Isabella and Adarin decide the better option is to go with her hammock. It involves Isabella almost entirely on top of her husband, but neither of them mind. Snuggles are recommended after death and subsequent resurrection, and trauma from same. Adarin's still a bit shivery and occasionally uncoordinated post-magic loss, but he can hold his wife just fine. Snuggles are provided for both parties, and eventually they both fall asleep, suspended in the air by cloud-pine.
"Anyway, and to do any of those things I need to do some combination of speak in verse, apply herbs to the situation, draw diagrams in various substances on the ground, and kill animals - in roughly decreasing order of typicality - and for some of my more recent inventions there are also gestures, but I don't have millennia of tradition telling me a lot about how that works, it's all new stuff."
"He is all right, mostly just lonely." Another pause, then a wince. "He has considered dispersing himself, because he can't sleep and there's no one to talk to, but he's afraid that if he does that his - er, and Adarin's, would be lost forever. So he is not."
"If... it's that unbearable, then I can ask the alethiometer what it would do to later spell attempts - but it doesn't seem like a good idea. I'm sorry. I'm not used to ghosts," apologizes Isabella to the empty spot in the air that Lynn seems to be looking at.
She stands, listening. "It's not just the loneliness, it's that he - knows what happens to ghosts. He knows that even surrounded by mages he'd tend to get ignored and would never really be able to make friends or do anything properly useful again. Then there's - he can't get home on his own, he needs help, so he'd be wandering a place that he's hated and is afraid of for the rest of eternity. And he's -" she motions to the living Adarin, "extraneous. He has nothing to do. He's terribly bored and feels useless and like it would be better for everyone - including himself - if he didn't exist at all. But he's not doing that because he's pretty sure he's the representation of Adarin's magic now, so he can't - die for good."
"Yes," says Path.
Presently there is a deck of cards in her bag. She puts away the mirror and takes out the cards and hands them to Lynn.
She finishes dealing out cards, and then takes one deck to look at herself, and holds the other set away from herself, facing out. This is one of the strange skills she's acquired in her life - how to play cards with a ghost.
"Well, obviously I'm a mage. And most of the mage population fucked off, either through your neat portal or to other planes by their own power. So, since I couldn't do that, I was one of the few left. Meaning I could see ghosts. Which sounds kind of minor, but actually turns out to be really, really important."
She starts playing the card game, working by sight on her end and direction from ghost-Adarin on the other.
"Because, guess who was an important, really magical person that died extremely recently? First two guesses don't count."
"As you like. Well, I found her, and because she was crazy and I was a little - unhealthy, at the time, we came up with the greatest plan of all time. I wanted to kill the creatures that had ruined my life, she wanted to gain power to affect the world again and - I didn't realize this until later - resurrect the dead. It turns out that demons can have their magic stolen if you know how. It involves killing them and transferring the power to something magical that doesn't have all of the annoying human fleshy bits that get in the way." Pause. "A ghost does not have any of the annoying human fleshy bits. I'm pretty sure you can see where I'm going with this."
"Yes. So, lots of killing things. For a while. I got to be very, very good at it. Eventually I start to get older - which is not something that Aliya wanted, because she needed me. To kill things for her. I think she could have managed to kill things herself at that point, but it would have depleted her stores and she was saving them. So - I couldn't tell you how she did it, possibly by throwing lots and lots of magic at the problem, but she made me immortal. Exciting."
She places a card down and then smiles. "I win."
And then all cards are collected and shuffled and she gets to re-dealing.
"But I digress. She wanted to speed up the power-gain, and by this point in time it's not like there was a lot of people left in Kystle. However, there was another nearby plane with lots of people that could potentially 'help.' She just needed to convince them that it was worth it. This she could manage where the demons and I had failed - the elderly Adarin has an explanation handy but I only understand about a fourth of it. So my explanation is, 'Because magic.' If you want the technicalities, go talk to him."
"I figured. So - it worked. I started recruiting, and I got help. If you're curious about how that worked, I got a necklace that translated every language available and let me travel through planes. Only with her help, I'd learn later, I couldn't work it when she didn't let me and when she dispersed it stopped working entirely. Just like - just about everything else she gave me. I have a few things that work just fine now, but they're few and far between. Aliya was a subtle control freak. I think she wanted to prevent me from ever using the artifacts against her."
Her eyes are glowing. In proper light, it might be hard to tell, but they're on the night side of New Kystle. It's obvious that this is a thing her eyes are doing that they weren't doing before.
"She used it. Once. And then she proceeded to drop off of the map and leave me and my recruits to die. Things she made for us stopped working - the necklace in particular, I never managed to get that to work again. She'd essentially left us to die, without hope of supplies or reinforcements."
"Next time," says Isabella, clapping her hands, "we send them a letter. We apologize for the unorthodox communiqué, fellow Bell-and-or-Adarin as the case may be, but we suspect you are an alternate version of me, and would like to come visit, please place a reply on the reverse of this correspondence for scrying twenty-four hours from this sending telling us about when and how you would like to receive this visit and what evidence you would like us to bring that we are not suitable for careless shield bubbling or other hostilities."
"Thank you for your services, Lynn. Er, ghost-Adarin, what would you -" Pause. "He would like to have a mage play cards with him or something, to alleviate boredom. He says if it's not Lynn the only people that come to mind are Zeviana and - someone named Xiara?"
"In summary? How well you work with him, how he feels about your actions and opinions in general, how effectively you are helpful to the world, and, of course, how he feels about you." Pause. "Forty-three point eight is an extremely high number in the scale we're using. If you hadn't guessed."
He looks embarrassed. "This next one's a bit weird to explain because there are lots and lots of numbers that lead to its sum and it's also kind of emotional rather than entirely logical, but - seven point four. Because we're married and there are various reasons for why that has occurred. I don't even know how I'd begin to explain that one, it would take some time. And then, you got an added one point four because you resurrected me and I dislike being dead."
"It sounds really bad when you say it like that," laughs Adarin "The portal bag itself, no, it's like a - point two or something, it's useful but not irreplaceable. I mean that you have magic that can be used for useful things and that is a valuable resource that can be used for other purposes. For example, helping sapient people."
He snickers. "I like being precise and exact! It's a bit less - nailed down to numbers in my head, you were easy to do because I think about you a lot. So I don't have to look through the metaphorical filing cabinet. Other people I'd have to poke my head a bit to come up with exact numbers. I could easily ballpark it, but not to - decimal points."
"Uh... I'm not sure if there's a good way, considering - my mother. But the obvious is to keep Nereus away from my mother and hope that keeps her non-murderous. Or - well. Killing her." He winces, then recovers. "If we find me when I'm a kid, that's a bit more straightforward. Snatch him and his sibling out of the hands of terrible guardians, find a Veron to be a dad at them both, squirrel all three of them away to Chamomile or something."
"... Huh," says Adarin.
The room itself is nice, and well kept, though it looks like recently things have become rather messy - papers left on the desk when they could be neatly stacked, books not returned to the nearby bookshelf, that sort of thing. It's still nice, and there are curious and obviously magical things just - around.
Prime takes off his shoes and sits on the bed. "All right, ready."