"Of their template. There are two who live in that world. They work for my alt there."

"How did there get to be two...?"

"They are not from the world. My alt hired them from other worlds to make coins for her. There was one who was native to it, but he moved away, on purpose."

"I can't imagine leaving the world to go and do magic somewhere else," he says, shaking his head. And hugging her some more. She's very huggable.

"This will be easier to talk about if I tell you their names," remarks Isibel. "My beloveds are called Aianon - the demon - and Ansharil - the dragon. The world they are in is named Origin. The Jokers who moved there are Queenie, and Ghosty, and the one who was born there and moved away is only called the Joker. He did not move away to do magic; he moved to be with his boyfriend in a world called Aurum. Ghosty and Queenie had both died when they met the rest of my friends and did not particularly want to stay where they were."

"...Is Ghosty," he inquires, "by any chance a ghost?"

"Yes. Of her own sort, though. We don't know of any who are the same kind of ghost."

"...Really? I was expecting a... world full of ghosts, or something."

Isibel shakes her head. "She died, and became a ghost, and there is no sign of other people who have died in her original world doing the same thing. Her world is attached to the same afterlife most of us use, now."

"...'Their' meaning...?"

"The ones from their worlds." Pause. "Generally romantically entangled. Pattern, the Bell from Origin, is the only Bell we know about who was born in a world with a Joker and did not wind up that way."

"Oh," says Lycaelon, almost elvishly.

"Perhaps you have heard about how elves find soul-sympathy."

"...I haven't, actually."

"Ah. It is a subtle - fitting, between two souls, almost like a lesser dragonbond. It is difficult to detect until it is already firmly in place. If you have heard a relatively unadulterated story of Idalia and Jermayan, she initially spurned him because she feared dying before he did and leaving him unable to get over her loss - this was based a misunderstanding of the phenomenon on her part; he was already committed. I found it for my beloved shortly after I was through convalescing."

"Oh," he says again, this time without so many questions attached.

"Hopefully that addresses your curiosities."

"Some of them."

"If you have others, you may describe them."

"Some of them are embarrassing."

"Ah."