"...Okay. Uh, if universes don't always sync up time-wise the concordance may be in more or fewer than six years two months. What with my not being in my universe right now."

"...Ooh...that is a point. Maybe I had better just give you a marker and unsummon you now and then summon you again soonish so you can let me know."

"I mean, when I made this computer I intended it for it to be an exact duplicate of the one that is currently in my house; no alarming amount of time has passed on the computer clock; and the making didn't feel weird in any way. But maybe you better had."

"I don't think there's anything we needed to do first, and I was planning on explaining you to my sister before having her summon you anyway." She reaches up the sleeve of her armor, the metal bending to give her hand room, and it comes back out with a metal orb. "Here."

He accepts the orb. "Do you have a spare for me to mail to Limbo, or will that wait?"

"I think that can wait. Most of the markers are back with my sister in the world she's currently in."

"Okay. Dismiss me at your leisure, then."

Okay. She just has to focus on wanting him gone--

- for about a minute. And then he's gone.

...Several hours later, he should feel the less urgent pull of a personal summon.

He pauses his movie and answers it.

It's Emily again. She's in the same place, without her sister, having laid out the circle design he gave her in some kind of silvery metal. She looks...frazzled.

"Hi again. What's going on?"

"I just--needed someone to talk to. Who wasn't part of the situation. At all." She swallows. "Remember how I said accidental psychic bonding wasn't much of a concern because people in the relevant universe would know how to avoid it?"

"...Yeah? I'm going to hate this story, aren't I."

"I honestly don't know. Anyway, Edie and I? Not from the relevant universe."

"Are you okay?"

"Oh, I'm fine. She's fine too, I'm pretty sure. But, yeah, she is the one the permanent life-changing thing happened to. I'm--pretty orthogonal to the whole thing. But, you know, she's my sister, something that makes a major difference in her life is going to make a major difference in mine."

"Naturally. What permanent life change is she dealing with?"

"Well, I think the extent of what I told you was that there was telepathy going on--that's nothing new for her. She can't turn it off, which I imagine is going to take some getting used to...and..." she gropes around for the right words. "I think there's some kind of...I don't know how to explain it...going on. I...I don't think it's literally possible for her to stop loving the dragon--and the demon--now, or for them to stop loving her."

"Mhm. And she's known them less than a day."

"So this is going to come with some major life rearrangement that she wasn't already long-term setting up."

"Yeah. I mean, it probably helps that we weren't really what you'd call stable right now, what with all the universe-hopping trying to get home, and we already figured that it was going to take long enough that some things were going to change by the time we got back, but."

"But."