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Bella's public facing email address (eor@eor.eor; many of the Bells are following similar protocols to Stella's, for web presence, and in Origin the relevant empire is called the Empire of Rings, after Saturn's feature) gets a lot of mail. Jane used to help with it; without Jane, there is still extremely smart filtering going on, and a program no one has noticed at work yet auto-responds to almost everything with canned but tweakable responses and links to the imperial website.
This still leaves a lot of emails every day she has to deal with herself, although some of them allow her to make gentle adjustments to Jane's program to handle future inquiries of the same kind. The number goes up over time. Slipstick's still on the lookout for a suitable secretary type person to help out. Until then, Bella leans on super-speed.
She has had to address the rumors about being able to raise the dead. It's a frustrating, narrow line to walk, between lying, explaining too much, and getting everyone's hopes up. Currently the FAQ has a section that looks like this:
Can you raise the dead?
Eventually, I'd like to be able to do that for everyone's departed loved ones. I'm working on it as fast as I can, but today all I can deploy are public health measures and, on a smaller scale, immortality, for people who are currently alive.
I heard you were dead and brought yourself back to life / I heard someone else was dead and you brought them back to life!
This is an exaggeration. I'm immortal; if I suffer lethal damage, the thing I do is called 'torching', not 'dying'. The same is true of other people who I've made able to torch.
I want to be able to torch.
There's a waiting list, but this is something I can do. Just fill out the form and my staff will process your application; if everything checks out the current wait time for getting into a torching batch is about four months.
I don't want to torch, but I want to stop aging.
This is also available, but the waiting list is longer; apply here.
Are you sure you can't raise the dead?
I really, really wish I could do that for everyone who asks. I maintain a waiting list of people whose resurrection has been particularly requested so that as soon as I have this capability I'll know who to use it for first.
bellfounding
bellfounding
[I know, right? I could have just got on the Euro instead of inventing my own adorable currency.]
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[I'm glad you like it. I stole the origami birds idea from Stella - it was too cute, I couldn't think of anything I liked as much - but I picked different ones except the swan, and the coins are all mine.]
bellfounding
[Yep. She's the one who brought the peal of Bells our most everyday-useful sort of magic, and her empire is called the Empire of the Stars and her adorable currency is called asters.]
bellfounding
[Yep. We are the peal of Bells. The Jokers form a deck,] she adds, [no one else has a collective noun.]
bellfounding
[There are fewer of all the other templates - except attached templates, like, all of us Bells have parents - so probably a combination of the two.]
bellfounding
[There are! One of the Jokers is a magical construct. Also there are some clones floating around.]
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[Siblings also vary; one of me has a fraternal twin sister, the rest of us are only children. Jokers occasionally have little brothers - those don't usually turn out well.]
bellfounding
[We call them Voices. They're - different, and not as easily adaptable as Jokers are. And if they're rescued early enough, they can turn out okay; Angela's Joker has one and he's - okay. But they can get very bad.]
bellfounding
[They do kill people, but they're less theatrical about it. Our primary exposures to them apart from Angela's okay one has been the one who found Shell Bell Downside and decided to take her home and torture her for twenty-five years. There was also the one who kidnapped Rose's husband and gave him brain damage; she killed him.]
tearingup
[Well, that's... charming,] says Ripper. [Twenty-five years? I suppose that's not long to a dead person.]
