"Yep. And I will probably accumulate legal power over time, anyway. And maybe I can find a decent filmmaker who wants to make a not-terrible movie about me and help them out and hope that crowds the market."

"People will probably want a movie about you with you actually in it more than they'll want ones without," she muses.

"I don't know if I'd go so far as acting in the thing. But I would endorse a decent movie."

"What would a decent movie about you be like?"

"Mmm... depends on how much interdimensional stuff I want to disclose, I guess, which I won't know until I'm up to speed on what's been going on in my absence."

"Well... what do you want to know about what's been going on?" she wonders.

"What do people think happened? How is the new afterlife affecting things? What's politics like at this point, culture - is there any intersubworld exchange going on to speak of - what's happened with tech?"

"There are some people talking to shades from other worlds," says Helen. "I don't hear that much about them, but they're there. I think maybe mortals are more affected by the afterlife than witches, or maybe it's just that the mortals I've met are usually younger than it is, and the witches sometimes aren't - I've known witches who forget once in a while about revenants and shade-dreams and things, and mortals don't do that so much."

"Interesting. I don't suppose you've personally dreamed your way here before?" Isabella gestures at her homemade subworld.

"Makes sense."

"Yeah. Well, I guess you could count the people who kidnapped me - I met them, and they're dead now - but they haven't tried dreaming at me so far."

"I would hope not. They can stay where they are."

"They were unpleasant. Well, that's not technically true, they were very nice to me if you ignore the part where they kept trying to kill Kas and probably had some kind of secret horrible plan."

"Do you care what the plan was? Have you been bothered since?"

"I don't care especially. I'm sort of curious, but not enough to bother trying to find out. And nobody else has tried to kidnap me or cast horrible curses on Kas since then. As far as I know. If he's caught any more horrible curses, he hasn't told me about them."

Isabella declines to mention the cluster headache curse. "Probably an isolated incident, then. I may look into it but it's not a priority."

"Okay," says Helen.