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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.
Sue links the demon, too, which echoes oddly in his head.
"Wishing away mindreading feature of the bond - now," says Golden.
Sue hisses. Ivy whimpers and huddles against his neck.
The moment the wish was cast, the dragon's mind went away. Not sleeping, not unconscious - gone. Blank as empty air. There is nothing like a thought in him now, a fact which the demon is experiencing in sixfold clarity. He lives, but that is all he does. Magic still hums in his bones, his heart beats on, his lungs draw breath, but the part of him that does the thinking is a void. This is particularly obvious through Rose's contribution, because their shared mindscape - the island that was their home for ten thousand years - is full of ragged gaping holes.
"It would be kinder to kill them all and leave them in the catacombs for eternity, undo it, now."
Golden reverses her wish, hands clenched at her sides.
The dragon gives a single all-over shudder and bends his head so the demon can kiss it frantically.
"I should have known," says the dragon, shuddering again. "The bond is the dragon. The dragon is the bond. The part of the bond that touches minds - is my mind."
"Are we going to have to leave her like that? We can't do that, it's horrible," breathes Juliet.
"If he could just back off," murmurs Golden. "If he could just not pay attention, or if her shielding worked..."
There is an abrupt chorus of nos from the other Bells.
"I know, I know, but -"
"Why is it that you simply can't refrain from reading her?" Angela asks the demon/dragon pair softly.
"I can do it if I stop thinking at all," says the demon. "But it's hard. I can't stay that way for long. And when I'm thinking of nothing but how much I love her, then her mind is full of my thoughts and she can't do anything else."
Amariah clenches both fists in her hair. "There has got to be a way to do this. We just haven't been thinking hard enough."
"It's not even the case that we can tolerate zero mindreading. I routinely allow Edward to read me - it just has to be under my control, is all."
"Can we edit the bond to - require consent, maybe, add a filter that the demon won't use but Isibel will...?"
"Wouldn't that amount to the same thing? Maybe not. If we just knew how it worked... you know what, I'm waking up Lazarus, this is important enough to wake him up for. Jane?"
Stella drops herself outside Lazarus's apartment and spends the triangle to wake him. [Lazarus. I remember giving you a no-need-to-sleep power, this is recreational, we have a disaster on our hands and I need you, please let Jane bring you to Atlantis to have a look at this elf Bell and her dragon.]