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Bell goes a-hiring. Magic is of considerable use in sorting applicants; she narrows thousands down to manageable dozens before she even meets them.

The fact that she has abolished the Hunger Games - she for some reason had to make an announcement about this; people were unclear on the concept of benevolent dictatorship - means that the Career facilities have been abandoned by their students and their staff are out of work. She writes a retraining pamphlet, but here at least are a handful of school-shaped locations where she can start to funnel Capitol children. They don't have room for everyone. She hires caretakers and teachers; she magics up another building in the hole in the ground where the Capitol once sat.

(She will put facilities there, but not her own capitol; for capitol purposes this is tainted ground. For the time being she's still operating out of Sherlock and Tony's house, not that she's made this public. Ultimately she plans to transition into an artificial island. Which will habitually sit in the water, off the coast of Four, but will be possible to render airborne as desired.)

She casually renders tracker-jackers extinct on the first occasion she thinks about it.

When there are places to put each Capitol minor, she formally declares everyone age fourteen and under innocent, and situates the ones willing to leave where they're at and all the ones who can't form preferences yet divided between the three ex-Career schools and the new one. They'd all fit in the new one, but this way personality conflicts or similar can be handled by simple transfers, and the ones in the District are better situated to put the kids in contact with potential adopting families anyway.

Kids fifteen and up have sometimes started internships. She expects to find most of them innocent too - heck, she expects to find most of the adults innocent - but that is the age at which she begins trials.

The trials - such as they are - are fairly summary. A decent fraction of Avoxes committed actual crimes. These have their tongues restored - she is not a barbarian - but they have to stay on the moon, with everyone protected by the new ground rules. The others are sent back to wherever they came from, if all they did was try to run away or sass a Peacekeeper.

She takes down the fences.

She hands out cornucopias like they're confetti.

She consigns every Capitol resident who worked on the Hunger Games in any capacity except - grudgingly - the stylists and prep teams, to a life on the moon.

She interviews the stylists case-by-case and finds them personally repellent but not, probably, dangerous, and they get to go home.

Everyone in Snow's administration, with the exception of one pathetic intern who spent her one month on the job working on a proposal to offer more generous tesserae terms in what seems to have been a genuine if twisted attempt to be helpful: mooned.

Most of the useless typical Capitol people: not mooned. (Although she does screen them for bad behavior first. Unless their "employees" decide to put in personal appeals, everyone who has ever hired the intimate services of a coerced Games victor: is mooned.)

She magics up another building. This one is sort of a hostel for those who leave the Moon and are not of an age to be likely to find adoptive families. And by the time she needs to staff this one, she has District Thirteen employees, courtesy of Coin, to man the place and provide slightly more lucid career counseling than what the reeling District residents could produce. Careers per se are not going to be strictly necessary anymore, but people do like to have things to do with themselves.

Not everyone's thing to do with themselves can be being the Empress of Atlantis. On a floating island with a castle made of coral and stained glass. With a beautiful consort by her side who radiates love and magic.

(Bell makes herself her Coral Palace by the end of week two of the Capitol's relocation. She is not really patient when she does not have to be.)
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Hardly anyone puts in a personal appeal for a 'client'.

Tony puts in four.
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Bell doesn't want details, but -

"You're sure?" she asks.
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"Yep," he says.

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"Okay then."

Those four are now allowed to leave the moon, should they so choose. They can't hurt anyone now, and she does acknowledge Tony's entitlement to input on whether punishment is called for.
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"Thanks," he says quietly.

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"You're welcome. Almost no one else bothered, even though I sent all the victors a note about it - I'm not sure if you got an unusual set of patrons or if you're just that sweet."

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"A little from column A..."

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"Well. They're free to go. If you want to drop by the hostel and help them find someplace to go besides there, you're welcome to," sighs Bell. "I'm very glad of the ground rules - I think there's a lot of resentment simmering in the districts, and now that no one's going to threaten to kill rebellious persons' families it would be safe to let it out against any Capitol-dweller who wandered by - and it is a good thing that they can't get far letting it out violently."

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"You are a very good Empress," says Sherlock.

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"It doesn't seem like I have to try very hard. I mean, I do have to think, and come up with good wishes, but here I sit under a crown in a palace and I don't feel the slightest inclination to murder my political opponents' loved ones or invent horrifying drug-filled wasps," says Bell. "I'm really not clear on why anyone would."

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"Because some people are not as nice as you are."

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"Maybe that's all it is. I dunno. It confuses me even so. If I didn't exist and you'd found Stella some other way and she had made you a mint for some other reason - what would you have done?"

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"It likely would have involved less whimsy," she says. "And perhaps more death. But the end result would have been essentially the same."

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"Why more death? What's the point of adding death when you can exile people to the moon?"

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"It is not that I would have chosen more death over less deliberately; it's that the first solutions I thought of would all have included killing anyone who did not seem possible to rehabilitate, and I might not have come up with better ones."

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Bell sighs and reaches for Sherlock's arm and hugs it.

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Sherlock hugs her.

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