[I kind of have a complex about being the undistinguished one. I'll probably show you off a bit at the next party, be all 'Iiiii have a unique boyfriend'.]

[You can show me off as much as you want,] he promises. [Make all the other Bells jealous.]

[Except Amariah and Cam, who I think it has been established are likely to work out any incipient jealousy by borrowing you.]

[But they don't get to keep me.]

[It's true! I am pretty lucky on that count.]

He giggles.

[So anyway, now the afterlife in Alethia is all nice, and people there have their daemon-bits back, and can sleep, and get a nice little memory jolt so if they spent a million years being dead forgetting who they were they get it back on moving locales, and if they are nice and enough live people want them back they can go be alive again.]

[I thought Bells disdained sleep.]

[For ourselves, yeah, except recreational naps, but not everyone has something better to do with their time. And they couldn't sleep, in the previous afterlife. They just had to be conscious all the time.]

[Which was tremendous fun, I'm sure. So what was that 'other story' you mentioned earlier, about Amariah's boyfriend...?]

[Ah, Amariah sent Path on an errand. Witches do that sometimes, since their daemons can go wherever they want. And on his way, some random psychopath got hold of Path. Daemon-touching is a bad thing. If you're not a Joker, you don't want anybody but your very favorite person in the world getting their hands on your daemon - the way Amariah talks about it I think it must be worse than rape - Jokers have slightly longer lists of favorite people and a lot of tolerance for shit happening to them but otherwise same deal. And she woke up as soon as the guy got Path, and Kas figured out what was going on and asked the alethiometer how to save him. And the alethiometer said the way to do it was for Petaal to turn witch-shaped and fly, alone, as fast as she could to the right place and kill the guy. If Kas went with her it would have slowed them down too much or he would have been too obvious on the final approach since he can't shapeshift and Joker daemons can. It took hours, it was a long flight, but the kidnapper was being really slow about getting around to killing Path, so she was there in time, and she killed him, and she brought Path home.]

[Yeah. Since then, Kas is a one-person list of non-daemon people allowed to touch Path.]

[No kidding.]

[Her aura tells everybody else to back the hell off. Kas and Petaal's aura does something a little like it - you can tell if it's okay for you to touch them - but anybell can, pretty much, although I haven't tried it.]

[...Anybell can touch Petaal? How much longer is this 'slightly longer' list of favourite people?]

[Much. It came in handy, though, Sarion was broken when she met Kas and Petaal in Milliways, and their aura told her it was okay to snuggle right up, and they got her in touch with the peal and we fixed her.]

[...I feel like I should remember what happened to Sarion - oh, was she the one with the telepathic thing?]

[Yeah, she's the one who had to bond with Ansharil to save the world and this involved involuntary mind-reading and after a while she'd pretty much stopped having thoughts because having them hurt.]

[Right,] he says. [That one.]

[Yeah. Yaaaay, UN meeting over, I get to go listen to doctory grievances now.]

[Have fun with that.]

[I'm sure it will be fascinating. All, 'but people NEED to suffer from kidney stones, it builds character and lines my pockets!']

[How many people have actually made that argument so far?]

[In those words, not at all, but I have been asked very solemnly if I considered the economic implications of curing cancer.]