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Isabella takes awhile catching up with her parents, and the queen.
She is back at the house late that night, not tired but a little ragged. Path alights on her shoulder when she reappears.
She inspects her house.
"I'm going to keep this place, since people sometimes use it as a landing pad to get daemons, and sometimes I want to be able to receive visitors from within the world," she decides, "and a castle in the afterlife won't do that, but I'm going to go build a castle in the afterlife, who wants to see it?"
dark_light
dark_light
"All right then."
Pop. They're in midair for a split second, but then Isabella summons the ground up into a hill, and then they are standing on it, overlooking the gates that go into the worlds from the land of the dead. "Have you seen this place at all before?"
Pop. They're in midair for a split second, but then Isabella summons the ground up into a hill, and then they are standing on it, overlooking the gates that go into the worlds from the land of the dead. "Have you seen this place at all before?"
dark_light
"Huh. Well, this is it. I was going to add more geographical variety, but I hadn't gotten around to it, before..." She shakes her head. "Whatever, I can do it now. Starting with a castle. Any suggestions?"
telesonorous
"Well, what kind of castle do you want?" she says consideringly. "I hear enchanted ones are convenient. If the walls and floors and so on keep themselves clean, then you can make them out of much more interesting things than if they don't. And there should be a stand of cloud-pine, because who wouldn't want their own stand of cloud-pine?"
dark_light
"I can make it behave in all kinds of ways, here, without specifically enchanting it, albeit not with quite the same degree of autonomy as a proper enchantment," muses Isabella. "Interesting flooring like - what are you thinking, here?"
dark_light
"Wood's nice, marble's more palatial... maybe I'll make it mostly out of live wood and tile the bottom floor with marble."
telesonorous
"Good idea," says Helen, grinning. "What kind of shape will it be? More round, or more rectangular? Round is more interesting, but harder to fit a bunch of rooms on the same floor. You could still do it, though..."
dark_light
"Maybe an ellipse. Rectangles in the middle, half-circle rooms on each end with nice curvy windows."
telesonorous
"Hmm," says Helen. "I'm imagining that and it just looks like a big pill from the outside. How about something more like this?"
She conjures an illusion: an octagonal courtyard enclosed by a thick wall, with circular towers at the corners and a much larger circular tower in the middle. Four of the outer towers have outward-facing doors, and all eight have doors facing into the courtyard; the main tower has one big door facing north, in line with the north outer door. Everything is made of wood; the octagonal wall linking the outer towers also has spiky glittering ice running along the top.
She conjures an illusion: an octagonal courtyard enclosed by a thick wall, with circular towers at the corners and a much larger circular tower in the middle. Four of the outer towers have outward-facing doors, and all eight have doors facing into the courtyard; the main tower has one big door facing north, in line with the north outer door. Everything is made of wood; the octagonal wall linking the outer towers also has spiky glittering ice running along the top.
dark_light
"Fortressy," comments Isabella. "Meshes oddly with the wood structure; I expect things shaped like that to be made of blocks. Might go with marble like your first suggestion."
telesonorous
Helen changes the entire outer structure in the illusion to black-and-white marble, but keeps the icy spikes and lets the inner tower stay wood.
"Better?"
"Better?"
telesonorous
"I like the way it looks," she shrugs. "Like the tower is a giant tree." Whimsically, she replaces the tower with an actual giant tree of roughly the same size, a nonspecific conifer, spreading enormous branches over the top of the outer wall and between the outer towers. It looks surprisingly good all together, although the door at the bottom is now a little incongruous.
dark_light
"Sarion's kind of elf has these..." Amariah tweaks the illusion to ensubtle the door. "Very sneaky houses. They're cool." And she tweaks the tree into a specific conifer; it's a giant cloudpine now.
telesonorous
"Very nice," admires Helen. "Do you know what you want the inside to look like?"
dark_light
Amariah adds windows - glass in the marble parts, cutouts leaving webs of wood in the outer trunk of the tree and dappling the inside with light - and reveals furniture and interior decoration. "I've had a while to think about eventually having a castle."
dark_light
"Thanks." Amariah makes a few adjustments - she didn't, after all, have the layout picked out before now. She fills in the illusion courtyard with plants and bejeweled-mosaic paths. She nudges the arrangement of the cloudpine branches, and hmms, and then she taps into her custom plane and there they are, on the ground floor of the tree-tower.
telesonorous
Helen proceeds to the middle of the tower, stands in the open central column, and looks up at the spiral stair winding around and around and around all the way to the top.
"Awesome," she says.
"Awesome," she says.
dark_light
There's a Janepoint here, and Amariah has sped up the castle environs to match outside time in contrast to the rest of her afterlife plane. She makes an ansible; Jane takes half and the other half plugs in. "And now arbitrary people can visit me without having to spend stars to ward off their potential daemons."