Bella teleports to where Sherlock is and flops down somewhat lapward. "Just checking," she says, "if I disappeared for several decades I would not come home to an unexpected alt of Carinna, right?"
"I hope this is a silence of 'of course not, that is a completely left-field sort of question, what could possibly have inspired you to ask', because what has inspired me to ask is that apparently while Amariah was gone, Kas went slightly mad and had their firstborn child all by himself without waiting for her input. Said firstborn child is now thirteen."
"He didn't mean for her to be Amariah's, in all fairness, I think he was trying to have some unspecified variety of offspring and just got an Yseult-alt. As for what happened it's only what I said - she was gone a long time. Sixty-six years. Meanwhile Aegis's Joker handled her political campaign for her, so, you know, if you happen to spot Amariah looking murderously in Aegis's direction at the next Bellparty see if you can distract her."
"No, he got elected himself, it was kind of time-sensitive, but behind the scenes they can work out whatever now one of them has the position," shrugs Bella, "and maybe they can wrangle a changeover at some point, I don't know enough about Peace politics to guess."
"Quite possibly, but apart from that, it's not exactly a cosmetic fucking difference. In the hypothetical distant future where I am for some reason considering having a child at all, I'd just as soon aim for one who will laugh when I joke about getting them fresh demon heads for their birthday."
"Depends on your definitions of 'soon' and 'fixed'. Anyway, I last talked to any of the little beads when they were like seven, maybe in the intervening years Kiawen has begun wearing black and writing moody poetry, I don't know. We did stop in Chronicle while re-pealing everyone, but we were mostly picking up Wellspring magic and catching up with each other."
"Nah. Hey, speaking of Wellspring magic, apparently that is the mysterious way in which Wellspring is related to Sunshine worlds. Same kind of magic, except Sunshine has icky 'patterns' stuck to it. We might have a Matilda-type guest seeing if she can unglue them here at some point. My magic system switched from Sunshine, which my opacity wasn't letting me use, to Wellspring, which it will, when a Matilda floated me for long enough. I got better than Cam and not as good as Glass."
"Glass also thinks that Bells are intensely susceptible to magic addiction wherever it's possible, so even though that's not something that should technically happen with Wellspring patterns in place of Sunny patterns, I went ahead and made a wish against it before doing any -" She crooks a finger in the direction of a rug's edge, rolling it up. "Of that."
She ticks off another finger. "There's Aether. She's the one the welcoming committee was originally trying to fetch, her world broke Jane. She's a psychic sorta thing they have in Materia, which is what she named her terrible anticausal world, and she was studying to be a therapist because that is what psychic Bells in terrible anticausal worlds do apparently. She has a Joker who goes around naked all the time for religious reasons and is also a garden; he now has censor bars. His name's Celo."
And a third finger. "And there is Etty, who is the peal's second lesbian, turns into a swan occasionally, had a nasty if not Shell Bell level time of it with her Joker's dad until he got dead, and has a grotesque magic system. Her Joker is girl-shaped, apparently from the beginning and not with the assistance of grotesque magic, and is called Nona."
"Well, she was one of a long string of people who got turned into swan-people by Nona's dad," says Bella. "It's not like, aside from the name, we are otherwise swan-themed as a group. No recurring swan daemons or swan-related magic powers or whatever, some of us don't even have the surname. Etty can just turn into a swan."
"And as a side effect of the spell the dress she appears wearing when she turns back into a human is made of white feathers. I don't know, we can ask Glass if it's related." She picks up her Janegem and flicks it on. "Hey, Jane, can you ask Glass if she got a look at Etty to see if the swan thing is related to the name attractor?"
[Sure.] And a moment later, [She says they're separate and basically coincidental, the swan transformation thing is a completely different kind of attractor, similar to Beast turning into a cat-monster - Etty was supposed to turn into a swan and Beast was supposed to turn into a beast in about the same way.]
"Causality. Science - not tech, science - doesn't behave there. If you look at the world's moving parts too hard, or you annoy something sufficiently epic, or it looks like you're cheating, or the universe feels like it, the reliability of induction bids you an impolite goodbye."
"And since she's a Bell there aren't the problems with operational security - and way fewer problems around Bells being cagey - than there would be with anyone else we could procure. But she'll be a few years; she hasn't actually taken courses in therapy, only in being psychic."
"She did cheat, but apparently being Materia-psychic is only weakly amenable to pentagoning. Certainly she'll go faster than standard now she has her speedup and recall and so on. Besides, Glass and Aegis and Amariah all completed locally standard educations for what they were trying to learn before they got the cheat codes. Rose too depending on what you mean by 'standard'. And I am still slightly enrolled in high school because Charlie doesn't want me to be one of those Sunnydale kids who just stops showing up one day, even if I'm ninety-five percent checked out whenever I show up."
[Yeah. Chelsea was a witch and she could build up or destroy relationships. The government Golden deposed used her to keep a larger-than-normal people-eating coven together without falling apart, and keep their enemies divided, and collect useful witches, and control the wolves. There's one in Tab's world, and she's stronger and she has better range and the local copy of James used her to take over the world, and Tab, astonishingly, has not assassinated either of them. Her jurisdiction, but it weirds me out.]
[The Gifts people have there are serious business, it's not just the Chelsea alt who's got major horror potential. I suppose turning everybody into a Care Bear might compete favorably with letting them run amok if people there are particularly prone to running amok. And Aelise - that's the James there - said Chelsa was retired.]
[In Chelsa not having gotten assassinated? I'm not sure, actually. We don't know what happens if a Chelsea-type actually gets at a Bell. Jokers are capable of intense mixed feelings, we know - Harley got got, the Gift Joker got got, I'm pretty sure neither of them acts in a way consistent with unambiguous Chelsa-adoration. But we haven't seen the case where a Bell has her feelings modified like that and I'm not sure what would happen.]
"...And, I should definitely check for templates in this world, I don't think I want to rely on finding them organically via metacausality anymore."
She sets about pastwatching for everyone she has heard of other Bells meeting. Starting with Chelseas.
"We don't have one of her, thank goodness."
When she checks for a Lazarus, one turns up who is an interesting new kind of demon: pebbled pine-green skin with iridescent black streaks in a vaguely spiky pattern, 'hair' made of thin iridescent black spines, short tidy iridescent black claws. Controlling for obvious species differences, his face is recognizably that of a Lazarus. He's even the same height, under that spiky crown of hair.
"It would spoil some fun and replace it with other fun. I will have to get my other fun someplace else, I suppose. If I become desperate to explain everything to someone I can always go surprise Renée. Or sit down a minion or three and present them with a slideshow."
"How does it even work, it must be fascinating - Bells get each other more than typical interacting persons do, I think, but we're doing, 'if I were a No Questions Elf with thus and such a traumatic past and a Joker-and-a-half and I was from that world, why would I say that', and I think you're just doing a more efficient version of the same thing you do all the time with everyone, not so much deploying special template knowledge of each other, right?"
"Oh, debatably. What makes it so efficient is that I know very accurately what another Sherlock is going to notice about me, and about our surroundings, so I don't have to waste time with unnecessary explanations. And if I observe them failing to pick up on something, I am very likely to know what it is and deduce all sorts of interesting things about them from there. It's the same thing we do with everyone, but the special template knowledge and the symmetry is what makes it so pretend-telepathic."
"Oh - Pearl and Steel have their respective shifted cultural contexts, and even if I hadn't guessed from how Steel dresses, I'd know from how they both react to how I dress in comparison to the other Sunshine-family Sherlocks. They can tell the difference, but their understanding isn't as fine-tuned as it would be if they were from the same time period. Pearl is picking it up a little faster, because Panem fashion is closer to our sort of Earth than Chronicle's is. Or for another example, it's screamingly obvious that Plus knows what it's like to lack a soul. The other Sherlocks are all guessing about the relevant bits of my internal architecture; he knows. Not that it's easy for most people to tell the difference. But every so often, he'll notice something before they do."
"Huh. That's close in some ways to what Bells do and different in others. The peal all have a sense now of what things are Us Things and what things vary more or less freely, and the new ones get the gist pretty fast - so if I meet a Bell, I assume whatever she's wearing, less the crown if applicable, is either a completely unexceptional thing to wear, or overwhelmingly convenient for some reason, or something someone around her somehow induced her to wear. And the less to my taste it is, the more likely it is to be towards the end of the list of reasons than to the former. Etty's feather outfit and Aegis's uniform are convenient, all the jeans-and-T-shirt-crowd are unexceptional and so are Angela and Amariah with their leather and silk, I'm pretty sure Sarion's kind of elf is vaguely communist and she wears whatever some clothes-handling person gives her, if I see a Joker-having Bell in a pretty dress I assume her Joker made it for her. Or in Aurora's case that he is it for her. The mental architecture bits - vary less, although Shell Bell sometimes - sort of twitches. And we all know why, not because we've been there but because we don't twitch like that so it must be the different thing. If a new Bell does the same thing we'll know something awful happened to her."
"Not so much that it would be telling as that talking about the details of intra-Sherlock signals using existing vocabulary would be a bit like trying to describe the dance choreography of an alien species from scratch without having specific labels for any directions, limbs, or appendages. Except that I could probably give you a lesson in alien anatomy a lot faster than I could teach you the anatomy of Pearl's emotional expression."
He taught her well, and she wasn't a slouch to start.
She's not even cheating significantly - no extra speed in mind or body beyond what Slayerhood gave her, and the wards are immaterial since he never aimed to really hurt her anyway.
And eventually she has him pinned to the wall.
"Why hello there."
"That's good. Well, it's not bad, at least." Bella closes her eyes and chooses a pastwatching viewpoint from a moment ago above herself and Sherlock and Steph so she knows where it's safe to move, where she won't touch the glowing genet; and then she repositions.