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The guest list winds up being pretty huge.
To start with, there are now eight Bells. Pattern isn't bringing anyone besides herself, and Aegis no one besides herself and her Whistle, but everyone else -
Between Alice, the Joker, the rescued Queenie, Kas, Micaiah, and Sue, plus Ghosty who Amariah picked up on her way home, that's seven Whistles. (Stella thinks ahead: there is a soundproofed orgy chamber away from the main party awning. With a few nodes off of it in case more than one orgy forms; she can think of at least two other likely ones.)
There's an equally absurd number of Sherlocks and Tonies if you count them together. They have Juliet's matched set, Shell Bell's matched set, two other matched sets from Bell-less worlds (one with souled vampire, one both human), a stray Tony, and a stray Sherlock from Downside.
Amariah grabbed a random Libby on top of the random extra Whistle, but at least she's not incorporating anyone from home.
Golden's bringing much of her family and many of her friends - although Edward is staying home, that still leaves Elspeth and Jacob, Alice and Jasper with little Brandon, Rosalie and Emmett and little Henry, Nathan accompanying his mate and their child Kerron, Esme and Carlisle and their Lily, Addy, and Elena who'll get to see her brother. Golden claims that this is a conservative list and she could easily have produced another twenty enthusiastic guests. Stella doesn't doubt it. She puts up a few signs reading Please Conduct Adult Conversation Only Via Brainphone. Little Half-Vampires Have Good Ears And Perfect Memories. As a last-minute surprise, Golden has taken Elspeth's suggestion to bring Edward's deceased mother Elizabeth, too.
Juliet has, on top of her boyfriend and his - progenitor? - her tiny Libby, James, a tagalong thereto called Virginia, and a ghost called Minnie, plus Giles.
Angela's list is more modest: her, her husband, and their friends Alleluia and Caleb.
Shell Bell is responsible for half the Sherlocks-and-Tonies all by herself, a tagalong called Pepper, and also someone called Darcy and also Matilda. (Shell Bell is also the reason Angela is not inviting her brother-in-law.)
Stella herself is responsible for inviting Libby, Orfeo, Chris, Mary, Anna, Sandy, Eights, Chainsaw, Lazarus, Kolya (who is informed that it would be awfully inconvenient for a majority of Bells to all have to coordinate on pretending he doesn't exist when only one of them has even met him to be able to identify him in the first place, so he can simply stay home if he's planning to be hidey), and Bridget.
Stella sets up a name tag system. Everyone will have a tag stuck to them. Solo persons - a minority - will just have their names. People with template names and nicknames will have both stamped on automatically. ("Hi! I'm a Bell, and you can call me Stella!"; "Hi! I'm a Whistle, and you can call me Alice!" "Hi! I'm a Sherlock, and I don't have a distinguishing nickname yet but as soon as I pick one it will appear here!")
She conjures up a nice buffet of food and beverages which will stay its correct temperature until consumed, and assorted synthetics for the vampires (labeled not for human consumption), and dishes and flatware (all glass; even some of the food-eating guests might dissolve anything else) and fusses with the awning opacity until it lets in just the right amount of sun, and, what the hell, she throws in a stage in case Angela wants to sing or she decides to play the flute or someone decides to pentagon some other performative skill to entertain the crowd. She makes sure there are enough bathrooms for all the people who still need bathrooms.
She puts out a few tables here and there with little bowls of squares and triangles - a mix of her glowing red and Alice's shifty black - in them for everyone's convenience. She accumulates coins in those sizes faster than she generally uses them and has a great many, so there are plenty for anyone to dip and wish if something comes up. She double-checks to make sure the Martian ground rules prohibit any misuses available for those size coins.
Jane gets one of those high-tech holographic projectors, on wheels, which she promptly manifests in, drives around the floor, and makes faces through.
self_composed
autokinetic
Aegis sort of wishes she were as far along in empire-building as some of the others. At least she's not completely on her own like poor Pattern, but her only guest is off in a pile of himselves. Oh well. Everybody here is filtered for being potentially interesting to people like her! There's a guy standing alone with a plate of food looking around with bemusement. She dances over in his direction. Her exo's been rendered quite redundant but she hasn't taken it off yet, so she's still all-over copper. "Hi -" She read his name tag. "Is that pronounced with a hard G or a soft G? Or like a J?"
"Giles," says Giles. (It's the J.) "And you are... Aegis?"
autokinetic
"Yes. Also with a G pronounced like a J," she says. "I'm the space soldier one who brought in Jane, if you're having trouble keeping us straight."
"Just a little, yes," he admits. "And I am... er... from Juliet's world."
autokinetic
"I can tell," says Aegis. "We can all see now by looking which world a person's from. She named your world Sunshine, by the way. You seem kind of overwhelmed by all this stuff," she says, gesturing around.
"That is... definitely accurate."
autokinetic
"You need stuff summarized or explained or would that just make it worse?"
"It all seems fairly straightforward," he says. "It's just, well, incredible."
autokinetic
Aegis grins. "I'm lucky, I had warning. Whistles like my Sue sometimes dream their way into Milliways, so I've been hearing about alts and mints and stuff since I was ten, even if I didn't buy it all as a real thing since it was just Sue telling me about a dream he had where there were more of me and one of 'em had wings."
"...Yes, I can imagine that would sound dubious."
autokinetic
"Quite." Aegis sways, and pivots around 360º. "How do you know Juliet well enough to get an invite?"
"I'm her Watcher," he says, and sighs. "Was. I was her Watcher. Now I'm probably redundant."
"...Well, do you know what a Slayer is?"
autokinetic
"Yeah, that was in the executive summary I got when I met up with the peal, Slayer's like a supernatural draftee versus monsters. Gets superpowers, but mostly combat ones, not magic. Sue visited Sunshine once, but Juliet made him spar with her first to make sure he'd be able to handle himself if they met anything and he gave her a bloody nose and she was really impressed, so they must be pretty good combat powers. He said she was easier to hit than me, though, just tougher."
"Yes, well, the Watchers are meant to lend her a hand. Or so I've always thought. Research obscure varieties of demon, oversee her training, that sort of thing."
autokinetic
"...So you've always thought?" inquires Aegis, tilting her head. She stretches her arms out and then drops them.
He sighs again.
"We recently had a disagreement with the Council. Juliet died. The Council representative is in jail for kidnapping."
"We recently had a disagreement with the Council. Juliet died. The Council representative is in jail for kidnapping."
autokinetic
"Yeesh. Did she piss them off or something? She kind of glossed over how she got to be one of the technically dead trio in all the excitement. I don't have as complete a picture of her as some of the others - Sue can't link her. Golden either. Their versions of our power won't let him in even if they try."
"No, apparently the Council just thinks that drugging a Slayer to take away her powers and locking her in an empty building with a starving vampire is a perfectly natural form of standardized testing. When I objected, the fellow hit me over the head and then did it anyway."
autokinetic
"Wow. The I.F. had some kind of screwed up ideas about that sort of thing too, I should probably commiserate with her at some point," says Aegis, wincing.
Giles nods.
autokinetic
"I was keeping it secret that I could link with Sue, because my telepath-blocking mutation is the only reason I was allowed to have this," says Aegis, flicking the copper webbing on the back of one hand, "but then they really wanted me to be able to do it for the war we were supposed to wage, so in the middle of the night they gave me an illegal mutation suppression drug and took my exoskeleton - and I was almost paralyzed without it before magic happened. But I fessed up about having been able to let Sue in all along and they gave me an antidote and my exo back."
"I'm sorry," he says, "that's awful. I apologize on behalf of self-important bureaucrats everywhere."
autokinetic
Aegis laughs. "They weren't a monolith. I hacked into the fleet psych files and there were some people who were shouting at some other people about fucking with us like that. But yeah, now the war's over and I'm an admiral and a mint and I've got Jane and I don't even need my exo anymore, I just haven't bothered to take it off - and some things are gonna change about my world."