Yeah, I'm all set, grab me.
To Sue, her mind isn't so much walled off or insubstantial as it is not in the correct sphere of existence. He can detect a shadow - she isn't Juliet's absence-of-a-person - but her mind definitely declines to be interacted with.
At Shell Bell's verbal summary, Golden says, "Let's do this, then."
"It was designed to work with as few as four of us, so with seven, I'll stay solo hanging out here in case something goes wrong, and the rest of you can pair off. One pair to scope out Upside because we don't know anything about it. Angela will stand out least there, I think, she's been historically harmless by their standards. Someone should visit some of the Downsiders for advice on how to present the takeover to the residents, and also make the wishes we know need making - nix torturer's control, first of all. Both of those groups should also install eyes-for-Jane as they go so she can reach in. And someone should go - cloaked as all get out - and spy on the administration."
"It's probably best to assume the admin has all the various powers that are assigned to anyone in Downside ever - control, immunity to same, seeing your history at a glance. Language-imprinting, if that matters. And probably a few other things up her sleeve. Maybe walk into my apartment, first, and then wish directly to be imperceptible to her."
He's already designing one, although it'd take more physical room than they've got in the Belltower. Maybe it's time to move that outside.
"Path's had enforced personal space against people in general since about a minute after I got minted, but good idea anyway," says Amariah. "Is it completely under Sue and Ivy's control when she's in and when she's out or should I do something other than copy it directly?"
(Bar has no problem with him adding a modestly sized tower out back in his location of choice. He stops by the peal to grab some coins from anybody who feels like dispensing them—he should only need a couple of hexes and a handful of pentagons, and he doesn't expect to use all of them.)
"If it doesn't work," says Shell Bell, "then you two - go to the catacombs, see if there's any alts of us or people we don't know still in pre-processing who we can get out even if we can't help everyone. We can make a dent in the place and regroup even if it turns out not to be safe for us to knock it all down."
(And lo, there is a tower. It comes equipped with four times as many ansibles as they actually need to link up the existing array of worlds; that way there'll be spares for later. The ansible room, two floors below ground, and the meeting room on the floor above it both have cameras and mics and Jarvis-style projection equipment for Jane, and the main common room on the ground floor has a computer she can access.)
Jane plugs in ansibles to her stations in Samaria, Aurum, Alethia, Sunshine, Eos, and her original unnamed world; she hasn't got her hooks into Atlantis yet. She pours into the new hardware happily; if she's ever going to run out of capacity to grow, it's not going to be soon. "Hi!" she says to Tony, showing off her chosen face.
A moment later Golden's Alice is fetched. She, unlike Mary, does need to be in the world that she's looking at, but the moment Shell Bell offers up Downside, she recoils. "That world and my sight do not get along. That's worse than looking at hybrids and wolves before I patched those holes." She uses one of the glowy gold squares on her not-invisible necklace to fix her headache. "Bleah. Sorry, Bella."
"It's all right. You can go home," murmurs Golden.
And since the link is right there, she pushes into it a rough sense of the distributions she's getting around this venture - no matter what they do, the Bells are going to end up in the blank spot if they enter Downside; before that point, they may tend to express various levels of positivity and negativity about the results of the expedition, depending on details of their plans that aren't clear to her; around the edges of the blank spot itself, the clearest constant is that Shell Bell is going to be nervous and unhappy for a while, and all the Bells are eventually going to leave Downside. The blank spot swallows up what kind of condition they'll be in when they do, and when exactly that might be for each of them.
"We've figured out how to move from place to place without waiting for Milliways," murmurs Shell Bell, "and got everybody together, but Stella's precog says whatever happens I'm not going to have a fun time of it, even though I'm just sitting here to hold the door and bail them out if necessary. Will you stay with me?"