"Do you often get people to answer your questions like that?"

"Do you often get people to answer your questions by subtly threatening them with bodily harm?"

"Pretty often, actually."

"How convenient for you. Your question is nearly meaningless to me and I suspect you feel the same about mine. Shall we proceed with or without violence?"

"Rather not stagger late into math class with someone's blood all over me, especially if yours is red and I can't pass it off as a disaster in the art room. My question could be rephrased as: are you a human, and did you do," she gestures at the bar, "this thing?"

"Yes for most working definitions, and definitely not. My question doesn't rephrase so easily, but if you don't recognize me you might not be able to answer it anyway."

"I don't recognize you - should I? Are you famous? - but you know sometimes people just look alike for no obvious reason."

"Yes," he says, "and sometimes there is a clone substitution plot instead. The way you look like Linyabel is definitely more clone than coincidence, although it's not quite exactly clone."

"I'm pretty sure I'm not a clone and I hang out with a guy who might be able to tell kind of a lot, never met anybody named Linyabel, and have no plans to substitute for anybody."

"I am a clone." He sweeps an ironic bow. "Mark Pierre Vorkosigan. Fascinated to meet you. Not especially famous, but anyone meant to replace my sister-in-law would have to know what her husband looked like."

"Man, why do I keep running into clones? I'm Bella Swan."

"Just your luck, I suppose. Who was the first one?"

"My boyfriend's a clone."

"Congratulations."

"Is having a British accent a clone thing, I wonder."

"I can't imagine how you'd expect that to be true," he says. "I grew up in London. When I'm mimicking my brother," he adopts Miles's Barrayaran accent, "I sound like this."

"I have no explanation for why it would be a pattern, but it's two for two, and Sherlock didn't grow up in London, he grew up with an AI who spoke in a British accent and picked up that accent instead of Tony's."

"Sherlock," says Mark. He feels the way Miles feels looking at him.

"That's... his name. What, do you know someone named Sherlock in addition to having a sister-in-law who is apparently the shinier version of me?"

"And, to clarify, does he have this name by coincidence or was it a deliberate reference on someone's part? If so, whose?"

"Oh, his own, he adopted the character when Tony neglected to supply him with a name."

"Right," says Mark. "See, I didn't grow up Mark. I grew up Miles - called by his name and made to study every available datum on his life. It inspired a certain kinship, the first time I read those stories - the process of extrapolating from limited information was very familiar to me. I even snuck out to the museum once."

"Do I."

"On and off," she repeats. "It's not just the accent, though."

"I wasn't getting the impression that it was just the accent," he says. "What else is it, specifically?"

"Phrasing, sort of - attitude."

"How curious..."

"Yeah. You don't look anything like him, though, he's yea high, brown eyes, not the same face."

"I don't seem to be a clone of the same person," he says, "so that's reasonable."

"Suppose. So you sound like my boyfriend and I look like your sister-in-law and this doesn't look like my math classroom, that's several mysteries."

"And I guess I'm the local expert on mysteries. Explanations, then, for why we are both here instead of the places and times we intended."

"Where are you getting 'times'?"

"You did not buy those clothes in the thirtieth century."

"Oh, there's a whole industry. I'm comparatively lucky. Some of us are grown to receive brain transplants from the old, rich, and unscrupulous."

"Thaaaaaat makes my staking hand itch."

"Staking?"

"Staking. It's the weapon of choice for close combat with vampires. ...Which have managed to stay quiet about existing for a long damn time but I'd be very surprised if they were still pulling it off in the thirtieth century."

"I would expect to know about it if there were vampires."

"Maybe they're extinct, that'd be mostly good."

"Only mostly?"

"Sherlock's a vampire."

"How'd I guess."

"Because I look like the sort of person who mixes business and pleasure?"

"Maaaaaaybe."

"He's a well-behaved vampire these days, quit eating people when I met him."

"How polite."

"Yep. This even though I spent that entire first meeting trying to shoot him."

"I am more and more convinced that he and I are fundamentally similar in some way."

"Do I seem like your sister-in-law besides how I look?" inquires Bella.

"Mm... hard to tell. I don't know her as well. Our longest conversation took place with her tied to a chair. There are definitely obvious superficial differences, but I don't know if there are non-obvious non-superficial similarities."

"It's a long story, how much of it would you like?"

"The outline."

"She was on the planet when my creator went ahead with the substitution plan. I did a flawless Miles, right up until she picked me up and kissed me, and then the obvious flinch reaction gave me away and I had to stun her and drag her off. I particularly wanted to talk to Miles alone before they had him killed, but since she was there too, I arranged a private conversation with her after the one I had with him. She didn't take it nearly as well. They're all alive and free now, by the way, don't be alarmed."

"I'm a little alarmed, but alive and free is good."

"Yes. My creator handed me a deadly weapon to demand that I shoot Miles with it, and I declined to act as expected."

"You and your creator have a much different relationship than Sherlock and Tony did. For that matter, I think you and Miles do too."

"...Were Sherlock and Tony by any chance having sex with one another?"

"...wouldn't floor me, hasn't come up, I was referring to the part where they got along on a much more basic level."

"Miles and I don't have much of a relationship as such, but I don't think he'd be keen to experiment in that direction even if he weren't married," says Mark. "We do get along, though, sort of. He gave me my name."

"Nice of him."

"He has strong feelings on the subject. His mother's influence. On her home planet, cloning is a reasonably ordinary way to generate relatives."

"Sure. I might clone myself if I was from someplace where it was customary and I was ready to have kids."

"Why?"

"Well, for one thing, my boyfriend is a vampire and the person to whom he was genetically identical died, so the conventional option isn't happening unless something currently unforseen crops up, and for another I'm sliiiightly narcissistic."

"I suppose I don't have to warn you that the person you get might not be as much like you as you might like."

"I'm aware. This is of course also a risk with conventional kids."

"With conventional kids, you have a co-parent to blame."

"Well, that sounds intensely dysfunctional."

"Are you surprised?"

"Enh." She holds her fingers a small pinching width apart.

He snickers.

"But anyway, I don't live someplace where cloning is customary. And Tony didn't leave his tech lying around and even if he did it came with an aging speedup thing so Sherlock caught up to him. I'm a technical cradle-robber."

"Charming. By how much?"

"He is chronologically six. It's occasionally weird to think about it, but he's pretty thoroughly eighteen in relevant ways."

"I had a boost too, but I only had to catch up to a six-year difference."

"Charming sort of person who wakes up one day and says 'I think I'll clone a first-grader'..."

"You don't know the half of it."

"I do not. Anyway, if you didn't replace my math class with a time traveling bar, I don't know how it happened, and it could be unfriendly. For instance, if I've been flung forward into the thirtieth century, there may have been a missing Slayer problem for the last millennium, although if you don't have vampires that suggests something else is going on." She looks around at the utterly innocuous furniture. "Interesting wall display," she says of the window with the exploding stars.

"Isn't it just?"

"Do you know something I don't about the wall display, Mark?"

"It gives a strong impression of being an actual vista of dying stars."

"Yes. It may be magic. I suspect everything here of being magic until otherwise demonstrated." Her hand is still hovering near her bag, though her wariness is mostly dropped with respect to Mark.

"I suspect everything here of being beyond our prior experience. 'Magic' is as good a label as any."

"And how much is the second beverage?" inquires Mark.

"And not obstructed in the attempt?"

"I suspected as much."

"Beyond our experience," says Mark.

"Mm."

"You look like you're contemplating me throwing you into a wall, over there."

"Do I? Is this a favoured pastime of your boyfriend's?"

"It is! But you're a human, so I'd have to pull my punches, and we'd have to go outside."

"I'm a trained assassin," he says. "I would also have to pull my punches. Your boyfriend's not the jealous type, is he? If so, I retract all identification with him."

"We do not have a sparring exclusivity arrangement. I'm tougher than I look, although I suppose if you're envisioning something like suddenly producing a sharp thing out of nowhere and stabbing me in the eye I might appreciate your restraint."

"I know a vast number of ways to efficiently kill people under almost any conceivable circumstance, and comparatively few ways to do less," says Mark. "By my best estimate, you are not tough enough to survive everything I could do even without sharp objects. And I don't want to kill you. So I will try not to kill you."

"If tangling with you is that direly fatal maybe it'd be better to skip it, the entertainment value of being thrown into walls notwithstanding."

"I have some faith in my ability to pull punches - I did not kill any of my martial arts instructors - but the risk is not literally zero," he says.

"Did you almost kill any of your martial arts instructors?"

"I did not. I didn't even maim any."

"Then we're probably good, if that's what you wanna do with your time."

"All right," he says. "If I accidentally kill you anyway I will be very sorry about it. If you accidentally kill me you may assume I had it coming if it makes you feel better."

"I will assume that you decided to spar with the Slayer with the understanding that this may be hazardous to your health. I think I'll reserve judgment on whether you have it coming," she says, and she downs the rest of her Orange Julius and heads out the back door.

Mark follows. For the sake of personal amusement, he does it silently.

"Only if you did it hard enough," she says, rolling away. "You fight like Sherlock - off and on. It's the off that's getting me; I'm used to him."

"You did tell me to surprise you. Are you sufficiently surprised?"

"I'm a little surprised. But I adjust fast."

And then she gets one that would have staved in his chest at strength.

He laughs.

"The bit of your style that isn't Sherlock is very weird," she comments.

"Is it? How?"

"Mmmm... Doesn't react normally to being boxed in."

"That's me, all right."

"It's half of you, at least."

"And your boyfriend's the other half, I suppose? Interesting way of looking at it."

"You do seem in some ways a cross between my boyfriend and a God-knows-what. 'Nother round?"

"Hang on, give me a second, I'm gonna upgrade my autopilot," she says, and she goes to where she dropped her bag and pulls out a notebook.

"Upgrade your...?"

"So, when one starts being the Slayer, one gets fancy combat instincts, but these instincts are highly compatible with learning new things, and I like to do that via notetaking for unrelated reasons."

"Aha. And now you are teaching yourself how to adapt to me," he says. "I expect I've still got a surprise or two left in me, even so."

Mark is vastly outclassed in raw physical terms, and the advantage lent by his assassin training dwindles with time, but he retains his edge in... call it lateral thinking. Disrupting patterns, foiling expectations.

"Anytime."

"Well, not literally, I don't think we're that mutually accessible under normal circumstances."

"Granted."

"You seem so disappointed."

"People who can beat me up when I'm trying are a rare resource."

"...Mm?"

"When I met Sherlock he was coasting along the edge of suicidality out of boredom, and then I proved very interesting, and now he's not. Wondering whether your life is lively enough to suit you."

"I think I'm self-sustaining on that score," he says. "I have different problems, and mostly not ones that make me likely to kill myself."

"Okay. ...Do you want to tell me about your problems?" she inquires, collecting her bag and heading back into the bar.

"Hmm... it's moderately agonizing to be unable to express myself genuinely without horrifying people," he says. "This is probably the longest friendly conversation I've had while not actively pretending to be someone I'm not since... well, since I had Miles tied to a chair."

"I don't feel especially horrified."

"You are easier to talk to than most people I encounter."

"That's not actually a compliment I am regularly paid."

"I have breathtakingly low standards. The fact that I haven't managed to drive you to storm off in disgust just about covers it."

"You don't seem to be trying to drive me off, at least not very hard."

"I don't try. It happens anyway. It happens when I try not to."

"Walk me through a scenario here?"

"Hmm... I sit near a stranger on the tubeway. I mention that I liked the book he is reading. He indicates it's an old favourite of his and asks what my favourite part was. I recognize that mentioning the torture scene would probably be a bad idea, so I say it was the final battle. He asks why. I say triumphing over the forces of darkness is always more fun when it involves setting most of a continent on fire. He looks deeply uncomfortable. I find another seat."

"Okay, I begin to see the scope of the problem - although that sort of conversation could go over it's not really a safe tack."

"Yes," he says. "It is abundantly clear to me that nothing I fucking try is a safe tack, except for the classic standby of 'say one genuinely nice thing and then leave before I can fuck it up'."

"In the example you gave probably the safe thing is 'don't answer, find out what the other person's favorite part was instead' - but then it just branches further from there so that kind of thing is very short term - and I'm not actually remotely qualified to teach remedial social skills, sorry."

"It's fine. I'm sure I'll survive."

"...I might," he acknowledges.

"Okay, that might be low-hanging fruit on not making people profoundly uncomfortable."

"I'm not sure that fruit hangs as low as it appears to."

"You'd know better than I would, but: the smile's kinda creepy, dude."

"I acknowledge the point."

"That smile that you're doing right now is wry and not creepy, for reference."

"Good to know."

"Aaaaand that one is sort of borderline, I am not creeped but I might be creeped if you were talking about continental pyromania."

Mark cracks up.

"And there we have a nice friendly smile, suitable for appreciating someone's witty comment on the weather."

"Are you going to rate all of my smiles from now on?"

"Yes. This one's good too. I give it a nine out of ten. The Russian judge dinged you for inadequate eye contact, but don't let it get to you."

Snort.

"Anyway, I've been meaning to ask, what cool things have you got in the thirtieth century besides apparently no vampires or magic and I'm going to guess also no demons?"

"Clones. Uterine replicators. Jumpships that transit wormholes between star systems. A fascinating array of weapons. I don't know, what don't you have in yours?"

"Hey, we have one clone, I think I mentioned him. What's a uterine replicator?"

"An artificial uterus, not attached to a human."

"That sounds convenient, assuming the right social structures popped up to match and they aren't being used in nasty coercive ways."

"There's plenty of nastiness, but it's mostly localized to especially nasty places."

"Par for the course, I guess. Do you know anything I could go home and 'invent' in my garage, I wonder?"

"Definitely not off the top of my head. The several hundred years of missing infrastructure would be a problem."

"Figures. Damn."

"If you are, or know, some kind of engineering genius, I could tell you things like my broad understanding of the physical principles behind a plasma arc. That's a weapon that fires bolts of plasma. Good for setting things extremely on fire. But I know I couldn't build one in a centuries-old garage."

"Yes, what did happen to him?"

"Vampires happened to him around the same time they happened to Sherlock, just not in the same way. This is also what befell the AI with the British accent. And you did the creepy smile when you asked that."

"And yet, you didn't run away. How heartening."

"You've earned some leeway with me, and this is not my, personal, tragedy that you have been slightly callous about, but I thought you might want the course-correction."

"Noted."

"...creepface, again."

"I was," he says, studying the picture.

"I never actually met Tony. And Sherlock doesn't talk about him all that much and I try not to bring him up."

"You seemed to imply just now that Sherlock does a good impression of him."

"But I haven't seen him do it, not in person. Tony was extremely famous, hence the magazine cover, and Sherlock impersonated him undetected a few times that I know of, so he must have done a pretty good impression - the accent and the," she gestures at the magazine, "characteristic smile, bare minimum, but I haven't seen it."

"I do a flawless Miles. Another point of congruence."

"I bet that's weird for his wife."

"It was, yes."

"Especially if you then proceeded to make that face at her."

"That would be kind of you," he says.

"Okay. Sorry."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome. Any time you need me to stop volunteering unsolicited impolite judgments on what your face is doing, I'm on it. Part of the Slayer skill set along with backflips and super-healing."

...He laughs.

"And spectacular wit."

"I noticed that part."

"That one I actually had before I activated. The backflips were new, though. First thing I noticed was that I stopped tripping all the time."

"Tripping all the time is not a problem Linyabel faces as far as I can tell."

"And she's also prettier, to hear you tell it."

"Extensive genetic engineering will do that."

"Will extensive genetic engineering also do gracefulness?"

"Probably."

"What do you know about her? I realize you haven't had tons of social contact, but..."

"Best known for inventing a moderately revolutionary computing device called a holo-pen. Very fond of her husband. She scoops him up. It's very cute, unless, for example, you are trying to impersonate him at the time and have a previously undiscovered paralyzing fear of affectionate physical contact."

"I am working on it," he says. "But yes, I'm glad of that too."

"How do you come by a paralyzing fear of affectionate physical contact?"

"I'm sure my childhood was at fault somehow. The complete lack of it is the most obvious possible cause, but there are others."

"Okay. Well, if desensitization therapy is still in vogue in the thirtieth century and you feel like doing any of it while we are both still in this bar, I am in the background quietly amenable to patting you on the head."

"I will consider your suggestion."

"Man, I wish Sherlock were awake and within yelling distance of my door, but he's nocturnal and does not frequent my high school, so I cannot introduce you and see what he'd make of you."

"And if I went home with you to meet him there's always the chance that I would be unable to go home," he says. "Which is some degree of undesirable."

"You seem more relaxed about this undesirability than I imagine most people would be."

"Eh. I have a family, in a sense, but I'm not completely sure I will ever want to see any of them again. Or meet the ones I haven't."

"Reasonable, I suppose, it sounds like eighty percent high-octane drama."

"I think I can safely say you don't know the half of it."

"Is it in fact one hundred and sixty percent high-octane drama?"

"That's closer."

"I have a pretty undramatic family life. I mean, except for the divorce, but I don't remember that."

"I was literally created to destroy my family. It makes things interesting."

"I am developing that impression. Fight your destiny, man."

"My destiny is deceased."

"Good for you. What's next?"

"Roaming the wormhole nexus, confusing the intelligence agents sent to track my movements, trying to figure out what if anything I want to do with my life and whether or not I want it to involve any of my relatives."

"Why are there intelligence agents tracking your movements?"

"Because I was created to destroy my family and, through them, their planet. Barrayaran Imperial Security has an interest in knowing what I am up to."

"Well, isn't that just ducky." Pause. "I might be able to get ahold of my Watcher from where my door is, and get him to go wake up and transport Sherlock, if you want to meet him, but it'd be risky and I'd like to leave it to when I'm about ready to head out of the magic bar."

"I'd like that."

"Sure. It's between classes, the library door should be open, and my supernatural accuracy applies to paper airplanes."

Giggle.

"Your boyfriend lives in a crypt? Because he is a vampire, or for unrelated reasons?"

"It's rent-free and has no windows."

Snort.

"It's also very thematic, but the rent part became more important when he stopped looting the bodies of people he ate, so."

Mark laughs.

"I'm such a good influence."

"Apparently so."

"Yes," says Mark. "What about cases of - half-variants?"

"Another reason to drag him in, then."

"Yeah. Um, my Watcher is way more easily ruffled than I am and I don't relish seeing him ruffled except when I do, are you gonna be reasonably non-ruffly if I write on my paper airplane 'hey come to the math room' instead of just 'please fetch me Sherlock'?"

"I can try. Failing all else I do have a second personality to fall back on."

Bella waves him in. "Hi, Giles. This is a magic time-pausing bar called Milliways. I've been in here for a couple hours. That guy is named Mark and he is from the thirtieth century in an alternate universe, and the bar is sapient and conjures up beverages and copies of Vanity Fair out of nothing while channeling Miss Manners into neatly handwritten napkins."

Mark giggles.

"Also we sparred - me and Mark, not me and Bar - and in that as well as other ways he occasionally reminds me of Sherlock. The door will disappear if there is nobody from our world behind it and it closes. I am hoping I can send you on an errand to Sherlock's to wake him up, put him under something opaque, and bring him over to meet Mark. And since the door's closure pauses time I will require a faculty note excusing me from math and allowing me to loiter on the floor outside the door holding it slightly ajar but not enough that anyone will notice what's behind it."

"You sparred? Is he human?"

"I'm tougher than I look."

"I. See."

"He's an interesting challenge! Most things I fight, if I set them up so they can do six things and the first five are instantly fatal, they'll do the sixth thing, and I can use that to maneuver. Sherlock often does a seventh thing. And Mark occasionally picks one of the first five in a way that manages to not be instantly fatal."

"My original question remains unanswered."

"He's good but not superhuman as far as I know."

"Yes. Unenhanced human. I just have a lot of training and I took to it well."

"Well. All right then."

"It occurs to me that you could also hold the door while I go get Sherlock myself, but then I need a faculty note for leaving campus."

"I could provide one of those."

"If you prefer it that way around, can do. But you do have to hold the door slightly open or time pauses and then I will find it challenging to drive."

"I understand."

"Okay." She gets him a piece of paper with which to write her note.

It is a very official-like note.

"Put on something opaque and hop in, time's slightly of the essence, but it's positive exciting news!"

Well, in that case... he emerges from his crypt moments later wrapped in a blackout curtain.

"But what if he'd think it was funny? ...Also, the first thing I'd want to do if I met a genuine duplicate of myself is fight them and the second thing also starts with an F, that seems like relevant information."

"I fought him. He's good, he got the first possibly-lethal hit on me, and the third one too. You are of course welcome to do the same as long as you have the 'one of you is a vampire and the other is a trained assassin' safety lecture first. I might want to have a more detailed conversation about your other activity that starts with F. He's not a straight-up duplicate, he doesn't look anything like you and occasionally he is heavier on the insane midget bit. And if you determine to the best of your considerable ability that he'd be more entertained than insulted by it you can pass on the phrase."

"Can we have that more detailed conversation while you are driving, or should it and consequently the relevant activity wait?"

"Eh, probably depends on how detailed it gets and whether traffic decides to make my reckless speeding complicated. Anybody besides versions of you and possibly insane midgets this is likely to come up with?"

"Well. There was Tony," he says. "And, consequently, any version of him we might find. And, oh, I don't know. In the absence of constraints on my behaviour like 'this would upset Juliet' the list could grow to be quite large."

"Hrm. On reflection," she says, running a yellow light, "I can probably cunningly use my powers of self-hacking to avoid being upset by you going around performing actions brought to us by the letter F, and I would particularly feel like a jerk if you found an alternate universe Tony and I got in your way - Mark, the insane midget, predicted that one, by the by - but would probably feel more generally threatened by non-Tony entanglements that had high ratios of emotional affair to fornication. Aaaand would feel extremely awkward if you picked up, say, a demon that I later felt obliged to kill."

"I can't easily predict the emotional affair to fornication ratio of consorting with whole or partial duplicates of myself," he says. "But with non-Tony non-selves it's likely to be pretty low. I will do my very best not to pick up anyone you might want to kill later."

"Okay, Tonies and yous are excepted from the emotional affair clause. Although I envision myself becoming rather unbecomingly mopey if I want attention and you're routinely off elsewhere."

"I will endeavour not to amass a harem of Tonies and selves."

In goes blackout-curtain'd Sherlock.

"Hi Giles thanks Giles! Mark, Sherlock; Sherlock, Mark."

"Hello, Mark."

"Hello, Sherlock."

"If you want to go out and let the door close, Giles, you will have to do exactly zero waiting should something that might interest you come up and cause me to lean out and tap you on the shoulder. Remain at your own risk to the cleanliness of your glasses."

"I was being a little imprecise," he says. "For lack of vocabulary. 'Try to damage one another' might be closer."

"Avoid brain damage and permanently crippling injuries and we're probably good."

"So noted."

"Outside or upstairs, is the question."

"Upstairs."

"Oh good."

"There's an upstairs?"

"I don't expect either of us to actually end up dead," says Sherlock, watching him go. "But I do expect it to be more than a sparring match."

"Uhhhhhh."

"I lack the diagnostic tools to tell if he has a soul, but the parts of him that are me are me," he says. "Very much congruent with the soul-free version. I genuinely do not know what would happen. Except that if he turned out to need killing we would all be very doomed. Which is a large part of the reason I haven't done it."

"Yyyyyeah. The insane midget half could have any sort of effect on the process, the fact that he's like you now, before the soulectomy, could have any sort of effect on the process... I suspect this isn't a good idea."

"I suspect likewise. He can be talked out of it," says Sherlock. "The sunlight problem was a major con."

"Sunlight, crosses, holy water, invitations to dwellings, dietary requirements, it's not exactly a convenient no-strings upgrade. Also, he does not have a me at home, except insofar as his sister-in-law who he's ambivalent about ever seeing again counts, to inspire him to not eat people."

"He doesn't eat people now," Sherlock points out. "If he made it through turning with his personality intact, and I'll grant you that's a hell of an if, he'd be unlikely to start."

"He's not a vampire now. People are not particularly appetizing or nutritious now."

"People exist in a vast abundance and frequently get in his way such that killing or harming them would be a viable solution, and yet he does not," says Sherlock. "He has killed one person and I can imagine few ways in which that murder would not have been ethically justified."

"Okay... this still hinges on the intact personality thing and I'd sooner not count on it."

"Yes, I agree. But if we had a guarantee on the personality, I would wholeheartedly back his prediction that he needs no outside intervention to stop him eating people."

"You're the expert on the half of him that isn't an insane midget, and the half of him that isn't an insane midget is probably the best source on the half that is."

"He laughed, by the way. And said that you clearly need to meet his insane midget brother."

"I'd rather meet his sister-in-law, who apparently in addition to being prettier than me is also a thirtieth-century galaxy-class expert in electrical engineering, programming, neurology, genetics, and music." She waves a research paper.

"What, all of them?"

"Yep. She's only published papers on the neurology thing, but I found a press piece about her revolutionary little computing gadget and it had some biographical information on her other hobbies. She's genetically engineered for various things including spectacular levels of intelligence. Oh, and she speaks twenty-five languages as of whenever the article came out. Gives a lot of money to useful charities. Very well-traveled. I kind of want to meet her right away, and I also kind of want to run off and accomplish a century's worth of shit first."

"Well, you'd best decide which. Although I suppose the difficulty of actually meeting her might make your choice for you."

"Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's not actually up to me."

"Well, if you wanted very badly to meet her as soon as possible, I'm sure Mark could be convinced to send you her way. There would be a slight issue where you might never see your home universe again."

"Yeah, and while my home universe is a little bit demon-infested, I feel some responsibility about that."

"So I've gathered."

"That and I have parents. And most of what I'd hope to walk away with from a meeting with Linyabel is cool stuff to deploy at home, since it seems like she's already very busy doing things I can't meaningfully help with on her end."

"So much for that, then."

"Yeah. Alas."

"Alas," Sherlock agrees.

"But there's still a magic bar! Who is very good about recommending reading material. And Orange Juliuses. I asked and she can also do blood which is both tasty and also no-people-were-harmed-in-the-process, not that you need that sorted particularly urgently."

"Yes," says Sherlock. "I had a light snack not too long ago."

"And you don't need a case of the stuff packed with some futuristic preservation methods for the next few months, either, because I'm so handy-dandy. Oh well."

"Not that I'd say no to trying some magic bar blood. It sounds interesting."

"She might be able to come up with something exotic. Some sort of drinkable non-human blood or a substitute or something."

And he gets a burgundy glass of something thin and metallic-smelling.