"All of them? How long ago did you find them -"

"A few days, Boots did a bunch while you were under - she can't actually work through my sleep thing, we had to transfer you over to her version. And people came to visit me and I went and looked at stuff and read everything."

"Fun. I am curious what my alts are like but not much more than baseline curiosity about interesting new people."

"Whereas Bells are self-absorbed enough to find alts of ourselves the most inherently fascinating thing of all time, although only Cam and Loki are actually dating each other, it's not as apparently inevitable as you suggested it is with Macalaurië and alts."

"If you're mostly straight girls and often attached by the time you meet that'd rather explain that - a Laurië who was already married wouldn't drop someone -"

"Sure, but they're never already married, whereas a bunch of me are to a wide variety of people. I'm not supposed to meet Golden's husband because he's weirded out by people who look like her and aren't, and Kib will gush about his husband at the slightest provocation, and there's Gem and Joy who are very cute at each other, and Boots is dating her Rúmil - not sure if you picked up on that or just that she's fond? - and then there's Cam and Loki. Rest of 'em are single unless you count Iobel being technically married."

"Who does that leave, Butterfly and T'Mir?"

"Both single and not feeling particularly urgent to stop but they'd let somebody set 'em up if there were somebody to set 'em up with."

"Golden and Kib's spouses are one-offs?"

"Yeah. Kib wholeheartedly recommends somebody snap up another Aydanci if one comes to be available; Golden's more reserved about Edward, there's a possibility they only work because he fell in irrevocable ultra-intense vampire love with her at first sight."

"That does seem like it would help."

"A bit, yes. That and it's symmetrical in vampires so if she wanted the local brand of immortality..."

Shiver.

"Yeah, Golden did put it off until she was in love with him anyway."

"How many exciting varieties of mind control does the universe have -"

"Aurum has two kinds of species-specific pairbonding things, there's more people with Boots's powers, Warp has some species with psi abilities but Boots pretty much categorically outclasses them all, Wish can throw mind-altering wishes and mind-altering powers if you become a magic rock but Gem's careful about wishes that might do that, spellbinders are pretty flexible but do have particular trouble with mind-affecting spells in general compared to other things, Edda contains the Mind and Soul stones which are the ones Loki is not advised to try operating, and there are Yeerks who are not magic but are mind-controlly, did the dossier contain a footnote or anything -?"

"It had species. That is a lot of exciting varieties of mind control."

"Yeah I just don't know if it has 'and then there's Ristrell, who is a Yeerk' or if it has 'and then there's Ristrell, who is a Yeerk, which are like this'."

"There are all kinds of endnotes but I hadn't gotten there yet."

"I can explain Yeerks or you can skip 'em for now, they're not an ongoing threat."

"Yeerks seem like a perfectly fine thing to explain while we're looking for Elspeth."

"Yeerks are the small horrifying aliens who were invading Butterfly's Earth. Their empire has been conquered and all Yeerks are currently under much more neighborly jurisdiction. They're slug-like, yea big," gesture, "and parasitic in the sense that in order to do things other than be aquatic slugs they crawl in people's ears and wrap around their brains and apprehend their contents astonishingly fast and pilot the bodies however they like from there."

"Yikes."

"Yeah, Matirin kind of has 'Yeerks' where Elves of you have 'Angband', I think."

"They got him?"