[Thanks, everybody,] says Bella, later, to the local Jokers. [That was the best date venue ever.]
"I think that when I do my processing for the day, it will keep coming up, and I'll process it, and it'll be fine, and then it'll be back again the next day. Just sort of - an extra mental errand to run. The majority of Bells wind up dating people who need to be polyamorous, and work it out okay, but I don't think it would have been any of our first choice."
"Stella designed it and it's part of the standard powerset now; it delivers the eponymous agony in integers of units called 'triangles', pretty much any flavor you can think of. I don't think just on general principles I should be handing out general-purpose ones that you could use on anybody, but one for use with Jokers I don't see why not."
[Wanna go ice skating?]
She doesn't actually know how to skate, and hasn't pentagoned it, either. Magic grace does give her decent balance, but everything more sophisticated she has elected to figure out from scratch, at least for now.
By the time they break apart, they are in her bed. She doesn't use it as much as typical humans do, but she does use it, and it's nice, blue and white sheets of exquisite softness and plenty of room and snuggly pillows. She squares their skates off.
After a while:
"I fetched up a batch of dead people. Turns out a nine-pointed coin will do thirty-two thousand, seven hundred and sixty-eight dead people in a batch. Randall's in the one I currently have asleep awaiting processing."
"There's no longer an issue with covering it up, I can wake him if there's someplace for him to go," she adds. "Anybody whose requesting person doesn't concoct such a place still gets waked, I can always put them on Saturn, but I figured I'd ask you first."
"I might actually use that one," he says. "But there's some pretty great shots later on, too."
Next shot, Ripper is in much the same position but now cracking up, caught in the middle of dragging an arm out of a drift of petals to cover his mouth while he laughs. The gory flower has fallen off his neck into the petal-pile.
Next shot, Ripper is trying to control further giggles. Next shot, he has calmed down again and replaced the goreflower in a slightly different position. The shot after that, someone has freshened up the petals, replacing crushed ones with new.
The shot after that, he is trying and failing to smother a smirk.
"They kept saying filthy things, trying for a rose avalanche," he says, gesturing to the part of the picture where saying filthy things to him would have been most likely to disturb some rose petals. "And I kept laughing instead."
He is very good at this Sexy, Dead, Covered In Flowers business.
And now there is a familiar figure creeping into the frame, menacing him. Sexily.
Ripper is particularly pleased by the shot where Aianon was leaning over him, mouth to his throat, wings mantled.
"I don't think I'm releasing these," he laughs, "but I had to keep them, they're too perfect."
"Which part are you looking at?" wonders Ripper of the present.
Ripper started giggling helplessly, and Queenie took a picture. And then a few more, as he calmed down and Ghosty rearranged the vegetation.
And just before Queenie took the next picture, a voice out of thin air chirped, "Remember that time you fucked me into a wall? That was fun," and Ripper failed not to smirk.
"I haven't discussed this with her, but she's got a something going on with Lazarus, her magic-seeing guy, and the only other ones of us who are engaged in anything other than Cam and Amariah's strictly casual activities with more than one person are with Sherlock-and-Tony sets. ...Did that make sense? I mean that there seems like there's, Cam and Amariah who have primaries but don't stay put to speak of, and then on the other end of the spectrum is, like, Golden, but most of us are sticking with one person or a Sherlock and the accompanying Tony, and Stella displays nonstandard behavior in that sense."
"It's kind of fun mapping out all the ways Bells handle any given thing, especially when you throw in the confounder that once we meet each other we tend to copy each other's strategies for anything and everything. When Aurora hit the peal she went around the entire Bellparty asking everybody except me and Golden how they dealt with polyamory."
"It might actually make more sense to hear the story from one of the Jokers. I know Stella's side of it but most of the unsettlement was Alice's. The basic idea was that Stella surprise-turned Alice into an Aurum type vampire, on the grounds that this hurts beyond the ken of mere mortals - awesome Christmas present for a Joker, yeah? - and this comes with some adjustments besides hurting intensely during the transition, and she and Alice didn't communicate well enough about the significance to each of them about the 'eternal mate bond' feature. And the way Stella explained all this to Aurora made Alice kind of skeeved out and he went and torched away being a vampire."
"Exactly what it sounds like. Aurum vampires mate for life and they take it really, really seriously. It does not go away. It is matey and bondy in nature. Usually monogamy is part of the package, but that didn't happen to Alice. Aurum werewolves do something a little similar but unidirectional and it's only male ones."
"Don't be a vampire," says Bella. "Also, maybe don't go to Aurum, because vampires can wind up mated to people who are not themselves vampires, that being the source of most of the awful corner cases. Golden has a precog who checks out visitors, but she's not perfect - I mean, she's really good, but people's decisions can throw her off, so if you meet anyone she didn't see you meeting there's a chance."
"Vampires who aren't mated already don't show up to Bell parties," Bella adds. "Except Addy showed up to one, but she isn't allowed anymore, and they're pretty sure she can't mate anyway, and I don't think Golden would hesitate to kill her on the spot and retrieve her out of Downside and not bother to turn her back into a vampire, if she did anyway."
"On top of the part where all vampires besides about a dozen of them ate humans on a regular basis before Golden took over and she was one of those? Addy really likes copying powers. They taste like things to her," explains Bella. "Before the previous vampire government found out that she existed, she sort of wandered the earth, finding witches, checking out their powers, tutoring them in making them more interesting, playing with them, and then moving on. The Volturi - that's the previous government in question - then threatened her into working for them, and her primary job was to copy and use the powers of witches who they couldn't threaten into working for them. They kept those witches in small pieces in the basement, since keeping vampires in small pieces doesn't kill them. And in her spare time Addy badgered Golden's daughter Elspeth into working on making her own power more interesting, more than she wanted to work on it, and when Elspeth tried to stand up to her Addy sent her off to get tortured by the witch whose witchcraft did that."
"Yeah. The fact that she's so interested in getting to taste powers makes her pretty easy to control, though. Golden doesn't really need her any more, since she has coins and enchanting and so on, which creates some tension, but - we're not big on revenge, us Bells, so as long as Addy behaves going forward and doesn't inconveniently mate to anyone who'd rather not be mated to she's probably just going to carry on as she has been."
"You wouldn't think so, but it's great. She can do it without talking if she wants, across a long range, really fast, with nested explanations of context for everything she's saying. She can do simultaneous translations into any language she knows. Sometimes she just randomly says things that are true that she has no way to know. There is a distinct, definite difference between when she says true things and false things, so you can tell if she decides to lie, which she only ever does as a demonstration of this difference anyway."
"It's also weaponizeable! And it was usable in that form as a sort of faux resurrection even before Aurum had access to Downside. If she gave a human too many high-fidelity vampire memories, it was not a good day for the human's continuity of experience, and it became possible to convince the human that they were one of the vampires whose memories they had. Elspeth didn't wipe anybody herself - Addy did that. She also had all these memories in the first place because of Addy. There was another witch who copied the entire life histories of anyone he touched, and Addy touched him and then broadcasted everything she had with Elspeth's power later to a bunch of people, including some human bystanders."
"Magic," says Bella. "Downside had the - this'll be easier to explain with an example - one of the people Addy blasted 'recognized herself' as a dead vampire without help. The human was called Paola and the vampire was called Didyme. Didyme's mate was still alive and the resurrection was high-fidelity enough to satisfy his mate bond, so they were all happy together and Didyme made nice with Paola's family insofar as she could and so on. Then, Downside was available, and as far as Downside was concerned, Didyme was dead, and Paola was the person who was going around calling herself Didyme. So the admin heard the entire story, imported the blast memories in the walking-around individual from since the blast into the dead version and took them out of the live version, and had a live vampire-bodied Paola and a dead human-bodied Didyme. Didyme went home, got turned over again, I don't think I ever heard if Paola in particular decided to go through Downside and be human again or stay a vampire but she got the option and a heap of reparation money."
He kisses her.
And indeed, the next series has him all freshened up - now in an artistically overgrown graveyard, draped over fallen trees or broken headstones or propped up against the walls of crypts, occasionally even wearing some amount of clothes in addition to the flowers. The lighting varies wildly, sometimes night and day and dusk and dawn in four consecutive shots; it is very likely that the entire set was conjured on an asteroid somewhere for just this purpose.
For the last set, he is floating in space, surrounded by various decorations - swirls of glitter in one shot, billowing fabric in the next, flames and stars and flower petals. In the very last one, Aianon is tackling him out of the middle of the field of carefully arranged floating water droplets from the last shot.
[Well, for one thing, it doesn't just do pain - it does heat, cold, pressure, anything you can feel. And it doesn't just beam it all over, like yours does - it goes where you want it to. I'm not that good at it yet, but some of the things Ghosty can do with it are pretty incredible.]
He can tell when she points it at him; he bites his lip, which shows as a pretty little flare in the nerve map and an uptick to a total of 1 1/2. When the total clears 1, there starts to be a feeling of triangleness about it.
Well, scratched up was a good look on him. She drags a trio of 'scratches' across his chest, slowly, keeping an eye on his body language. And then, parallel, interleaved, the negative image of those scratches - lines of nice.
[Good, mischief is so upsetting.] She spends the hex; if she's misjudged him she can torch it off him later. [To make a coin you just move the pain across your mind, in a way that should have just begun to make sense. Do you want your own coin sorter or do you want to keep them loose or what?]