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.
[Alice walked into Milliways about an hour ago and didn't mention he was going. He hasn't come out. I'm aware that sometimes Milliways is just uncooperative, but it hasn't been to us before, and I have to consider the possibility that he's managed to die or find something more interesting than being the consort of a space empress, mate bond notwithstanding. And that means that - quite apart from my personal reaction to his disappearance - I need to think about replacing him in a more functional capacity. I think I can get notes to everyone who might be able to usefully take over with a hex, maybe a star, but then assuming there's a bunch of them they have to be pared down, and they have to be trustworthy, because this would involve making them a mint.]
She checks.
Her ingot power won't allow it.
[Aaaand I'm right. Okay. My note draft looks like "A magical process, unmonitored in its details by any person, has determined that you may possess a skill which is essential to a position the Empire of the Stars is currently hiring for. If you may be interested, please email libby@eos.eos, or, if email is inaccessible, tear this note into eight pieces of any size and your identity and location will be noted. Any other response to this note will not alert anyone to the fact that you were among those contacted, and you should feel free to do so." I guess it's a bit complicated, but I can't really see working with anyone who doesn't understand that level of complexity anyway unless the circumstances get really dire. Can you interview them without explaining what exactly they're interviewing for? I'm going to want a magically enforced nondisclosure thingy and it'd be slightly more expensive for you to be able to do it as well.]
Bella can't do it with a hex. She spends a star, biting her lip. (At least she mass-declawed them after Alice turned and her supply of hexes doesn't have to be balanced against her supply of stars.)
Over the next day or so, masochists of Alice's caliber, or who would welcome becoming of same, who do not have jobs they like, who are not vehemently opposed to the Empire of the Stars or particularly wary of magic, who according to a naive and loose magical evaluation are reasonably bright and decent - receive notes.
She has to shift a lot of priorities to get them all down as fast as she wants to. Once or twice she has to pentagon a language. She does them in batches, and then she goes home and thinks hard about the people she's just met and whether or not she would trust them with the world.
It's a week before she gets back to Bella with a first-pass list of names, and it's a short list.
The emails, one addressed to Anna Reeve and one to Sandy Buford, read:
Hello! My personnel officer has shortlisted you; congratulations. When are you available to be teleported to Mars for an interview with me?
- the Empress of the Stars
She hits send.
She sighs, and closes her computer, and teleports to Alice's lair and hugs herself.
Works for me.
She'll go see Sandy first; she can go at noon sharp and if she hasn't decided on him one way or another by the time she needs to go visit Anna she can schedule another.
"Isn't it nice?" Bella says, affecting a chatty tone. She has decided not to tell anyone that she is - was? - has been known to be dating the previous occupant of the job they're interviewing for, so acting bereft will not serve her. "I'm very pleased with the place. Now. The note you got and the interview you had with my personnel officer didn't tell you what this is all about, did they?"
"Ideally, I'd like it to stay that way to the general public. So, should you agree to continue the interview, it will be under a non-disclosure agreement." Pause. "An enforced non-disclosure agreement. If you're not willing to be literally unable to discuss the rest of what we talk about today, then I'll teleport you - and your remaining orange juice - back home and that'll be that."
"Grand," she says. Unobtrusively, she digs the corner of one toenail into the neighboring toe, and a triangle appears in her palm. "This," she says, "is a wish coin."
"Wishcoins are extremely useful. This is just a little one, but they come in a variety of power levels. As the name implies, they let you make wishes. A triangle like this can, say - flip a lightswitch from across the room, or heat up lunch that's been left sitting on the counter for a few minutes. A square can conjure something - like my crown. Pentagons can grant someone a permanent nonmagical skill, like a language. Hexagons can do permanent magical superpowers, which is how I can teleport and fly and so on. Seven-pointed stars are what I used for terraforming this place. They're very convenient. The only inconvenient thing about them is how they have to be made." She sighs. "Wishcoins are made out of pain."
"I can make triangles and squares. I could make pentagons if I had to. I have made one hexagon and I was not in that situation voluntarily," says Bella. "I had help, someone who could cheerfully make even the star kind for days on end if the situation called for it, and he has wandered off to another dimension and I don't know if he's coming back. I have a non-wish-based magical power that, for the most part, is very useful, but it will not let me edit myself to be able to comfortably make larger coins. Hence the... job posting."
"The job is making coins. I have an -" She makes air quotes - "'agony beam', or you could arrange it on your own in some more usual way if you preferred. You'd get paid, yes, and you could keep some fraction of any coins you made for personal use - although there is a trick to stars and I must ask that you never try one of those."
"There's..." She shrugs. "Options. Geases like the nondisclosure agreement, maybe. I could read the last guy's mind, but I don't think I'd better make that an employment requirement. Libby likes you enough to have put you on the shortlist. That counts for a fair bit."
"Yes. Yes it is." She mentally consults the time; it is nowhere near her appointment with Anna. "What else would you like to know? Or tell me, for that matter? If you had as many wishes as you were willing to suffer through the requisite discomfort for, as opposed to the traditional three..." She shrugs. "What would you wish for?"
"If I had unlimited magic to throw around... I'd want a planet," he decides. "I don't know whether I'd make it or find one I liked and move in. But I'd have my own planet, and I'd live there and just make stuff all the time." As an afterthought, "I'd give myself magic Internet, too. You can do that, right?"
"Olympus has magic internet free to all residents with internet-friendly devices," agrees Bella. "It was easier to just make my own ISP than to figure out how to wire the place traditionally. I have not yet taken the step of installing a web browser in my brain, but it's occurred to me. A planet's kind of big for one person. Why a planet and not a moon or an asteroid?"
Bella waves a hand. "I'm going to colonize the entire galaxy. Giving one person who's helping me do that proprietorship of Mercury or permission to occupy some currently unoccupied solar orbital shell with a new planet isn't a big deal. If I hire you and you stay on long enough."
Usually she'd kill the spare hour flying or designing cities or something.
Today -
She takes a nap that is exactly one hour long.
In Alice's bed, in Alice's lair.
And then she wakes up and triangles her hair presentable and teleports invisibly to Montreal.
"Nicely chosen experiment. Now, the reason that one only does little bitty things is because it's a triangle. There are also squares, pentagons, hexagons, seven-pointed stars, and I have exactly one eight-pointed three-dimensional thing that isn't particularly coinlike. Wishcoins are very convenient; the more points they've got, the more they can do. The inconvenient thing about them is where they come from." Pause, breath, eye contact. "Wishcoins are made of pain."
"Yeah, I know, my original assessment was along the lines of 'these are fucked-up magic powers,'" Bella agrees. "It's not something I can edit, not even with a star. I cannot make it so that wishcoins are made out of sunshine. They're just made of pain. More pain, pointier coin. I can make triangles and squares. I can make pentagons if I have to. I made a hexagon once, and I wasn't in that situation on purpose. And I used to have help, who could manufacture stars for days on end if the situation called for it, but he has wandered into another dimension and I don't know whether to expect him back - but I have to assume he's gone. Hence, job posting."
"You don't have a job that you like - I don't know whether you have none at all or just don't like the one you have. You aren't, at least in principle, anti-Empire-of-the-Stars or weirded out by magic. And according to a naive, loose, magically-handled definition of the terms, you are reasonably bright and decent."
"Depends on the coin," says Bella, spreading her hands. "I'm not going to sugar-coat it - for the big ones it's a lot. When I made the only hexagon I have ever made, I was hit by a van, broke most of the bones in my body, and might never have woken, let alone walked again, if my previous coinmaking helper hadn't patched me up. Stars are worse. It goes up exponentially per coin type in a unit I call 'triangles' because it's the minimum amount of pain to make one triangle - just a pinprick will do. So a square is what you get for anything in the range of ten to ninety-nine triangles."
"Magic is pretty good about this sort of thing," Bella says. "And while I can't make myself the right amount of masochist, it is an achievable edit for brains that aren't walled in like mine. And if you don't work out for some other reason, no big deal, I send you your last paycheck and you can go home or live on Mars like a regular Martian or whatever, although any coins you do make would still have to be dealt with appropriately."
"I don't really care if there are triangles floating around, as long as I don't have to deal with the PR issue of people knowing what constitutes them," says Bella, waving a hand. "Triangles aren't a big deal. Squares and up, though, can be, especially stars, which are mean and which you should not ever try to use. Martian ground rules prevent people from doing nasty things to each other, but there is a magic door to Earth right in the middle of this city. So I'd want to have the coins, or I'd want to be sure that you weren't giving them out like party favors and were using them responsibly. The last occupant of this position invited me to read his mind. I don't want to make that a condition of employment, but I do want to take the fact that I'm giving out phenomenal cosmic power very seriously."
"Letting coins you make leave your possession except in specified ways?" suggests Bella, shrugging. "The way I designed the power, I can release a geas - or even remove just parts of it, as long as the result is strictly less binding than the original - at any time, so there would be opportunities to revise it if it turned out to be inconvenient."
Bella nods. "I don't expect most people to want 'mindreading subject' as part of their job description," she says ruefully. "Do you have more questions? Or anything you want to tell me? I'd let you keep some reasonable fraction of the hexes and smaller you made, if I hire you; what would you do with them?"
Bella spreads her hands. "Yeah, that's a problem. It's possible I should have charged some pittance and spouted bull about economies of scale. But that seems like such a wretched thing to do. I can give it away for free, I want to give it away for free, all I want to do is wear a crown and introduce myself as Empress of the Stars and have some actual happy citizens to back that up - finessing a complicated signaling game to do less of what I want doesn't appeal."
"He's kind of hard to break up with?" she says. "I mean, it's not like he stalks me or anything, it's just we've been together for a while and there's always more of each other's stuff to give back and then he brings me flowers and we end up accidentally on another date and... why am I telling an empress about my love life," she laughs. "Sorry."
"I'm afraid that someone - not necessarily Davey, could be a neighbor or a family member or a friend - will figure out what you do for a living. Or will just notice that everything is suddenly working out a lot nicer for you and determine that you have something going on. We can arrange for you to be unable to distribute coins, some small mercy, but I can't think of an unintrusive way to make sure the people in your life can't have leading conversations with you about what they'd do with magic or about my politics or about how they really don't like that one guy down the street or whatever. Even if we set it up so all the coins you make teleport to my stash instantaneously and I give you an allowance, instead of the setup where you've got a quota to manage on your own or with my help and can keep the excess... you'll have some access to magic, or I shouldn't be trusting you with mint powers in the first place."
"I give my friends stuff all the time. The stuff itself isn't a big deal. The information - and the possible badgering - could be, depending on who gets it. You're still dating a guy you don't get along with; are you still friends with someone pushy who'll take the appearance of an out of print book as a cue to tell you to curse their enemies or wish them exceptions to Mars's ground rules just this once, or...?" She waves a hand.
"If you lived on Mars you could 'block' him. Mars works like some websites in that way," says Bella. "I haven't installed that on Earth yet - I try to confine my work there to things that no one can object to without sounding evil, like eradicating malaria - but if you don't want to hear from him again and he's making that difficult, that can be arranged."
"Well, how it works on Mars is that if Andy decides to block Betty, they don't exist for each other. They can walk right through each other, certainly can see through each other and don't hear any sounds the other produces. They can't enter each other's apartments. There's some weirdness if they're in the same place at the same time and one of them is visibly interacting with an object, but I couldn't come up with a good way to get around that. If I were handling your case individually it could be more customized."
She teleports to Alice's lair again, and lets her smile fall.
Bad enough to lose her boyfriend. Worse to have to interview potential replacements.
But he might never come back. And she has other things to do.
(She is glad she didn't turn herself into a vampire. Golden Bella was in no shape to run the world during the years she spent without Edward.)
[I'm managing. The uncertainty's almost worse than the mere fact of his absence - but while I plan to try it anyway when I get the chance, I think past-viewing in Milliways would probably just get me a smear by virtue of whatever lets it be at the end of the Universe for forever in subjective time.]
[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.]
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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Maybe he's just... stuck?" offers Lazarus. "If he went to Milliways and got into something he couldn't get out of without help, and no one else came along to rescue him, he might not come out until you can go get him. ...I don't know. I'm just trying to be optimistic. Maybe I shouldn't."
"The things that could get him stuck are probably also Lovecraftian. He carries coins with him; he's not significantly less able to self-rescue than I am to play the cavalry. I wish I knew," exclaims Bella. "If I knew he was dead, I could see if a star will fix that. And I don't know, and there are half a dozen reasons why wishing on a star could fail besides him being alive. There's even some possibility that if I were at all inexact I'd wind up duplicating him while he's alive somewhere in his original form."
"I don't think he'd mind, or at least he wouldn't mind much, but I'd mind, and I have no idea how it would interact with the vampire mate bond," says Bella. "Frozen in time - possible. When I find Milliways I'll try everything I can think of to track him down. I'll bring you with me if you'll come. You have good ideas, you can see things I can't." She sighs.
"The empressing is fun," Bella reassures him. "The losing my boyfriend and having all this power and not having a way to get him back is the part that's getting me down. I can't even wish for a door. But," she shrugs. "Golden managed to raise a daughter with negligible money, everyone she knew thinking she was dead, and her thinking her mate was dead. I'm in better shape than that. I didn't crack during the interviews at all." She sighs. "The hug helped, though."
"Dunno if he'd mind, but of the two people I interviewed he is not the one who opted to chide me for teleporting directly into his house instead of knocking," shrugs Bella. "I'll leave him be if he complains. Just a sec." [Hey, Sandy, it's me, got a minute?]
[Huh. Well, Libby has summarily rejected everyone she had still to interview, so it's down to you and one other person. I'm considering just hiring you both so I don't have to do this again if one of you walks into the magic interdimensional portal and doesn't come out. Or if one of you quits, for the more mundane possibility.]
[Can they interact with anyone else? Can they do things, besides observe, talk amongst themselves, and interact with you in dreams - for instance, could one take the purely mental action of making a wish and use your skin to count as being in contact with a coin?]
[Yeah, I can come by and give you a triangle, but do you think they'll cooperate with the trying part? Can you tell if they do or don't? I might not be able to directly interact with them, if part of your power is that they're hidden away like that - "ingot" powers beat mint wishes.]
And port. She doesn't bother with turning invisible first.
"Very peculiar. Er, but I'm not sure to what extent I want to trust them. I haven't even met them - and Libby, who is my external module for character judgment these days, hasn't either - and -" She makes another square, and it doesn't go; she tries a pentagon and it doesn't go. "If their claim is magically checkable it at least requires unusually heavy-duty magic to check it."
Teleportation!
"Sandy's little friends," Bella says, "say they can't wish on a coin he's holding, but I'd like to be a little surer than the word of people I've never met. And I'm not sure if it would be safe for me to..." She makes a vague gesture. "Meet them. If my slew of magic stuff would work there."
"It was a compliment," Lazarus assures him. "What was the question again? If your 'little friends' can use a coin you're touching? Well, no," he says. "They're part of you, but they're not you. The interesting question is, can somebody take a coin into your dream world, and could they use it then? That one I can't answer."
"...I was going to say it should be fine as long as you don't actually hand them any big ones, but I'm not sure how much the fact that you'd be walking around inside someone's ingot power would affect things," he says. "One thing I can tell you, though, is that Sandy's power has almost no interest in the world outside Sandy. It would really surprise me if any of his magic friends wanted to wish on a coin, unless it was for something that affected him directly."
"Ingot powers are funky," says Bella. "But it's sounding like yours shouldn't be a problem." She ramps up to full speed, closing her eyes, and contemplates. Finally she says, "I'm going to tell Libby about the power and consult with her, but if she clears you given that you're hired."
"I am indeed the one who's magic." She is about to ask Mary to see about buying the Empire some Canadian dollars in a minute. "Bearing in mind that you may not attempt to use stars and any of those will have to go to me regardless of how many you make - does a quota model sound fair to you? Assuming I can get comparable output from your co-worker-to-be, barring emergencies, I would like to be getting two stars, a dozen hexagons, and some thirty pentagons each week. I can make my own squares and triangles, although of course I will be happy to take those off your hands if they should wind up cluttering your volcano castle or whatever on Amalthea. There will also need to be some combinations of geases and ground rules installed to prevent coins from leaving your possession except to be turned in to me or wished on for personal use, the nondisclosure agreement will continue to apply including to how discreet you'll need to be about using your coins, and I recommend that you consult me or Lazarus about the precise design of any hexagon-sized wishes while you're getting used to things."
"The geases have to be done out loud because of how I designed the power - I like to make it inconvenient for myself to do things I oughtn't - but I can install ground rules now if you don't have questions about how they're going to work or anything," Bella says to Sandy.
"New coins you make will appear somewhere in contact with your person. Especially since you're highly likely to produce coins in your sleep and not be able to direct that accurately, I want that automatically directed to someplace safe - even someone who travels to Amalthea and sneaks into your bedroom shouldn't be able to take your coins. And I really don't want you to give them away, either. You can make small, discreet wishes for friends, but the idea of all the secrecy is that I don't really want to have to explain where my magic is coming from anytime soon, and someone clever could get a lot of mileage from knowing who else has it. That one we can do with a geas or with a limitation on your coin repository preventing the coins from leaving it except by a wish from me or direct use by you."
Since he doesn't exhibit a preference between the geas or ground rules option, and since she trusts ground rules to hold up against more situations than geases, she shrugs and implements it as such. And she makes him a chain like hers. She hands him his new expansible coin-chain. "Here. I have one like it, but you can't see it. Wear it. It won't come off unless I allow it, so you aren't going to pull it off in your sleep or whatever. It and coins on it will go through anything that isn't you or me, it and coins on it are invisible to anyone who isn't you or me, coins will go on it when you make them, it'll get longer if there get to be a lot of them, you can make wishes with coins on it but only I can take them off."
"It's entirely possible that you'll be able to make all the coins you need to overnight. If that turns out to be not the case, I recommend wishing yourself some sort of regeneration power if you want to handle them yourself, or I can agony-beam it for you," Bella says in as businesslike a fashion as possible.
His chain acquires a triangle; he holds it up to inspect it. It's not glossy like Alice's or glowy like Bella's or sparkly like Elias Frobisher's: it's a dark, mottled red-purple like the inside of a bruise, and it's flat, without texture or shine.
"My favourite colour," he says happily. "Cool."
"You can wish for a copy of a power I have without actually having me explain what you're copying," she says. "You might not want to do that with all my powers. For instance, my regeneration comes with anaesthetic. But I like my teleportation design enough to recommend it to you, and it's simpler to operate than some of my arsenal."
"What I did for the other person I hired," Bella says, "is I made him a coin-holding chain similar to mine. I can do the same thing for you. It and coins on it will be insubstantial to anything but you, and invisible to anyone but you and me. It won't come off unless I tell it to, it'll automatically collect any coins you make, and coins won't go off of it unless I wish them off or you use them and they disappear outright. This way no coins will go astray. Does that sound like a plan?"
"Good, that's much more convenient for me. You've been to this planet so you've already got an account for those to go in." She names the same quota that she did for Sandy - stars, hexes, pentagons, optional squares and triangles. "Sound doable? If you want to do these by yourself instead of by agony beam I recommend hexing up a regeneration power."
Teleport teleport. "Sandy, this is Anna. Anna, this is Sandy. Oh, I need to give you your chain still -" She makes Anna a chain, and she hands it over. "And mint you." She does that too. "Ta-da. Aaaaand you're not going to be able to talk shop unless I - there. You can talk shop to each other, as well as me, just not anyone else."
And then she teleports away.
To Alice's lair.
And lets her acting-pentagon-manfactured smile fall off her face and shatter on the floor, and cries.
[Lazarus, Sandy and his new co-worker have more questions about mindscape visitations,] Bella adds to her magic-seeing-guy.
She doesn't really. But she'd like to cultivate that impression, especially as the empire grows and her things to do list may grow with it. [Out of your building's front door, hang a left, he's in the one with the blue detailing around the doors and windows, first floor, room 177. I'll meet you there if you turn out to need wish-designing expertise on top of details about what exactly you'd be wishing for.]
She visits Charlie for a bit. He's pleased to see her and grudgingly happy about the protection-from-reporters that he has enjoyed. She makes him grilled cheese sandwiches - from scratch - for old times' sake, and they eat them in companionable silence.
Until he asks her where Alice is, and she explains in spare summary, sobered and no longer hungry for the last three bites. The visit doesn't last much longer after that.
She's not mad at Charlie. She just misses her Alice.
[Hey Kolya, do you care if I retroactively spy on the meeting with Anna and Sandy and Lazarus in which you caused Anna to eep?]
Ah, Lazarus eeping never gets old. She is also pleased to note that her ingot power persists even retroactively and she can see Kolya up until the moment he reveals himself. (Her illusion-seeing doesn't work through the past-viewing, so she doesn't see a difference except in everyone's behavior; she may need to edit that later, but she thinks she'll hold off until she's collected a batch of coins from her new mints.)
[You're very cute when you eep, you know,] she informs Lazarus.
She checks for Alice's mind. It's not there.
She stalks through the bar, singleminded, looking at faces. An alt who might have been around long enough to see him pass through; he loves - loved? - meeting alts, he would have stopped to greet one. An alt of her, maybe who might have caught his attention. She'll check the Belltower after covering the main floor.
Finally, she asks the bar.
"Excuse me," she says, surprising herself by sounding soft and tentative. "Do you happen to know where my Alice went? He came in here and hasn't come out."
She closes it. She tries wishes, one after the other, until finally a star goes, and she opens the door.
She thinks this might actually be Roberta's house. Perhaps Roberta can be induced to hold the door for her while she mounts a rescue mission. Or looks for Alice's body. [Lazarus. Bar says Alice left with the Joker. I've been to his world. before. Stars can force the door to open where I want. You coming?]
"Yes," says Bella firmly. "If you hold this door until I come back, I will grant you three wishes. Roberta let me through once, I'm the one who put the Joker on an asteroid? I need to - run an errand in your world and don't want to spend any longer here than I have to."
Alfred blinks at her. "I am capable of holding the door," he says.
"Excellent. Lazarus, do you want to be invisible or do you just want me to drop you off on the opposite side of the asteroid from the Joker and 'see' through it for me?"
She might mean the asteroid, or the person.
They share a name for a reason.
She lands Lazarus and herself on the point on the asteroid that is diametrically opposite the Joker's current location. And then she looks for Alice's mind. She could have done this first, but she wants to confront the Joker either way.
And she lifts off into the artificial atmosphere of the asteroid and zooms the relevant few kilometers to where she needs to be.
"We went out my door. He's in here somewhere, now. But I don't know how to get him out again. With Ghosty, she just..." he makes a little fanfareish explosive gesture with his hands, "popped back into the bar before I woke up. I didn't have to do anything about it."
"In there somewhere? Can he get out? Is he aware?" Bella demands, relaying the entirety of the conversation so far transcribed to Lazarus in the text form of the brainphone. Struck by inspiration, she also tries brainphoning Alice; maybe talking will work where reading doesn't. [Alice?]
Alice doesn't answer her. She doesn't even get a busy message.
"So all you know is that it worked fine when Ghosty tried it - when Ghosty is a completely unrelated species of undead and already has among her abilities the ability to get into and out of other people. And you brought Alice back with you anyway and you don't know anything else. Is that the gist here?"
The hex works.
Alice hugs his Bella.
"I'm sorry," he says, "I didn't know that was gonna happen, we thought it was safe, Ghosty tried it first and everything, please don't be mad, I love you."
"I thought you were dead," she says into his shoulder, hugging him as tightly as she possibly can. "I thought you were dead, I thought you'd run into something horrifying straight out of Lovecraft that killed you in spite of everything, I couldn't think what else - Ghosty is not a reasonable test - she can get into and out of people already - she is not the same sort of undead creature you are - I thought you were dead, I love you, I love you, I love you -"
"Thank you," she says, turning her head just enough out of the hug to clearly direct the comment at the butler. "Thank you so much. Do you want those three wishes?"
"I do not believe that will be necessary, although I may tell Miss Wayne that you offered, in case she ever wishes to call in a rain check," says Alfred.
"Sure, she can collect too if you want to transfer them. Thank you so much."
Not letting Alice go for a minute, she sort of shuffles back into Milliways.
"I thought you were dead and I couldn't wish a door to Milliways - I can force it to go where I want from the inside, turns out, but I can't make one appear, not even with a star - to look for you - and I thought you were dead. And I still had this empire to run and I need coins for that so I hired mints."
"Sure you can meet them. They're nice. They're called Anna and Sandy. Anna has moved to Mars and Sandy lives in Toronto and he's also an ingot. I actually gave the Joker a copy of his power to get you out - Lazarus's idea - he has a persistent mindscape with people in it."
[Shapeshifting power's probably the most efficient thing,] Bella murmurs; her face is pressed into his shirt and she doesn't feel like moving it to talk aloud. She has looked up all the X-Men since their first discussion of where to get ideas for powers: [Like Mystique, with this as your default shape.]
She tells Libby first - a summary of what happened and that she's going to cut Sandy and Anna's quotas but continue to employ them - and then she conference-brainphones all three of the relevant mints.
[Hey, Sandy, Anna, you guys busy? I have news.]
[I'm cutting your quotas. Your predecessor is not permanently vanished into another dimension after all; I mounted a successful rescue mission. I'm keeping you on for necessary redundancy, but as long as there's three of you I don't expect more than half of what I said before. Still happy to take excess if you don't have enough ideas, though. And, he's curious about you and wants to be introduced.]