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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.
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bellfounding
bellfounding
"I think that's some kind of kingfisher, but I don't know what kind," muses Bella. "I could conjure up one of the books of possible daemons to look it up and what it's supposed to mean, if you like."
bellfounding
"Yeah, like horoscopes but more reliably - daemons settle into single forms around puberty for reasons having to do with personality. Unless they belong to a Joker and then they never settle at all. Witches like my alt from that world, Amariah, always have flying birds, but otherwise it can be anything."
bellfounding
Bella conjures up the bird daemon books, flips through the key guide, and finally finds it. "Green kingfisher. Chloroceryle americana - I think you've got the mathewsii subspecies. There's nothing specific to the green kind, but kingfisher-people in general are supposed to be adaptable, supposedly adopting any of several nigh-contradictory personalities to suit varying circumstances at different points in their lives."
bellfounding
Pattern shrugs. "They vary in how much information they have. Some kinds of daemons are so common that it's hard to make any general statements because there will be exceptions whose relevant personality features shifted after puberty or something - some are so rare that it's hard to make any general statements because there are negligible data points. Fireflies are in the sweet spot where there's a good amount for information-gathering; they mean insight and - the book said 'intellectual sparkle', I'm not sure exactly what that's supposed to mean."
bellfounding
"Interestingly, some of me produce glowy magic. I don't. It seems to match up with which of us have native forms of mental opacity."
bellfounding
"Wishes have physical form. Little pointy coins. What color they are depends on who makes them," Bella explains. She makes a triangle, appears it in the palm of her hand. "This is one of mine."
bellfounding
"I don't make most of my own wishcoins; that's what the Jokers are for. But it's nice to know what my coin color is. There haven't been any exact matches so far. If you made coins they'd look like -" She puts the triangle away, pulls a square, wishes on it. An illusion square appears next to the illusion kingfisher; it looks like gray suede. "That. Neat."
bellfounding
"You'd know better than I would about your own coin color. Some of them are pretty clearly referring to particular things; if you don't recognize it, though, I don't know what it's likely to be." She banishes both illusions.