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Veron is installed in a nice house in Seattle with the help of Isabella's staff.
The colony gets big enough that Isabella sculpts herself an ice crown and applies permanency to it so it won't melt. She makes Adarin one too out of cypress branches, wired into shape, magicked to stay alive and shaped like that, and then freed of the wire. She wears hers on Earth sometimes, as well as on the colony. Her queen elects not to comment.
Various people are resurrected. Isabella hires more people to sort more requests; she's not going to be able to handle this via descending on charities. (She extracts longer-term promises of help - and nonviolence - from the clans she shares this spell with, though.) She opens an office near San Francisco, puts a lot of poultry in the back yard and makes a deal with an egg producer to save the otherwise unwanted males till adulthood for the purpose in future months, arranges regular deliveries of all the necessary herbs and ashes, and has someone carve out an enormous stencil of all the runes to speed up the process: the diagram may now be drawn with a broom, as long as it's still a witch doing it. (She also has stencils of the immortalization spell made.) There is always some witch in residence, working off their favor to her a few hours at a time, and a security team to prevent unruly demands, interference by religious protestors, and a receptionist or two to make sure the people coming in actually have appointments (or standby arrangements, in case of no-shows) to collect loved ones.
She gets into a bit of an argument with the United States military about resurrecting fallen soldiers. While she originally had no intention of discriminating against soldiers, she insists that resurrected ones be considered honorably discharged and that their re-upping be optional, and absolutely refuses to approve any systematic preferential resurrection of people who are just going to pick up guns and walk into war zones again.
Normally, there would be some clan with access to the spell who'd cut a deal.
On this occasion, with this particular Olympic witch having come up with three (really two, but the portals are still officially credited to her, with everyone understanding now that she's proprietary about the process and capitalistic about the disposition to fund her anti-death projects) revolutionary spells in fewer years than that, they're a little concerned that they won't get a look in the next time she publishes, if they do things she doesn't approve of.
Isabella threatens to move her resurrection office to New Zealand. The military backpedals. Resurrections proceed.
(Isabella does open a second resurrection office in New Zealand. And one in Finland and one in India. There are witch clans all around the world and they are all beholden to her.)
Insurance companies freak out, then remake their actuarial tables and throw lawyers at their contractual language and calm down again. Isabella's insurance company of choice has a small head start. Isabella's insurance company of choice loves her.
Luzia gets her son back. She dithers for a bit about the husband. She gets the husband back. The husband is kind of taken aback by Luzia's activities since then but decides that Zeviana "doesn't count" as cheating. It's up to Zeviana whether she wants to call that close enough and continue carrying on.
Isabella and Adarin have no such problems. They continue to be deliriously happy.
Then, there's a relatively slow day. Isabella flops across her husband's lap on the couch and says, "Want to start looking for places to plague with utopias?"
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come_midnight
Iobel takes notes and departs the guest room so that the rest of this business can be conducted without flagrantly cheerful alts breathing down their necks.
"What are they unrestful about?" she inquires.
"What are they unrestful about?" she inquires.
royal_obligation
"A mess my mother made. She ripped a nice house out from under a noble family and handed it to someone else entirely on a whim. They've caught on to me generally undoing things she's done, and now they're demanding they get their house back. Problem is, the people living in it now have actually been extremely helpful towards country-fixing purposes. Except, favoritism. Leads to other problems."
come_midnight
"Are they helpful enough that you could honor them with an invitation to live in the castle for a year doing helpful things, then give them a different house? Nataliem's maybe, I'm assuming you went ahead and confiscated his stuff."
royal_obligation
"Confiscated his stuff, plied some of his family members with a few heirlooms so they didn't raise a fuss, but his house is mine. I could honor them, but they have children and I'm not sure how they would feel about uprooting them and bringing them to court."
royal_obligation
"Uhh... One's four, one's seven, and the last is twelve. I think."
come_midnight
"Do they want to attend the school my mother works at? I'm an alumna and can get them reduced tuition even if I don't ask my mom about it. It's a good school, I can talk it up given the chance. And it's in Emavan."
come_midnight
"Also, we should absolutely be using our wealthy alts to render all forms of relatively physically compact trade goods fungible. They said they're rich, and I think they're helpfully disposed enough that they'd be willing to trade us anything for anything and dispose of what they can't use themselves within their own economy. If we have any shortages of anything in particular and comfortable surpluses of anything else that they don't have strictly better version of in their world."
royal_obligation
"The problem with that is I'm not sure what kinds of things they'd need. I don't know the full extent of their magic or technology levels, it's entirely possible that we are completely eclipsed. But, we don't know, so - we should go ask."
come_midnight
"She uses herbs. We have those. If her immortality and resurrection spells also use herbs, she needs lots of them - there weren't any left on the ground after she cast the notice-me-not spell, they vanished completely. There was a bow and arrows strapped to her tree branch, so at least some people in their world use those too. They wear fabric."
royal_obligation
"The arrows - yes, possibly, but the herbs, I'd have to know more in order to talk of anything more than theory. But it's kind of pointless if we don't know what herbs they want. They might have herbs we don't have here, or vice versa. I'm not against the idea, but I think we should find out more from them before we make assumptions about what they need. It's worth looking into, certainly, but only if we find out the scope of what sorts of things they're looking for."
come_midnight
"I don't know what we have or need yet, either. I'm just tossing out the general principle and pointing out that they're not so far advanced that they have grown past the need for things like... plants."
royal_obligation
Edarial doesn't really think it's very useful to mess around with 'what ifs' of trade agreements for people he knows nearly nothing about other than being a more flagrantly cheerful version of them. Especially when the people are not actually present.
"Okay. Feel free to bring it up to them," he sighs. "I never said I was against the general principle, just against the lack of any knowledge about the subject."
"Okay. Feel free to bring it up to them," he sighs. "I never said I was against the general principle, just against the lack of any knowledge about the subject."
come_midnight
Iobel looks away, frustrated, and picks up Cricket again from where he's been following at her heels.
royal_obligation
This is going to be a long day. This is why he was delegating, with easy problems.
"The ambassadors are to try and coax a trade route out of Lathalind - that's where the roads would be going if we can manage it," he tells her, because he is going to at least try to work with her.
"The ambassadors are to try and coax a trade route out of Lathalind - that's where the roads would be going if we can manage it," he tells her, because he is going to at least try to work with her.
come_midnight
"...and Lathalind in particular is irritated, apprehensive, skeptical of our ability to produce useful trade goods, what?"
royal_obligation
"Apprehensive and skeptical that we are a safe place to travel and trade with. I think several members are irritated, but not the country as a whole."
come_midnight
"Safe as in controlling the risk of highway robbery or safe as in not planning to declare war on them or safe in some other sense or all of the above?"
royal_obligation
"In the sense that they are worried they will randomly lose their property to the crown, but highway robbery is a problem, too. I am also trying to fix that, but that's more of a long-term thing."
come_midnight
"As in - seizure of loads of this or that on the road. Is the current plan to be handling all of the trade expeditions under the direct auspices of the Crown? I would imagine that given most conditions of the prevalence of bandits and public confidence in your ability to keep your hands off random cartsful of dye and rice and candles some private traders would be inclined to take the risk and then the leadership of Lathalind would risk nothing in particular by encouraging the road unless they expected you to actually invade them by it."
royal_obligation
"It's not, but I'm having trouble finding private traders of Marlatia that are not terrified of royalty. So."