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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
"Yeah, I can't duplicate anyone's aura but mine like this. At least not properly; I've seen about twenty seconds of Brilliance's lightshow and I could replicate that."
bellfounding
"Yeah. Enchanter auras are what happens if you do a lot of enchanting. Most of us and most of the Jokers got ours by working on Saturn, although since we found Glass and Saturn won't need any more work for a while, the going thing is now to visit Glass's fairytale forest and just dump a lot of magic into it; it's not exactly the same stuff, but it's compatible."
bellfounding
"Wishes are like programs, sort of. They can fill in a lot of gaps, but they work best when you know exactly the effect you want. Enchantments have personality, without intelligence, but enough to sometimes provide things you didn't expect to want in a convenient way."
bellfounding
"Convenient for the enchanter or enchantress, at any rate. It can be excruciatingly inconvenient for other people if that's intended. Rose and her Joker got caught in an enchanted castle for a long time - him more than her."
bellfounding
"Enchanted to keep him there, and steer away anyone who wasn't a candidate for curse breaking by means of falling in mutual love with him. While he was enchanted into a sort of a cat-monster body. On a deadline." She waves her hand and the relevant illusion changes. "He waited for about a hundred years, Rose wandered into the surrounding bewitched forest and got funneled into the castle, she immediately raided the library to see if she could just disassemble the curse by magic, and now she's a great enchantress but she wound up breaking the curse the intended way anyhow."
tearingup
Ripper looks at the illusory cat-monster.
"...I have so many rude questions," he snorts.
"...I have so many rude questions," he snorts.
bellfounding
"Rose's early studies of enchantment permitted her to see his 'true form' even while he was still a cat monster, and breaking the curse made it so he could change back and forth," says Bella.
bellfounding
"You might have to spell them out before I can answer them."
tearingup
"...So did they have sex while he was...? Because if he's as much like a cat as he looks, that could get very uncomfortable very fast."
bellfounding
"They didn't have sex until they got married, which happened subsequent to cursebreaking. It is my confident speculation that his ability to swap back and forth hasn't been used this way with Rose, but you'd have to ask somejoker about what they get up to at parties. Or retroactively supervise them, I guess, they've issued blanket willingness to be retroactively supervised."
bellfounding
"A lot of templates, Jokers most enthusiastically among them, wind up rendering it necessary that if Bells are going to throw parties and invite them, we have to have designated rooms for people to have sex in."
bellfounding
"Yeah, one of the Bell standard powers is past-watching, so they thought they'd make it known in case any of us felt like using it that way or anyone else felt like picking up the power."