"I mean it's fucked but not in a, like, incomprehensible way. It's a pretty straightforward type of being fucked."

"Just wait until you see the horrors beyond reality," he grumbles.

"Do you enjoy doing that?"

"Doing wh—oh." He laughs. "Oh I guess I did get into some kind of antisocial habits didn't I, sorry. Uh, how much do you remember about what it feels like to... go places. Like, far away places. Not necessarily super far away but, you know, taking a cab from the rental to the village."

"...if there's something really obvious I should be remembering, I don't."

"It seems to me that the world is not a nice mostly-spherical object floating in space but rather a set of disjoint bubbles of reality that pretend to have approximate locations with respect to each other but which are separated by undefinable patches of unreality. By which I mean that if you want to go somewhere in a different bubble of reality you will experience a time skip, a vague sensation of nonspecific memories of having crossed the distance will be downloaded directly into your brain, and you will be in your destination, but you will not actually experience the process of traversing that space. And if you try, reality gets—wrong. Very, very wrong."

"You know, for a minute there I thought you were only very confusing because I didn't use to be able to remember the starts of sentences but even now that I do you still talk in confusing ways."

"...is that a joke. Are you calling me a nerd."

"Yes."

"Well I may be a nerd but I'm also hot, so."

"Oh I don't think I'd have bothered to pay attention to what you were saying if you didn't look pretty while saying it, don't you worry."

"Whatever works."

"Anyway I don't understand what you mean by the reality bubbles thing but I'm sure I'll have time to experience it firsthand. Any other big things I'm missing?"

"What do you figure your life expectancy is?"

"What's the right answer?"

"The right answer is that it isn't, because you're a powerful spellcaster and we're friends and so I'm definitely sharing my potion of Rejuvenation once I have any, but absent that it would have been about twelve weeks, ish."

"You're. Joking, right? Twelve weeks?"

"You'd know better than me! Apparently you already died once, of old age even!"

"—shit, I did. Yo, hold on, what? I reincarnated?"

"How are you only realizing this now, you were the one who told me???? —okay I guess it was Zach actually but."

"I mean, I knew but I didn't, like, know? It never came up? I never thought about it? But it's a huge fucking deal?"

"Do you remember that you're Alexei's twin? And that Zach is Alexei's ex-husband James? Dead husband, I guess."

"Oh fuck. Oh fuck he is."