"It's also interesting how--okay, so, the four bodies in the basement, one of them is my brother and then the other three are all my parents. As in, all three of them are my parents, not, the three of them are all of the parents that I have."

"...how'd they manage that?"

"Well, you see, not all of me had the same exact set of parents."

"So one of them is your parent twice as often, or something?"

"The woman who had white hair like mine, she's there almost all the time. Actually, the other two are there less than half the time, but I guess that's still enough to make it into the corpse vault instead of the soul garden. ...Sometimes she or the other mom in there is trans, or there's magic, is how I can have one mom almost all the time and the other one oftener than almost never."

"And there's... additional parents who didn't get incorporated, or are only present as soul glass things?"

"Yeah. A handful more dads in the soul garden."

"Are they... going to all get along?"

"I hope so."

"Not obvious based on what you remember?"

"I mean, it seems likely, for sure, but most of the situations I remember involved monogamy and I'm not sure how some of them are going to react to, uh, logistically speaking, not that."

"And they're all - glommed together. Yeah that sounds complicated. None of you had a situation that - either involved or did not involve monogamy? - there has to have been a more elegant way to put that."

"Of the mes that I remember being, all of them died or were otherwise interrupted young and had not yet picked up one or more significant others. Lotsa friends, though, hence the largeness of the garden. There aren't that many extra dads, and I only had a couple other siblings besides the one brother ever."

"You are remarkably coherent for a person agglomeration. How long have you been a person agglomeration?"

"Since...I...woke up? I have no idea how long I was asleep, and if I dreamed anything I don't remember it."

"You are especially remarkably coherent for a person agglomeration if you only woke up around when I was trying to burgle you!"

"The fact that all the people I am made up of are, like, the same person, is really helping. I'm pretty sure. But you're right, it's weird that I'm handling this as well as I am."

"I hope there are more of me. Though I don't think I'd care to agglomerate with them."

"It seems like a preferable alternative to total death, or being on a destroyed timeline, or other ways of unexistifying all the way, and emphatically not to continuing to be alive and doing things on your own."

"Yeah exactly."

"One hundred percent with you there."

"Is 'ritual' as in 'for pie' a catchall term for several magic systems or is there one specific one that's ritual based?"

"Uh...hm...how to give an answer that's not only technically correct but also not misleading...okay, all the rituals I can think of off the top of my head go in a sort of clump together, but I don't know if that's going to keep being the case going forward, and also there's some not-ritual stuff that's sort of clumped together with them? Not as closely connected as they are to each other but more closely connected to them than anything else."

"...is this clumping about being from the same universe or about a different thing?"

"Almost none of the magic I have now is exactly the same as magic that a previous me had. A lot of different magics got sort of melted together, like, Chime isn't made of a bunch of familiars I had because those familiars were all the same like all the mes are the same, they're like that because the various having-a-familiar magics sort of got piled on top of each other and syncretized. A bunch of the magic I have I can correlate with several different things I've had in the past, like, a lot of mes had various healing abilities, but the accretion process that created me was a lot more complicated than just taking individual fragments and stapling them together. ...I think that's part of why I'm so coherent, too, actually."