"Staff size among Bells varies. Golden has the most, which I think is some combination of nepotism and the fact having a lot of employees was the only way to have access to a lot of magic before she imported her mint. I'm probably going to want ambassador-types? There's a lot of demons to deal with; pentagons will do languages but I'm not necessarily a very diplomatic person."
"Hello, Arthur."
Arthur is sitting in lockup, looking confused about how this could possibly have happened to his life. Nothing about his situation improves when he hears Bella's voice. (She is still invisible.)
"I'm not a ghost," says Bella conversationally. "I know one - friendly girl, also murdered, but not my sort of dead. I am technically dead. The fact that this has been overall to my advantage in terms of how much I can do notwithstanding, you murdered me. I don't care if you didn't know what the square could do. You wished for me to be mortally injured. You assaulted me with crippling drugs and you locked me in a house with a vampire, who you did know what he could do. I talked my way past him and decided not to mark you for death in reply, and for my restraint I got my throat ripped out. That hurt, by the way. Because of what you did I underwent quite a lot of pain and fear and something unspeakably terrible happened to someone I love. I haven't decided what to do with you yet."
"I - I was under orders -"
"Yes, well, I haven't decided what to do with the rest of the Watchers, yet, either, besides protect the new Slayer from you. They won't find her unless they got it in quick before I came back from the dead. Have you spoken to them since murdering me?"
"I - yes."
"Liar," murmurs Bella. Oh yes, she's had that on.
"I did, I got my - my one phone call -"
"Liar," repeats Bella.
"They found her and -"
"And you're still lying to me and if they had found her it wouldn't matter, she's smart and she'd have listened to me even if I were the second person to show up instead of the first. Well, this has been unproductive. I think I'll leave you here at the mercies of a criminal justice system that heavily features a father who watched you murder his daughter in cold blood, shall I? But you see I'm going to be legally alive, if not yet then soon, and I'll be able to testify regarding the kidnapping, albeit it would be peculiar for me to tell a jury that you killed me. I do wonder if the Watchers have enough international political pull to put me slightly out of my way in making their communiqués disappear to circumvent any attempts at skirting the consequences. That seems like the kind of self-serving bullshit they'd spend their resources on, is fake diplomatic immunity."
"I-I-"
Bella's not there anymore.
She teleports back to Jarvis's living room.
"It turns out the new Slayer is very bright and also an alt of Stella's personnel officer. So I'm apparently going to wind up with a similar hiring arrangement and tomorrow morning I'm going to meet her best friend. The Watchers aren't going to find her. I talked to Arthur, too. He didn't have a lot to say."
"I didn't think it was just my ethical inhibitions that kept me from - what happened. It isn't appealing the way that - that breaking Arthur Mallory's jaw just because he hurt me and I could, is. Or I thought so but she came from somewhere and until I know where I can't dig her out of my brain and set her on metaphorical fire."
"I love you," she sighs. "And I want you to be happy and to get things that you want and not things that you don't want. And I don't see how anything about that is an ethical inhibition. It should just be wrapped up in loving you. Shouldn't it? I don't know which parts are soul-parts."
"That is all wrapped up in loving someone for me," he says. "And not in any part of my soul. But sometimes vampires do find that for whatever reason their mortal affections don't carry. Perhaps the actual boundaries of the soul's effect on the brain differ case by case."
Pause.
"I - wonder if I had better tell the other Bells. They're probably wired like me. I guess it's unlikely any of them will be presented with any comparable choice, but - unlikely things sometimes happen. Would that be awful of me? If I told them? Not in the book, I wouldn't write it in the book."
"But would you rather I wasn't specific? They'll listen to me if I just tell them that something worse than the alternative-as-we-knew-it happened. They won't like it but they'll listen to me. Golden won't tell if I ask her not to. They might be able to guess a short list, but not the exact thing."
"If she'd killed or tortured somebody, that would also be bad. If she'd... actually the mere fact that she had a serious personality change, any serious personality change, might do it. I was hoping I'd turn out like you. With maybe a different wardrobe and having to do more of my ethical process by thinking instead of feeling, nothing big."
"I don't think I could do that. Even if I thought it would be a really good idea to be someone other than Bella. I don't think I could want to. I mean, I could probably learn an accent if I tried, that sort of thing, but it'd wind up being cosmetic on me."
Judging by size, shape, and weight, he got her a bowling ball.
"I think this is happening now," she murmurs. "I think they're freaking out because Arthur hasn't called and they don't know if I'm dead - that one thinks I must be alive because they still, heh, can't find the Slayer, and it would just be impossible for two in a row to have my, heh, little problem..."
She has a few clues. There is what Vampire Juliet did. There is what Amariah said, about Path - Path can't just be a connected owl-creature, to her, he must serve some purpose that outwardly looks like it inhabits Amariah's own body, or he couldn't be so crucial to Amariah's identity. She has Shell Bell's account how she changed after decades Downside: what stayed - what proved indelible, for a Bell with a soul - and what fell away.
"Did she know what she was doing?" Bella asks, after a silence. "Would she have owned up to it by name if it'd come up in conversation with someone she had reason to be honest towards? Or did she manage to delude herself about it somehow?"
She figures on this.
Even unmerged Shell, devoid of memory and identity, had an idea of what she'd do with the world if she had it, warped by her history though it was. And Shell kept her ability to love, truly, generously, in a way that put the point of the love in someone else instead of in her.
James said she could get Bella behind a better candidate for world rulership. Is this true? Probably. Angela is after all not angling for her god's job, last she checked. So the reason the Bells all do in fact want to rule the world except the vampire has to do with the fact that they are right for the job.
The vampire didn't want to rule the world. She couldn't see the point. She was happy to abandon Sunshine, making no further attempt to repair its flaws. She thought Shell Bell should've had a pentagon effectively stolen from her, even if she didn't care about the results that would have achieved.
"Who says I have one?"
A Bell without ambition.
She didn't care what happened to anyone. Except herself. She tried to talk Sherlock into doing what she wanted, and as soon as that didn't look like the easiest way to get it, she changed tactics. She wasn't making any long-term plans or she'd have done a better job of pretending to be Bella-as-she-was. She just saw something she wanted, devoid of any terms referring to people other than her and what they liked or didn't - and she inspected what she wanted and what she had and how to get the latter using the former. That ability was intact. In the short term. Unless Bella's ability to get bored had gone with everything else -
"Maybe my entire ability to care about other people is attached to ethical - stuff," murmurs Bella. "Maybe I don't care about people I love differently from people I don't know, just - more. That and long-term planning. That might do it."