"I think it - I think it might be different for different types of magic. I dunno. I can ask Wishbone if he thinks it'd take. - that would be cool. If we could get away with it."

"Yeah."

"Yeah.

" - um, I'm gonna go build houses, I think. I'll see you later."

" - okay."

She is a super idiot who wanted to end this conversation on a positive note but this was obviously a tactical error. She smiles and waves when she says goodbye in case this successfully communicates a lack of hostility. She goes back to her room. Her room is not where people build houses.

Slayer's log, Stardate 33,000 BC or so. Had one conversation with Ryan that was mostly pretty good, apart from the fact that I backed out of it at a weird moment and I bet he thinks I like super hate him or something. Proceeded to lie about going to build houses. Planning to attempt snuggles at some unspecified future hour, which will hopefully make other things less panic-inducing, who knows. Mildly panicking about snuggles. Currently offering one of my two friends fairly pointless updates in the form of a fake Star Trek log, because that is the sort of idiot I am, I guess.

Why was that a bad thing to say?

He paces for a while trying to figure that out.

Maybe because it's not great to get their hopes up. It's probably a bad idea to do this hoping you won't have to go through with it. Kind of like saying as everyone's getting into the chopper that maybe the bad guys won't have any guns this time. It's not that that wouldn't be nice it's just that it's kind of alarming that that's what you were contemplating. 

He should learn how to build houses in case next time she invites him she actually means it. Not right now, though, because there probably aren't two locations where houses are being built and she clearly wants to be left alone. 

She sits in her room on the floor and hugs herself.

Hey Alex, can you bounce a thing to Wishbone?

Yeah.

Ryan pointed out that the first time I died was when I drowned, and the slayer line counted it as a death even though people were actually able to bring me right back with CPR. He wants to know if we can maybe get away with something like that in this situation, and then maybe the baby doesn't have to die.

No, not this time. The ritual traps the god inside the infant and merges the two entities. It might be possible to bring one back with very powerful magic, under very specific circumstances, but as a general rule, if the infant doesn't stay dead, neither will the god.

I figured it was something like that. Thanks anyway.

Hey Alex, can I ask you a totally unrelated thing that you don't need to bounce to Wishbone and also it's kind of weird so you should definitely feel free to say no if you think it's gonna make things weird because I actually really really need to keep being able to talk to you without it being weird.

Yeah, of course.

Be warned that it's very stupid.

Would you like me to run around naked when the moon is full singing 'I'm a little teapot?'

Very weak laugh.

So, uh, I've been thinking, about how I'm gonna do all this stuff, stuff that's supposed to be good stuff, have all these really important experiences for the first time, except they're all gonna be twisted into - this - instead of how they're supposed to be, and - I know this is a really stupid thing to be thinking about right now, next to all of the other stuff, but, uh - I've never kissed anyone before? And I kind of wanted it to be - I dunno, I dunno what it's even supposed to be, I think most first kiss stories are really dumb actually, but I just - keep thinking about how it's a thing that isn't actually necessary for this but how it'll be kind of weird if I'm super opposed to it and how maybe Ryan'll go back to thinking I'm not mature enough to be making decisions about these things, and - then on the other hand maybe Ryan won't even want to, maybe he'll want to just get everything over with as fast as possible, but if he doesn't or if he thinks it'll be helpful, then - I think it's dumb to have any feelings about this but I sort of have them anyway and I don't wanna end up doing it just because I feel like it'll be weird to not, and I just -

- d'you think you could kiss me so I don't have to think about it being the first one if I end up kissing Ryan? Because at least then the first one won't be - this.

He - takes a while to think about that, actually. 

Yes.

It's OK if you don't want to.

Yeah, I gathered that. I do want to.

OK.

I'm hiding in my room again.

He knocks on the door a couple of minutes later.

She gets up and opens it.

"Hi."

Hug. "I'm really proud of you."

Hug.

"Thanks."

So, like, this isn't, like - this is partly 'cause I do, actually, think this is gonna make it less bad if I end up kissing Ryan, and I'm in favor of things that lower the badness levels there, because the badness levels are pretty high. And also so that if we ever get home, which I realize is vanishingly unlikely, but if we ever do, and I'm ever, like, living at the batcave, and I have my friends over for a sleepover or something, and then we're doing the thing where we're all staying up and eating ice cream, and then someone decides that we should go around and everyone should say what their first kiss was, then Faith can be all 'I have been kissing boys for entire years' and talk about some boy she broke up with five days later, and Mercy can be like 'I don't like boys, I only like justice, and therefore have no kissing stories, for justice does not have lips', and I dunno, I'll have some other friend who had to kiss someone for a school play, and they were nervous and conflicted about it but then they figured that actually it worked out and the play was really amazing, so they're OK with this scenario, and then we'll get to mummy girl and mummy girl will be like 'actually my first kiss was that time some random high school boy broke the seal in my museum exhibit and I reached up and kissed him and killed him without knowing what I was doing', and we'll all go 'wow, that sucks, you should've gotten to have something better', and then we'll get to me, and I'll get to be like 'well, when me and Alex and Wishbone were in the other timeline I was maybe gonna end up kissing this other guy for complicated magical slayer reasons, and I was nervous about it, because I was sixteen and not the very mature seventeen-year-old I am now, or however old I am in this hypothetical, and so I asked Alex to kiss me first, and that happened and it was, like, OK.'

And it won't top mummy girl, and we won't all have to be like 'wow I'm so sorry that happened to you Karen, that sounds awful', we'll just, like, acknowledge that it was weird but that everyone does some slightly weird things when they're a teenager, and it's OK, they still get to become responsible adults who make decisions that make sense.

I don't know how mummy girl is talking in this hypothetical but that's not really the point. 

The point is that it'll - fit. With all of everybody else's weird. And it'll just be a thing that happened, and it won't have to be the only thing that ever happens, and - we can all just go on and have lives that have weird dumb teenager stories in them, and not just the eternal shadow of that time I slew my firstborn child to slay an evil god.

- Does that make any sense? It might not make sense. And you don't have to do it even if it does.