There's more people than bunks and Aya is new and has no friends here and can't very well fight somebody for theirs so she's on the floor. It's cold and she'd better fall asleep before it gets colder or she'll be shivering all night. At the old lady's the mat she had was deep enough that she could lie on her back without her collar digging into her neck; here no such luck so she's on her side, arm under her head.
When he's done crying (and that takes a long time) he conjures for complete written works of the Bell and there is one, there is a Bell, everything is going to be okay, and then he conjures for a scale model of the Bell and their surroundings and -
- well.
That is not okay.
He doesn't even bother going invisible.
Pop.
He doesn't have room for an amphitheater. The barracks opens out onto a small yard and is enclosed on three sides by other buildings.
"Kiddo, you have a very nice embroidery but it doesn't mean you can just abolish slavery," says a slave.
"Fuck that, I want to teleport to Tsopix, can you do that," says someone else.
Well, he'll do the walls as stunningly pretty as he can manage them.
"Yeah, sure, what direction is it from here? And I can too abolish slavery, I can take everybody who thinks it's okay and put them on a different planet if I need to. Your government is stupid and evil and the Bell is in charge now - where's the Bell -" he looks searchingly around the room and sees Aya - "oh, it's an Aly face!! You're in charge of the world now. Who all wanted a teleport to Tsopix?"
It should be obvious by the time he's done with the song. This song is magic and will make you feel like you just got a very restful night of sleep, he announces to everybody. I have so so much magic and I am using it to end slavery and the Bell is in charge of the world now.
And to the Bell - do you want a crown? Or something?
"The world I'm from is called Telperion but the world I live in is called Warp and there are a couple hundred dimensions all connected to each other and we're kind of a big collective that runs around fixing them all. The Bells call themselves the 'peal'. Because collective noun for Bells."
"Your world might not have a collective noun for bells, then. Okay. I can make you a handheld translator but that won't help with puns, I don't think. Anyway, there are lots of us and we have lots of magic and we go around fixing everything and my Bella adopted me because I was so sad all the time and it was really good, I'm really happy now."
"Yeah but if I couldn't have told that I could probably have guessed by now because you weren't, like, 'no, me, who would have me run the country' and you had sensible concrete suggestions on how to denominate the money and stuff and I'd definitely have guessed by an hour from now when you'll have heard everything you need to know and figured out how to end slavery."
"There's a Bell who's a demon like me only mine is wished on and his is for real so he can conjure past adjacency limits - he can conjure stuff even if it's not in a dimension next to him - and I can't - and so if I write him letters he can read them by making 'letters addressed to Cam in the last day' and then he can pass them on to everyone else."
"Tons. Some closer to humans than others. Quendi are pretty close - the major differences are that if we swear something we can't break our word and we live forever and we age slower and we die of lots of things that don't kill humans - like slavery, wouldn't work at all - and we need things to be pretty and we sing a lot."
"Some kinds of worlds happen over and over, and Ardas are one of those. Telperion's one. If nothing happens to them then they're horrible forever pretty much and if you land early enough you can save them without much drama and if you land late enough it's a horrible war."
"Nope. Uh, mana recharges and won't recharge here but none of the stuff I've told you about has any limits at all. Well, I can't make stuff that's much farther away from me than your sun is from here, but that's really far, and I can't make stuff arbitrarily fast but the limit on that's really big, too."
"I checked for mes, there are no mes, there probably aren't any of my family either but I didn't check that yet -" he does - "and then most other interesting people are one-offs - I can check for all the Bell spouses -" he does that, too - "nope. And you don't have a twin? One Bell has a twin."
"Convincing people that the technology is what you say it is and not weird embroidered stuff would make it time-consuming to convince each person. Maybe sell the technology and then buy the slaves - or bribe the nobles - do I need to explain embroidery or does it translate idiom?"
"Magic here comes in the form of a kind of place called, creatively, 'magics'. Things, animals, and people that enter magics have random things happen to them. Someone or something that has been in and out of a magic and changed in a way that is not totally disabling is called 'embroidered'. Someone who is totally disabled - turned into a rock or something - is 'sleeved'. Your wings make you look obviously embroidered, and having more powers makes you look even more luckily embroidered than that, but if you list a bunch of powers that don't seem obviously related and also nothing horrible has happened to you it loses plausibility that you got that way by going in and out of magics recklessly."
"Then it might make the most sense to just describe it by what it can do - anywhere in the world can talk to anywhere else in the world instantly, you can go visit the stars, which are all suns like yours, and some of them have planets around them and some of those planets have life. You can make copies of books faster than you can blink and fit a whole library onto a little card the size of my fingernail and make live moving pictures of things that are going on and keep those on cards the size of my fingernail too. You can build invisible walls and invisible walls that let some kinds of things through and not others. You can leap dimensions, you can destroy worlds, you can translate any language into any other one -"
"I'm actually speaking Esevi with magic, it's a bit more convenient when you've got both around. There aren't worlds that should be destroyed - not now, anyway, we've got better options - but lots of technology went to weaponry because that's how most species are motivated."
"Uh. I can't make anything smarter than a snail except there's a kind of person who keeps their brain on a - piece of advanced technology - and I could make that kind of person if we needed it really badly but it's not very ethical so I wouldn't want to do it without a good reason. I can make you a computer with the things I'm allowed to know about the multiverse and you could read it? I don't have access to all the Bell things but I think I am allowed to know most of the important stuff."
"I think so? A computer is the thing that holds whole libraries - here's one -" and he's holding something shiny and a few inches long - "and eventually you might want a chip-locked one but for now the standard kind will do -" and here is a table, and when the computer projects itself a screen it will also project a keyboard and touchpad onto the screen. "Ignore the keys, different alphabet, I'll teach it yours later." And he pulls up the approved-for-Fëanors version of the multiverse summary, and shows her how to scroll.
"I gave it the complete written works of your world and then I manually told it a couple sentences and how they translate and now it's learning how the whole language translates by comparing the words in it to rules about languages, and when it has a pretty good guess it'll tell me and then I can read through it and correct places where it made a statistically justified bad guess and then you can read it."
"A couple of months to be doing useful stuff, a couple of years before it wasn't obvious that I was from a low-tech world, I still don't know everything there is to know but I'll learn it all eventually somehow. But I had a head start because even before we landed in Warp Boots introduced some modern stuff from Materia."
"It's the most powerful magic we've got, Loki's basically omnipotent in her dimension and adjacent ones. It does - space. Anything to do with space. Like 'I would like this to be somewhere else' or 'I would like this to be reshaped without moving anything else' or 'I would like this thing to be in my hand now' or 'I would like to be close in this sense but far away in this other sense -'"
"Yeah, the Tesseract gave Loki a special kind of magic and she used it to make - illusions, and turning into a bird, and healing, and then the Tesseract thought she was being boring so it pushed her into a nearby Arda and the Arda needed saving so the me invented necklaces that give you a perfect memory even retroactively so Loki could remember enough of her physics textbooks to teach them advanced technology to fight Melkor with only even that wasn't enough so then Loki worked for decades with magic-song acceleration and the eidetic memory and developed an interdimensional teleport and got the Tesseract and killed Melkor with it. And the spells work for anyone who can remember them, so once we had the eidetic memory necklaces we could give them out to people we could trust enough."
...he pulls the computer over and starts correcting it. "So imagine that you have an eidetic memory but you have to communicate and you could only do that by - nodding and shaking your head. And you had something complicated to say, so maybe you wanted to try spelling it out - one way of spelling it out would be to read all the letters in the alphabet to you and have you nod when you get to the right one, but that's really slow. A faster way is to have sequences, so the first letter of the Esevi alphabet is nod-nod-shake-nod, make sense?"
"So that's how computers talk. It's all - you'd be close if you imagine tiny depressions in metal which a little reader can read and register as a nod or a head-shake. If a book is on a computer, it's there with eight little yes-or-nos for each character. If a picture is on a computer, it's made of tiny squares with yes-or-nos specifying the color of each square. Eight yes-or-nos is called a byte. A thousand-twenty-four bytes is called a kilobyte. A thousand kilobytes is called a megabyte. A thousand megabytes is called a gigabyte, and a thousand gigabytes a terabyte, and a thousand terabytes a petabyte, and a thousand petabytes an exabyte, and that computer of yours fits about fifty of those."
"Okay... there's a hilly area around the city we dropped the others off in which isn't built up and might have a convenient tucked-away spot to put a house that suits you in it. It wouldn't be convenient to move large amounts of stuff to and fro, but that's without teleporting."
"Yeah, I'd teleport out the whole hill and then put the building in and then put hill in around it. If I were very clever I could teleport out a bit at a time while I added foundations for the building but that'd be harder and I don't actually do this much so it's probably better to just clear it out and put it in. People won't have long to notice it's missing."
He layers an illusion of the hill exactly as it currently looks from a lot of angles over the hill. Then he teleportation-excavates the hill into space and puts in the foundations and then puts in a shiny soaring underground fortress-place with enough concrete supports for all the dirt that's going on top of it and then he layers more concrete for protection against unknown magic that could do bombing-like stuff and then he puts back the grass and the hill.
And he teleports them in. The ground is like the palace in Tirion from an era later than his; ink-black with stars, like you're walking on the night sky. The ceilings are in black marble, lit with fixtures behind the walls so the light is nice and diffuse and glowy.
"It looks a little bit like an evil palace," he says, "but an awesome one."
"I haven't done it before, but the computer has estimates -" he looks it up - "estimates that one at 2000 hours. So probably the thing to do would be to use the perception-speeding song, at the full acceleration where you don't want to drop out of it because it's really disorienting, and then not sleep, and then it'd be three weeks."
"I'm a Fëanáro, we're kind of workaholics...does that translate? Anyway, I'll be lonely doing that but mostly because I'm lonely missing my family. It took me - I don't know the local years - the length of time it takes a human baby to grow to look older than me - to get the interdimensional teleport for Boots and at the end I was fine."
"Thank you." And he unwraps himself and makes a desk with large pretty high-definition monitors for his chip-locked computer and gets the instructions and then puts on headphones with the stacked perception song. The headphones have to be spaced like so for the magic to work; they look a little ridiculous.
This is nice of her. He writes letters to Boots every objective-day. They are a bit boring. "Did another thirteen segments of the necklace enchanting. I think your alt is happy. Mostly because Bells are happy if you show up and dump magic on them, it's hard for me to guess if people are happy by looking. I am sort of tempted to drop a thousand ball bearings into a magic and teleport them out and see if any of them are stunningly useful or something. Tried another few ways to check if Aelare exists, didn't come up with anything. If you guys figured it out I will be annoyed and jealous."
Eventually one of Aya's letters mentions that there's been some hasty law-revision regarding the blessing-of-Aelare de-tattooing clause, won't work anymore, options now amount to theft or purchase, she's leaning "theft of newly enslaved persons" because that's bottlenecked at certain legal offices, and purchase of preexisting slaves, followed up by theft if anyone won't sell, but it will be important to not be suspected of thievery while operating as purchasers.
Yeah. It is known that she was there too and wasn't with the main clump, but once she's got the necklace she can pretend to be embroidered invisible, and then they can start selling tech. Probably best to start out picking one tech thing that is easy to use without knowing it's not magical and pretend to have a thing she got in the magic that churns them out; prompts the fewest questions. Once slavery in Eseo is handled they can afford to be more conspicuously outlandish.
It's pretty! And soothing! He is proud of himself for being able to make an eidetic memory necklace in three weeks but it's not exactly very much fun. At least inventing an eidetic memory necklace would have involved thinking.
He flies in lazy circles for a while and then folds up his wings and dive-bombs the water and then swims until he's tired and then flies until he's dry and then goes back to their underground palace.
"I think a good thing to pretend we have an embroidered object mass-producing would be simple music players that play a healing song. I can sell some in the square until I have enough money to rent a storefront. Meanwhile you can set up somewhere nice to put stolen slaves and any loved ones they want to bring. It might be a better idea to find or make an island than to terraform a planet, so they aren't indefinitely dependent on us for transportation."
Aya gets some sleep. In the morning after breakfast she packs up a bunch of singing mushrooms, turns herself invisible, teleports into town, finds somewhere unobtrusive, turns her clothes and the box of mushrooms visible again, and goes into the square to lay out a blanket and set mushrooms on it.
"Machine learning? Uh, writing programs to do this sort of thing takes local years and years to learn. But lots of programs you don't actually have to know what's going on under the surface, there are probably some where you'd literally just click the patterns you like and it'd make guesses off those and you could get it better at guessing - I'm doing something in between that -"
"All kinds of things - like, in particular, if you have lots of data and you want to notice patterns in it, you know there are some, but you don't have guesses about how the pattern'll show up in the data - like, if you were trying to teach a computer to recognize people. You know what people look like, but you don't know what to tell a computer to look for, but you can show it lots of people and not-people and let it figure it out. Or if we wondered if various kinds of scanner detect anything about magics, but we don't actually understand how to interpret the scanner output, we could teach the computer what results in the scanners magics produce."