Cypress offers to do the scrying, but Prime shrugs him off. Which one of them is married and therefore has a wife to bang in his free time? Oh, right, yes, that's Cypress. Go, be free, twenty-something year old alt. Prime doesn't hate your happiness. (Much.) Now, if Prime gets married, they can divvy up the annoying work between themselves. But, not happening anytime soon, so he'll do it.
Exciting scrying happens. It involves lots of staring off into the distance and looking at places.
And then, he informs the various people arrayed around him in Pantheon:
"Found a set. A female Adarin, and a female Bell. Also a Zeviana and a - girl whom I don't recognize. And parents." Pause. "They're all living in the same house."
He dearly hopes they local Bell and Adarin are not siblings, that would make everyone uncomfortable. Oh, nope, look, the Bell and the Adarin just kissed. How quaint.
"Pretty sure they're not siblings," he clarifies. "Unless this is the plane of incest."
Hi. Exciting magical happenings! There are lots of alternate universe versions of you in various worlds. If you activate this mirror (see reverse) you can talk to us and we can catch you up on whichever of the thousand possible questions are foremost in your mind. Possibly relevant: yes, you can come meet us in person. Yes, we have fantastic miscellaneous magical powers and are generally shareful. Some of us look just like you and you probably have very similar names to some of us too so you're going to need nicknames. As of the depositing of this note we are all hanging out waiting to see if you call right away but somebody will be monitoring the mirror even if you need a while. Welcome to the peal :)
"That's. Huh. Okay. Twin stuff is - when we turn sixteen, we get our basics, which basically puts us on par with an Olympic athlete and gives us an ability to talk to our twin from long distances away and also heal them, and then our bonus, which is a superpower. Mine's portals. Bella's is teleportation."
"Hello. Nearest mage. Portals - our portals, anyway - need a flat, stable surface to go on that is unlikely to break or be disturbed. They're permanent, as long as the surface they're on isn't broken. Also, we can disguise them as either a blank wall, or a painting, or something. Actually we recently got a security upgrade, anyone that wants to pass through the portals needs a very specific microchip. It's not necessary, but we had a problem a little while ago."
And that is when Adana gets up and runs off. For notes.
"Anyway, since I can teleport, if we're never going to need to get to the portal without me along or at least available for a half a second, I'd recommend putting it someplace really obscure. Since people other than me might want to make trips while I'm asleep or something, though, maybe it should be near the house."
"That's up to you. Mages can also teleport, but not within half a second and not everywhere or, in fact, very casually, and I think all of us can fly through some method or other. Which, we can distribute among ourselves." Pause. "Also my wife can grant immortality and resurrect the dead."
"Fuck. Right, okay, ash clouds - how bad are they, we have a person that can make anything, a person that can change anything, and we have access to twenty-second century technology, and various magic types with different strengths and weaknesses that all require some kind of time investment. How - was there an evacuation, how thorough was it, do you have places to put the people?"
"There - there was an evacuation. They made a list of who saved how many people and we're on it... We ran out of places to put people. We had to stop because there was nowhere else for them to go, after the eruption. It's been less than a year so we're not at Biblical levels of famine yet but I do the grocery shopping in Europe just because I can, because it means fewer dirty looks from the neighbors at the store - this is why the Sanderses are here, Dad said we could bring friends when we had to leave Phoenix, so we're all crammed into his house - how fast do the maker and changer work? The caldera is - it's loosely similar to the historical Lava Creek tuff. If you look at a picture of how big that is. And the clouds are everywhere."
"Ash clouds are more Adana's thing than mine but I can probably rehabilitate the caldera some. I make, she changes - I can't get rid of anything but she can turn the ash to air, albeit not that fast. I can also just straight-up make food in meaningful quantities if you know where it should go."
"Spring and Prime aren't. Rest of us are. Usually it's girl Bells - all of whom look like you except Spring who is some sort of otherworldly brown ethnicity - and boy Adarins, who look like Cypress who you saw plus or minus the hair color. We found your world next because my angel didn't want to be the only girl Adarin."
"Coming, coming! Sorry, they were really - buried under crap, I had to fetch Savannah to figure out where they were -" Conduit hurries back to the room with various notes on how to use portals cleverly clutched in her hands. She peers at the mirror. "Wheeere did the portal person go...?"
"I can change anything into any other thing, my boyfriend can make any non-magical object, and neither of us need to sleep or go to the bathroom and are very unproblematically immortal. And Ice can resurrect the dead. Plus we have other stuff that's less easy to explain concisely."
"Even if we moved out it'd be squishy in here. I don't think Alli and Savannah would share a room very well. And Charlie'll find out one way or another if we have as much traffic and intervention as we're talking about. I'll go - get him." She pecks Conduit on the cheek and goes looking for her dad.
"Oh! Right, um. Superpowered disaster relief, and people who help coordinate them. They're supposed to be called the 'Gemini Guard' but since the astrological sign shows up mostly in June, they got nicknamed the Junebugs to be cute. B- Flicker and I are junior members. They have a pretty good idea of what's going on, where, so coordinating with them would be great."
Quite anticlimactically, he pokes the wall, and says in a deadpan, "Boop."
There is now a portal. It's not like Conduit's - it sort of shimmers and the surface of it looks like water instead of air.
"You'll need the microchips to pass through it. Otherwise, it will be like walking into a wall."
"Sorry about him," Cam says to Charlie. "Iiii think I'll stick my head through the portal and get my girlfriend to help with the remodeling and also with the being convincingly alternate universe versions of them." He points at Flicker and Conduit, goes to the portal, says, "Pantheon", leans through, and says, "Aaaaangel?"
She checks for pictures, so she doesn't break anything. Then she eyes up the wall and makes a 'hmmm' sound, and adds extra supports so the house doesn't collapse. Then - there is a doorway. After some specifications, she adds foundation for her boyfriend to build off of, and then starts adding stairs down to a cellar, which she hollows out neatly. She's doing this carefully, the house is not going to collapse in on itself.
"All yours, Cam," she says, when she's finished.
"Alli can split herself. Two copies of her, exact same personality, exact same memories - they're perfectly in sync until someone or something else unsyncs them. Then after - I forget how long, sorry, she can end it early if she wants - one of them joins back up into the other and Alli gets both sets of memories."
"She'll want to come, I think," agrees Conduit dryly. She opens a portal to her sister and sticks her head through. She could twine her, but this is for her sister's travel convenience. "Hey, we have alternate universe selves with magic and they've shown up. Want to come meet some of them?"
"Right. Yeah. I think it might make sense to summon a bunch of angels to deploy versus ash. We can assembly-line it. I can make most of the circles, the various humans or close-enough can finish them, there can be signs on the walls explaining the deal - spend so many hours dealing with ash and a demon will make you a thing! - somebody escorts them to your world, which you need to name - the drawback of this is that we just installed the microchip system."
"In Inferno, our world, some daeva are ex-humans, like me and Revival. The way you get to be a daeva instead of a Limboite with way fewer cool powers is by being a summoner when you're alive. Humans from other worlds have not shown up in our afterlife quartet - yet - but it could still be that summoning daeva plugs you in to the system. So, if you have something you'd rather be than a daeva-possibly-with-other-stuff-pruned-a
"Unfortunately, that rules out me, the mages, the spellbinders - we already have enough to worry about with them - and, I suppose, the twins, because who knows how that works. The daeva can't. So we have Max who's already involved, we have Spring who can probably be re-blessed - though maybe someone should ask Rae to check pretty please if he can bless daeva. We have Idania, maybe, if the answer is yes."
"Yeah, if we can count on his can-I-bless-them detector working definitely for sure. The reason we want to know is that we want to summon lots of angels to get rid of ash clouds in the new world we just contacted, and people who summon daeva are known to turn into daeva after death, and so we want only people whose powers are recoverable if they turn into daeva doing that. That's basically me, and you, and Max who's already done it whether it'll interact weird with him being a peryton or not."
"Ooo. Yeah, that's a valid reason." She addresses a sand vial. "Hey, Rae, people who summon daeva become daeva after they die. We're not sure how it messes with blessings or if they can be blessed. Want to test it on Adana and Cam?" Pause. "Yeah, that convinced him. Give him a bit, he'll come check."
"So, Spring and Idania and Max can summon angels - how long are you guys willing to spend finishing circles and making sure that the angels don't want anything I had better not give them and then dismissing them when we're done with them, should we call it good with three or call in other people?"
Five Verons (Cypress's, Prime's, Revival's, Conduit's, and Max's).
Four Charlies (Ice's, Flicker's, Katydid's, and Phix's).
Only one Renée (Flicker's) - the others being disqualified on account of being a witch, a spellbinder, and three different amounts of deceased. ("We could get back mine," Phix comments, "but I think she might want a little downtime rather than immediately meeting alts and summoning angels.")
"Going to have to say it," says one, identifiable only by his possum daemon from the others. "Weirdest experience of my life. Both of 'em, even. And that's saying something."
"Same," shrugs another.
"Roll with it?"
"There will be weirder things."
And that seems to be the extent of their reaction.
"I'm gonna... number you, so the angels know who to go to in order to be dismissed," says Cam. "I think the efficient way to handle this is to have you all in a line here near the Earth portal in Inferno, in front of a sign outlining the deal on offer. Me and Revival and Zane will be over here, I'll make most of each circle and you finish them. You ask the angel if it agrees to the printed deal, if it doesn't you dismiss it, if it does you say 'deal' and then it'll go through Conduit's portal - Conduit, you're going to want to put the Gemini end closer to ground zero - and then Revival'll clear the circle away and I'll replace it and you do it again. In a few hours angels will start coming back, us demons will give them things within the parameters outlined by the original deal, and they will go back to their summoners and you will dismiss them. This takes a minute of concentration per angel. If an angel wants to stick around and do extra ash-busting that's fine. Keep a checklist of how many angels you have summoned so we don't lose any."
To Gemini with girl Adarins. Flicker flicker flicker.
The lady behind the Junebug office desk looks nonplussed by Older Winged Conduit.
"Hi, captain," says Flicker. "If you don't recognize me, I'm Flicker, this is Conduit, and this is Conduit's alternate-universe winged duplicate with different magical powers. Those magical powers are very good for ash-cloud-fixing. Conduit's going to put a portal over Ground Zero and lots of winged people are going to come in and turn ash into air."
"It's likely that we'll also help with ash cover in other areas, but it's important to manage Ground Zero first."
"Uh," says the Junebug captain.
"Do you need any of that repeated or clarified? Do you want to forward us to your CO, your twin, or a specialist officer?"
"...I think I got it. Thanks."
"What did you do?"
"Sent a bunch of air-cleaning winged people through a portal."
"What were they doing?"
"Turning the ash into air."
"Where did they come from?"
"Well, the other end of the portal."
"Where did you find them?"
"It was pretty far away."
"Why were they helping?"
"I think I saw one of them take home a new espresso machine that a friend of ours got for him. I don't remember all of it."