"China, want me to send you the picture or come with?"

"The latter."

"Do you have the spell to go bird, I've been going in in the air as a bird, easy to spot a place where you can pop in person-shaped..."

"Yes, I do. I also have the spell to turn invisible, though." Which she does.

And here they are back half a mile above the local Bell.

"Beijing," Golden diagnoses. She prefers to fly by wizardry rather than turn into a bird and lose many of her favorite vampire attributes, as long as there are Huans to be had for occasional top-offs. "I wonder what she's doing in Beijing." She descends to the ground, finds a moment when no one's looking, murmurs for Elf ears but not loud enough for any humans to hear - "Ah, I'm going to stay invisible, I might be mistaken for her and that might inconvenience someone."

"Makes sense."

She goes back to her normal shape and starts walking.

Bella wanders along... goes into a convenience store with the door propped open... stops, looking at a world atlas.

"This Earth," she says softly, "is... dented."

"Hmm?"

"Look at the southeast of North America."

"Yikes. That's - a lot of people, right -"

"Tens of millions of them."

"So something bad happened to the world before Bella took over. ...something really bad. We probably can't ask without getting the same reaction I got earlier..."

"If it's before she took over. We know evil alts are a thing. Let's find a library."

"Is sinking half a continent the sort of thing you think an evil alt of you might do?"

Library.

"If it seemed expedient to take over the world? Possibly."

Golden's not as good with illusions as Loki but she can still more or less make herself look like Alice, of whom she has an excellent mental image, and go sit down at a computer and look some things up.

"...and she's based in China because China supplied nukes -"

"Which were - used?"

"Looks like. ...Not for the dent, though, that was something else - I don't have enough context for some of this to be comprehensible without more background research -"

"And the stuff we read here probably won't be true if your alt's evil -"

"- looks like there was at the time some confusion about exactly who dented the planet - yeah."

"Um. I don't know what to do -"

"We get a Maitimo and have him meet her, I think."

"Okay. Thanks for - coming by - I would not have thought to check that stuff -"

"I could have missed it too if there hadn't been that store between our convenient alley and the headquarters-looking building she must work in."

She looks at some pictures of a hundred fifty nuclear bombs going off. 

She sighs. "Okay. Back?"