"She was definitely Probably English," says Alice. "And she'd read the book too."

"...Can someone catch me up, here?"

"There's a book called Matilda in my world about a little girl who comes from a shitty family and gets magical powers. One time I met somebody who seemed to pretty much be the girl from the book, and we talked about stuff for a while and it was pretty great and I never saw her again."

"And now it seems like she's our alt, except that we're only mostly like the girl from the book and she's at least a little bit more like her than we are."

"So she's the Strat to your other-Sherlocks, or something. I guess that's not the kind of thing Glass would see unless she had her handy to look at? I wonder if Shell Bell can find her world if Alice stands next to her or something."

"I haven't read the Matilda book, though I did read some Holmes stories - but that's two templates discernibly book-related, are we just assuming Milliways cross-contagion and timefuckery or what?"

"How would we find out? Unless Glass sees something, how do we figure out what the books have to do with the Matildas? Resurrect some world's Roald Dahl and interrogate him? It's not necessarily something he'd know; Sherlocks converge on their template without their books when they have to."

"I've always thought of it as just an interesting coincidence," says Matilda. "The sort of thing that seems perfectly reasonable when it happens at Milliways."

"...I had that book when I was a kid. It had daemons in it. So do the Sherlock Holmes books. Maybe books have templates and modify to fit their worlds? Or can be templates, just like intelligent species?"

"Maybe everybody should bring me copies and I should insta-read them to see how many little textual differences there are?"

"I imagine Glass would have mentioned it if she could see templateness or metacausality hanging around written media, but it could just be a gap in her aura."

"Has Glass ever perceived the templateness or metacausality of an inanimate object?"

"No. Which, come to think of it, is already known to be a bit odd because so many worlds have duplicate planets and cities and so on in them."

"Sounds like a gap to me," says Agent Honey.

"Okay, so you have alts who are books, apparently, and we have another Matilda to look for. I didn't have this book when I was a kid, is it any good?"

"It has definite charms."

"It made me cry," volunteers Alice.

"Okay. I wanna read the version with daemons, that sounds entertaining." Aegis conjures up a copy of Alethia's version of the story.

"What would our daemons be, if we had them?" wonders Matilda.

"The book doesn't have an opinion, the character's too young to be settled."

"Huh," says Amariah. "Human daemons happen at home, but they're not at all common."

"Do they mean anything in particular?" wonders Matilda, banishing the illusions.

"Do you want the positive stereotypes or the negative ones?"

"All of the above, of course," says Agent Honey.