[Good for Pearl,] he says, impressed.

[Yeah, she is intensely devoted to Shell Bell. So newly-split Pearl reassured newly-split Shell Bell. Everyone else who was exploring the land of the dead got alethiometer directions so they could converge on each other and not get caught alone, and they found a group of more harpies.]

[Did that end in tears and horror?]

[No, they talked to them, and Bells aren't all that diplomatic, even Cam, but the Jokers did a slightly better job of not antagonizing them and telling them non-guilt-related stories to keep them happy, and Amariah eventually got them to agree to work for her in the revamped afterlife, to make sure no one too awful returned to the world of the living. Jane does that, Downside, and I'm muddling along without her here; in Alethia it's reformed harpies. But I'm getting ahead of myself; the harpies said that they'd been made by the Authority, and the alethiometer couldn't tell them all that much about him, and Amariah was concerned that if she did anything to the land of the dead he'd made, he'd just undo all her work. So obviously he had to be handled next.]

[So of course she dragged everybody off to have a friendly word with God,] snorts Ripper.

[Well, Shell Bell and Pearl went home.]

[Right, that makes sense. And how did the word with God go?]

[They couldn't teleport directly to him. They had to go to the base of this floating mountain and fly up the rest of the way, and they got interrupted by some angels. Not the same kind as Angela.]

[What kind, then?]

[A semi-insubstantial magical kind, whereas Angela's ancestors just genetically engineered some of them to have wings and warm blood and pretty singing voices and good muscle tone. So a flock of these little angels who could barely hurt a fly all tackled Aianon. He could have gotten them off, but he'd have wound up killing six of them if he so much as beat a wing, and Amariah wasn't quite ready to authorize lethal force, so he just sort of let them carry him off.]

[...This is an incredibly hilarious mental image,] giggles Ripper.

[Isn't it just? So everyone else kept flying up, because I guess they weren't as high a priority as the literal demon, and they meet this bigger, more substantial angel, and he said they had to leave.]

[I wonder what they did next,] Ripper says innocently.

[Oh, turned around, gave up, went home,] says Bella merrily. [It's kind of an anticlimactic story, I don't know why I bothered telling it.]

He cracks up.

[Nah, they wouldn't leave, and the angel let Amariah describe what she wanted but turned her down, and they still wouldn't leave, and the angel charged up some kind of light bolt attack and swatted her and Cam and Kas. Kas torched on the spot - Jokers don't load up on wards the way Bells do - and was kinda stunned. Cam hit the ground. Amariah recovered faster, she's been flying since she was little because witches do, and she got her dagger out and fought the angel.]

[Oooooh, did she win? I'm in suspense!]

[She stabbed him in the gut, offered him a chance to surrender, he told her to die and started charging the beam again, she cut his throat, he dissolved.]

[Damn,] laughs Ripper. [Remind me not to piss her off.]

[Oh, it's safe to piss Bells off under normal circumstances, it's just not safe to get in our way when we are trying to end the torment of several billion suffering creatures.]

[Got it.]

[Not that I advise pissing Bells off, it's just that summary execution isn't the standard response. Anyway. They went on up through some magic fog they couldn't see through even with the see-through-specific-stuff power I invented, and felt around for a way into the mountain, and found it. And in this mountain was a crystal box with no openings that contained a wrinkly faded old angel.]

[...uh-huh,] says Ripper. [Wonder who that was.]

[He wouldn't say. She tapped on the glass to get him to wake up and talk to her, but he almost fell apart. He couldn't remember who he was. The alethiometer knew, though. It was the Authority.]

[Thought so.]