Tab sits ready to take notes. "I don't know what all you know so I don't know what's maybe useful."

"I don't know what's useful either," he says. "You have a bunch of alts. The one I've met is a vampire empress, there's more that are other kinds of empress, basically all of you end up taking over the world somehow or other but there's different kinds of taking over and 'empress' isn't always it. Um - vampires in Aurum used to all eat people, now they mostly eat fake blood instead, the ones who eat people tend to get violent with each other and you usually couldn't get more than a group of three or so to hang out for long without somebody ripping somebody's head off and setting them on fire - Chelsea, our Chelsa, she was a vampire and she worked for the previous vampire government making their employees all like each other so they could stick together and not fight."

"This world is already taken over," frowns Tab. "How do they take over their worlds? Do they have to do anything horrible like Chelsa-ing people to do it?"

"I think one of them blew up a building once or something," he says. "But the rest just set up colonies on Mars and stuff."

"How would blowing up a building help?"

"I should know? I just heard it from somebody once," he shrugs.

"Well, how do they run the worlds once they take them over, then?"

"Pretty well, I guess."

"No, I mean - what do they do? They've had more time to think of ideas than me, maybe they have good ones I can copy?"

"I should know?" he repeats, frustrated. "I don't follow Bella around all day watching her empress."

"Oh," muses Tab.

Harley sighs.

"You knew she killed the Chelsa in your world, though, what did she do when all those people who liked her didn't have her any more?"

"Uh, killed a bunch and hired the rest?"

"How did she get them to work for her if she just killed a person they liked?"

"Oh, that. Um, her daughter could un-Chelsea people," he says. "Wipe out what she put on, I mean, not grow back what she cut off."

"Wow," says Tab. "Do you think she would work on Chelsa too?"

"Yeah," he says. "She couldn't do a whole planet in one shot, though, and if she did there'd be riots. Even just the fifty-some people she got for her mom's takeover, some shit went down - I mean, suddenly everybody didn't automatically like each other, you know?"

"I don't know," says Tab. "I'm safe but that's just me."

"Ask Aelise, then, I bet she remembers," he says.

"She remembers what it's like to have never liked everybody. I don't think she remembers what it's like to stop."

"I don't either. I wasn't there."

"This is a really hard problem," sighs Tab, looking at her notes.

"No shit," says Harley.

Tab stays a while longer, since Harley is lonely, but it doesn't take her long to agree with him that she's not making much difference on her own. And he has nothing else of much use to tell her. She goes back to Kers, after.