"Okay, so you've got Cam and Amariah and Shell Bell and Amariah's boyfriend and one of his alts all prowling the afterlife, checking the place out, talking to the shades of the dead, looking for harpies - the alethiometer warned them about harpies but it was really vague, it explained that there was some thing in the afterlife that 'hungered for truth' and 'had knowledge' and 'caused suffering', you can see why they would not immediately think 'harpy with guilt-screech attack'. And then Shell Bell found one. And it screamed at her." Bella pauses dramatically.

"Oh no!" says Ike, obligingly.

"Now," says Bella, "of the Bells - Shell Bell wins at Traumatic Past. The details are another story - it's not a secret, if you're curious and like sad stories, but it'd be a distraction from the Story Of Alethia's Afterlife right now - but anyway, she has been through, and I do not exaggerate, hell. And in the course of being through hell she's done a couple things she's not proud of. Nothing awful, but she felt bad about it, and the harpy grabbed that and yanked. The other four who were in there tried to go after her, but, surprise! Alethian afterlife is topologically screwed up, teleporting doesn't work there - you can teleport out, but not to any point within. They could fly around looking for her, but had no guarantee of finding her anytime soon. That wasn't good enough for Shell Bell's girlfriend. Shell Bell's girlfriend is an alt of my boyfriend - they're Sherlocks - and the name is not just for decoration. So Sherlock put down Shell Bell's screaming crying unhappy duck daemon and picked herself up and flew across the river and left behind a hawk daemon she didn't intend to acquire and went looking for Shell Bell. And she found her, and picked her up, and got her out. Shell Bell was down for the count after that. The other four decided to find each other and travel in a group after that."

"Wow," says Ike. "I hope Shell Bell is okay now!"

"She usually is, but she was a yummy target for a harpy, apparently. They eat - information about people's histories, basically. They like all kinds, but the only kind they can take regardless of whether you feel like telling them stories or not is stuff you feel guilty about - they scream, that dredges it up, they feast. They were made like that. They were there to punish the dead. Not even a subset of the dead, just everybody. The other people down there appeased them by telling them stories. And eventually they were much friendlier and agreed to work for Amariah in the new afterlife she was going to build. But first, she wanted to figure out who had decided to build such a thing. This is where the angels come in."

"The terrible angels," says Ike, nodding.

"Yeah, there's another kind of angels from another world who are not terrible, they're just genetically engineered humans with wings, one of me is those. But Alethia's angels are these wispy fragile things, and most of them work for an angel called the Authority - also known as God. Amariah and company went and paid him a visit him where he lives, on this big floating Clouded Mountain that can traverse subworlds."

"I see," says Ike. "How did that go?"

"The Authority is older than the hills and in much worse shape. When Amariah found him, he was curled up in a crystal box, could barely stay awake, and almost died when she tapped on the glass. She's leaving him alone. But he had this helper angel, who was stronger and more solid than the other ones, and he blasted her and her boyfriend and Cam. Cam's as durable as anybell, he wasn't hurt, but he hit the ground really hard. Kas, Amariah's boyfriend, just torched in midair - that's a reset we can do when we encounter otherwise-lethal situations. Amariah recovered, since she's been flying since she was little, and went back up and got a knife into the pissed-off angel and offered him a surrender and he said die and was about to blast them again and she killed him. While all this was going on, one of Kas's alts - who looks like this -" She replaces the Cam illusion with an Aianon illusion - "was mobbed by a flock of lesser angels, I'm sure you can see why angels might attack him. They couldn't hurt him, but we didn't know yet if we wanted to kill them, so he was sort of letting them tow him away from the mountain; he couldn't have flapped a wing without shredding a few. Fragile. So, Cam was already down there, he followed them and tried to talk to them, it didn't work very well. They started attacking him, he teleported out of range, and then Kas got the alethiometer to tell him the Clouded Mountain agenda, which boils down to - every world in the sheaf, every thinking being in all of them, united in unthinking obedience to the Authority. This was not on. Cam started killing angels when it was clear they really, really didn't want to talk. Meanwhile Amariah figured out that while our all-purpose go-to magic didn't work on the Clouded Mountain, another kind did; she whipped up an angel aquarium that sucked the live ones up and trapped them there. And she parked the mountain, and the angels still wouldn't talk to her, so they're all just hanging out now. She'd resurrect the dead ones if there was anything to resurrect them for besides living in an aviary eating angel food cake."

"That is the most demony demon I have ever seen," says Ike, blinking at illusory Aianon. "What's his species called?"

"Demons," snorts Juliet. "Or Endarkened. There's only the one kinda demon on Thilanushinyel - that's where he's from. He's psychically attached to a dragon -" Illusion! - "and also to the elf one of me, but less so, he and the dragon are basically the same person."

"Those wings are amazing," he observes. "Both of them, actually, but the Endarkened's are cooler-looking."

"The Endarkened is the last of his kind," intones Bella. "The dragon's an endangered species, but they're working on that, and Sarion - the elf me - will probably help. She's getting better. She also has some Traumatic Past Problems and she's mostly recovered now but it's been slow and we're not sure what she's going to do with her world yet. Anyway. So the angels were handled, the harpies were on board with the program - oh, by the way, in the Alethian afterlife space time runs about six thousand times slower, or faster, I'm not sure how to count it, as on the outside. I mean if you spend a second in the outside world, it's almost two hours in the afterlife. So one of these guys -" She waves at the dragon - "they have an alt who's a ghost, she was hanging out there telling the harpies stories while everything else was taken care of. And then Amariah had the run of her worldsheaf, no interfering horrible angels! But our primary magic things? Don't work in the afterlife. She decided she wanted to make one from scratch. She had to ask another alt of these guys to help her out - I won't trouble you with the details of how it works, but anyway he agreed and she got some heavy-duty magic and made her own subworld in Alethia over which she is God, and the conditions are much nicer there, and live people can visit dead ones while dreaming, and properly vetted dead people can go back to where they lived when they lived if they want. And then she made a door between the old afterlife and the new one."

"You guys do a lot of stuff," Ike observes.

"We do! We are awesome like that. Sunshine hooks up to Downside nice and friendly - in fact, it was already like that when I got here - so I don't need to do that particular dramatic thing, but dramatic things are underway. You guys get front row seats 'cause you're helping."

"I like front row seats," says Val.

"I'm so glad!" Bella is still taking in the Siathe scenery appreciatively.

"We almost at someplace more inhabited? Eminently stealable flora aside, I'm mostly interested in the local people."

"Yeah, it's not that far a walk," says Val.

"Cool. If it were a very long walk I might want to teleport or at least fly."

"But then we'd leave poor Ike behind!"

"Does poor Ike," Bella says, raising an eyebrow at Ike, "have a fear of teleporting and/or flying that was not disclosed before I totally teleported us all to this dimension?"

"He can't fly," says Val, rolling her eyes. "And he doesn't like it when I carry him."

"It is undignified," says Ike.