at her, "but I'm seeing high perception, medium-high entanglement - do you even know these terms?"

"Nnno, I was going to talk it over with Matilda or Tilly, whichever, and then - Jane broke."

"Okay," Agent Honey says cheerfully. "Short version: there are five qualities that dictate how you interact with magic. Perception is how well you understand the system intuitively; entanglement is how easily you can add new patterns or introduce variations on existing ones; handling is how much power you can use effectively at a time; storage is the maximum amount of power you can personally have 'on' you, so to speak; and generation is how fast you make more power. Your HSG is all within normal range, which I'm given to understand is not that normal for a Bell; your perception is unusually high, and your entanglement is on the high side of normal. These things can all increase over time, roughly in proportion to how much you started with, if you use magic a lot. Oh, and if you use magic a lot, there's a good chance your world will catch it and other people will start coming up with it, but that's generally considered a good thing because Wellspring magic is very very nice. Do you want me to conjure you a laptop with all the latest research notes on it? Will I have to explain laptops?"

"I know a few things about computers. Jane didn't break instantly on being introduced to me, and we talked. But - yes, explaining a few things about laptops would help. I'm not surprised my perception is high; I can see magic as an aura feature - although I can only interpret it once I've learned how; it's a bit like being able to see invisible ink written in all manner of foreign languages I can't even pentagon."

She snaps her fingers. A laptop appears. She hands it over and offers a short tutorial on how to navigate the file system, open files, and read them; it's reasonably intuitive, and the holographic three-dimensional interface is very pretty in addition to being easy to handle.

"...What?"

"Remember when I said Wellspring was related to the Sunshine family?" asks Glass slowly.

"Yeah, of course."

"I think the Sunshine magic system might be - on some level - the same as Wellspring magic. Except Wellspring is - nicer, newer, friendlier? The Sunshines are all Voices and Wellspring is Nathaniel? I don't know. And you already had statistics in the system, but they were blocked up, and now you've sort of - stepped sideways into a version of the system that your opacity doesn't object to so much."

"You have all these patterns stuck to you," says Agent Honey. "They were barely visible before, I just took them for random noise, but I can see them more clearly now. It definitely looks like you're from another world where the same magic system has been used in a completely different way for hundreds or thousands of years. I mean, I wouldn't have previously thought I'd recognize that if I saw it, but... there it is."

"Sunshine family magic is terrible. I haven't touched it - I tried, when I was less well-informed, but it's dangerous as all get out, addictive, involves treating with semi-hostile powers, etcetera - I would never have guessed it."

"Well, that explains why the patterns you've got are all so... icky," she says. "Do you want a laptop too? Maybe if you stick to my world's spells, you'll have a positive influence on your world's patternspace. Your entanglement's not terrible."

"Yes please. And I understand how to laptops. You don't think I'll get hooked on Wellspring magic if I use it in Sunshine?"

"Wellspring magic doesn't have an 'addictive' pattern at all," she says. "I... can't swear that it won't happen, but I don't expect it to."

"I think -" begins Glass slowly. "I think Bells are very susceptible to magic addiction, come to mention it, I think if we get too close to any magic system that has that potential we will immediately be stuck in it. It's sheer luck you were steered away. I'd wish against it before trying anything if I were you, Juliet, just in case Sunshine leaks into your Wellspring-version system."

"There are a few Sunshine family worlds, so if you can do it, you will be able to keep yourselves occupied for a while between Sunshine itself and Helios and Apollo. It would be very nice of you. On the other hand, I bet part of the reason the worldfamily is so mean is because it's full of demons, many of whom are straight-up evil. I'm not sure how much you guys can counteract millennia of large populations using magic to do nasty things, however deeply entangled you are."

"We'll definitely want to give it a shot, anyway," she says. "As a long-term project, after your interdimensional transport system is up and running again. As another long-term project, I think we want to work on a better interdimensional transport system..."

"We've asked the Jarvises if they'd mind spreading out more. They're reluctant; they prefer to be houses, containing friendly people, and Bells aren't really homebodies, although it's possible we should have pushed it more when we had the chance."

"This castle, for example, is occupied," says Glass.

"Well, now I'm considering running back to Sunshine and asking if Jarvises want to be it. I've also discovered that a tenner will put someone Downside directly - at least from Sunshine; tenners are not freely available enough to afford much experimentation and Sunshine was natively Downside-attached so it might not generalize."

"I mean, I can probably finagle more tenners, but not huge numbers, especially with a baker's dozen Bells to distribute them among, so they should probably remain an emergency or Dramatic Large Project thing and not the basis of any sort of regular transit."

"Minting really is a remarkable magical system," says Agent Honey. "Although they're not all positive remarks."

"Stella ran all the sensible experiments about trying to make it run on sunshine or something, no dice."

"If only it was nice and flexible like Wellspring's. Then again, considering Sunshine, maybe not."

"Yeah," says Juliet, shaking her head, "and so far we've found more of Sunshine than we have of Wellspring."

"I'm going to maintain that Sunshine might be fixable until we actually try and fail," says Agent Honey.

"I think you can significantly affect it. I don't think you can walk in and command it to suddenly behave."

"You have interesting ideas about our methods," says Agent Honey.

"I don't mean methodologically. This is coming out of metacausality-vision, not magic-seeing. You can make progress, I don't think you can complete the job."

"Walking in and commanding it to suddenly behave was not the plan," she says. "It sounded like you meant it more or less literally, as a course of action that you predicted wouldn't work - did you not?"

"No, of course not. I meant I didn't think the resources you'd throw at the project, whatever they are - I don't know what they are, this is a metacausality pronouncement about how Matildas and Sunshine worlds might interact with no comment on the details - would complete the task. Although I think that might have changed since I said it."

"Yes, telling us we probably can't do something often has that effect," says Agent Honey.

She grins.

"Awesome. I haven't swept Sunshine for native Matildas, yet, but if there isn't one I'll be happy to take outside help."

"Matildas are neat," agrees Shell Bell approvingly.

"We are, it's true!"

"Do you want to ask your wives and mother-in-law about Jarvising the castle, or should I?" Juliet asks Glass.

"I got it, but I'll conference you in." [Honeys, Marianne? Juliet is here, with a couple of the others; Jane is still down but Juliet's suggested that a Jarvis might like to be installed in the castle.]

[What exactly is a Jarvis like?]

[They're the same general sort of entity as Jane, in that they're computer-based intelligences, but more local - they inhabit buildings, not networks. It'd mean cameras - uh, mechanical seeing devices - and microphones, mechanical listening devices - all over the place, but they are good about respecting privacy on request. They are nice and helpful and prefer to be occupied by friendly people.]

[The template is attached to Tony's, but can't be realized without help in low-tech worlds like Chronicle, and doesn't crop up everywhere, like Atlantis doesn't have one.]

[I'd ask what my alts think of this, but - well,] sighs Marianne. [All right.]

[Okay. This might involve hosting one or more foreign Tonies for a while.]

[We have room.]

[Bring on the Tonies!]

[Yes, I don't imagine anyone will be upset about the eventuality. I suppose Carinna might find it disconcerting, but not prohibitively. Okay. I guess us Bells and Agent Honey will be out for a moment talking to Jarvises and retrieving Tonies.]

Shell Bell produces a door. "I guess we'll have to impose on your hospitality a bit longer to wait for Jarvis to be installed; the forked one in Sunshine doored okay but they might produce this version differently and I'm not sure if the ability will carry."

"That's fine," says Glass serenely.

"Out we go, then?"

Out they go!

"We checked with Marianne and Steel and Iron. Are all available Tonies up for it?"

"And by the castle's residents, do you mean we should also run this by my children and Howard and the servants and so on? Kanim? He doesn't live there but is present often."

"We would not want to live anywhere we were unwelcome. Consulting Tonies as we speak." Pause. "Tonies are coming in unanimously affirmative."

"Okay, I'll stick my head back into Chronicle to check with the girls and Kanim, and see if Marianne asked Howard, and mention it to the staff, and then we'll go round up Tonies."

And lo, it is so!

[...But he will stop if we want, right?]

[I think it sounds fine.]

[Yes, he won't watch you or listen to you if you don't want him to.]

[Fine by me too,] says Tanalin.

[I did ask Howard. Howard is fine.]

All right then. To all three Sunshine worlds and Yggdrasil! And Tune asks Screwdriver if he'd like to join them, and the answer is sure, so also briefly to Atlantis! And then back to Chronicle!

Carinna shadows them while they work, hiding around corners.

"We have a spy," Iron Man remarks.

"She does that," says Iron.

Carinna does not deign to reply.

Kiawen is far more open about her supervision; she tags along, slightly underfoot, piano bear on her shoulder.

"That thing is excruciatingly adorable," says Iron Man. "I'm not used to working around this much cute."

"His name is Keys. He's a piano bear," says Kiawen.

"Wow. Really?" he says. "I would've gone for 'pocket panda', personally, it alliterates and all, but piano bear's not bad."

"What's a panda?" asks Kiawen.

"They look like that, but bigger. You can ask Jarvis all about them when we've got him up and running. How do people in this world live without Google?" he wonders.

"What's Google?"

One of the other Tonies obliges him!

Kiawen laughs and goes on following them.

"Welcome to Chronicle!" says Glass.

"Pleased to meet you," he says serenely. "I think I'm going to like it here."

"Do you already know how to door to Milliways, like the Sunshine fork did, or would you like me to show you?" asks Shell Bell.

"Well done. All right, where to next? Should we just look in on everybody...?"

"I want to see if I can get a door to that new Bell's world, first. If I can't, or if that doesn't fix Jane, then yes."

"I'm inclined to come along."

"I'm not sure what I want to do," says Agent Honey. "But I might as well tag along for a little while longer."

"Let's hit Origin first. Aianon and Ansharil were there; I assume Sarion can still do telepathy with them, but if it's been more than a few hours there and in Thilanushinyel she must miss them something fierce and vice-versa."

Shell Bell obliges with the doors.