sweeping changes

[mind_game]

Jane has finally been updated in all of the "extra" worlds with no Bells, Jarvises, or other routine visitors to the peal, and she is conducting template sweeps in them.

[Hey,] she tells all the Jokers and all the Bells. [There's a Joker in world number twelve who wasn't there before I crashed. Can't find him online at all, though.]

Comments

[her_imperial_radiance]

"I'm a good candidate for it. Particularly since there was Harley. And you needed help."

[inhispockets]

"What's the deal with Harley?"

[her_imperial_radiance]

"What do you mean? He's grown up, now, he won't need me around as much."

[inhispockets]

He gives her an impatient look. "If the reason you're so perfect for me is 'cause of him, why were you so perfect for him? Where is he?"

[her_imperial_radiance]

"I last saw him twenty minutes ago in the backyard of the interdimensional hub, in the tower that my mother and her alts maintain, but he could be anywhere by now. I think he left his external shapeshifting soul with his wolf in Québec, though. I volunteered to fetch him and look after him when Jane found him when he was a baby. There weren't any other obvious candidates, I had the wherewithal to do it, and the existing group of Jokers okayed me."

[inhispockets]

"What's their stake?" he mutters.

[her_imperial_radiance]

"The Jokers?" says Elspeth, bewildered. "They're versions of you. Alternate selves."

[inhispockets]

"So? They're all grown up, aren't they?"

[her_imperial_radiance]

"Yes. What does that have to do with anything?"

[inhispockets]

"Well... if I got to never think about Reggie again, I wouldn't ever."

[her_imperial_radiance]

Elspeth blinks. She consults her judgesighted memories.

"I think," she concludes, "that you have an atypical history for the template. Most of the unpleasant parental figures are not named that. So that might be related, although I think it's more likely you're just underestimating how much distance you could get in a few years."

[inhispockets]

He peers suspicously at her. "What do you mean, atypical history? What's the typical one, then?"

[her_imperial_radiance]

"Well, typically you guys are born in New York City when born on Earths at all, for one, so the fact that when I went looking for you I landed in Chicago was already a clue. You also don't look like them - they all mostly look like -" She sends a picture of Harley as he is now, grown-up, smiling. "Or -" Nona's face. "One born like that so far but she's not from an Earth, the others get that way by magic on whim. They're initially named after their fathers, who are rich, also physically and verbally abusive, and if left to their own devices long enough they blow up their houses with both parents inside and wander away and, where a Gotham exists, do the unrequited-love-with-costumed-superheroine thing, that's played out in its entirety three times now."

[inhispockets]

He digests this.

"How do you even know I am one, then?"

[her_imperial_radiance]

"Jane was able to send a blank brainphone message to 'the local Joker' in your world, and I was able to teleport to you with 'the local Joker' as my target, but if you're not sure enough yet, we can ask Glass; she's an alt of my mother's and she can tell by looking."

[inhispockets]

"Tell how?"

[her_imperial_radiance]

"She has an enchantress's aura that lets her see something called 'metacausality' - templates, the things that templates attract, that kind of thing. Auras develop if you do enough of a certain kind of magic. You can have one when you're older if you like."

[inhispockets]

"I can have magic? Are you sure you know more of me?"

[her_imperial_radiance]

"I did say," says Elspeth, "when you're older. Right now I'm not going to give you anything bigger than the smallest kind of wishcoin, and if you get up to anything particularly irritating with the triangles I won't distribute those either."

[inhispockets]

He snorts. "Yeah, that sounds more like it."

[her_imperial_radiance]

"I can make you immortal, though," she adds casually.

[inhispockets]

"Why?"

[her_imperial_radiance]

"Well, if you died, then I'd have to go get you out of the afterlife, and I couldn't even do that if Jane happened to break again."

[mind_game]

"I'm not going to break again. I'm all snug in the tower."

[her_imperial_radiance]

"Most people like being alive. Even most of you like being alive most of the time," Elspeth adds to the yet-unnamed Joker. "You don't have to go back where you came from. You don't even have to come home with me if you don't want to. There are plenty of things to do with being alive that aren't being mistreated."