friendly door

[her_imperial_radiance]

Elspeth gets a door.

It's been so long she reels for a moment, and then she throws herself forward and almost lands in a peal of Bells. Yes, there's Shell Bell, there's Juliet and Aurora, there's Glass, there's some Matilda she hasn't seen before.

"Elspeth!" exclaims Glass.

"How long has it been?" Aurora asks.

"Seventeen years. Shell Bell - I need you to help me find Harley," says Elspeth.

Comments

[cross_and_bow]

"I tried wishing it fixed. Maybe I didn't know enough to be specific correctly."

[incanted]

"Are the clocks synced up?"

[queensidecastle]

"In the ring and the tower? As much as they can be," she says. "Right now there's such pervasive instability, the tower isn't synced up with itself. But the two ends of the link you gave me agree with each other. I'm guessing there's more links in the tower, but I can't reach them to tell you how their clocks are doing."

[she_sells_seashells]

"She is so, so broken," sighs Shell Bell. "Last time wasn't this bad. What is in that world?"

[thaumobabble]

"I'll stick my head in first and find out but I want Golden covering me while I do it. Or Tab, if Tab can do that," shudders Glass.

[giftedandtalented]

"I can blanket other people as long as I'm awake," Tab assures her. "I can also do it inside-out but that's probably not what you have in mind. And - Kers, I didn't wink out when I left the world, did I?"

[queensidecastle]

"Nope," she says. "Do you want me to start covering your friends?" She eyes the small crowd. "I can get these, but how many more are there?"

[giftedandtalented]

"I'm number fourteen, total," says Tab. "If you only count Bells and not anybody's partners or children or siblings. It's mostly Glass, she's the one who'd need to peer into uninvestigated worlds like the one that broke Jane. The rest of them should be fine coasting on wishes and torching."

[queensidecastle]

"Done," shrugs Kers.

[thaumobabble]

"Thanks," says Glass. "I like my aura powers. On net. The part where I'm the bellwether for - oh, hey, that's a pun in English, cute - for nasty worlds is a little scary."

[queensidecastle]

"Well, now you have fewer things to be scared of."

[thaumobabble]

Glass smiles at her.

Then she suddenly squints at Tab, and at Aelise, and frowns, and says, "How did you two meet exactly?"

[giftedandtalented]

"...Why, what are you seeing?"

[thaumobabble]

"...It looks like she almost killed you."

[giftedandtalented]

"It was an option on the table but I was pretty smart when I was six so she could stash me elsewhere instead, I sulked about it for a while when I was thirteen," says Tab. "How is that the sort of thing you can see? It's not exactly a Bell attractor, is it?"

[thaumobabble]

"...No, it's not a template thing, it's a metacausality thing that isn't a template thing," says Glass. "It looks - ugh, this power - it looks like she retroactively didn't kill you."

[salus_populi]

"...What kind of sense is that supposed to make?"

[thaumobabble]

"I don't know!" exclaims Glass. "My aura didn't come with an instruction manual, I just say things."

[giftedandtalented]

"...Well, I'm alive," says Tab. "And well. And I had to fake my death, but that's not unprecedented." She waves at Shell Bell and Golden.

[salus_populi]

Aelise smiles.

"And we're halfway to solving the immortality scale issue, if you can create Harleys at will. So in a hundred years or so, when Chelsa dies of old age, you can contact your parents without risking the stability of my empire."

[giftedandtalented]

"I was thinking of putting Toronto on Venus," says Tab. "And then they could just quietly emigrate."

[incanted]

"Putting Toronto on Venus would be a lot easier with Jane, but you should be able to do it with a hex for the city - maybe a star - on top of terraforming the planet, and the population will probably go with an arrow, and the admin solved the duping problem. I can spot you the coins, but you'll want your own mint. Maybe we can finagle Ghosty for you if Corona never wants to come back."

[salus_populi]

Aelise nods thoughtfully.

"You can have Toronto, sure. And a certain amount of quiet emigration. That will definitely solve some problems. But keep an eye on your Gifted and call me if you sense trouble; I would like to have the Last War stay that way. And don't resurrect Delphi. There's a reason they dropped a nuclear bomb on that crowd."

[she_sells_seashells]

"We'll stop by Origin and you can talk to Stella about managing ingots. They're not as scaled-up and splashy as Gifted, but they do invariably 'win' versus coined stuff."

[giftedandtalented]

"Sure. Delphi sleeps forever, I crib Stella's notes," says Tab agreeably.