[That's so much more interesting than economic sanctions.]

[It is! You should come have a listen when you're done with your meeting.]

[After the UN I'm talking to some representatives from miscellaneous medical unions about how very unkind of me it was to put them out of jobs and what I'm going to do about that. You could sing it at me over the brainphone, but then I guess I'd miss the instrumentation.]

[And it might distract you from your meetings.]

[And we can't have that.]

[I don't know, can we?]

[Do you want to be responsible for me blushing in front of the Mayo Clinic representative?]

[Maybe.]

[That would be embarrassing.]

[Does that mean I shouldn't sing you my lovely new song just yet?]

[Yeah, let's wait until I figure out doctor retirement packages. In the meantime whatever shall we do about this boring meeting? Wanna listen to more Stories Of The Adventures Of Bells or something?]

[Always.]

[I could tell you about how Amariah's afterlife got handled, I haven't gotten to that one yet. Unless Ghosty or Aianon told you; they were there and I wasn't.]

[They haven't mentioned it, no.]

[Okay. Amariah's world is the one with the external animal souls, I know I mentioned that but did it stick?]

[Yeah. Green kingfisher. I remember.]

[So if you have one of those, you have to stay close together, or it hurts, unless you do it anyway for long enough and far enough, and then the bond is all stretched out and you can be as far apart as you like. Witches like Amariah do that as a coming-of-age thing, but humans also never do unless they're spies or in horrible accidents or have inconvenient fish daemons or something. Even though it would be really useful to be able to leave your bear or your whatever at home sometimes. It's just that unpleasant. The Alethia worldsheaf doesn't have daemons out-and-about in all of the subworlds, but the parts of people that are daemons have this property even when they're all folded up 'asleep' inside their people - you don't want to be without it. And the thing about the Alethia afterlife is that it didn't let daemon-parts in.]

[...Ouch,] says Ripper.

[So everyone who ever died in Alethia was in a state of what amounts to perpetual physical and emotional torture, not so fun,] continues Bella. [Time also went faster there, so if someone died fifty years ago they would have centuries of being dead under their belt. And on top of that, the afterlife was populated by harpies, who have this magic screaming thing they can do to make everything bad you've ever done bubble up and make you feel like crap. They feed on - emotions and stories from life and stuff in general, but the only one they can elicit on purpose is guilt, so they did a lot of that.]

[That sounds horrible. I bet Amariah wasn't happy.]

[She was not! She found all this stuff out partially by asking this artifact she has called an alethiometer. It dispenses objective truth - only it's hard to use. Her boyfriend Kas can do it intuitively, though, so that's not such a problem. The alehtiometer couldn't tell her everything, though. Some stuff is hidden from it. By this character called the Authority, who made the afterlife, and the harpies, in the first place. The Authority is also known as 'God'.]

[Eugh,] says Ripper.

[Yeah. This didn't really bother Amariah on a theological level, of course, since witches have this pantheon of goddesses they call on for spells and don't go in for human religion, but it gives you an idea of the kind of power this fellow was throwing around when things were made. So, she figured first she'd investigate the afterlife, fill in the gaps in what the alethiometer could tell her. She could leave her daemon Pathalan - he's a cute little owl - behind, because she's a witch and got that taken care of when she was younger. And her boyfriend did the same thing, later in life, to save her and Path from some asshole, but that's another story. Anyone else who tried to walk into the afterlife without dying first would leave a daemon behind who couldn't get in, which, as aforementioned, is pretty unpleasant.]

[Doesn't sound like she'd be getting a lot of volunteers.]

[Most of us turned her down. I didn't particularly want a firefly-soul, personally. But she got a few. Aianon, Ansharil, and Ghosty all showed up without daemons appearing for them. They weren't the right species. Ghosty wound up having to leave some of her presence outside the afterlife, but otherwise could move around normally. Aianon and Ansharil were different - as long as they didn't try to go into the afterlife, nothing happened, but the alethiometer said that if one of them went the other would acquire daemon properties. Bear that in mind if you ever consider touching Ansharil - daemon-touching is a huge thing, even if Joker daemons are a little more gregarious than normal.]