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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.
"She is dead," says the dragon, with strongly mixed emotions. "I felt it. The bond no longer links us."
"She is with us again," he murmurs.
She offers up her love to her Bonded; there's not a lot else for her to do.
When Angela hears this report she sighs and picks up Isibel again and asks Jane to take them both back to Atlantis; there is clearly no point to keeping Isibel away from the dragon. She puts Isibel back to sleep.
Angela deposits the elf with her beloveds and steps back solemnly.
"It's an atrocity, unless I desperately miss my guess - sweeties, Sue -"
"What is it?" says Petaal, wrapping herself around Kas's neck and shoulders as a dark grey snake with pebbled skin.
"I was going to say we can patch that part, Amariah," says Pattern. "We can hook them up to just each other and not Isibel like ten ways and throw in Sue for good measure and then go after the dragonbondy thing."
"They want to take the bond apart but it's what holds the demon and the dragon together," murmurs Amariah to the daemoned Jokers. "I'm not sure if - there's no substitutions for daemons but maybe they work just differently enough?"
He touches the dragon's mind.
The demon and the dragon show him what it is to be them: sharing every thought, touching souls even in dreams. One person with two experiences of the world.
"They're a lot like us," says Ivy. "A lot, a lot. But - I don't know - if you linked them up every way you could, it might work." She shivers. "We can't see how it wouldn't, just from looking."
"Bell standard with visual channel isn't going to cut it here," says Stella. "Maybe same basis, omit the visuals, just run it with everything automatically 'opened' as it happens." She hexes it up in both directions.
"And enchanter's mindscape-reading. If you're truly one I don't know how well it will work, but -" Rose wishes both enchanter power and enchanter skill and murmurs the instructions to the mindscape-reading spell she uses with Beast.
"And a link like Sue's, automated pushing - and Sue, you might wanna stay hooked in while we do it, if you can stand it, in case they need more bandwidth or something -" Aegis wishes them a facsimile of what Sue does just between demon and dragon.
"And something like what daemons have with their people, not the drawbacks but the connection," says Amariah, and she takes a moment to work out a design, preemptive anti-intercision, and she wishes it into place.
"And something as near to the original as possible without incorporating Isibel or anything else, just - copied over with that edit," says Angela, and she wishes too.
"Could throw in a limited target version of Edward, or - no, if you want it comprehensive you want Aro-at-range. Here." Golden wishes too.