Isabella Mariel Swan ∀ &quot;Glass&quot;

Steel is eavesdropping.

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"...so I think there must be something weird about how translation interacts with magic, because otherwise there's no reason for whatever Glass speaks to translate a word for particular sort of magic user as 'witch' - hi, Steel, what's up?"

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"Oh, do continue."

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Juliet laughs. "So Amariah's a witch, and Golden's a witch, and Glass is a witch among other things, and the first two you can explain by the fact that they're both from Earths where English is spoken, but your language - super pretty, by the way - is matching up one of the kinds of magic user Glass is to the same word, and other kinds to other words, and I popped into Milliways for a second to check and started talking to a random person about it and he heard 'witch' in both cases too even when I used your language. It's weird. And Cam's a wizard, which matches word-wise with a kind of magic you have here, too, even though the execution is different, and Aurora's a sorceress but she just made up calling herself that so I don't know how to count it."

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"Translation magic is indeed a mystery," says Golden. "I'm not sure how to go about solving it."

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"Interesting," says Steel. "Does it need solving?"

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"Well, otherwise we won't know why it's happening," laughs Golden. "It doesn't seem urgent for any practical reasons."

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She contemplates the question.

Then she says, "Why not ask Glass?"

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"Do you suppose that's the kind of thing her aura-sense can do?" wonders Juliet.

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"I think there is one obvious way to find that out, and no obvious downside to trying."

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"Yeah, fair enough. Hey, Glass!"

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Glass appears and kisses her wife and says, "What's up?"

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"There are some odd regularities in how various languages are magically translated into one another and we were wondering if you could shed light on the subject," says Golden.

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"Uh. Hm. Say some of the words?" Glass asks.

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"Witch, witch," says Juliet, switching between languages, "wizard, wizard, sorceress, sorceress."

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"And you only just noticed this because the local language has words for those things and isn't English. Hmmmmm." Glass nibbles her lip, closes her eyes. "Witch, witch, witch - There might be a - no, I can't really make sense of it. I'm still figuring out how I work now."

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Sherlock kisses her anyway.

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Kissees!

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"What were you going to say? I promise not to take it as an irrefutable fact of the multiverse."

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"I was going to say, meta-language," says Glass, "but I have no idea what that would mean."

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"Can it not just be essentially a coincidence, deriving from the fact that the kinds of magic user in question don't have direct counterparts in the various worlds but the magic chose to translate the terms anyway?"

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"Nnnno, I think it's not that - not on the level I'm seeing through aura, anyway, that might be what we'd find on a causal level. There's some sort of reason wizards get the same terminology as Cam and witches the same as Amariah or Golden."

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"There's witches on my world too," Juliet adds. "Just, I'm not one."

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