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Everyone pops in. All the Bells, all the Jokers - except for the Joker, who is missing for some reason - and the Bells immediately, without having to speak, divide their tasks amongst themselves. Stella and Angela and Pattern and Cam start brainstorming solutions - not implementing them, yet, just generating ideas that might work depending on what they're dealing with. Golden, as the one who's actually had her mind read by a loved one - albeit under more controlled circumstances - is working with Shell Bell, the other previously broken-beyond-recognition Bell, on coming up with a plan to help walk Isibel through recovery after they fix this somehow. Cam eventually folds into this conversation from the other since he's the one with a talking notebook; if they can find Isibel's old books they might be able to turn them into something that could help more actively. Rose is peering into Isibel's mindscape, looking for visible damage that she can just heal directly. Amariah's popping back into Milliways and forcing the door to the elf's world so she can drop a Janepoint in the cave to keep it temporally synced, then coming back and joining Juliet and Aegis in interrogating the demon and the waking dragon about what exactly they have done to Isibel.
"What," says Aegis, "exactly caused this link between you - and what are its features?"
"It's a Dragonbond," he says. "They happen through - fate, I suppose, or the Wild Magic. A unicorn came to Isibel, after she met me, and he told her that she must bond to my love - " he pets the dragon's folded wing " - to save the world. So she did, and she learned the elven magic that comes now only to those who bond with dragons, and we found who the world needed saving from and killed him."
"So this is leftover now, we can disrupt it and get her some fucking privacy and it won't ruin her world?"
"How do fate and wild magic and so on operate in your world, magic varies between worlds, we need to understand it," Aegis says.
"The bond is meant to be for life," he says. "I don't know if it can be changed. I don't know if it can be broken. I don't know if she would live through it if you tried. I don't know if she would want to. It is made of - love, not just magic."
The dragon sweeps a wing protectively around his loves, hiding them from sight, and growls.
"No, dude, it's okay, I'm dead, we can get her back, it just might break the bond on the way," says Juliet.
"It would not harm her?" he asks.
"Well, I mean, there's still the part where we'd have to kill her. There would be a corpse. But then we could get her out like me, or Pattern, or Shell Bell - we all died, we're fine now. You don't have Cam's and Amariah's problem that they can't hook into Downside from their worlds, and it looks like Amariah didn't jump the gun on making her torchable so it's an option. Not a pretty option, but if it's as indelible as, like, vampire mate bonds - we know those don't survive a trip through Downside."
"If you're sure," the dragon murmurs. "If you're sure."
"It's not something we ever tried on purpose before," Aegis says. "But yeah, those three all died, and we can hook you into Downside. Hey brainstormers!" she calls. "Have you got anything better than sending her through Downside?"
"I think we probably want to try, you know, basic mental defense wishes first," says Stella. "Failing that, wish away that aspect of the bond entirely."
"My love, my love," he says. "We are bonded too, my demon and I. Kill us if you must, though it break our beloved's heart, but do not make us separate."
"...Guys," says Amariah, "in case there was doubt, we actually need to take that seriously, I am getting daemony vibes here, I don't think they're just being theatrical."
"I take it just putting them in different worlds wouldn't work. Isibel in one and the demon and dragon in another," says Angela. "That seems the least likely to be harmful. The most easily reversible."
"Our beloved has been to your between-worlds place," says the demon. "We felt her there just the same."
Rose emerges from her mindscape trance. "I can't find anything. I can appear to enter her mindscape, it doesn't refuse me outright the way some of ours do, but I can't find anything there, it's empty. I don't know if that's damage or simply how she's made."
"Fat lot of good her opacity did her, if it's that," snorts Aegis.
"Apart from mindreading," says Shell Bell, "there's - I overheard something about it being made of love? I'm - wary of messing with that. Considering."
"Love and magic," says the dragon. "A dragon loves their Bonded, and the Bonded love the Dragon. My demon and I are closer than most - we had ten thousand years together before our beloved found us, and we knew from the start that we were the same - so, loving me, she loves him too."
"Yeah, um, I'm not sure outright unbonding her is the first thing we want to try," Shell Bell says. "I like the sound of mental defense wishes. Let's do mental defense wishes. What's the state of the art?"
"Did... that work?" she asks hopefully.