"I guess. My parents had us slower than Angela and Micaiah had our alts."

"And a bunch of other Jokers and Bells haven't had any kids yet at all. I'm not even sure I have the whole list - Stella and Alice, Aegis and Sue, Jellybean and Cam, Aianon and Sarion, Brilliance and Aurora... I wonder if Brilliance and Aurora can have kids, isn't he not even biological? I guess magic solves a lot of things, but I don't know what solving that would look like in the first place."

"I guess they'd just wish her pregnant with one of you?" shrugs Céleste. "Since they know it'd be a you if it were just solved all by itself."

"Well, but what if Brilliance wanted to be more involved in the process? Kas made himself pregnant with me. When it's just that two people can't have kids the traditional way because they don't have the right combination of parts or aren't species that normally go together, I can imagine fixing that with magic, but I can't imagine what you would even wish for to get a kid out of someone who isn't a kind of thing that reproduces." She shrugs. "I guess it's not my problem."

"...Maybe they would make a Device that was a you like Jane is a Device now? I don't know if Devices are babies ever, though, and people who want kids seem to think it is important that they spend some time being babies."

"Maybe it wouldn't be important for Devices, since they don't," says Helen.

"Maybe. Aurora's a human, though."

"Yeah, I mean maybe it wouldn't be important for kids who were Devices to be babies if Devices don't do that," she says. "But I don't know that much about Devices anyway. I haven't actually met the other Jokers. They'll probably get around to mobbing me in a few hours."

"Probably. I don't know where they all are now, and I told Maman I had lost track of Papa, and she said that was probably for the best."

"...Yeah, I bet they're off somewhere having... fun," says Helen.

"I know, I don't want to think about it though."

"In fairness, we don't actually know that they're not baking an enormous cake," says Helen. "Or making each other silly costumes. I'm now imagining Kas dressed up as a frog and it's really funny."

"...Now I'm imagining Papa being fluffy and dressed up as a bird, at the same time."

Helen giggles. "Fluffy bird! We should tell them, they'll do it."

"He would be like a weird layered griffin. Rainier would be ashamed of him."

She giggles some more.

"And -" Whatever Céleste was about to say get cut off; she turns around. "There's... something coming."

The stairs on which Céleste is standing enter a closed section about a dozen steps below the gathering. Someone emerges from that archway, sipping his tea as he climbs.

The Griffins look at each other again, then approach him tentatively, stepping in sync.

"...Er. Hello," he says.

"We can fix that," they say at the same time.

"Fix... what?"

"Your arm," says just Keziah.

"Have you ever done this before, because I haven't."