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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.
"It wouldn't make sense to get you in trouble for something I magic-utteranced," says Elspeth.
"I'm the nearest unicorn, it's still my responsibility."
"Then it is fortunate that Elspeth's magic utterance has both satisfied our curiosity and not landed you in unjust trouble."
"I have met another one of my beloveds - I did not see him with the others, now that I can remember clearly what they all looked like."
"I think so. He recognized me. I think I made him upset. I didn't meet her."
"Of course you made him upset - you were broke and he couldn't fix you," murmurs Aegis, "and he has a Bell and I bet he loves her to bits and you were like her. We should find them."
"Through Milliways. You met him, you'll have the best chance at forcing the door," Shell Bell says. "I'll go with you."
"Bye," says Liselen.
Shell Bell waves at the unicorn and cues Jane, and she and Sarion vanish.
"So if the new Joker recognized Sarion then presumably this one is a girl too. Are we all going to be girls except me? That could get really tiresome if there are ever, like, forty of us and I'm still the only boy one."
"Relax," snorts Juliet. "Given that we come in boy at all we probably come in boy more than once per forty. If there are even that many Bells in the multiverse."
"There are an awful lot of you."
"Used to be Golden and Stella met occasionally, and then I met Shell Bell and we set up a thing in the interdimensional hub to collect more of us," says Amariah. "It's worked pretty well, I guess Sarion didn't get gotten that way because she never went up to the bar."
"Minus recognized me before I went up to the bar," says Cam. "I'm still pretty impressed by that."
"Minus is a weird name," opines Liselen, who still hasn't told the peal his.
"It's not his name, his name is Sherlock, but there are a bunch of those, too - Shell Bell's girlfriend and some others without Bells attached - and so they had to pick nicknames. And they are much worse at it than Bells are."
"Minus's nickname refers to the fact that he didn't use to have a soul. Now he does, so it's not even accurate anymore."
"Oh," says Liselen.
"Yes! It's Liselen," says the unicorn.
"We are mostly named Isabella, but we all have different nicknames to keep ourselves straight in particularly Bell-dense cohorts," says Angela. "I don't know if you'd get any use out of them or not."