Shrug. "Well, backups are harder for us. Riskier. Couple centuries ago I'd be dead of old age though, so I can't complain about the tech. Anyway, who I am now is what counts in my opinion."

(Rapid noms to finish the dish. Ear-twitching and squeezing her eyes shut at the spiciness concentration.)

It is so cute and she really wants to pet her. She restrains herself. 

"How widespread are these cortical stacks, anyway? Are they cheap? Because while we've fixed aging accidentals and genetic diseases still get people."

"They're cheap, the procedure is really streamlined. There's charities that do work stacking people in really poor places on Mars and dust-speck republics? Er, little asteroids full of survivalists. So it's not literally free. But pretty close to. It's considered inhumane to have a kid and not stack them and I think most governments subsidize it hard. Oh, kids have to be like two or three before it'll take."

"Sounds like we'll pay a lot for the technology once we get back to your world. And of course then your world will get our cool shit too, it'll be a whole thing, but we have practice with that, it ought to go fine. Want to go meet my sisters before the show?"

"Hmm... Sure. Sounds interesting. I change myself, but you fork and change yourselves. It's kind of a neat mirror. Ice cream first, though." She sticks out her tongue and winks. It's slightly fuzzy.

Ice cream! Chocolate swirl for Hannah, and for Changeling?

She rolls a mental die, which lands on lemon sorbet.

Also, a small bloodfruit, just to try it.

The sorbet is quite good. The bloodfruit is an acquired taste; it's sticky-sweet and coppery and clings in your mouth. 

After tasting both, she finishes the bloodfruit first, savoring it, then washes it away with the sorbet.

"Kind of literal, isn't it? Well, I'm glad I tried it. Are there vampires around?"

"There are vampires! They're from down in Skanthivus, one of the Half-Tamed worlds. Has an effect that screws up magic. They've got some weird instincts and they need sun-charms but they're again mostly just people." 

She fishes in her interdimensional pocket for a couple seconds and comes up with a pyramidal beacon. She sets it down in a clear space, pushes a button, and there's a door. 

"After you," she says to Changeling.

"Spiffy portal!" She prances walks in, ears twitching in a slightly different way (front-to-back for excitement, instead of the quick side-jig that pain causes).

It's really cute how her ears broadcast her emotions. She follows Changeling and gets the beacon behind her.

"Hello there Hannah!", says Eva from behind her paperwork-covered desk. "Who's this you've brought along with you?"

"This is Changeling, she's from an uncontacted and shifts to be different people, naturally I thought of you."

"Fascinating! Mind if I ask for a demonstration?"

"Sure thing. One personality and body change coming right up. Takes a few minutes though. Hmm... D'you want someone chill or careful or confident?"

"Let's go with confident, my own selves who get ambitious are - exciting, let's put it that way."

"Sure thing, one dragon-girl coming up. Meanwhile, so, you're the Eva I've heard so much-" Ear-twitch "-A few things about. I think the way I said it was, the two components of my soul are casual omnivory and bucket lists, meaning I'll try everything once and many things repeatedly, as hobbies. And Hannah says you do something similar."

"There's this organization I used to belong to, the Society of Sensation, that says that life is about getting out there and doing things and experiencing things. I took that credo to heart. One of the first things I did when I got this immortality was I threw myself into a sun. Just to experience dying like that. ...well, and other reasons too, like establishing that there's no "original" me anymore. I'm not one person, I'm a whole organization, and these days my activities can only be understood statistically, but - go everywhere, do everything. I have a very heavy presence in the OTC's exploratory arm."

"Yeah I noticed that there seem to be a lot of you. Forking's nightmare fuel where I'm from because it fucks up in little or big ways so much, and illegal mostly. I've only gone sundiving the once, in a super special shielded spaceplane. Have you experienced being a spaceship? It's trippy, I couldn't take it for more than a couple hours."

"I have not!" She taps her necklace, and far away a place is set aside in the Thousand Stars for precisely that memory. "Now I have to do it. Your world lets people be a lot of different things, then?"

She grins and lets out a little subvocalized "Huh-hn" laugh, and ear-twitches. (The ears seem - slightly different, now)

"Yeah, you can map 'stack inputs lots of different ways. It's an art and a science. There's lots and lots of frames you can pick up - bodies, that is. Robotic ones and ones made of meat. Planes and submarines and spider walkers, or plain androids. Lots of different animal bodies - I was an octopus for a while. I'm a meathead - biological purist, I don't ever want to spend more than a few hours in a robot or get too much metal in one of my bodies." Shrug. "People think we're silly but it's a way to be."

"It seems reasonable to want to - defend some part of what you were before all of this. It's conservative in a way I didn't expect but it makes sense."

"That's a good way to put it actually. I'm not saying gynoids aren't alive, but - something's just missing if you're all circuits and no cells. Hannah, you still here?"

"Yeah, just holding my peace to let the big girls talk. I know when I'm outgunned in a conversation."