But she can't see anything till they show up.
Cam arrives first, despite having been a later addition to the expedition - no one was distracting him with last-minute goodbye makeouts - and she clears him and he waits around for Jellybean.
The aura doesn't appear to care about Nathan's air filter.
Nathan is making confused noises, and he's trying to bite Jellybean's neck open, and it's not working very well.
"Your aura, withdraw your aura," exclaims Alice, scrunching her eyes shut.
"That was by far the weirdest sensory experience I've ever had," he says. "Sorry about that."
"You could get thirstlessness like I did," Alice says. "It's more comfortable anyway."
"No thanks," says Nathan. "I don't think many people are going to show up all synaesthetic sugar that bypasses my air filter, and sometimes I want to be a little thirsty. Right, babe?" He winks at the Joker.
"I don't see anybody mating to you, anyway, Jellybean," says Alice. "So you and Cam are both clear to move freely around Aurum with standard cautions about not revealing magic to random humans and so on."
He takes a step back, inhaling deeply. "Wow."
Alice mentioned it. She says it won't bother half-vampires since we're more used to literal candy, but if you let it out among full vampires they'll start fighting over you because the relevant instincts don't expect you to contain enough blood for sharing.
Her office is otherwise quite empty; it's just Addy, a standing desk and a computer, and some random objects (glass of water, bottle of bubbly, stack of files). She looks him over, taps him on the nose and hmmms and shakes her head, and then folds her arms and looks at him expectantly.
Addy is a little more restrained than Nathan; she drinks to the point of discomfort but not distention. "Fascinating," she says. "This operates on a completely different level than the tastes of magic do. Does the exact type of sweet you - emit - change at all, ever?"
"Ah, you're a little out of date on Bell auras, Golden's gives her fine shield control that she didn't notice till she tried to use it," Addy says, wagging a finger. "I don't know about the others, they're not as accustomed to indulging my curiosity. What all else can you do with it, now that I'm full enough not to get distracted and leap for your throat with it turned up?"
"All the normal Joker stuff," he says, gesturing vaguely—his soundtrack fades in with melancholy violins; his mood-aura dips to match, then brightens into giggly happiness while the soundtrack keens sadly onward. His aura of candy flavours itself pineapple, then blueberry, then acquires a hint of chocolate.
The obvious exceptions aren't obvious. Despite being spoken in a universally understandable language, the things he's saying don't make a whole lot of sense.
"It's called the Speech," he says, still speaking same; the Speech's name for itself translates as such, but has stronger overtones of fundamentality. "It's from my world. You can use it to talk to anything that can understand you, and if you speak it, you understand anybody who's trying to talk to you. Somebody should teach it to your princess, I bet she'd have a field day."
"If somebody killed me I'd turn up Downside, but come to think of it I'm not sure if Bella would bother to get me out at this point," muses Addy. "But if he's only lying about the power that'd be no fun, would it? I'd never get to play with anything he promised. So that's not a concern, is it?"
"Hey, Jellybean," says Cam, putting an arm around Jellybean's waist and tugging him over. "I don't think you actually met Golden, I think you were off doing your own thing by the time she showed up to have a look at me. This is her. Golden, this is my Jellybean."
"Addy? Yes. Both of those things. Also completely amoral and only barely kept under control by the fact that she can get access to more interesting magic by keeping me happy than otherwise, so thank you for not attempting to grant her access to any of yours, I would have had to have words with you or asked Elspeth to do so."
[No, not really. All the Bells seem to have a sort of polite incomprehension about what any of us see in templates that don't match our own significant others, except maybe Amariah, so she's probably just filing this under "apparently that's something that Bells with Jokers get used to". If Edward has any reaction to anything that isn't whispering in Golden's ear I haven't seen it.]
Then he says, [...I kind of feel like I've been set up here? I mean. Nobody warned me ahead of time that I'm not supposed to give magic to Addy. I figured it out on my own 'cause she talks like she's on a leash and she's pretty overtly creepy, but if she'd acted like it'd be fine for me to give her the Speech, I would've had no reason not to think so. And I might've just done it. And it makes me fucking itch to have Golden come along after the fact and say 'by the way, if you'd done this thing I never asked you not to do, I would've been mad', especially because when she finally got around to coughing up a reason it was a really good reason and the way she said it made it seem like she expected me not to care. Maybe I'm wrong about that part, I dunno. But the whole thing just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.]
Pause.
[But she might also have thought that you wouldn't care, because she doesn't know you individually, just the template, and not too closely, and Jokes doesn't seem to lose any sleep over having personally done a lot of screwed-up crap, and she can work with him but she can also work with Addy, so.]
A few seconds later Cam joins him and pulls him into a hug. "She's going to have Elspeth coordinate with everybody to write 'before you visit this world, here's what you should know' pamphlets, Aurum first, Alethia next because of the spontaneous daemon thing, and so on. And she's not going to let Addy leave Aurum without an escort anymore."