The Jokers arrange themselves as described; the 'middle bunch' consists of Brilliance, Micaiah, Jellybean, Kas, Beast, Corona, and Celo. War and Sue come as a unit, but Sue stands closer to the central mass.
"They're something about how we think," says War. "I couldn't begin to put it in words - I'm not even sure I could summarize it in link. But I see a lot of it 'cause I'm the hub when we link up. The retirees are one thing, and me and Sue are another thing, and the middle bunch are all different flavours of a third thing, and Alice and Nona are a fourth thing, and Aianon and Harley are fifth and sixth things."
"Like..." Glass starts tracing lines between the clusters of assembled Jokers. "Yeah, that's why 'amounts' popped into my head even though it's wrong... Anyway, Felicity is that 'amount'." She waves in Alice and Nona's direction. "But Corona's kind. And a new face - I'd tell you where he looks like he's from but it wouldn't mean anything to somebody who wasn't from Chronicle."
"Harley got rescued before he was any phase," War continues, "he's been off course for most of his life. Me and Sue... I'm not sure, it's harder to see from the inside. Aianon, I feel like he got off course just about when he hit his island; the way he remembers being before then is like middle-phase with more fear. Ansharil is weird, he was never on course in the first place but when he met Aianon he got to be the same phase right away before they went off to the island."
Glass lifts her hands. "What do you mean, 'get it'? I can pass on recommendations about what to do, and she'll more likely follow them than not. She is also more likely than not to privately think that she emerged from hell and promptly conquered the world."
"...I feel weird 'cause I'm on the other side of this from most of us," he says. "I was never the kid they're talking about. But I wish there was a way for Golden to understand it better than that. But I get what the Joker's saying about her, too; she's the way she is because that's the life she's lived and the way she's lived it, and you can't just wish people would stop being themselves."
"Well," says Corona, "if she's smug about him, and if he notices - and I'm pretty sure he'd notice - then either he won't give a shit about her any which way, or it'll hurt him and he won't deal well. So maybe better just to avoid the whole problem. Unless she wants to take the chance, I guess. But you said telling her what's up would make her defensive, so..." He shrugs.
"Putting it the way you put it would. I'm trying to think if there's - I mean, if one of my daughters were bringing up a fosterling, I'd want to meet the kid," says Glass. "If the kid needed particular care in handling, I'd do my best to accommodate that - but then my eldest already requires care in handling, so maybe I'm just used to it."
He closes his eyes and leans into Queenie's arms.
"Like when I was in the sun," says Harley. "But with fear instead of pain."
"Yeah," says Corona, "a lot like that."
Harley piles on to the Queenie-and-Corona hug.
"He's twelve. He had enough of a dose of Terrible Childhood that the minimum-suffering attractor is all done pulling on him. And Corona's concerned that - Corona's particularly relevant here, he's metacausally clustered closer to Felicity than the others - that he'll be able to tell if there's any hint of 'smug' going on, on your end, when you evaluate how he deals with having recently been traumatized. How he deals with it is probably going to boil down to 'not well'."
He considers his next words for a moment, perhaps also conferring with Alice and/or Corona.
"The way they're all like each other is... there's something you're feeling, and it's bad, and you can't get away from it, and it changes the whole landscape of what it's like in your head. Anything else you were going to think about, anything you were going to do, it all gets that much harder. Being in the sun was the worst for that - I couldn't think at all, most of the time. Turning we guess is somewhere in the middle, but we can't be sure where it'd be for somebody who didn't like it the way Alice did. Being scared all the time like Corona was, like we figure Felicity is... well, it's not as bad, Corona could still walk and talk and do stuff most of the time, but it's the same kind of thing. Inescapable pressure."
"The off-course ones I'm less sure about," says Harley. "But I still feel like we're all headed to something like the same place, even if no two of us are getting there exactly the same way. I mean, I'm never gonna be a retiree, right, I'm not planning to go back to my Gotham and blow a bunch of things up and then die, but... I'd like to get to where Ghosty and Queenie and the Joker are, someday. That way they have of just being okay, even when they're not. I don't know, maybe it doesn't make sense if you're not a Joker."
"My grandpa Carlisle bought it for my grandma Esme a long time ago." She snaps her fingers. "I said I'd get you a computer." And she conjures up a tablet laptop for him and bounces an overview of how to work it in simple enough terms for a twelve-year-old from the nineteen-eighties. "The hookups to the internet from Origin will roll out in a week, and Gift will take a little longer, and once the kinks have been ironed out we're going to add Atlantis too."
Eventually, dinnertime rolls around, and Jacob opens the front door, and Elspeth hops over the back of the couch to traipse over to him and give him a hug.
The way Jake looks at Elspeth would make it pretty obvious he was her wolf even if Felicity had not been previously introduced to the concept.
"Hi, Felicity," says Jake. "Huh, this one's not white."
"He is not," agrees Elspeth. "Just barely not the first discovered case - the elf Sandy looks Asian, I'm not sure what the equivalent phenotype in Thilanushinyel is called."
"Huh," says Jake.
"As a shortcut. Yeah."
"Heh. Well, at least I know what's around. Lots of ingredients."
"Feel free to conjure a pizza," chuckles Elspeth.
"Might just. Felicity, you want pizza?"
"Pepperoni is more than seventy years old as a pizza topping. Felicity is more likely to be puzzled by the availability of mashed potatoes. Or fig slices."
"All right, one with fig slices, coming right up." Jacob conjures two pizzas, on platters rather than in cardboard boxes; his is covered in assorted forms of meat and cut into very wide slices, Felicity's is dotted with sliced figs and has more standard cuts. Jacob proceeds to sit in front of and eat his pizza. He gives Elspeth a bite when she leans over his shoulder.
When he does slow down, Elspeth takes five triangles out of her coin sorter. Two of them are the same color as her hair, one of them is Harley's white-and-streaked-with-color, and two are a warm, chocolate brown sort of like the weird magnet-clasped uniform Jacob's wearing. "Here are some little wishcoins. They'll make little wishes - they'll clean off your computer screen or braid your hair or flick a lightswitch from across the room, that sort of thing."
"A lot of the Jokers do rainbowy coins, actually. The eponymous Joker, the one who works for my mom, makes these -" She pulls out a clear triangle, also streaked. "It's not always clear why coin colors are what they are, though. Sometimes they're obvious." She tugs at her hair. Then she pulls out one of her mother's triangles, gold and glowy. "Bells' coins glow if they have native magic for defense against mental spying and tampering, in all different solid colors, and they're other, non-glowy patterns if they don't. Do you want to see what yours would be?"
"Pretty," he says admiringly.
Elspeth shrugs too, and conjures him a light set of pajamas to match the warm climate, white with yellow edging like the bedroom he picked out. "Here you go. I'll come up with a few outfits to magic into your closet overnight, if you don't have any requests."
When Jake comes home for dinner, either Elspeth tells him privately the spaghetti's not for him or he figures it out, because he fixes himself a plate of sandwiches and eats them between items of pack gossip that he catches Elspeth up on. Apparently she owes Kim a visit and Alice found an imprint for Sawyer who he'll meet in two weeks and Pamela's thinking of moving to Becky's pack and teaching third grade there.
"I'm talking to the people who do the nearest equivalent of my job in Origin. We're talking about how to reveal other worlds and the upcoming general interworld ansible services to the populations of Aurum and Origin. They'll be able to talk to each other soon enough, so we need to match reasonably well."
Elspeth jumps down off the roof and lands on her feet, after a while, and puts her tablet on her pillow while she takes a break (she brushes out her hair by hand, and braids it with a triangle, then sits with her eyes closed and her hands clasped to sort through the many thousands of years of unprocessed memories she still holds).
Elspeth puts a few cookbooks on the kitchen counter but draws no special attention to them.
The following morning, Jake leaves first thing in the morning. Elspeth says a couple hours later, "Felicity? I'm going to be out for a few hours. Do you need anything before I go?"
An hour after Elspeth leaves, he goes back in the house. It takes a little time and ingenuity to set an empty cereal box on fire - he's already out of triangles anyway, and hasn't asked for more - but he manages it, and then he carries it around to as many flammable things as he can, and then he curls up on the living room floor and waits.
She sits down next to him. She's not sure if his ears are working, with this extent of damage. But Elspeth can talk to the comatose, and he's not that far gone. I can heal you. I can torch you better. I can leave you alone. What do you prefer?
"It's a little more complicated than that. I wouldn't have left you unsupervised near anything both destructible and irreplaceable in the first place. Had I done so for some reason, I would probably mourn the loss of whatever was destroyed. But in reality I have plenty of magic and I was warned to expect destruction of property, so there's nothing to be mad about."