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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
[Yes, but not magic, so I don't think it's very fair. Although, ironically, I could use the money.]
tearingup
[Not much I can do for you there, unless you want to bribe him with my autograph,] he says whimsically.
bellfounding
[Same reason I'm not cheating at a lottery. I'd take the Randi Prize in a heartbeat, but I didn't get on it quick enough; it folded up before I could try. The money's not urgent. I can magic up any things I need, and people are buying up some Imperial Rings. I just don't have enough to throw around casually in terrestrial markets for things that do need to be denominated in cash instead of magical favors, and I don't want to charge for most of the services I offer.]
bellfounding
[The other magical empresses I know mostly don't have this problem.]
She's not joking, although this might not be immediately evident.
She's not joking, although this might not be immediately evident.
bellfounding
[Other worlds. I can't get to them, just like I can't get to the afterlife, right now. Used to be we could bounce around wherever we liked.]
bellfounding
[There used to be a person who lived in a faster-than-light computer network, and worked even when spread out between many worlds. She could pick people up and put them down, anywhere she could see, and she worked for us. She's broken.]
bellfounding
[It's happened before, and she came back. She's broken worse this time and I don't know what happened.]
bellfounding
[No. The problem isn't here; it's probably with the person her personality sort of sits in, and she's in some other world, and she has all the power I do and then some; I have to wait for her or someone who's with her to fix it, but for all I know it could take a hundred years in this world for thirty seconds to pass there.]
bellfounding
[Yeah, it's frustrating and I'm worried about them, but at least I have most of what I need here.]
bellfounding
[Jane - the computer person - was also really, really good at handling email and other computer tasks. The programs she ran for it are mostly local, so I can still use them, but they're not quite as high quality without consciousness operating them. Everything else does boil down to interdimensional travel and communication.]