"What kinds of things do you gather from another Sherlock failing to pick up on something?"

"Oh - Pearl and Steel have their respective shifted cultural contexts, and even if I hadn't guessed from how Steel dresses, I'd know from how they both react to how I dress in comparison to the other Sunshine-family Sherlocks. They can tell the difference, but their understanding isn't as fine-tuned as it would be if they were from the same time period. Pearl is picking it up a little faster, because Panem fashion is closer to our sort of Earth than Chronicle's is. Or for another example, it's screamingly obvious that Plus knows what it's like to lack a soul. The other Sherlocks are all guessing about the relevant bits of my internal architecture; he knows. Not that it's easy for most people to tell the difference. But every so often, he'll notice something before they do."

"Huh. That's close in some ways to what Bells do and different in others. The peal all have a sense now of what things are Us Things and what things vary more or less freely, and the new ones get the gist pretty fast - so if I meet a Bell, I assume whatever she's wearing, less the crown if applicable, is either a completely unexceptional thing to wear, or overwhelmingly convenient for some reason, or something someone around her somehow induced her to wear. And the less to my taste it is, the more likely it is to be towards the end of the list of reasons than to the former. Etty's feather outfit and Aegis's uniform are convenient, all the jeans-and-T-shirt-crowd are unexceptional and so are Angela and Amariah with their leather and silk, I'm pretty sure Sarion's kind of elf is vaguely communist and she wears whatever some clothes-handling person gives her, if I see a Joker-having Bell in a pretty dress I assume her Joker made it for her. Or in Aurora's case that he is it for her. The mental architecture bits - vary less, although Shell Bell sometimes - sort of twitches. And we all know why, not because we've been there but because we don't twitch like that so it must be the different thing. If a new Bell does the same thing we'll know something awful happened to her."

"Interesting. Yes, we don't have any particular special tricks for detecting trauma in foreign Sherlocks."

She squeezes his hand. "Well, you're a stoic breed, I wouldn't expect you to do obvious twitching."

"Not obvious to most people, you mean. We do notice each other's twitches, it's just that we each have a different palette of sensitivities and it's not always immediately clear which twitches are coming from where."

"Ooh, non-transparent highly subtle twitching. Can you elaborate or would that be telling?"

"Not so much that it would be telling as that talking about the details of intra-Sherlock signals using existing vocabulary would be a bit like trying to describe the dance choreography of an alien species from scratch without having specific labels for any directions, limbs, or appendages. Except that I could probably give you a lesson in alien anatomy a lot faster than I could teach you the anatomy of Pearl's emotional expression."

"Is Pearl a special case for some reason? I don't think I've ever talked to her when Shell Bell wasn't around and Shell Bell's an order of magnitude more comprehensible, just because we are both Bells, so she gets most of my attention."

"I estimate that any expression of hers in the range from 'neutral' to 'murderous fury' will read as 'slightly bored' to an outsider. Most of us have some tendency to be excessively subtle, but hers is off the fucking charts even by comparison."

"Probably helps Shell Bell that she can read her mind, I suppose."

"Yes. But she exhibits some ability to tell regardless, which is also interesting."

"How can you tell that she can tell? I mean, I guess she's probably got some giveaway when she reads Pearl, is that all you mean?"

"Pearl said so, love. We do use words once in a while."

"Ah yes, I had forgotten in all this discussion of pseudotelepathy that words are not just a way of communicating with those of us who are not oddly-appendaged aliens."

He giggles.

"Do you gossip about your respective Bells often?"

"Define 'gossip'."

She elbows him gently, repositions the snuggle. "Do you talk about us. How good we are at reading you and so on."

"Good things, I hope."

"Oh, now I'm imagining you whispering about my defects to your alts."

"Yes. Surreptitiously spreading around critiques of your pre-training autopilot."

Bella thoughtfully considers her pre-training autopilot. "It was pretty wretched," she concedes with a light sigh, and then she grins. "But then you fixed it. I can prove it if you like."