She flies on intercessions, and generally brings him along, for rain, to halt a blizzard, to calm a storm, and once she finds a plague flag and puts Micaiah down far away from the settlement while she quizzes the healthier community members about their symptoms. Angels rarely catch the plague; she feels safe enough picking Micaiah up again so he can listen to her sing through the verse designated for each complaint (this for fever, that for cough, the other for the rash) and watch the pills fall to earth. The flag comes down and they continue home.
She keeps half an eye on Nathaniel, and quietly informs Baruch of the situation as well so he'll be mindful of the boy's potential sensitivities.
She falls into an assistant role with Delilah - nothing so formal as the situation she had with Linus, because Isabella would be living at the Eyrie either way, but Delilah sends her to greet visitors and has her take notes at meetings and occasionally even asks her opinion on questions about this or that.
And one morning, Isabella opens her door to leave her quarters and sing a pre-dawn duet with Serah - and the hallway is not there.
"Micaiah," she murmurs.
She steps, slowly, as though afraid to put weight on the floor, but she goes in.
"What kind of place is this?" murmurs Isabella.
"I'll - meet her - but why would different worlds have copies of people on them with talking snakes, or - anything?" asks Isabella, stepping further into the bar to follow where they lead. "We were carried to Samaria from another world, but not in such a way that I would expect copies of our ancestors to produce copies of us over the years."
"Hello! Wow, you've got wings, that's new, none of the others so far have wings, though if Stella hasn't wished to fly yet I'll eat my cloudpine," says the other her chattily. "I'm Isabella Amariah and this -" She indicates the owl, who waves a wing - "is Pathalan. You can call me Amariah for non-redundancy and him Path for short. What about you?"
"You must not even have magic, wings aside," remarks Amariah. "Okay. Path and Petaal are called daemons. On our world, everyone has them. They're like our souls, but we keep them outside of our bodies. Children's daemons can turn into anything they like. Most settle down around puberty - Path can only be this kind of owl, now - but Petaal never did. She can be whatever she wants. Including a he. So she'll change shape sometimes, and sometimes does this in such a way as to suddenly be something that would normally wear clothes but not have any. Make sense?"
"This is the most bizarre thing to have ever happened in my life," she says, but she picks up the odd pen beside the book, figures out which end writes, and puts in her own page. "I don't understand how to put the pictures in."
"Yeah, that's Path. That's most people, actually. Petaal's more..." Amariah shrugs. "Touchable. To alts of Kas, anyway. There should really be some general name for the class now there's at least four floating around; they don't have name consistency like we do... That doesn't mean you should touch her, though," Amariah adds hastily. "No one should without asking. It's... intimate." Her expression clearly indicates that this is an understatement.
"Jovah chose us for each other," says Angela. She glances at Amariah's bare arm and explains: "The bits of crystal in our arms - they're our dedications to the god - they get people's attention when they've met their true loves - mine never looked like this before I met Micaiah. And to be sure, I checked with the oracle at Sinai, and she said that if I were ever named Archangel, he'd be my angelico."
"...Okay, look, maybe your one is different, or something," says Amariah. "But based on what I know about the template doubled up over there, I was almost surprised to find them just cuddling and not making out or outright absconded into one of the bedrooms by the time we came back. Maybe your god is really good at finding true loves, and sure, he'll always come back, but I don't think you're looking at a life of monogamy with - what is an angelico?"
"I'm from the kind of world in which I'm an endangered species," Angela says defensively. "Everything I know was presented with the expectation that I'm on board with the project of making more angels. Dalliances aren't uncommon - anything to make more little angels - I can get used to that, particularly if the other people he wants to dally with are other angel girls - but no, this is new, give me a minute."
"Why, just because I've never heard of - people absconding to bedrooms with others of the same sex? All right," says Angela, sighing. She is tired of standing. She sits on the floor, extending her wings behind her; this will be uncomfortable in a while but by then her feet will be ready to hold her up again. "I was born in an angel hold. It's - rich, and comfortable, and there is always music, and the leader of the host there was also Archangel for the first fifteen years or so I lived and even now that the title has passed on to Linus at Monteverde it's still a place of political consequence for the province. Angels pray for weather, or sometimes for seeds or medicines, and Jovah grants our prayers, and I've been able to do intercessions alone or with help since I was thirteen. We are always concerned about making more angels, and there's never a guarantee that any given child will be one - even the one time in history Jovah allowed two angels to wed, this was only because they were not about to produce malformed lucifers; even the only safe pairing of angels ever to have occurred resulted in one mortal daughter along with her angel sisters. My parents tried for more children but Rinnah hasn't been able to get pregnant again since she bore a stillborn mortal brother when I was six."
"It's okay," sighs Amariah. "You've heard it now. At least you're reacting like you really just never heard of it and not like it's inherently evil or against your religion or something, because that would be awkward. There are religions on my world that forbid it. Mine doesn't care," she adds with a grin.
"Loan me a bracelet, I'll get a stack of them and we can keep this place stocked," says Amariah, and once she's gotten one of the credit bracelets, she goes, and comes back with a bunch of blank notebooks and pens and pencils. She hands one of each to the angel.
"Well, that's not something you're going to have to worry about once you and Micaiah go home and nobody has them, but," Amariah shrugs, "there's different ways to do it. Usually people don't touch each other's daemons. It's more intense, more intimate, than sex. Even married couples sometimes never get that far. In which case the daemons snuggle with each other somewhere nearby to whatever extent their shapes allow. In this case, Petaal's touchier than most, and besides Micaiah doesn't have one of her to keep her occupied if they left her out - she'll be involved directly - but really she's not a separate person, if that's what has you concerned. ...Do I need to explain that more than two entire separate people can have sex, too...?"
"You hungry? Buy me lunch with your fancy credit bracelets," says Amariah, and she pulls the angel to her feet and leads her back downstairs. They sit at the bar and Amariah explains how it works, and Angela dutifully buys them both meals, although hers - given that it's not even dawn where she came from - is breakfast.
Amariah notices him and recognizes the face, and narrows it down from a few possibilities based on the observant look. "Hi, Sherlock!" she says, friendly, before she notices that something is wrong, and leans back, narrowing her eyes. "Oh, you're not the one I was thinking of. What is wrong with your soul?"
"That sucks," says Amariah. "I don't actually go by Bella. It's Isabella, which is itself short for Isabella Amariah, and when there's others around my unique nickname of choice is the Amariah part instead. This one's also Isabella and she decided to go by Angela for antiredundancy purposes. Angela, this is an alt of Shell Bell's girlfriend, but not the one I met before. Sherlock, you've got a Bella in your world?"
"Likewise! I've been here a few times, and me and Shell Bell, who is not here today, are the founding members of the Belltower, which is a place for alts of us and our friends to hang out, but this is Angela's first time and she's from a weird world that I don't fully get yet, so she's reeling a little," Amariah says chattily. "You looked surprised when you walked in - first timer?"
"What's Juliet's story? I'm a witch and I have an artifact that cryptically dispenses objective truth and I'm working on taking over the world with that and ritual magic. Angela's an angel and she's trying to be a good person so her god will appoint her Archangel. Stella, who's not here today either and I haven't met her but she signed the guest book, colonized Mars and is already calling herself Empress, and Shell Bell is well on her way and she's met Stella and Stella can give out her ultra-powerful sort of magic, so Shell Bell's probably done taking over her world by now too. And Stella has reportedly met a vampire - although not, I think, your kind - of us who is an empress also. It's a trend."
"Juliet's story is several thousand years old," he says, "but a brief sketch: my world is overrun with all sorts of nasty bitey creatures, of which vampires are perhaps the most numerous but by no means the only. A long time ago, some collection of magic-wielding people with bizarre priorities decided to dump a lovely package of superpowers onto a teenage girl and make her fight off the nasty bitey hordes for them, with the superpowers then passing on to yet another teenage girl when the first was inevitably killed in the line of duty. Juliet is the latest such person; they're called Slayers. I am currently acting as her bodyguard and martial arts instructor in the hope that she will live past twenty-six, which no other Slayer has ever done."
"If this is your first time here," Amariah says, "then you won't know - the place has a time-distortion effect and if everything goes normally you'll leave at the same time you came in. So there's no hurry, but if you haven't been here before you also don't know how routinely you find the door... Jarvis -" She pauses, assessing his reaction to the mention.
"...Could open a door with perfect reliability, but everyone else is stuck with some amount of chance. My boyfriend finds this place every couple of months; I've never found it on my own yet. Shell Bell used to wait a year or more sometimes, between door-finding; her Sherlock gets better results and her Tony can sometimes get it on purpose but the other Tony couldn't and I don't remember about the other other Sherlock. We don't have stats on Angela or her boyfriend - he's an alt of mine - yet. And Stella didn't leave notes about her and her friends - Stella's boyfriend is also an alt of mine - but she did mention that she told Bar to give a Belltower key to the vampire us's daughter because she's here a lot and her mom isn't. My point is, I could wind up stuck in your world for a while, will I have a place to crash or should I see if Angela will buy me a hammock with her credit bracelets and hang it from my cloud-pine somewhere up in the sky?"
He shifts to vampire face: nose and brow ridged in an artificial snarl, teeth long and sharp and dangerous, eyes a wolfish yellow.
"Except, of course," he reverts to his human face again, "when they don't. I live in a crypt because I catch fire when exposed to sunlight, so participating in normal human society is generally hazardous to my health, and the town of Sunnydale is oversupplied with graveyards so there are plenty of crypts to go around."
"Earth; winter of 2005; Sunnydale, California; and we have literally uncounted sentient species, in that no one has ever been able to accurately count them, but humans and vampires are probably the two largest populations. The existence of anything other than humans is not widely known."
"Huh. I'm almost nineteen, so older but not by much; I was born in ninety-four. In a few decades I'll have a lovely patina of ageless witchiness though. Before you ask, I haven't figured out to make non-witches as immortal as we are," she adds regretfully. "I'm working on it, but the absolute truth device is limited to communicating through an array of thirty-six symbols with layers of meaning, and I can barely read it myself anyway, my boyfriend has to do most of it. It helps but I have legwork to do."
"Well, you can try me again when I've made more progress, or, talk to Stella or Shell Bell who's got a copy of her magic, or possibly Golden - we're not sure she'll go by Golden as she hasn't been by in person yet, but it seems likely - and they'll be able to take care of it. Golden's probably a last resort if there's enough hope you'll run into one of the others of us, though, since her way involves a species change and stuff. We all get along with each other and we'll be more than happy to help your Juliet with immortality," says Amariah encouragingly. "Or she might work it out herself, given enough magic to play with. In the meantime I can make her somewhat less vulnerable to physical harm."
The guestbook contains profiles and a visit log of which (isa)bell(a)s encountered which other (isa)bell(a)s, and Stella's secondhand description of Golden, her empire, and her world standing in as a placeholder until Golden appears in person or authorizes her and Edward's daughter Elspeth to do it for her.
The walls are now decorated with more pictures than there are (isa)bell(a)s apart from Angela, since Amariah put up two, one of Forks and one of the cloudpine forest; Stella added an aerial view of Olympus and Shell Bell has at some point been here and encountered no one but did decide to show off her Coral Palace.
"Unfortunately, no," he says. "The other side of the door for me is the inside of the aforementioned crypt; I was just stepping out to walk to her house. I assume the location is variable? Some other time it might decide to usurp the door to a janitor's closet or public bathroom?"
"Oh, a while ago I threw a rock at her window and then recited the opening lines of the balcony scene because it seemed hilarious at the time. It hasn't stopped seeming hilarious yet, and she likes the name. The fact that one of her is dating one of me is, I admit, a fascinating piece of information."
"Until you showed up I thought Kas and his alts were the only repeats, since Golden's husband is unique and the other Sherlock I met besides you and Shell Bell's didn't have a Bell of any sort, but maybe Sherlocks are interdimensionally popular among Bells too," says Amariah. "So you like Juliet but you're not dating her? Yet?"
"It may very well be," he says. "Vampires and Slayers are not exactly traditional allies; there was a certain amount of distrust when we first met. Distrust and crossbow bolts. And she certainly knows I like her, but she has not expressed any interest in return since I mentioned it."
"I am not really finding it likely that he'll turn down the proposition," says Amariah. "While we wait, let's talk protection spells - I can conjure up many of the materials I'll need on the spot, but some of them I'll want to get from Bar before we leave, like the tea tree oil, and you know better than I do what sorts of threats Juliet's up against." And she starts listing protective blessings and enchantments and tattoos she can do.
Amariah writes down notes. "She might veto the tattoos," she says. "Kas has a bayleaf, but he doesn't mind being marked up and he definitely doesn't mind it hurting. I cursed him with cluster headaches a while ago as a present and he complains when I suppress them because I'm worried Petaal's going to crash her cloudpine if one strikes at the wrong moment."
Angela taps the Kiss in her arm. "I mentioned that Jovah chose us for each other. There's the colors, but many people's Kisses also hurt when they're active. Mine doesn't. Micaiah's does, especially when I sing." Pause. "He makes the most curious faces sometimes..."
"She didn't write it down, but she told me about it. When she was resource-collecting, she found that one, he recognized her as one of Stella, and he said she could have his guns if she shot him with one of them. And she was like, '...okaaaaay...' and she shot him and took his stuff." Amariah shrugs. "He was all right, it turned out, Kas is always very excited to see him when they run into each other, but don't assume you can collect arbitrary injuries here - he shows up in his dreams when he's asleep, not through doors."
And then both Isabellas are hugging each other, chattering about celestial light and night-flying.
"Ooh," says Amariah, tilting her head. "Interesting. You might have to bite a little harder than you'd expect if you're aiming for blood, since he's got a bayleaf." She sits over by Petaal and Path, and reaches speculatively for an angel wing.
Except for a sudden tone shift at the last syllable when her expression goes darker, Path's feathers fluff out, and she reaches out to take Path back from Petaal.
"Sorry," she mutters. "Sorry."
"Most people's daemons can barely go across the room from them, but witches are different," says Kas. "She sent Path on an errand once and some complete sack of shit caught him on the way. It's already the worst thing in the world when somebody touches your daemon that you don't want to, but the asshole tortured him too."
"Witches aren't fundamentally different. We just make separation conventional instead of exceptional, and have access to the Waste," murmurs Isabella. "It isn't easier for us as a group. Some people have to try several times to get across the Waste. Kas was able to send Petaal after Path even though they weren't separated before. But Path was hours away."
Ultimately, though, she gets antsy, and she's wondering if Angela is even still there; they haven't talked about everything they might wish to talk about, after all. She slips out and ties her silks back on. "Can I throw a blanket over you guys for Angela's sensibilities before I go see if she's still there?"
"It's the only part of the name that always crop up. You and I aren't Swans, Shell Bell isn't an Isabella or even a Bella. Actually, I think this is why Alice's middle name is given as Whistle. Bells and whistles...? Do you not have that expression in Samaria? Well, anyway, I'm going to start calling Kas/Micaiah/Alice/Joker types Whistles as a group. I'm going to make a note of that in the guestbook."
"We're just about caught up here. If Angela'll spot me the credit for a hammock and the tea tree oil and whatnot so I can come home with you and help out Juliet, I'll help you carry them downstairs, dump them out in the living room through my door, and then visit your place and work some magic."
Angela asks Bar for an angel chair, gets one, and hauls it up to the Belltower so she'll have somewhere to sit that isn't the floor or the beds. She wants to hang out a little more to see if anyone else comes by. Perhaps she will get in a nap before going home, too, so that she can act as though it is five in the morning when she returns to the Eyrie.
She is quick. "Fun," she remarks. "And you've read me - d'you want magic powers? Or rather do you want your - we're calling them Whistles now, cute, do you want your Whistle to have magic powers?"
"Yes, and then them and Amariah and Path all went into the other bedroom while Micaiah napped and indulged themselves with what I'm told is yet a third Sherlock who belongs to a Bell who has not yet been here herself," says Angela. "I didn't feel the need to commit that to paper, but as long as someone present is curious."
"I think I'm as much one of you as Amariah is," says Angela. "But my god doesn't work like her goddesses who don't care what she does. I want it, but - we have songs, prayers, already written down to teach us how to ask for everything Jovah is willing to offer. We're born with the capacity to learn, and angels with a few more blessings besides to carry out the god's work. Your magic isn't part of the world he made for us when he carried us away from our ancestor's home full of violence and hatred. If I do not already have these powers, it's because Jovah didn't choose to offer them to me."
"Jovah watches over us - the descendants of people who wanted to live a simple life without so much leverage over the world around us. We're always told that what was given up was technological, not magical, but the principle is the same, isn't it? Even now there is friction over things as simple as the batteries that Alleluia's husband invented. Just because I don't think I would misuse greater power than I have doesn't mean that it's safe to bring it into the world. I wasn't born with it; it's not intended for me."
"If Jovah can hear me here," she says finally, "I'll consider that possibility. Amariah said there is an 'outside'? I don't think he could begrudge me some unnecessary rain or sunshine to see if he watches over here as everywhere."
She sings, ignoring her floating duplicate and losing herself in the music.
(There is no other sensation to lose herself in. The air isn't... shifting, not even in the little ways it normally does after only the first verse of a prayer.)
Angela shakes her head. "Jovah's not here to be offering us anything through Stella," she tells Micaiah. "If he wanted you to have powers he could have given them to you, too, they'd be - sealed away in an oracle's caverns in a box somewhere and when the time was right he'd tell the oracle to seek you out and present them to you, even if you weren't meant to have them from the beginning."
A musical interlude at the Belltower ensues. Angela doesn't object to Stella using her magic for herself, even though a few more unexpected uses make her flinch enviously. But after it's been and gone and the Whistles have exchanged carnal knowledge and the Bells have swapped the more usual sort, Stella decides she is done for the day at Milliways and Angela is left up in the Belltower with just Micaiah. She decides to get in that nap she'd been thinking about.
"It's lovely to meet you. I nicknamed myself Angela," says Angela. "I seem to have arrived on a high-traffic day. Amariah and Kas met us when we first came in, and then Amariah recognized an alt of Sherlock - a male one - who was here for the first time, and then after they'd gone Stella was here, and now you."
"I turned her down because I don't believe Jovah wants me to have that kind of power. For a moment Micaiah had me half-convinced that Stella was an instrument of Jovah, but he can't even hear me here. I went outside and tried praying for rain and none fell; he wasn't listening."
"I - have no idea what to say to that," says Angela frankly. "I... well. Jovah isn't a withholding god or anything. When I'm home, if I pray for something, it falls. But our ancestors gave up a lot of less divine power to be able to live in harmony with each other, and Jovah carried them to Samaria, and I don't think suddenly disrupting that with a gift that cannot possibly have any connection to him would be wise. However tempting it is."
"We could. I think I'd want to make a trip to Gaza for that, though, Peninnah knows me well enough to let one strange question slide," says Angela, laughing weakly. "And if he says no, or if he's cryptic - he often is - I can't have any of those coins sitting around itching at me. So I'd have to hope to meet one of you again if Jovah said it was all right."
"We could come visit your world," says Shell Bell. "I promise not to use magic in unapproved ways on your world or give you powers unless Jovah says it's okay, but then you wouldn't risk being stuck without access to them for years if it did turn out to be fine. I mean, if you want to go on a trip, Sherlock," she adds. "But I think I could use a vacation from dealing with Coin, and all the appeals from the moon, and - everything."
"Oh, that's right, Sherlocks usually come with Tonies, I remember Amariah asking the one from earlier about his. Apparently that one died. I'm glad yours is intact. If only the door functioned a little more cooperatively we could organize some kind of - not reunion, but a possibly comforting meeting."
"He - I don't remember the exact words. He said that some vampires killed Tony and also Jarvis - you're the one who doesn't have a Jarvis, yes? - and turned him into a vampire as well, and then he killed those responsible and started looking for a reason not to set himself on fire, and he found a Bell alt I've written some secondhand notes about from his description. Temporary nickname of Juliet. And she's - diverting enough, I guess? Amariah wound up going to his world with him to cast some protective magic over Juliet."
"I don't know how you picked yours, or where 'Juliet' came from, but mine's a nickname I've had since I was eight, and Stella and Golden both have... empire themes, of sorts, that they just extended to their nicknames, and Amariah just picked the other piece of her name. The Sherlocks don't tend to have empires with themes, or nicknames intended for general use - not unique ones, particularly - or much name variation. I mean, my Sherlock is surnamed Stark and the other one we met isn't, but calling her Stark wouldn't work because that's all the Tonies' last name. So they'd have a little more trouble hitting non-redundant targets."
"Juliet is something Juliet's Sherlock calls her. I got the impression it was a reference to something," says Angela. "And on my world, 'angela' is a polite thing to call a female angel, like 'ma'am' or 'lady' - it's not ideal but I couldn't think of anything else and I'll at least turn my head when someone says it."
"Or you could each let your Bells name you and hope the one who doesn't have a Bell lands on something else, if we're the ones who are different enough to come up with different things. I didn't name Micaiah, but Amariah named Kas and his daemon. And I don't know where Alice's first name came from, but Whistle and Swan are clearly borrowings from Stella."
(She doesn't read Sherlock all the time by default - there's far too much to track if she wants to concentrate on anything else and Sherlock isn't explicitly slowing down for her - but she can tell when her girlfriend is making a deadpan joke.)
"If you ever see Milliways decorated in red and pink and white and this shape -" Shell Bell gestures - "run. It's celebrated with little darts of mind-altering drugs that make you fall in love with whoever you're with. It was horrible. It showed me what it'd be like to be in love with Sherlock so I could do it on purpose later, which is lovely, but the experience itself was terrifying and you've already got your Whistle."
"...Before I read your entry in the guestbook I was not aware that it was something people did to date within their own gender," says Angela quietly. "My education on the subject has been theoretical and designed around the fact that I belong to an endangered species."
"...your world is going to be an experience," says Shell Bell. "TV is... a form of storytelling or news reporting that works by recording moving pictures, and sound. It's displayed on a screen and it's like you're seeing the event that's depicted, miniaturized and captured for replay."
"...Well, it kind of does," admits Shell Bell. "Our world had a particularly nasty... event... that was televised, and if it hadn't been possible to record it I think the event would've been less effective at its intended purposes. Although that took way more than the mere existence of the technology and I'm not planning to abolish TV or anything."
"That was a less strange question. It was only one step away from something some oracle has to answer once a generation anyway," demurs Angela. "I really don't think Alleluia likes me. Why else would she send me all the way to Mount Sudan when I'm from Bethel? If she thought I was - I don't know, evil or irresponsible or something, then I assume she'd have felt comfortable telling Delilah that I oughtn't be spending a year with an oracle at all, since they're old friends, but it was clear that she didn't like my company - or something. I'm certainly not sure why. We had a long conversation when I was first asking to study with her that seemed to go fine."
"That's kind, but I'm a little concerned that Jovah's answer will differ depending on whether the petitioner's an angel, or already has magic, or something, so if the answer is supposed to be something I'm going to rely on I think I'd better ask as myself, even if blaming Micaiah for the idea is safer than claiming the question as my own."
"Okay. I guess we can go, then. But - outside of a local emergency - no significant magic on anything other than yourselves until I have an answer," admonishes Angela. "And it might take me a few days to find time to fly to Sinai. There are always intercessions to do and I'm well-known for taking them whenever I can."