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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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dark_light
prodigal_miser
"Yes, but not right now. I used a lot of - magical power to get here, I need to wait for it to recharge a bit before I can do other things."
dark_light
"Mana's more of a - continuous substance. Do you run out of spells? Does any of this have to do with why your eyes are glowing?"
come_midnight
"Spells aren't a continuous substance. We get six spells or one hex a day. The spells have to charge. I'm charging your anti-clumsiness now. It will take a few more minutes."
prodigal_miser
"That's tidier than mine. It recharges at a fixed rate that goes faster if I'm asleep. Technically if I wanted to I could try and do something else magical today, but uh - something of a bad idea. If I run out of mana entirely, I die, if I get close, I will wish I was dead. Essentially."
prodigal_miser
"I wasn't planning on it, my dear," says Adarin, amused. "But I needed to explain the system. I would not actually do it, it's - it would worry you, and be unpleasant for me."
He pats Edarial's head, then releases him from the hug. He needs to hold his wife's hand, that is a thing that he needs to do. So he does it.
He pats Edarial's head, then releases him from the hug. He needs to hold his wife's hand, that is a thing that he needs to do. So he does it.
royal_obligation
Edarial doesn't protest the release of hugs, but he does look between Adarin and his wife with a complicated expression.
dark_light
"My magic has no intrinsic usage limitations at all except for the time it takes to cast a spell, but for most of it I need to be sprinkling herbs on things or drawing diagrams or sacrificing animals. Resurrection takes two birds, immortalization takes one mammal, ideally a biggish one, I was using deer at first but now I have something worked out to get cows and pigs. And to use it you have to be a witch, meaning the daughter of someone herself a witch."
prodigal_miser
Adarin nods. "Mine is similarly incapable of being passed on - my children will get a diluted form of my magic. They'll still be mages, but they won't have as much mana to work with as I do."
Pause. "Sorry, I knew you were wondering," he says, to Edarial.
Pause. "Sorry, I knew you were wondering," he says, to Edarial.
come_midnight
"Here, anyone can be a spellbinder if they want, though if you're going to it's best to do it young. But you need a spirit animal. Do you have those?"
dark_light
"...I don't think so. We have daemons, which we left home, but they're our souls and don't enable any practical magic and we have them from birth. On my world, anyway; Adarin didn't get his till he came to Earth."
prodigal_miser
"Is there a way to check? It could be a similar situation to Earth, we might have miraculously gained spirit animals when we arrived."
dark_light
"Um, in my years at least, I'm almost twenty-one, he's a year older, does that sound reasonable for how we look or do we need to figure out conversion factors?"
come_midnight
"It sounds reasonable. At that age you'd probably still be able to see your spirit animal if you tried, although I wouldn't bet on you being able to understand their - how are you speaking Marlese, anyway?"