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.
Subject: What exactly is the holdup?
I want someone resurrected. Name of Randall White, died of a dream overdose six months ago in London. Assuming you're not some kind of elaborate hoax, it would be nice if you explained just what your technical difficulties are, because I'm not buying this 'exaggeration' crap for a second. You're lying or you're onto something: which is it?
Re: What exactly is the holdup?
I've added Randall to the waiting list for you, with you as a contact person for him, and I have every confidence that Her Majesty will be able to get him back for you eventually; I'm just not sure when 'eventually' is. None of her reported accomplishments are hoaxes, but between the distribution of torching and the general scope of her activities, it was inevitable that there would be rumors about resurrection, too. She's working on it.
Please feel free to email with any further questions.
- Imperial Staff
The thing is, neither of them actually liked Randall, but for Ripper that seems to make it worse. If hauling that little shit out of the grave is what it takes to shut up all this pathetic moping, then that's what Ethan will do. Except that since he's now been blown off by Her fucking Majesty the Empress of Useless Bullshit, it doesn't look like he'll be getting that resurrection anytime soon.
Of course, maybe all they need is more pressure. A personal appeal from someone who actually gives a shit, for example. But for all his moping, Ripper is decidedly lacking in the action department. When asked how someone can be worth all this emotional turmoil but not worth a simple email to the imperial necromancy department, he just growls and throws food.
Maybe all he needs is more pressure.
Two months after Ethan's email about Randall, there is an email about Ethan.
Subject: Look, can you do it or not?
My best friend got himself killed last night. His name was Ethan Rayne. And he was right, it doesn't make sense that you're so fucking sure you can raise the dead but you won't admit to ever doing it or say one word about how you plan to try.
Re: Look, can you do it or not?
I've put Ethan on the waiting list for you, with your email down for contact info. Some magic is more difficult than other magic, and all of it is complicated to explain, but we don't think any problems are permanently insoluble unless they'd require time travel to the past.
I recommend signing up for torching. You can find the form here.
- Imperial Staff
Re: Look, can you do it or not?
Fine. I have some spare time tomorrow morning, eight-thirty in your time zone. Say the word and I'll teleport in to have a chat about it then.
- Bella
She still defaults to jeans and t-shirts, but Queenie sews her presents sometimes, so they're nice, perfectly fitted, embroidered jeans and blousey ruched "t-shirts" dyed with artful gradients; this pair of jeans is in fact mostly blue and the blouse is eggshell. Her crown is a flat ring that floats like a halo over her head, and it's white, with a thin blue stripe towards the inside. (She enchanted it to match whatever she puts on, but she favors blue and white; may as well run with the coin color.)
Her aura is out, but toggled to "ninja", and she's only interested in being observed along any axis by the person who emailed her, not his roommates, neighbors, or recording devices. It hums magic magic magic in an understated sort of way.
Roommates, neighbours, and recording devices are thin on the ground. It's a messy little flat full of guitars and old laundry, and the only person present is a man in his early twenties with vivid green eyes, wearing artfully torn black jeans and an artlessly rumpled white T-shirt. He is drinking tea from a chipped brown mug when she appears, and immediately drops it in his lap with a startled yell.
"Good morning. I am inclined to tell you stuff, but I don't really want you running to the tabloids with it; would you be so kind as to consent to a geas enjoining you not to repeat anything I say to anyone else without my express permission?"
He reaches for a crumpled shirt on the floor, then frowns and sits up again, glancing into the now-pristine mug and then plonking it down on the table (actually a tidy stack of encyclopedia volumes topped by a plank) next to his chair.
"You said you were going to teleport, sure," he says without looking up from this vital task, "you didn't specify it was going to be into my flat."
"It wouldn't have accomplished much if I had elected to teleport to the Andromeda Galaxy. If I find your company charming enough that I want to visit you again in the future I'll put you on the brainphone network and I can warn you when I'm incoming, how does that sound?"
"Are you telling me you honestly don't think anything of hopping into a stranger's living room without a word, and advance warning is reserved for people you actually like? For fuck's sake, the door's right there," he gestures, "is it somehow mystically impossible for you to land on the other side of it?"
"All right." Geas goes; she can feel it settle. "So. I can raise the dead. I just can't do it a lot. The magic I can use to do it is a renewable but finite resource, unlike torching, which I can do as much as I want. Additionally, anyone who died prior to April 4, 2009, may be currently awake in the afterlife, and bringing that class of person back is more complicated - they'll have attachments there, stuff, friends, residences, and I don't have a way to talk to them before I resurrect them. People who died after that date are asleep, but I still can't meaningfully scale things. I used to have a way to handle all of this, but it broke, I can't fix it, and while I wait for it to get fixed from the outside, the passage of time in this universe is not correlated with the passage of time in said outside - it could happen next week or in a hundred years or never."
"Maybe you can. He'd have to predictably agree to the non-disclosure, too, and so would anyone else who learned that he died and would subsequently learn that he's alive. I've done this a few times since the system broke, but largely as a favor to political entities who could notify me instantly on point of death before the news spread and already have the operational security to order the resurrected individuals to keep their mouths shut. Or, I'd have to think that having him back now, as opposed to when the waiting list gets long enough that I'm willing to try some extra big magic on handling it all in a batch, was very important - enough to be worth the risk of getting a hundred million emails from people just like you in a week because Ethan wants to tell the nice reporters about how he was dead and then he wasn't. Well, sort of. He'd be technically dead still, like me."
[I have actually had multiple cups of tea since you left,] he informs her, with a hint of a laugh. [No, it's just - Rayne stormed out in a huff yesterday and I've been feeling watched ever since, I'm trying to narrow it down between 'paranoia about magical empress with lapsed sense of personal boundaries' and 'paranoia about morally depraved ex-friend'.]
Empire of Rings passports look about like normal ones, in blue-white with her ring symbol on the cover, but they're attached to their persons with magic, not by fallible photographic evidence; it doesn't even have his name in it, just pages for stamps. [Welcome to the Empire. If you can't get to a transit office by yourself, the torching pamphlet I gave you has a bit in the back about arranging a pickup. Or you might catch me at a free moment and I could give you a ride.]
[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.]
[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.]
[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.]
[The secretary in particular is proving difficult, but I imagine someone will turn up; I could always go back to one of the rejected candidates if my email starts piling up too badly. I don't want you thinking Slipstick - the personnel officer - isn't good at what she does; it's just she's an import from another world and hasn't had as long as she'd ideally need to build up her network.]
[Nnnno, not really. I lived an unremarkable life, died at age seventeen, and then was woken up by seven alternate versions of myself, three of whom weren't even human, and they gave me lots of magic powers and we took over the afterlife together. I got dropped directly into 'fantastic', took it really well, and have not been much surprised since.]
[We're all of a template. Personalities - and faces and life narrative features - crop up over and over, and there are lots of me. They don't all look precisely like me,] she amends. [There is a boy one and an angel one and an elf one and a vampire one. And of the girls, two of them are shorter than the rest of us and one is taller due to childhood malnutrition and growing up in low gravity, respectively. And our thing is being magical empresses.]
[Because they all deviate from the same pattern - imagine you saw a sentence written a dozen times and each iteration had a different word changed to something random, you'd be able to work out what the sentence was. Also, because the one of me who is the princess of a fairytale forest and can magically see template properties says so.]
She laughs. [For a certain reading of 'strange', maybe I do. I'm not completely indiscernible - like, I'm the only single one, I am the only Bell from a world that has a Gotham in it - they're not usual; most worlds have no Gotham and a more significant New York City instead - and anything I do with the knowledge of what the others have done, like starting on Saturn instead of Mars, is a chance to be distinguished. I just didn't start out with anything much beyond the fact that all the worlds are a little different and this one's mine.]
[The others mostly wind up with this one template - there are three and a half of them here, but one of them works for me, another one is basically her cuddle therapist, and the one and a half belong to the elf of me and got stranded here while they were helping me with the Saturn ecosystem, I'm not dating any of them. Although it is sort of tragically convenient that the one and a half are here because they're psychically bonded to Elf Bell and that means I can talk to her some. There was yet another one of this template who was born here, but by the time I un-died he'd already moved to Vampire Bell's world with his vampire boyfriend. And of the rest, most of them are dating or in one case married to one or both of this paired template which isn't here, and there are stray ones but I never wound up importing any or anything based on random party conversations, and then Vampire Me is the only one with a non-template significant other and they're Mystically Vampire Bonded.]
[They've flirted with me, I just don't really flirt back with them. The Tonies are all named Tony, although I think it's short for a variety of things. The others have no name consistency at all - the ones here are named Queenie, Ghosty, Aianon, and Ansharil.]
[Queenie and Ghosty describe themselves as 'retired'. Aianon and Ansharil hang out on Saturn, filling in gaps in the ecosystem and wishing they were back with Elf Bell back in their world and thinking at her a lot via telepathic bond thing. Jokers are really useful if you know what to do with them; the problem was the Bat had one and a worse than useless idea of what to do with him.]
[I mean I could introduce you to them and they'd probably hit on you. They're not going around doing nefarious things! They're retired, they don't want Batlady's attention anymore - Aianon and Ansharil don't even come from a world that has one of her - and they wouldn't hurt you unless you're into that.]
[They're not unusually nice for Jokers. The Joker, from here, is living peacefully in a world called Aurum with his vampire boyfriend and their adorable hybrid children. Jokers aren't so much 'nice' or 'not nice'. It's a matter of what abilities and opportunities they're presented with. I hired Queenie, Ghosty followed her here, Aianon and Ansharil are stranded here because they were still around when Jane broke and they were doing Saturn's ecology.]
[You know, I'm actually not sure, he just doesn't default to wearing them. He'll put them on when reminded, sometimes he remembers by himself. Probably has to do with the part where him and the dragon lived on an island all by themselves for several thousand years.]
Bella concludes her meeting with the King of Sweden, cures four obscure diseases, reads reports from her ambassadors to Japan and Uruguay, beams into existence and collects a batch of coins from Queenie, catches up with Sarion through Aianon, has dinner, clears out some email, unravels a budding hurricane, does an interview with the Associated Press, takes a thirty-minute break that involves a conjured candy apple and her lovely blue garden on Titan, tells her site administrator to update the FAQ in response to recent emails, makes a routine check-in with the people operating her emergency retrieval team and immigration handlers, checks out a new family of Saturnian animals, has a lunch meeting with her PR person, remembers to tell Slipstick when the concert actually is, accedes to six of twelve requests by the Audobon Society regarding various birds, pentagons a little-used Inuit language and reads a magazine in it, increments her progress in her economics curriculum, bakes muffins with Renée while holding a brainphone conversation with the operator of the imperial bank, drops in on Charlie and sits in companionable silence with cider during a background chat with the person NASA has appointed to deal with her and her abuse of astronomy, reads a series of science fiction novels, participates in composing a press release about her unwillingness to back the United States in achieving miscellaneous objectives by military means, has a recreational twenty-minute nap and a five-minute luxuriating snuggle under the covers, has an e-mail argument with some woman who is inexplicably a celebrity and wants her to eradicate autism like she did measles without consulting any of the people who have it, interviews with another press outlet and regrets it when she finds herself being unfortunately evasive about her beliefs regarding the afterlife, refuses a production company the rights to her likeness for a film about her (and appears to that meeting half-stealthed), looks in on the Ganymede prison colony -
And, when it is time for the concert, she puts on a pretty dress, doffs her floaty crown, picks up Slipstick, and goes to it.
Queenie made her this dress. She likes it, but doesn't wear it much; it's loose and drapes over itself in folds and folds and folds, around the neck and shoulders, but it gets itself under control at the point where it's belted and falls to her ankle in a slimmer sheath. It's green, with one bullseye of cheerful yellow tie-dye at her hip to match the gold belt.
The venue is small, more like a bar than a concert hall, with scattered seating that at least does all face the stage. There are three people on said stage. Ripper is wearing the same black jeans from when she met him, and no shirt, either because of the temperature or for crowd-pleasing purposes; the crowd is definitely pleased either way. The drummer has her tight-curled brown hair pulled back away from her face with a bandanna; the bass player is bald, probably from aesthetic choice because he's in his mid-twenties. They are all very seriously engaged in their sound check. When Ripper spots Bella and Slipstick, he flashes a grin in their direction and a few heads turn, but there is no lingering interest from the audience.
The sound check concludes. The concert begins.
Wretched is a really good punk band, it turns out. The drummer is a genius, the bassist more than adequate, Ripper plays that guitar like he's making love to it, and his voice can flow like honey and scream like a hurricane in the same ten seconds if he needs it to.
At the end, as the band starts packing up, about half the crowd yells for an encore. The bassist grabs Ripper's microphone and yells back, "You know what that means, don't you?", and there is a general shout of agreement, and the bassist hands Ripper back his microphone and brings him a bottle of water and an acoustic guitar.
Ripper sits down. He plays a few idle notes on this new instrument. The audience, which has been varyingly noisy, quiets down with a ripple of shushes.
And then he starts to sing.
The song is about the end of a long and rocky friendship. It's heart-wrenchingly melancholy and wickedly hilarious. The lyrics have a few rough spots, but the tune is beautiful and he plays it perfectly.
To most of the crowd, it won't be obvious that he wrote it this week about Rayne.
[Genetically engineered space angel, big speckly wings, grew up in a tech-relinquished culture that thinks she's an agent of their god and uses angels to control the weather via song, she later found out the god was a reasonably intelligent spaceship. Not a person, though. Jane ate it and cribbed the notes from the software so now I can still talk to my systems even though she's gone.]
She laughs. [It's not Hell any more. It was just really, really awful for a long, long time, and we found out about it in the obvious way - not me, I was asleep the whole time, but Shell Bell had a nasty time of it - and we did not like it. It's not quite accurate to say we took it over, but we caused enough of a stir to get a meeting with the admin, and she doesn't really like... doing things, as far as we can tell... so she let us change a bunch of stuff and now it is not Hell.]
[Yeah, she set up the place's initial conditions, and changed them a few times in response to miscellaneous badgering, and she's locally omnipotent. She's not bad, just kind of apathetic; she was perfectly happy to replace her existing systems for sorting people with Jane and us Bells. The place is called Downside - there's also a section called Upside but it doesn't come up as frequently.]
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.
[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.]
[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.]
[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.]
[They do kill people, but they're less theatrical about it. Our primary exposures to them apart from Angela's okay one has been the one who found Shell Bell Downside and decided to take her home and torture her for twenty-five years. There was also the one who kidnapped Rose's husband and gave him brain damage; she killed him.]
[She's okay now. Although her girlfriend felt pretty awful about not having known she needed help. Because right after she got assassinated, said girlfriend resurrected her, only the problem was that back then if you did that it just forked the resurrected person, so there were two of her. They merged later.]
[We actually get assassinated a fair amount! I'm just an ordinary car crash victim, but Shell Bell got nuked by a political rival, people have tried and only just barely failed to kill Golden twice, somebody who didn't like Juliet got his hands on a wish and killed her, Aegis's spaceship got shredded by a local superweapon, Cam was nearly suffocated in his sleep by the evil deity-thing I mentioned. Also, if you want to count it, at one point we killed Sarion on purpose because we were trying to solve a problem she had that could conceivably have been solved by sending her through Downside. Didn't work, though.]
[The "till death do us part" kind. Her thing with Ansharil and Aianon involved involuntary mind-reading, and that tops the list of ways to break Bells into non-functional shells of our former selves - Shell Bell got broke too but it took way longer her way. We were trying to get Sarion out of the dragon bond thing. Eventually we hauled in Stella's magic-seeing guy and got him to design a patch for it, once it turned out that the dragonbond snapped back into place as soon as we woke up Technically Dead Sarion.]
[Sarion is better now. Cam designed her an assistive version of our standard perfect recall, based on his magic notebook but without involving another personality, and she had some recovery time, and now she's doing the whole curing-diseases-setting-up-ground-
[Well, it nearly worked, I'll give him that. At any rate, my dead people waiting list cleared four hundred thousand this morning; I don't know how many at once a relevantly sized wish will do, but it's getting to the point where I'm willing to try one even at the risk of wasting some of its capacity.]
"Yeah, except then, and then I suppose Elspeth's silence would be fairly damning. So perhaps it's just as well I don't have one, especially since by all accounts her father's not such a prize. I haven't gotten to meet him because Bells who aren't his wife make him uncomfortable, except Cam, who doesn't count."
"One of them," says Bella, "is a naturally immortal witch whose soul takes the form of a talking screech owl. She has assassinated a president, defeated an archangel in single combat, rescued all of the dead shades from her Downside-incompatible worldsheaf from an eternity of sleepless despair, and co-founded the Belltower that allowed us to all find each other."
"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."
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."
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."
"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."
"Until Bells get perfect recall, most of us do this thing where we write down everything we think, so we can look at it from the outside. We're very introspective. My coin color is clearly a Bell thing, but it isn't a Pattern thing in particular. Angela's look like her feathers - Glass's look like little chips of colored glass melted together - Golden's glow gold which matches with her whole empire theme, Aegis's are copper like the assistive exoskeleton she used to wear, Amariah's look like the tree branch she flies around on, Aurora's look like her mana. I guess Sarion's coins aren't any better than mine - parchment, with inkspots."
"Shell Bell got the nickname when she was a kid, because she used to collect shells so she could buy food at Milliways with them because she didn't have any actual money and was scared Milliways would stop coming if she didn't pay her tab.
"Stella is because of stars - seven pointed coins - and also because she was the first one to go the 'space colonization' route.
"Amariah just goes by her second name - witches have two, and her second is similar to the standard middle name Marie, but not so close that she can't use it.
"Angela's kind of angel gets called 'angela', if they're women, to be polite, so she was used to getting called that and picked it up.
"Juliet is so called because her boyfriend once had a conversation with her through her bedroom window, and started calling her that, and she kept it when she pealed.
"Aegis has been calling herself that since she was little as a mythological reference - Athena's shield, referring to her mental opacity.
"Rose's mindscape is full of roses.
"Cam is just short for Campbell; he didn't have to change nicknames because we're otherwise all girls.
"Sarion is just Elvish for 'elfmage'.
"Aurora named herself after her mana color - mana is a thing with mages from her world.
"And Glass calls herself that because she uses glass a lot when working with her local magic."
"If he's named Campbell and goes by Cam, I suppose they'll have to work something else out, yeah. He might not be named Campbell, though - the girls don't all match. It's usually Isabella, but there's a Bell and a Belle and an Isibel. The 'bel' part is the only guaranteed part."
"Pronunciation has some wiggle room. Shell Bell and Aegis are native English speakers but have noticeable accents relative to standard because they're from the future; Rose and Glass and Sarion and Angela didn't originally speak English at all - although Rose's language is mutually intelligible with regular French and Angela's culture uses a lot of Biblical names - and the correct pronunciations of their full names are slightly affected by that."
"Not the same future. Shell Bell grew up in a flooded dystopia where the totalitarian government had all the tech, Aegis grew up in space to learn to fight aliens," giggles Bella. "Angela's also from the future, but by a lot more, except her ancestors plunked down on this other planet, destroyed most of their technology and lied to their kids about the rest. She hasn't left the planet to check out the rest of civilization yet; she's trying to take it slow so she doesn't shock her population too badly, since the complete revelation involves telling them that God doesn't exist except in the form of a spaceship that addresses her as 'Captain'."
"Yeah, apparently they colonized the planet from someplace that had a lot of wars and thought it was technology's fault. There's supposed to be one person who knows about the god and the technology and stuff at any given time, so they can go up and fix the ship, if it needs it."
"It totally is, the chain was broken not long before Angela was born and the microphones that detect the weather-control songs weren't working," snorts Bella, "and another angel figured out what was wrong and fixed it. She's the one who told Angela, because - do you want this whole story or just the overview?"
"Alleluia did some Archangeling, could not find her intended angelico because his tracking device all the babies on this world get implanted in their arms at birth was broken, and wound up teaching herself the oracular language and going to the empty oracle site and going up and replacing a circuit board. So then it worked again. Also her intended angelico found out what she was doing, went to the ship and got identified as such, and swiped some batteries from the ship, which he was able to use to fix the previous Archangel's broken wing well enough for her to fly. Alleluia became the oracle in the empty oracular site, all was well.
"Then, though, Angela finds us, and she takes some magic - she had misgivings about it, she was really religious, but she actually asked Alleluia to ask Jovah, that's the god's name, if magic was forbidden, and he said no. So she took it, and started doing covert miracles, and then there was this deformed baby born in her angel hold. So she swipes him and flies up where no one can see her, and asks Jovah to fix it, and of course he doesn't, because he's a spaceship, so she does it with magic and flies back down and tells everyone that Jovah did it - but Alleluia knew she was lying. So she confronted her and they swapped secrets, because Angela of course wanted to know how Alleluia could have figured out she was lying. Oh, and meanwhile, Angela had also asked who would be her angelico if she were ever named Archangel, and her Joker Micaiah who she'd already met was the answer, and so by the time she learned that Jovah was just a spaceship she was already married and knocked up. Bit of a rough day. They're okay though, they had four little cherubs last time I saw them."
"Little angels, yeah, oldest one was ten last I saw her. Micaiah is definitely the sweetest Joker, though. Except literally in which case it's Jellybean. All the Joker kids I know about are doing fine - there's Angela's four, Rose's two who match Angela's eldest, and then the ones the Joker from here had with his vampire boyfriend."
"Yeah, he's from Cam's world, and he used wizarding to make himself taste like candy, and now he has an enchanter's aura that does it much more effectively. I haven't sampled him, but it's easy to tell even from a distance even if it weren't for the other Jokers always mentioning it."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Probably a mix of stuff - Samaria has its own musical tradition, like the hymn I played you, and I imagine there's all kinds of futuristic music from Peace and Atlantis and even Aurum, and exotic offerings from Chronicle and Thilanushinyel, and probably vaguely but not exactly Earthly stuff from Rêverie, and even us boring Earthlings might be able to come up with unique offerings - I bet Alethia produces songs about daemons or witches or armored bears at a sufficient rate, people have written songs about Gotham, Cam and Aurora could go crib notes from their respective extraterrestrials, I'm not sure what Stella would do."
"I wonder if anyone else is working on an anthem," Bella muses. "While time is all unsynced and everything. I don't think Samaria has one, amusingly enough - I suppose the Enchanted Forest might have come with one already when Glass married into the royal family - I might actually beat everyone to it unless Stella or Aurora also enter colonists into the Olympics or others catch up with the space colonization."
"Tell him I'll be there within ten minutes, J," Bella tells it. "Sorry," she sighs to Ripper.