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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
"Nothing terrifying. They get soundtracks that flare up at appropriate moments."
bellfounding
"Micaiah's will cooperate with Angela's if they sing together, it's really cute."
bellfounding
"I could conjure up a recording if you want to hear. They perform at parties sometimes."
bellfounding
And lo, music begins to play, of a Samarian song of some sort, entwined voices and supportive auras.
bellfounding
It comes to an end. "Samarian culture is very big on music."
tearingup
He shrugs.
"You've got magic coming out your ears; I'm sure you could sing like her if you wanted to."
"You've got magic coming out your ears; I'm sure you could sing like her if you wanted to."
bellfounding
"I imagine I could duplicate the voice and fake the training, but I wouldn't love it like she does."
bellfounding
"Mm, I don't think so exactly. The fact that I haven't intensely cared about music since I was capable of making intelligible sound means I'd be worse at singing; I don't think I could sing like Angela as a pure hobbyist even if I were really interested in acquiring the hobby."
tearingup
"A pure hobbyist as opposed to what, a professional? Is there that big a difference?"
bellfounding
"I'm not actually sure," Pattern confesses. "But Angela's just a musical person, on a basic level - she got music for an aura feature, it's been her work and her passion for her whole life. Maybe I could almost completely close the gap with some combination of magic and practice but my feeling is there would always be some difference. Possibly unless time stalls in Samaria while I spend twenty years catching up."
tearingup
He laughs.
"Maybe it just looks different from the other side. Or maybe I'm overestimating your magic. I mean, to me, singing is much less impressive than raising the dead, but for you it seems to be the other way around."
"Maybe it just looks different from the other side. Or maybe I'm overestimating your magic. I mean, to me, singing is much less impressive than raising the dead, but for you it seems to be the other way around."
bellfounding
"Depends what you mean by impressive. I know exactly what steps I take to bring a dead person back. It's not complicated. You could do it, if I gave you a sufficiently pointy coin. It's not a skill, it's a matter of having fallen in with the right crowd and been the right sort of person for that crowd to trust me with the power. And the same magic can impress people with skills, but that doesn't make the skills unimpressive when they're gained the ordinary way, and I don't think the limiting factor on how good a pentagon could make me at singing is that it's just a pentagon and not a hex."
tearingup
"Right. Which should make sense, because I know perfectly well not everybody can sing like I can, but - " He shrugs. "It just doesn't feel that hard, you know?"
bellfounding
"I suppose I could always spend a pentagon on actually testing my guess, but who's going to judge? You? You've already indicated yourself biased where Bells are concerned."
bellfounding
"For judging contests, probably. Perhaps not for other purposes."