A potentially familiar person is sitting at the bar with a wooden tankard of Asgardian mead.

Potentially familiar? Bell remembers everything now. She sits right down. "Hi, Darcy!"

"I found another of me who gave me kickass magic and now I am the sorceress-empress of Atlantis," Bell says proudly. She hasn't been wearing her crown; she squares an illusion of it into place for illustrative purposes. "How's heroing going?"

"That is awesome," says Darcy, "because I totally couldn't come through on talking to Stark. I went to Asgard and they had a little bitty civil war and now I'm stuck until they rebuild their teleporting bridge thingy. Uh, but the hero training's going great!"

"If someone where your door is would hold the door for me, I could come through, teleport you where you want to go, maybe fix the bridge, and teleport back to go through the held door," Shell Bell says. "Actually, if whoever would be willing to hold the door long enough I'd be really curious to meet your Tony."

"That would be really handy!" says Darcy. "I could ask Sif, I guess. But I can't promise anything about Stark."

"Well, if he's a jerk or he doesn't want to talk to me, I'll just go back through the door."

"Okay," says Darcy.

"Lemme know when you want to go," says Shell Bell, and she orders a milkshake. "I hope the civil war wasn't too terrible as such things go? Mine basically began and ended with me putting the entire Capitol on the moon."

"Well, long story short—the old king was in a coma, so the heir apparent took the throne, but he decided to work out his daddy issues by starting a war of the non-civil variety and almost blowing up a planet, and I had to kick his ass," says Darcy. "The whole thing was over in like two hours."

"Is everybody else okay?"

"Mostly? Some people died, but not a lot of people, especially considering he was trying to wipe out a whole species."

"I don't know yet if I can resurrect the dead," says Shell Bell. "None of us with this kind of magic have tried it yet. I'm going to, though, soon, once everything's settled down from the change of management and I know they'd have a place to go."

"Good luck."

"Well, what I mean is that as long as I'm going to your world, if someone will hold the door, if it's not more than -" She makes a quick count of stars on her bandolier - "a couple dozen people, I could try and see. If they've only just died then there won't be a question of there being someplace for them to go because they could just as easily have not died. But I can't promise it will work. It might be too big a job for even a star."

"...Maybe," says Darcy. "It's probably gonna get complicated. The Asgardians and the guys Loki started the war with really don't like each other, so even if you could resurrect everybody, they might just go back to killing each other."

"Maybe just a few people, then. But it's sad when people die and if I can undo it I should. I can afford to wait in my world because all the people who have died there will still have died there in six months and then I'll have figured out how to reintegrate them. Everyone who lost the Hunger Games, everyone who was executed as a political dissident, and then I'll start taking special appeals when we've gotten through all those - if it works."

"We'll see, I guess." She glances at the door. "Okay, so if I take you to Asgard, will you try to fix the bridge? Because otherwise I don't actually think taking me back to Earth would help. Unless Sif wants to go too. But I don't think she does. And it would be," she smiles ruefully, "complicated."

"Well, I'll fix the bridge if I can, although it's possible that it's not amenable to fixing with the coins I have. What would be complicated?"

"I want to go back to Earth because it's, you know, my planet, but Sif's Asgardian and she's the one who's giving me the hero lessons, and if I did take her back to Earth we'd probably have to okay it with the nice people from the government," Darcy explains.

"Oh, right," says Shell Bell. "Governments that aren't me! Annoying!"

"They won't be diplomatic with an offworld empress?" Shell Bell asks. "Even a slightly flippant one?"

"Ye-es," says Darcy, "but their idea of diplomatic sometimes involves challenging people to single combat. I get to skip a lot of that because Mewtwo's on my side."