"Hi! Welcome to Milliways. It's an interdimensional bar."

"Seriously?"

"Yup. If you don't wanna be in an interdimensional bar just turn around and close the door and it'll leave you alone."

"Well, I don't know if I want to be in an interdimensional bar," she says. "I've never been in one before. Is it a nice interdimensional bar? Will it give me cookies?"

"She's really nice, and she will give you cookies! You have to pay for 'em or run up a tab, though. She'll give you a free drink if you've never been here before though. Oh, and the bar is a she."

"Does the bar have a name, or just a pronoun?"

"Bar's name is Bar. Real easy to remember."

"How's the food?"

"Awesome. Bar makes the best everything."

"Every everything? The best best?"

"I mean, I have a huuuuuge soft spot for stuff my imprint homemakes, but Bar makes really good everything."

"Imprint?"

"Oh, uh, I'm not a human, I'm a werewolf, rar, we do a thing called imprinting, I have done the thing, so I'm ridiculous amounts of in love with my boyfriend, basically."

"Oh! Well, that's cute."

"Yep! Anyway my name's Zeus, what's yours?"

"Ophelia."

"Pretty."

"Thanks! 'Zeus' is cute too."

"My mom has a thing for Greek deity names. And my imprint's name is Harley but he's in the bathroom and this place screws around with time and we don't have syncing thingies so it could be a while."

"Harley is also cute, does everyone you know have a cute name?"

"Uh, maybe? Might depend on how picky you are. Andrea? Bartholomew? Elspeth? Jake?"

"Decreasing cuteness," she concludes.

"So, not everybody I know has a cute name."

"But plenty of 'em!"

Zeus giggles. And eats more pizza.

"That's a lot of pizza," Ophelia observes.

"Wolves eat a lot. You can have a slice if you want though."

"You cook too?"

"Do I ever."

"...You're right," she says, "that is a weird question. And yes. And what the hell?"

"Okay so this bar does alternate dimensions! And sometimes the alternate dimensions are, like, not so creative, so it does people over and over again, but with some things tweaked, like, you don't look like my imprint, but you talk like him and there's also the pansexual reckless sharp things - I forget all the words I used already - there's also that thing."

"I'm not surprised I don't look like your imprint. What's your imprint look like?"

"White, almost as tall as me, not quite wolf amount of buff but close, longish curly hair, it's kind of hard to describe faces - you wouldn't have to look like him, though, there's one who looks more like Jake than like Harley for instance."

"Uh - yeah, I was going to say not born shaped that way but one was. And then there's magic. Wolves can actually only imprint on girl-shaped people, Harley was fucking around with magic."

"Huh!" she repeats. "Magic, like, what kind of magic?"

"There's a bunch of kinds, that kind was wish coins."

"What other fun stuff can wish coins do?"

"Most anything if you have a big enough one."

"Nifty. I want some."

"I don't have any on me. Harley'll have to come out of the bathroom eventually, though."

"Yeah, one would hope!" she snickers.

"Usually he leaves Andrea with me and she'd do time syncing but she's been less clingy lately."

"Andrea?"

"Oh, uh, she's his daemon. He started keeping his soul outside of his body after there was a teleportation accident? It's weird."

"Sounds it!"

"But she can shapeshift, and if I'm holding her I'm literally holding Harley's soul, and so on, so, it's nice."

"What's holding somebody's soul like?"

"It's a bigger deal on their end than mine. I mean it's a big deal for me mostly imprinty reasons but it doesn't feel like a whole lot? It feels like something. I would notice if I picked up the wrong rabbit."

"Is she fluffy when she's a rabbit? I bet she's fluffy."

"Very fluffy."

She giggles.

"Anyway if I'm right about you being a one of Harley the bunch of you are called Jokers. There's a bunch of bunches. I'm the only me though, at least so far."

"How do you tell when there's more? I mean, not everybody can be as - as recognizable as me, right?"

"There's somebody who can tell by looking. She's an alt of the empress of my world, there's a bunch of her. She makes a point of looking at everybody."

"Gotcha. You have an Empress?"

"She's not exactly the empress of everybody. She usurped this evil vampire government that was doing evil vampire things, and now she is the good vampire government. She's my empress 'cause I'm a wolf, though."

"'The empress of my world' was a little unclear that way."

"Well, there's a bunch of her, and lots of them are empresses, but of other worlds. Also I have, like, wolf educational background, where there was not so much attention paid to 'oh by the way we technically live in Canada, Canada is technically a thing' and more to 'this is the empress, this is her kid, the princess is the alpha's imprint, we are pretty thoroughly attached to this shadow government here'."

"We live kind of in the middle of nowhere? I mean, I've been places. My family goes to Burning Man every year. But the Canada thing is just not as relevant as alphas and imperials and whatnot."

"Sure. I dunno, though, if I lived somewhere I'd want to live there."

"I live in my town. There's people in it. Wolves and imprints and puppies, and every now and then the Capital passes through, although I don't like to hang out with full vampires because they smell."

"They smell?"

"And vice-versa. I guess I could do magic to it but I don't, like, have Internet friends who are vampires."

"'Do magic to it'," she giggles. "Man, I wanna do magic to things."

Zeus giggles. "What things?"

"Thing things! Shapeshifting? Cake? I would make the greatest cake."

"Harley prefers to make cake from scratch most of the time. And other stuff. He makes me omelettes. He makes really good omelettes."

"Well, no wonder, if he's used to magic. I'm not used to magic."

"Oh, I guess. He grew up with it. The princess kidnapped him from another world when he was a baby because of the shitty childhood thing."

"Lucky Harley."

"...Sort of? Apparently Jokers are, like, metaphysically supposed to suffer, so when he skipped the shitty childhood then he later had to have a teleporting accident and meet Alternate Universe Scarier Than Hitler Lady and also spend a few years in the sun repeatedly doing the thing that really really magicked people do instead of dying over and over. The princess had to knock me out so I wouldn't be conscious while he was missing."

"He okay now?"

"He's better. He's not leaving Andrea on me all the time anymore. There was a while before he woke me up and he wasn't doing so hot then."

"Metaphysically supposed to suffer, huh? Sounds about right."

"The princess kidnapped another one but he's like twelve so he's got it out of the way enough that it won't chase him, Glass says. She's the one who sees weird stuff like that."

"Very kidnap-happy, this princess of yours."

"It's just the two Jokers, nobody else. She had the other Jokers' approval."

"Oh, don't get me wrong, I totally approve."

"She's nice. When Harley didn't want to move away from Québec she stayed right next door to me till he grew up."

"Aww."

"And when I was asleep and Harley came home all scarier-than-Hitlered, she took care of him. Got him a poof, they're this spherical fuzzball animal from another world, sorta therapeutic to pet."

"Well, that sounds completely adorable."

"It is."

"What's your world like, I'm guessing you have an Earth of some kind but even those vary."

"It's an Earth! It's, I don't know, Earthy. What do normal Earths have?"

"Uhhhh - Canadas. Moons. Oh, here's a thing, is there a city called Gotham in yours?"

"Not that I know of! Should there be?"

"No, that's actually probably a good thing? If you have a Gotham there's a funky storyline Jokers play out in them. Harley skipped it because kidnapping but it's gone all the way through a few places. Stuff explodes, you fall in love with a lady and make her very unhappy."

"I wouldn't mind a little more exploding stuff in my life. Not a lot more, though."

"I'm sure you can arrange plenty of exploding stuff, but exploding Gotham in particular isn't the happiest story."

Shrug. "Lucky me not having one, then, yeah?"

"Apparently. Uhhhh, some Earths have magic, some have stuff that's sort of like magic but they don't call it that for reasons, some don't have either?"

"No magic!"

"Aw, poor you. Annnnd there's templates, I guess. You don't have a little brother, do you?"

"Nope! Well, not that I know of."

"Okay, well, you might have one you don't know of, I think it's happened that way a couple times, and those, uh, they can come out of the shit childhood okay but only if they are gotten out as kids, if it just runs its course they don't bounce back like you."

"Damn," she says. "See, now I really want magic. If I've got a little brother somewhere that I don't know about I'd better find him."

"Could be a sister, they're only all boys so far," adds Zeus. "Some templates can be either but I think most of them are usually one or the other."

"If I've got any little siblings whose childhoods are as shitty as my childhood was, I wanna know about it. And do some magic to it."

"Yeah. Man, I wish Harley had left Andrea, I dunno how long this is gonna take. I guess we could go to the Belltower? Probably nobody will sneer at me for being presumptuous about going to the Belltower and that is my imagination just because Bells wear crowns. But then you'll have Bells all over the place."

"I'm getting hilarious mental images that I'm pretty sure are not what you meant. 'Bells'?"

"Oh, you're - you're probably a - Joker, the empress is a Bell."

"And is having Bells all over the place a bad thing?"

"Nah, not really, they make pretty good empresses, they'll swoop in and fix whatever ails your world and whatnot. I find them intimidating though."

"What if there hypothetically wasn't anything wrong with my world a couple of magic cakes couldn't fix?"

"Then they want to figure out what makes it tick and import it, probably, but you and them might have different standards of 'wrong with'."

"Yeah, I bet we do."

"Do you have one? The Bells will all be very excited if you have one."

"Well, how would I know?"

"Her name will have a 'bel' in it. And she will be the sort of person who would take over the world and then run it very nicely."

"Mm," she says. "Well, if I ask nicely, will these Bells of yours give me magic to play with?"

"I think that's standard procedure with Jokers, yeah. That and introduce you to all the other ones."

"Now that sounds like fun."

"Oh yeah, they have big piles, they're fun."

"I want a Joker pile!"

"With Harley taking forever in the bathroom the fastest way to get one is the Belltower, you want?"

"Sure," she declares.

Zeus smiles and scritches Andrea.

"You can also acquire an enchanter's aura if you visit my world and donate some magic to the forest. I bet Harley will help. And we can give you a Janegem."

"What's a Janegem?"

"You can," says Glass, "turn off the camera and microphone without wrecking her connection."

[Love you too.]

[A thing. A kind of really hard to explain thing? Where are you right now? Uh, a decent short version might be 'I scored what sure looks like totally arbitrary magic fueled by pain off of what sure looked like about twenty alternate-universe versions of me, without telling any of them anything about where I was from or why I wanted it'.]

[Nobody around who'd be surprised by me teleporting right in front of you? I mean, and shouldn't be?]

[In this room it's just me right now.]

Bella blinks at him. "How do I work these new powers?" she wonders.

"I dunno, it was obvious to me," he shrugs. "Anyway, those are kind of trivial, the big one is minting and you'd get way less use out of that than me. You can have it anyway if you want, it's just a hex, hexes are cheap." He fans out a progression of coins in his hand, from triangle up to seven-pointed star, all made of what looks like clear glass veined with thick twisting streaks of colour. The streaks move, slowly but visibly. "Arbitrary magic fueled by pain. You touch a coin and make a wish and if it's a big enough coin and it's not a specifically impossible wish, wish comes true. Anybody can wish on 'em but only mints can make 'em. These are all mine."

"I was in one of my human morphs - this one," he flickers briefly into the appropriate shape to demonstrate, "and I walked into the library and instead of the library there was this bar. Cute guy sitting at the bar with a ton of pizzas told me it was interdimensional, we got to talking, I said my name was Ophelia, he's Zeus apparently, and also apparently his boyfriend is a - what was it he said, something like 'pansexual masochistic snuggle-fiend with a shitty home life', anyway there's like twenty of me and we're collectively called Jokers. I'm also pretty damn sure there's a bunch of you, but I only met the one, and I don't have a way to verify those. The Jokers all telepathically dumped their life histories on me, I gave back something heavy on the childhood trauma and light on the identifying details, I'm pretty convinced about them, but I don't think the same solution exactly applies when it's you."

"Okay. I'll - hm. Do you still care about secrecy, should we meet 'em somewhere that's not your house?"

"I... don't if they're me, do if they're not."

"Butterfly it is. I'm Glass. You look kind of... uh... shellshocked."

"You look like me. How do I know that you don't just look like me?"

"...I'm not sure if we've actually had this problem before. We know you're us because I can tell by looking - before that Bar did the same thing - uh, you can tell we're you because we're about to hand you lots and lots of magical power and assume you'll do good Bell things with it?"

"Here's your shot at the genie," Trouble puts in.

"What do I have to do?" Butterfly asks Glass.

"This... isn't a trade. This is, you are us, therefore if we just free and clear give you stuff, stuff that we would approve of will follow straightforwardly. ...Uh. Possibly I should mention that one of us is in school to be a therapist. What in the fuck is wrong with your world?"

"So much," says Trouble.

"The worst thing."

"That's n- one of us grew up on a planet where literally every human being was brainwashed on a daily basis to adore the brainwasher and the monarch who employed her. She's not shellshocked. Butterfly, what's...?"

"Why didn't the brainwasher get her?"

"Except her, yes, I neglected to say; some of us have a template immunity to mental magic - what happened to you?"

"Nothing yet. Nothing yet. To me."

"...Second thing. If you would rather just sit there silently rather than risk inviting a metaphorical vampire into your metaphorical house I'll whisk you away in, say, five minutes."

"And hey," says Trouble, "whatever else is going on, I still have arbitrary magic."

"Whoa. I've never gotten to watch that happen in real time before," Glass says, blinking at Trouble.

"You just changed phases. Sublimated them, practically, you skipped one."

"Oh, is that what that was. Huh."

"Yep. What's it like on the inside?"

"Like... mm," he says, considering. "Deciding that if Bella's too freaked out to save the world, I'll do it."

"Assuming I'm not being had," says Butterfly, "I think I'll be okay to do it after a few days, tops, to decompress." Wryly, "It's sort of my specialty."

"That would sure be nice."

"A few days to decompress is easy," Glass says. "I wonder who else you have besides a Joker. I can run a sweep and see."

"I'd - rather find that out myself and do it myself, I think."

"Sure."

Trouble is pretty sure Zeus was one of Rhea, but he doesn't see any point in bringing that up right now.

Robin finds the Belltower. She peers at it.

"Hello," says a woman's voice from one of the external speakers.

"Hi," says Robin. "Is my friend Bella - Butterfly - in there?"

"Yes, she is. You're whitelisted to visit her if you like."

"Yeah, thanks."

The door opens. Butterfly is not on the first floor. "Stairs are to your left," says Jane.

In she goes. She finds the stairs.

With her is someone who looks just like her, but several years older. "Hi."

"Hi and hi," says Robin. "So - Butterfly - decided if we're being had yet?"

"I'm pretty sure we are not being had. The large quantities of unchecked magical power and no catch yet has been a clue. This is Aether, by the way."

"Nice to meet you. I'm Robin, but apparently you already know that," says Robin. "Good, Trouble was worried."

"I'm in good shape, way better than I was. I should be ready to go home and solve all the everything in another subjective day or three."

"Do you want Trouble to wait for you? He seemed pretty well ready to start solving things himself."

"I would - hope so, but you do have the worst Bell/Joker relationship the peal's ever seen," says Aether. "Which is probably affecting him less than it's affected you but makes me unconfident in my prediction."

"He specifically asked me to ask you if you wanted him to wait, if it came up," says Robin. "Asking just to screw with you really doesn't seem his style."

Butterfly glances at Aether.

"If you let him go ahead without you my best guess is that you'll find whatever he comes up with to be stylistically displeasing, morally tolerable if more risk-tolerant than you'd like, and involve very little of you wearing a crown."

"...Uh, are you clear that Butterfly's visitor whitelist is a whitelist and not a free-for-all for reasons?"

"...Eh?"

"Butterfly is on a low-stress diet while she decompresses. She made a list of people who don't stress her out, and no Jokers are on it. Let's not relay messages just yet."

"...I think the specifics of 'let's not relay messages' are a lot more obvious to you than to me," says Robin.

"Please do not attempt to serve as a relay point for anything resembling real-time conversation between Trouble and Butterfly, nor distribute detailed information about what Butterfly's up to, nor bring her news about current events since most of her world is on heavy dilation and there shouldn't be any current events that need her attention. One-off yes-or-no questions like you first came in with are fine."

"Okay, well, if you wanna know what War has to say about your guess, ask him," she says.

"I may. Thank you. If Jokers want to talk to me they have all sorts of ways of doing it without interfering with Butterfly."

Butterfly sighs.

"She's not keeping me in solitary or anything, I made the list," Butterfly says. "What're you looking at us like that for?"

"I dunno, you just looked - more upset than I'd expect from somebody who just got tons of superpowers and a free vacation from all of life's problems," shrugs Robin.

"Pealing is pure upside, to the point where it comes with enough leeway for Butterfly to be something other than completely on and controlled and functional one hundred percent of the time. So some stuff is bubbling up."

"Okay, that makes sense."

"Which is good, being on all the time is exhausting, especially without magic boosts."

"Well. Have a nice magic holiday?"

"I am, thank you."

"Good!"

"Did anybody tell you you're a template? I mean, you'll have to check with Glass to be positive, but you resemble a template."

"Who do I resemble?"

"They're called Kingfishers, because the ones who go by Rupert and the ones who go by Ripper are embarrassed by each other and they compromised on the suborder shared by the animals they'd have as daemons."

...Snort.

"Aw, it's cute," says Robin. "Go me."

"So it looks like I was right. And they all have Ethans too but most of them don't like them nearly as much as you like yours."

"Really? Why not? I mean, Ethan's very... Ethan, but I still like him fine..."

"One Ethan faked his death in order to provoke his Ripper into writing the local Bell an email," says Butterfly. "There's less peal-common-knowledge about the falling-outs the Ruperts had, though."

"...That definitely does sound like something that'd piss me off," she acknowledges.

"The Bell in question is now dating her Ripper, which apparently both Bells possessed of Ruperts instead find very funny."

"Juliet moreso than Aegis."

"...Are any of these other Kingfishers girls?"

"No, just you. A lot of templates have strong but not perfectly consistent gender skews. There's one boy Bell, for instance."

"Huh."

"Also, templates come in two kinds, which we don't know anything about except that Glass can see them and your kind is much more likely to be bisexual masochists. You're purple, we're green."

I got Jane's gloss on it but I haven't been called in as, like, the expert-among-Bells-on-Jokers or anything, and I think Aether's taking point, so not much detail. What's funny?

I don't quiiiite get the joke. I get why the phrasing's cute - I bet you it's intentionally cute. Aether probably hasn't been paying tons of attention to your Hegemony and your phasing though.

Well, yeah, and I bet if she knew what we know she'd have said something else, that soooort of is what's funny? But whatever, Joker sense of humour is a mystery of the multiverse, we knew that one already. If Butterfly actually doesn't let Trouble help save his universe I feel kinda bad for him, though, all that— (wordless reiteration of the commonalities between Trouble's and Sue's respective decisions: a strong sense of it being time to get down to business, the deliberate choice to take it upon oneself to do things about things) —and nowhere to put it. We can probably find him something else to do if he still has the itch after the dust settles, I guess.

Jane said they did not have a great working relationship beforehand. I can't imagine it being bad enough that she wouldn't, say, take coins from him, but I don't know how bad it gets, so maybe even after her self-reconstruction project she will not want him involved?

We'll think of something. He's not gonna argue with her if she says she doesn't want him doing anything. Might move out of the universe, though, depending - he's got a girlfriend he doesn't wanna leave behind.

Anybody we know?

Probably an alt of Zeus, Trouble figures.

What's his side on why things got this unpleasant between him and Butterfly in the first place?

She scared him?

Mm. This looks like a mess.

No shit, Sue agrees. I feel bad for both of 'em.

Maybe him jumping phases will help, but I'm sort of worried she's too put off at this point.

Sucks for them. Well, more for him on this one, she's not gonna be heartbroken if she decides she can't stand him.

She'll look at those of us conspicuously attached to Jokers and sigh about it, but yeah, not heartbreak.

You doing anything important or can I come be conspicuously attached to you?

If you mean 'lend me added consequence' come now, if you mean 'make out' wait sixty seconds.

Sixty seconds it is.