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Mars has more people on it now. Bella has conjured herself a crown of seamless moissanite and star sapphire, and wears it around most of the time. She does something nice for Earth every Cygnus and makes routine public appearances, with the PR guy Libby found for her on the brainphone steering her away from missteps. (Most missteps. Occasionally she just disagrees with him.) Life is good.
It happens one day that she attempts to read Alice, thinking it about time to top off her supply of coins - and besides, even if it weren't, she does like to spend time with her boyfriend - and - he's not there.
Her first reaction is panic. She has known from the beginning that a contest between them would come down to reaction time. Did she screw up by introducing him to Ghosty - did something else happen - does some switch trip in the relevant template at a certain age, is hers decent only because he's young - has he blocked her off with his considerable power and begun to wreak havoc?
But of course there's a much more reasonable explanation. He's in Milliways, that's all, he found a door and wandered off without thinking to notify her.
Because visits to Milliways take only moments worldside. This has been true even when they've been into other's worlds: the door is at a very narrow slice of time except when held open.
But she checks again a minute later.
And he's still not there.
Is he dead? Did he think of - stumble across - cook up some way to die that would be so fascinating that he had to try it right then, without consulting her, without thinking of her and how it would hurt her at all, without knowing if stars can revive the dead -
Or did he, somehow, in spite of what is now magically bolstered love for her -
Decide not to come back at all?
She's getting ahead of herself. She can find out if he went to Milliways or not. She -
Stops before completing her wish.
If he's gone - if he's not coming back soon, or at all - then she has to work at least for a while with the coins she already has.
She will not spend a pentagon to see this one snippet of the past. She will spend a hex to gain past-viewing as a stable power she can use whenever she wants. If she chooses the right powers to make with her current supply of hexes, she may be able to coast for many years with almost no individual wishes larger than a square. Now that she has the template of Olympus to draw on she's sure she could find a way to compress wishes for more cities - maybe even planetsful of cities - into single stars, and she has a lot of stars from the days Alice spent turning.
And there have got to be other masochists in the world. Some might be comparable, or people like Shell Bell's Sherlock who'll willingly be made so.
Her empire will go on just fine.
Bella's just not sure - when she's finished designing and installing the power, when she's finished watching Alice casually walk through the kitchen door in his lair to Milliways instead and not come out - whether she will.
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self_composed
self_composed
[One of my alts who calls herself Shell Bell - isn't that cute? - and another one whose name is Isabella Amariah and goes by just Amariah among ourselves set up a room in Milliways. The Bar'll give keys to any of us who show up and tell them where to find it. There's a guestbook. I'll give you a key if you like. Amariah's a witch. And I made Shell Bell and her girlfriend into mints, since they didn't have any of their own magic. I don't think the vampire me found it yet but I told Bar to give Elspeth a key since she's in there more often than her mom anyway.]
self_composed
She appears in his apartment. (She will cultivate the knocking habit when she's not dealing with people who she's just brainphoned in advance.) She presents him with a key. "I think if there are ever enough of us in the place at the same time for it to feel crowded, I'll ask Bar if I can put an actual tower out back, but so far it's just the three who've found it and Golden who will soon enough."
self_composed
"It was trippy. Me and Golden have - practically identical histories. Up until the point where we both moved to Forks, and I found coins and she found vampires. Shell Bell was a whole other story. She's from this crappy nonmagical world with a totalitarian government and she's been going to Milliways since she was six trying to collect stuff to survive and maybe be able to do something about it. The witch alt killed the president for her - I have no reason to dispute this action as correct, although I might've been capable of more restraint since I have more flexibility - and then I gave her the tools to solve the rest of the problem."
nonbird
"What's the witch alt's magic like? Or did you not find that out? I want to meet her," Lazarus declares.
self_composed
"I didn't meet her personally. Shell Bell described how she did it - apparently spells are made up of various combinations of poems and drawing symbols in various substances and killing animals and putting herbs on stuff. And she's got a talking owl named Pathalan who she claims is her external soul and she kept calling everyone at Milliways 'zombies' because we don't have external souls. And she -" Bella sobers. "Has an alt of Alice, too."
self_composed
"And of course he's also got an external soul and instead of being an owl or something she can change shape."
self_composed
"Shell Bell doesn't have one, though, her girlfriend is called Sherlock Stark, I met her and her brother Tony. And apparently the Stark twins have alts that they've met, too, and the alternate Tony has a Belltower key. It's all very tangled."
nonbird
"Not unreasonably so, if you ignore how many of these people are... each... other." He smiles ruefully.
self_composed
"Yeah. I wonder why some people have bunches of alts and some people don't. Or why some people find bunches of alts and some people don't. Shell Bell wanted to find another us since somebody first told her that she reminded them of 'her Majesty' - it seems to be a common theme that we take over the worlds in which we find ourselves and run magical empires, and Shell Bell figured - quite correctly - that encountering one of those would be her ticket to success."
self_composed
"Is it? I haven't been making any other mints - although I need to hire at least one of the people I interviewed today if the rest of Libby's interviews fail to turn up another shortlist. Who else have I been arranging success for particularly?"
self_composed
"If you want to call having a place to live and food to eat and not dying of cancer success instead of a reasonable start, sure," shrugs Bella.
nonbird
"Maybe success isn't the word I wanted. You're a lot of people's ticket to more than they otherwise had."