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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
tearingup
[Never mind,] he sighs. [I'm gonna go to sleep. No other takers for Saturn, by the way.]
bellfounding
Bella pops back to her palace, puts on her crown, and continues about her business.
She also orders a copy of the band's album, paying real money and arranging for it to be sent to Renée's house for her to pick up.
She also orders a copy of the band's album, paying real money and arranging for it to be sent to Renée's house for her to pick up.
tearingup
Several of the songs they played at the concert are on there, along with several they didn't, and they sound even better on the studio recording.
The lyric sheets also contain pictures of the band. Apparently Ripper going shirtless is some kind of theme. In fact, that might be him on the album cover, which shows a naked person lying facedown and apparently dead on a dimly lit wooden floor.
The lyric sheets also contain pictures of the band. Apparently Ripper going shirtless is some kind of theme. In fact, that might be him on the album cover, which shows a naked person lying facedown and apparently dead on a dimly lit wooden floor.
tearingup
A few weeks later, he brainphones her again.
[Managed to dodge that Nobel Prize yet?]
[Managed to dodge that Nobel Prize yet?]
bellfounding
[Oh, the king agreed to recommend against nominating me to the committee, but it's anybody's guess whether they'll do it anyway. How are you doing?]
bellfounding
[I'm glad you like it! A bunch of my alts and some Jokers swung by to enchant it with me, it was a fun group project and we got auras that way.]
bellfounding
[There is a lot of it. I only have the Bell-standard kinds, since there isn't any from around here and I never got around to asking the unicorn how to safely copy elf magic like I was planning. I should maybe ask Aianon to ask Sarion to ask him for me.]
bellfounding
[There's an entire population of them - actually two worlds have unicorns, but Thilanushinyel is the one with elf magic I wanted to copy and also the one I can currently talk to.]
bellfounding
[I don't need it for any specific effects, but insofar as it does things, it does things without running down any finite resources.]
bellfounding
[Yep. In Thilanushinyel, you get it by, one, being an elf, and two, being psychically bonded to a dragon, and the dragon serves as a power source; the unicorn showed up to warn us that if I just naively copied the magic I'd wind up stealing it from the elves, so I have to work out a design for the duplication with him, or possibly another unicorn but most likely the same one. Unicorns in that world go around reporting on what the Wild Magic has to say, and it knows stuff.]
bellfounding
[We're not totally clear on that; it won't talk to us directly, even Sarion, and it's kind of vague with the unicorns too. I think it's like a cross between an instantiation of magic in general in that world - although only one of several kinds of magic user is actually called "Wildmage" - and maybe a god, but not an omnipotent one or anything.]
bellfounding
[On a personal level, no idea. In terms of stuff it's motivated to do, not awful - it cared that I was about to accidentally steal elf magic, it told Sarion what she had to do to save the world. It has a history of telling people to do things to save the world.]
bellfounding
[Yeah, Sarion doesn't look poised to take its job so much as render it obsolescent.]