"She's going to be annoyed when she finds out that this place showed up and didn't let her in."

"Maybe Milliways didn't let her in because she would've wanted to take the fight to the forces of darkness and it disapproves. Or because it wanted to give me a nice quiet drink and a talk with a confusing doppelganger instead of forcing me to handle a pyromaniac alien crusader."

"I'm personally confusing, or the part where we look the same is confusing?"

"The doppelgangerness is confusing. You're fairly vanilla."

"It's especially strange given you're not even a human."

"I mean, most demons do kind of specialize in looking like humans. Makes hunting easier, keeps them from setting you on fire with lemons."

"If I lived someplace where lemon-vulnerable things wanted to attack me I would probably just keep candied lemon rind in my pocket all the time."

"If you wanted to keep the weakness of every obscure demon in your pocket, your pants would weigh more than you did."

"Oh. Too many kinds?"

"Literally millions. Most aren't going to eat you, but there are still thousands and thousands of different kinds that will."

"Ugh."

"Diversity is a beautiful thing."

"You're very gung-ho about this, I guess nothing eats you except fruit and fruit doesn't run very fast."

"Well, back in Uvalranda the Atame have some natural predators, but that would be why Mom left the motherland. And the demons running around California generally prefer purebred human. Apparently shadowblood is kind of gamey."

"California's your country?"

"Eh, close enough. It's a state within the country of America, but America's enormous and conveniently subdivided, so we generally just say what state we're from. Plus I'm pretty sure New England has some folks running around who'd love a filet of Ataman, which is why I can't just say America in that case."

"...Okay. I live in a country called Welce. There are regions but we bounce around between three different houses these days, plus visiting people, so generally I just say Welce."

"Well enough."

"I guess you could say four houses. Kiri has a permanent suite in the palace, she just doesn't own the place."

"Ah, nobility. I think Mom had a claim to the Ataman throne for a while, but she kind of hated the whole dimension, so she fucked off to Earth and married a convenient human for citizenship. The palace is apparently very nice, though."

"Kiri isn't and can't be queen. There's the royalty and then there's the primes and you can't have primes marrying royalty because of marital asset forfeiture rules or something. But you need all five primes to ratify new monarchs and they're the ones with the magic powers and fuckloads of money, so she's not too broken up about that, not that she wanted to marry an available prince in the first place."

"Yeah, I'd imagine being one of exactly five people in the world with magic is a nice consolation prize. I think I'm allowed to be glad on behalf of your world that Zanna isn't the prime your sister is, that would result in hilarious amounts of destruction and tyranny. I mean, probably that goes for any primeness, but- telepathy and fire. Seriously."

"Other options are water and blood, air and soul, earth and flesh, and wood and bone."

"...Air and soul? Okay, I have a new Nightmare Zanna."

"I've never seen a Dochenza do anything scary with the soul stuff. They can tell what element a person is from very far away, is the only application I actually know. The air thing is fun though, Sarelle can do music - her predecessor died trying to fly."