She flits into smoke and fire, flowing out of Ellie's reach and circling around. (Laughing, too.)

"Don't break my house, you two."

This is such an innocent looking tiger!

"We wouldn't dream of it!"

"Of course." She sits down primly. "Her full name is Burning Ruby Tiger Decima, since we're sharing," she informs the guests.

She preens. And: "Titles are your artifact name plus your working name. So the formal short forms are actually Decima and Nyx..."

"Artifacts?"

"Yeah. My shape's an artifact - if someone else got this shape, they'd also use Burning Ruby Tiger in their title, and their powers would be on a similar theme to mine. And if I used Ellie's shape, I'd be the Mystic Storm of Feline Destiny Decima. But I'm not sure bonding to a new artifact's actually possible outside our home world, and our home world won't let us back in..."

"Interesting. I don't think we've come across magic quite like that before."

She nods. "It felt weird even to us, really... Magic's a secret in our world. Possibly because of the world kicking out people who try to write things on the moon, actually, come to think of it. But the ways people thought magic might work were mostly pretty different."

"...Writing on a moon would be classified as ecological vandalism in my universe. And is a prosecutable offense in most jurisdictions, though exile is an- atypical punishment."

She laughs. "Fair. We were trying to break the masquerade, but also being impulsive young adults who'd originally flown out for a vacation..."

"Ah, teenagers."

Snicker. "Technically still, yeah. But it wasn't a bad plan - there were a lot of people I knew who'd gone missing after expressing they were going to try to break the masquerade, and a lot of other people sort of mysteriously dropping off the map after their names got known, and I'd never heard of anyone being active for more than a decade, usually not more than five years... So we figured, hey, we're up here on the moon, even if there's a shadowy cabal enforcing the masquerade and they can go lightspeed it'd take them a bit over a second to get here and we should be able to break the masquerade in that time, right, if we do something big enough, and while hitting lightspeed's theoretically possible with our magic the framework for it wasn't one I'd ever heard a rumor of - we hadn't planned it ahead at all, and were planning at that time over telepathy, which's a secure channel with our system. So, if the masquerade can be broken, we're in a good position..."

"So we went to do it and landed in another universe. And Bellona got notes back and forth with my dad and there weren't even, like, paw prints on the moon or anything even though I'd totally stepped on the surface. And I scried some of the people I knew who'd gone missing - couldn't find most of them 'cause of shields, that's distinct from 'cause of not existing, but did find one in that universe with us, and a whole bunch of people using our magic system on a galactic scale which is way bigger than anything anyone ever used it for back home."

"That sounds unfriendly in the opposite direction of Ashes'."

Sigh. "Yeah. We weren't very attached to the world itself, though, luckily. Though I missed some media releases I'd been looking forward to..."

"I will never find out which king Kvothe killed. Though probably I wouldn't have even if we'd stayed."

She giggles. "I'll never find out what's up with the 'corpse of the day', even if All Night Laundry's still updating..."

"Tragic."

"We have so many very serious problems, it's true."

"Not least of which the inability to remember and abide by the customs of polite society in the company of your close friends."

"And a lack of pockets for keys."

She nods. "Both valid points! Why don't monster artifacts come with pockets, actually, that seems like the sort of poor design I'd expect of magical girls."

"We'd probably be overpowered if we had pockets."

"Very true. It's important to maintain balance in things like this. We get to be banned from going all out in a spar over an inhabited planet, everyone else gets pockets."

"You have quite a bit of power at your command, then."