It's been so long she reels for a moment, and then she throws herself forward and almost lands in a peal of Bells. Yes, there's Shell Bell, there's Juliet and Aurora, there's Glass, there's some Matilda she hasn't seen before.
"Elspeth!" exclaims Glass.
"How long has it been?" Aurora asks.
"Seventeen years. Shell Bell - I need you to help me find Harley," says Elspeth.
It's still fast, and still nests within itself with fractal context for instant comprehension. (Addy was so pleased when she learned to do that.)
Harley (her fosterling, a Joker) went missing (like Sue, not controlled, like Glass said) (Elspeth tried and the attractor got him anyway) to another world (no name, has a Libby and a Chelsea (she's a monster, she does this thing)) and it's an empire (dead babies; mind control) run by the first with the aid of the second; Harley dreamed his way to Milliways (Jokers do that, when trapped...) and someone let him out their door and it was Aurum after all (and then she deprogrammed him (with her witchcraft; it is like this -) but she can only do it halfway (she can disillusion but not restore) and it was harder than Chelsea's work ever was to undo) (and his wolf woke (wolves are this thing)) and they did not realize he hadn't only teleported again, that he was dreaming, that he might wake, until he vanished (and Zeus screamed) - and it has been months since in Aurum and who knows how long in the other world.
And she wants him back and home and safe and to tear out everything Chelsa has put into his head and to ask Glass if that was enough, if the template has taken all the toll it needs to be satisfied.
Golden will shield them. Lizzie will talk to Aelise. Elspeth will get her fosterling back again.
"Tab. Mehitabel Marika Coscoroba. I met her eleven years ago, when she was six. And if I'm going to say anything more about her, I'm going to want some assurance that you're not quite as hostile as you look." She glances at Lizzie when she says this.
"Turning your aura off would be conducive to reasonable negotiations," says Lizzie. "She means that she wants to know what we're doing here, what we want, and that we're not going to harm her or Tab or anyone else who might drop into the line of fire while we're talking it over. And there are probably some dicey secrets in the mix that she would rather we not mention to anyone without her say-so."
Juliet withdraws her aura. "Tab's safe if she's a Bell like it sounds like she is, probably safe even if she's not, and if she is a Bell this is her jurisdiction and we are just here to hand her the ability to do whatever she pleases with the place; if you're lucky, she likes you." She snaps her fingers and spends a pentagon, and here is Tab.
"And is also some, although admittedly not most, of why I sounded murdery," Golden adds to Tab. "If we eventually come up with some way to safely store Chelseas - perhaps we accumulate a few hundred of them and can store them far away from anyone who doesn't produce informed consent in triplicate after Elspeth's gone over them - then they won't be irretrievable."
"I am deprogramming Harley," says Elspeth quietly. "My power is oriented around truth. I can make people stop lying to themselves in the ways that support what Chelsa's power does. It's harder for this one than it was for the Aurum version, but I can do it."
"That's a disaster waiting to happen," she says. "Not for Harley - you can have Harley with my best wishes - but please do not do that to, for example, me. I still have to deal with her occasionally and if I fade any faster than standard, she'll want to know why."
"As far as I can tell," says Aelise, unruffled, "either people from my world just have a higher inclination to go to war with each other than people from yours, or throwing Gifts into the mix changes the game significantly. When I let Chelsa loose on the world, I was trying to avoid it being nuked down to a population of one. As far as I can tell from what Harley said to Tab about ten years ago, your world has never faced down a crisis of that magnitude, or at least not from such a short distance. Now that I've finally got her back in the box, I am not going to let the last three hundred years go to waste by ripping the band-aid off six billion minds."
"I think a subset of us should go to Milliways," puts in Aurora. "Shell Bell and Golden are the only Bells who need to be here - and maybe Tab but we'll only be out for a moment and she's got New Bell Stuff to do. Me and Glass and Juliet between us can get Downside to grab Corona, to Rainbow to snag Brilliance if Corona's not on board with enchanneling, and to Chronicle so Tab can dump power into the forest, and have her back all nicely Belled up, yeah? And Harley and Elspeth don't need to be here unless anyone besides him needs deprogramming. You have been safe, right, Tab?"
Out they go. Juliet concentrates and reopens the door shortly after it closes. Downside! They don't want to split up, without Jane syncing them, so she just sticks her head in, torchables Tab while Elspeth starts summarizing things at her, and says to the admin, [Just added a world. Can I get its Joker?]
(He died (there is an afterlife (it was once awful (torture and eternity and the uncaring infinite) but it has been fixed by these and their alts (alts are this thing; like him and Harley (she is Harley's Elspeth, if ever he mentioned her or Corona guessed)) and they can remove people from it at will; and they knew he took his own life (but the other Jokers, of whom there are many, whom he may meet, like to be alive, and Chelsa can never touch him again, and Elspeth can deprogram him as she is doing for Harley, if he likes, when she is done with her fosterling.))
"One of the things on Tab's checklist is acquiring an enchantress's aura. This requires a helper. The helper hurts," says Aurora. "I dunno where you are psychologically; if it's not good I can lean into my world and get Brilliance instead, but you're more convenient."
"You're pretty," Corona says admiringly. He touches the hem of his T-shirt. "I have no idea who put me in this, I just woke up like two minutes ago, I'm still kind of dealing with not being dead. What is that?" He reaches out a hand, and a pink glimmer tucked into a curl of Brilliance's hair brightens into a tiny sun.
"It hurts for the channel - sort of a stinging stretchedness? - and lasts awhile, if the channel isn't the same person as the enchanter." Glass opens the door. "Jarvis, please tell everyone who might care to know that we've found a new Bell Tab, a new Joker Corona, and a grown-up Harley, and we're stopping in for aura purposes." (Jarvis is handy for filtering for people who are likely to care to know, and he is better at timing than her previous strategy of "indiscriminate immediate brainphone".)
"Start with something medium-sized because they vary in tolerance some, and, Elspeth warned you in her explanation this is a thing with Jokers, right, you don't have to do anything about it but if that bothers you we should go back Downside and see if Eights is free."
"It can be his thing as long as no one expects it to be my thing," shrugs Tab. "Symbiosis, yeah? I just dump power in the forest and it'll suck it up?" At Glass's nod, she tilts back into her mindscape - the orbital ring - and reaches for Corona's.
Corona's mindscape is a broad, bright field of wildflowers, dotted with trees and bordered by water. The shape of that ring of water almost suggests a moat, and there are piles of old, tumbled stones covered with ivy that hint at a tall building that might once have stood here. A castle, maybe. But it's hardly possible to tell under all that vegetation.
"Oh, it would have been more efficient to mint him first," sighs Glass, "I didn't think of it, that's a pity - anyway - I'm seeing stuff, but I can't tell you exactly what it does. Lazarus could, he gets interpretation with his magic-seeing. This feature here looks slightly teleportation-colored but not shaped like the Bell standard..."
Bells set about gossiping and talking to Tab about how she's going to handle her world. They discover that her coins are glowing mirrors, which catch surrounding colors but give them back brighter. They fit her with a starting set, mostly in Brilliance's color, in all sizes.
Meanwhile, Tab has started composing a profile to splice into the Bellbook when they go back through Milliways. As soon as she puts any of it on paper, she makes a face. "Oh, huh. I think - Glass, have you got a library? Without anything especially private in it?"
It's not just that the depth, intensity, and detail of the projection are all incredible, either. It comes with other effects - physical comfort like Aianon and Ansharil's aura, but with a flavour to it that echoes the 'happy, comfortable, contented' theme; a subtle shimmer in the air around him; a pleasant ring to the sound of his laughing voice. As though his aura is determined to make being around him more pleasant, on every available level, in a way that marches in step with the flavour of his emotional projection.
Elspeth is deprogramming Corona again. "I'm going back to Aurum. I think my door-friendliness is back to normal, so even if Mama turns out not to want arbitrary numbers of Jokers in her world it should be relatively straightforward to send you to Origin instead."
When Brilliance has gone, Tab opens the door, and they're back in Aelise's office. Her aura's out, bright as the other unflavored sorts, but she comes up short when she gets within a few feet of Aelise's desk. "Uh, Aelise, I automatically slurp up books I get near enough now and I don't know if it works on computers. Do you want me to stand back from yours or am I cleared?"
"I got it, Elspeth was pretty thorough," says Tab. "Jane's an accidental AI who basically works for the peal of Bells. She's broken now, but when she works she does at-will interworld transit and eats Internets. She can avoid parts of them - she hasn't bothered the various Jarvises, who are non-accidental AIs who are attached to another template we don't have here - and I think she'll need to steer clear of a few things here, too. But there's no harm in just having a gem that connects up to her Belltower hub so she can talk to me if she reappears."
"Elspeth has gone home to Aurum with Harley, but it's still possible to get her back, if there is anyone who should be deprogrammed," Tab adds. "Oh, and Golden, she took Corona with her for the time being but he's aware you might send him to Origin."
[Aelise, lookit, telepathy,] Tab adds. [I was thinking - there is a problem, with Jane broken, that time doesn't sync between worlds. This sub-peal ran into Elspeth who sent them here in the process of collecting all the other Bells to regroup. The interworld signaling tech, ansibles, is one thing that works for syncing, but it doesn't do it without an awake person on both ends - Jane's ansibles are still hooked up but Aurum's been out seventeen years and Atlantis mere seconds. I'm wondering if Kers would count?]
"I don't think Kers wants to be houses. Kers, they've got instantaneous signaling that persists between universes," Tab explains. "It syncs time, if nothing's at relativistic speed - and if there's a person on both ends. Their usual person is not working, and the backup person insists on being houses. Very nice houses, but it's a constraint."
"In the ring and the tower? As much as they can be," she says. "Right now there's such pervasive instability, the tower isn't synced up with itself. But the two ends of the link you gave me agree with each other. I'm guessing there's more links in the tower, but I can't reach them to tell you how their clocks are doing."
"I'm number fourteen, total," says Tab. "If you only count Bells and not anybody's partners or children or siblings. It's mostly Glass, she's the one who'd need to peer into uninvestigated worlds like the one that broke Jane. The rest of them should be fine coasting on wishes and torching."
"It was an option on the table but I was pretty smart when I was six so she could stash me elsewhere instead, I sulked about it for a while when I was thirteen," says Tab. "How is that the sort of thing you can see? It's not exactly a Bell attractor, is it?"
"Putting Toronto on Venus would be a lot easier with Jane, but you should be able to do it with a hex for the city - maybe a star - on top of terraforming the planet, and the population will probably go with an arrow, and the admin solved the duping problem. I can spot you the coins, but you'll want your own mint. Maybe we can finagle Ghosty for you if Corona never wants to come back."
"You can have Toronto, sure. And a certain amount of quiet emigration. That will definitely solve some problems. But keep an eye on your Gifted and call me if you sense trouble; I would like to have the Last War stay that way. And don't resurrect Delphi. There's a reason they dropped a nuclear bomb on that crowd."
"Two of us, but on my world coined wishes can interfere with and modify witchcraft - although not with perfect reliability. On Eos with ingot powers, that's simply impossible - coins are native to there and they always lose the contest. Stella's experience will probably be more relevant to Gift than mine in this respect."
"It's a template attractor. Horrible things have to happen to Jokers; there are strong tendencies for it to be a certain short list of things, and there's flexibility on the amount, but it's not escapable. Elspeth took Harley away from bad parents when he was a baby and he grew up happy and safe in Aurum, so of course he had to develop uncontrollable teleporting ability and land somewhere that wouldn't treat him kindly."
"He teleported three more times while he was here, apparently deliberately - once to the bottom of the ocean, once to the middle of the largest active volcano on the planet, and once into the sun. I managed to retrieve him from the ocean and the volcano. The sun was a tougher problem."
"Harley was taken from his biological parents. That's it in every case where parents are the thing, I believe, although I suppose it could have escaped common knowledge if Jellybean or Kas had stepfathers, and Brilliance is not an organism and has creators instead of any form of parent. And I don't know about the one from the Jane-breaking world; that Bell had a Joker but we don't know about his provenance."
"Templates do cluster. Some of them are attached to each other - Bells all come with the same set of parents, Libbies all come with Chrises, etcetera - and some just drift together a lot; Bells and Jokers do that. Will Luhan have a heart attack and die if I just teleport in front of him to see? Would that be a bad idea for any reason?"
"If you make friends with the one of me who lives here and she invites you to parties, or if you get out of the world by other means, you might meet people who look like you and have the same basic personality and..." She squints. "You're also pretty attached to the kind of magic you have. And Canada, I think virtually all of you will come from Canadas when there are Canadas available."
"Sure, but most worlds don't have Gifts, they have other forms of magic, or in a few cases none at all. Your alts will do the same thing in different ways. My template has something like that too, except my world doesn't support it so I don't have a native version."
"Speaking of going to see Lazarus, do we need to hang around here any longer? Should we just pack up some Kers ansible-halves, sweep Downside for more Gift alts, and move on? I mean, we are agreed that if anything needs doing about the dead babies and mind control thing Tab can do for the peal, right?"
"Ideally not," Kers agrees. "All right. Set for now? Tab, do you want an extra gem to carry around personally? For that matter, I think I want an extra gem to carry around personally, but installing it might get delicate and my usual connection is just fine for now."
"Cyborg," says Kers. "My Gift is an externally-focused multiple-target shield against various kinds of harm. I also happen to be hooked into the orbital ring's computer systems. And I think I'd rather wish the installation myself, Tab, if it's all the same to you. I'm the one who knows all my specifications."
"Gotta love instantaneous transmissions," she murmurs, smiling crookedly. "Do you want to go plug this into the ring?" She offers Tab the other half, along with the unused square.
Tab expects them to be inconvenient to fetch later, since she can't door at will and Shell Bell has her own empire to run, but she doesn't have anything to do with them immediately; she retrieves them asleep, thanks the admin, and brings them home to stash in an out-of-the-way bit of orbital ring. Shouldn't make any difference to them.