Today they are practicing the Third Angelic Rite.
And then - how rude! - the door to the music room opens.
But not to the hallway - and not to any visible hand - and there is a strong press of magical presence emanating from it, and a faint sheen of rainbow water droplets hanging in the air.
"You couldn't bring Elspeth, guys?" Keziah says to the peal. "They're like my mom, but from other places," says Keziah. "They're from all different worlds with a bunch of names I can't remember. You can get to other universes with magic doors like the one they made, and there used to be another way that worked better but it broke. They're here to get my mom to do some thing with all of them, I guess. Most of them are named Isabella so they have nicknames and they call my mom Angela so they don't get confused."
[He also kept Sueporting into increasingly inhospitable locations to get away from Chelsa, such as, lastly, the sun,] adds Tab, [but I have the impression he preferred it, so. Gift had a local Joker called Corona, too, but he's in Aurum at the moment.]
[Currently his ongoing residence there hasn't been negotiated. Speaking of people in Aurum, I will talk to Nathaniel about coming back here after we've investigated the welcoming committee, but it's been almost sixteen years in Aurum and he might prefer to stay at this point.]
"...Once upon a time there was a mysterious door," says Keziah, turning pink as she recites a bedtime story she heard before she knew it was true. "It was supposed to lead to a hallway, but it did not. Instead, it led to a place in the center of everything, everywhere, that could touch doors so far away that no one from nearby knew they existed."
"It's just how my mom used to tell the story before she told me it was true," squirms Keziah, blushing fiercely. "Um, and then the protagonists of the story who later turned out to be Mom and Dad went through the door, and they met - Amariah first, she wasn't in the group you saw. And Amariah keeps her soul in a talking owl and she has a flying tree branch instead of wings and she can do magic - not the kind we have, a kind she gets for being a witch which is a thing in her world."
"Yeah. There's magic in a lot of worlds, and it all works different. Mom has - like - sort of two and a half kinds - two kinds that do a lot of things and one kind that only does one thing - or, no, there's also a magic language she knows but she doesn't use it much - and there are more that aren't as easy to share around."
"They're Bells. Me and my alt decided to be Griffins - she has a pet one and I would too if magic wasn't secret. That was when we were seven, I don't know, maybe we'll think of something better now. Dars and her alt couldn't think of anything and the last time there was a Bell party Ariel and Pen were too little to go and there weren't more of them anyway. There might still not be. Depends how many Bells who have alts of my dad - those're called Jokers - have the right number of kids."
"Parents," says Junia. "You have a set of parents, and your parents each also have two parents, and so do theirs, and so on. And each of those pairs of people met somehow or other and decided to have children, with or without the intervention of the divine, but mostly without, on the whole. And for there to be another you, there has to be another of your mother, and another of your father, and another of each of their mothers and fathers - doesn't there? And how can all those people come together just the same even living in entirely different places and - and Isabella's an angel, but none of them were - why does this work so that people who are together in one universe tend to be together in all the rest?"
"Oh, not all of them are," says Keziah, "some of the Bells are with other people and some of the Jokers aren't with Bells either. Also templates don't just work by parents, they only mostly do - there's a Joker who was made out of magic by some people and doesn't really have parents at all."
"The one who said she had one of you at home is not from the world with the talking animal souls or the one where people can be made out of magic, though," says Keziah. "Minting is from there and sometimes people have magic powers - supposedly I should have one of those by now, but if I do I don't know what - but nothing else that weird except for more technology and they don't live on one of this planet. Nobody lives on one of this planet but us, actually, it is not very popular."
"Yeah, except in other worlds they didn't have quite the same thing so there are still people on Earths in all the worlds that have Earths. And no angels, except there's a different kind of thing called angels that aren't like us much at all except sort of being shaped alike in the animal-souls world, and they aren't very nice."
"It's - Mom told me stories about the kind of thing when I was little so I would know what she was talking about later - it's called a spaceship? It's an - enclosed - giant - boat - thing - that goes in the sky, up where there's no air - you know how if you fly really high there's less air, if you go high enough there's none, and this is a kind of boat that can be there and move around there. And there's a machine on it, a smart machine that can hear and - make it rain and stuff."
"Well, Mom told me, and I've seen it and talked to it - but it'll talk differently soon because now all the Bells are going to try to fix Jane and she's another machine but she's smarter than the spaceship and she sort of absorbed it and when she's working she talks through it instead of the voice it had before."