Sherlock is usually very puncutal. He's only one minute late, but that's still not quite as punctual as usual. Bella peers out the window, not yet allowing herself outright concern.
"Well," says Amariah, "that answers the mental opacity question very handily. Hi! I'm an alternate version of you from another dimension! I'm Isabella Amariah and you can call me Amariah for non-redundancy. Sherlock's been calling you Juliet, can I do the same?"
"Sherlock can't hear me," says Amariah. "I've got a spell on that prevents anyone from noticing me. You're immune! Congratulations. Can we all go back to Sherlock's crypt so I can take the spell off? He doesn't need the blood anyway, my boyfriend let him bite him not half an hour ago."
"It won't," says Amariah. "Too many of us to keep straight in the interdimensional hub, so we're all picking nicknames. Me, Shell Bell, Stella, Angela, and Golden hasn't picked a nickname officially but Stella's met her and that's her guess, and Sherlock supplied Juliet for you but you could go with something different."
"Shell Bell is dating a girl version of him," says Amariah chattily. "I've met that one, her Tony, and another pair where they're both boys. This one doesn't have a Tony anymore, which is terribly sad - At any rate, I recognized him and said hi before I realized there was something the matter with his soul. Oh, by the way, my owl is my soul. Don't touch him. His name's Pathalan."
"I'm a witch - I can't teach you, we're a species, not an academic specialty - and therefore magically sensitive. I can tell by looking that you don't have a Pathalan of your own. Which is still weird to me, but I'm getting used to it. And I could tell by looking that Sherlock's soul is not only internal but also weird."
"It can be," says Amariah. "But I'm much less dependent on notebooks or whatever for self-sorting than the others are - well, Shell Bell does audio recording and some of them have perfect recall now, but I mean barring that - because I can talk to Path, and he knows me inside and out."
"Should've warned you," says Amariah apologetically. "So! I can do magic. I'm not as nigh-omnipotent as Stella or Shell Bell now that Stella has shared with her, but I can do some stuff. And I can catch you up on all of us Bells, in case you don't make it to Milliways yourself any time soon, too!"
"I do have a list!" says Amariah, producing her list. "Six of these are just basic blessings with no interactions and no side effects and I can do them all. Then these ones do interact and you can't have the whole set; I have a guess which you'll want but you know more about the situation than I do. And then there are some protective tattoos, which work very well and can go with anything else I know how to do just fine but they hurt to put on for a few seconds. I only know so many because my boyfriend is such a masochist."
"Shell Bell's dating a girl alt of Sherlock, yeah, but I'm not dating a Sherlock at all - don't seem to have one, or at least haven't run into one outside Milliways. My boyfriend is a duplicate, though, there's three of him dating Bells and one who Stella dislikes so much that she put him on an asteroid," says Amariah. "We're calling the class of them 'Whistles'. They don't have name consistency like we do. Mine is Kas and his daemon's Petaal."
"I'm planning to sacrifice a couple of rats, a live rosemary sprout, and maybe a crow and a seagull depending on which incompatible spells you pick and whether you want the tattoos," says Amariah. "Other than that no harm will come to any living thing, least of all me."
Juliet looks over the list. "I think I'm going to go with the set you picked out, with one swap. Tempting as this one about falls is. I'm not clumsy anymore," she says. "The opposite since I activated, really. I'll take the faster healing one instead. I already heal fast, but maybe it'll stack."
"Ooh, nice. I'm not clumsy when I'm flying, but I still trip over things on the ground," says Amariah. "It took me ridiculous extra remedial lessons before I was declared not a clan embarrassment with a dagger, and they had to settle for that because there's no way I'm getting up to merely below average." Oil runes are forming as she pours them in a square on the floor of Sherlock's crypt.
"Aren't they though? We also talk in our sleep," volunteers Amariah. "Most of us don't find that out for a while, though, someone has to actually be in the room while we're sleeping. And of course Golden doesn't sleep anymore, and Stella doesn't have to although she can if she wants."
"Well, there's me. There's Shell Bell, who's a human from a nasty little dystopia called Panem, but she ran into Stella and got Stella magic and so I imagine she's got the placed all fixed up by now. There's Stella, who has a Whistle called Alice, and she has the most overpowered magic ever, although it has this one eensy drawback - her magic system converts pain into wishes - so it's lucky she's got a Whistle, isn't it, because he's utterly thrilled to help her with that. Stella left notes in the guestbook about one who we're calling Golden who hasn't been by in person yet. Golden's a vampire - not the same kind as you have here, her kind sound like a much better deal all around I have to say - and she's married to a nonduplicate named Edward and they have a kid named Elspeth and she runs a secret vampire empire. I just met Angela today and she's an angel - I mean she literally has great big speckly wings coming out of her back - and she's kind of a personality outlier, kinda sheltered, I feel like she's editing herself farther upstream than the rest of us do. Which makes sense. She lives in a theocracy and she wants the local god to name her the next Archangel. And she grew up in a childhood of useful luxury, so that's as far as her ambition seems to go at the moment, can you imagine?"
"Angels where she's from fly around and pray for weather, or sometimes medicine or seeds, by singing," says Amariah. "The place otherwise has nearly unlivable weather. And she is good at singing. I'm almost surprised she harbors ambitions that go as far up as Archangel, although I'm not sure if the living conditions for the non-angels are quite where she'd like them to be, so there's that."
"Okay, think about it," says Amariah. "We are both selfish and altruistic to the point of near-contradiction. Usually, this results in taking over the world. Golden was a revolutionary, I think Shell Bell's going that way too, Stella's going a sort of sideways route by colonizing Mars first, I've got a longer plan underway but it's definitely on the agenda, Juliet's still in the point in the Bell life-cycle where she's collecting resources and not moving forward on world takeover but I bet it sounds pretty good to her too."
"Being the benevolent dictator of the world is kind of the pinnacle of useful luxury, altruistic self-interest, power and service. Empress Bellas are comfortable, they are surrounded by people they like who acknowledge that they are in charge, they get to accomplish all kinds of valuable results for their worlds while also getting to wear elaborate crowns to boot. But we've all done this from a starting point of mediocrity. Most of us have divorced parents; Shell Bell's and mine are together, but Shell Bell grew up in oppressive poverty and my parents have this disastrous on-again off-again marriage. We attend public schools that are only adequate judged against other public schools. I've been half in witch culture, which is better - I get to learn magic and fly and stuff, which I'm good at - but there aren't any real affordances for doing things. Experiencing stuff, sure, I can always hop on my cloud pine and see the Taj Mahal or whatever, but doing stuff out in the world? Useful stuff? Fewer obvious routes, so of course I'm going to just claim the entire planet as my own, piecemeal, and declare the entire thing my responsibility. But Angela..." Amariah shakes her head. "Angela's parents are happily married. She never had to move or split herself between cultures or summer at one parents' house and spend the rest of the year at the others. She has friends, close friends, who she's known since she was born. She's high-status and she can fly and sing and all anyone wants from her is for her to fly and sing. Her god has more to say on the subject of how to live a good life than any of my goddesses do, so she's got an absorbing self-improvement project. She was born with everything she needed to ascend to the highest political office of her land and all she has to do is something she's good at, something she enjoys, something that visibly helps people who need it, under the direction of people she respects. I'm not surprised she wants to be Archangel, but I'm also not surprised she doesn't aspire beyond the standard-issue twenty-year term after the current Archangel is good and done with his."
"- to tell you while he was here, because there is some chance you'll flip before you calm back down again, but me and Kas kinda slept with Sherlock. Yours, I mean, not one of the others floating around."
"Oh, I know, but he liked you first, and I bet you like him even if you haven't decided to act on it so far, and while obviously we can do nonexclusivity just fine if we want to it doesn't come standard with being a Bell. So I wanted to make sure you had a minute to process first. Whistles don't come in monogamous; I don't know if Sherlocks do, but it's not default, at least."
"I can put a few spells on your house, too, if you want them," says Amariah. "Probably a good idea to wait until Charlie's at work, though. Walking down the street in a weird outfit is one thing, drizzling substances on the carpet and killing pigeons is another."
"You mentioned dagger training. Are you good enough to give me a run for my money so I can get in some practice against two people who don't actually want to kill me at the same time? I'm worried I'm going to fixate on combat patterns that only work for a single opponent and not for a single opponent and their friends and cousins and neighbors too."
"And since I'm not actually good with it, just capable of not cutting off my own fingers, I guess I won't have to worry about getting past you and hurting you, but are you going to be at risk of hurting me? If you're still learning, do you know how to pull your punches? I can do healing spells on myself if it comes to that, but only if I'm conscious and I have an intact trachea to recite verse and so on..."
"That is a risk," admits Juliet. "I don't really have to pull my punches with Sherlock; he's more durable than that. And I don't want to, like, embed a habit of punch-pulling. Sherlock, do you think it would be long-term disadvantageous to have a habit of engaging a primary opponent one at a time and only dodge the next person until the first one is down? Because if that's something reasonable to aim at, Amariah can weave around and be stabby and I can take you down while trying not to get stabbed?"
"It might do you good to have an option of pulling your punches, if you can separate that from the rest of the programming. It's not inconceivable that you may someday have to fight a human who is intent on harming you, yet prefer to leave them alive. As for the dodging... it is not the only good way to engage a group, but it is one such way." He quirks a smile. "Really, what you need is four of me. Perhaps I should advertise in the dimensional hub."
"I can already sort of feed the programming goals, including don't hit that person too hard - I'm just not sure any of the progamming knows how strong I am or how much an unenhanced person can take. D'you think other yous would want to participate even if you could find several of them all at once? Especially if they're not vampires, especially if they come from worlds similar enough to have literally been scared of turning into you? Do worlds even cluster that close together?" Juliet asks, directing the last question at Amariah.
"We were talking about souls," Path says, "and he said that on his world if you get turned into a vampire you become a people-eating asshole version of you."
"Yes he was," Sherlock says cheerfully. "In the vast majority of cases, turning into a vampire does make someone much nastier than they previously were. I am, as ever, an outlier. And I did eat people for a while, but it's not a sufficient draw to be worth how much it will piss off Juliet, so I stopped."
"Nope, that is not what I had in mind. Oh well. Shell Bell's Sherlock killed twenty approximately innocent people on live national television. My Whistle killed some nasty individuals, even. Also, I assassinated Shell Bell's former president for her, he was bad news." Pause. "Actually, I think he was an alt of someone the other other Sherlock and Tony knew? I wasn't there, but I think they brought him to Milliways with them and then sent him home after Shell Bell screamed and drew her fire wand on him."
"Anyway, all this talk of who everyone has killed - I'm at twenty-one miscellaneous vampires and I don't have their names - isn't answering the question of whether otherworldly Sherlocks would be willing or able to be helpful even if accumulated in sufficient quantity," says Juliet.
"Not sure," says Amariah. "I mean, Sherlock found the door once and I haven't found it myself before and neither have you, so he's the most likely to find it again but we don't have a good idea of frequency; we should have some way set up for him to be able to notify me when he does run into it. I can work something out with a saltwater charm if you don't have phones or mine turns out not to get service here. I'm happy to hang out for a while if I have to. I'm not getting meaningfully older, I have a project to work on that could easily take me a year, I'd miss Kas if it took a long time but he routinely fucks off for months on his own anyway, I'm willing to sleep in a hammock hanging from my cloud-pine in the sky, I have a cornucopia so I won't even be relying on you guys for food."
"I'd put the charm on your wrist or the inside of your elbow, and you'd press on the relevant vein just enough to slow it down, and my copy of the charm would inform me then. These are originally designed to notify people if the other party dies, but you can modify them for more purposeful communication," she says, and she tells her cornucopia to give her salt and a cup of water.
"Magic is great! What's the stuff around here like?" Amariah murmurs the thickening charm. She takes the liberty of touching Sherlock's chin so she can tilt his head back to paint over his airway, so the charm will be able to pick up on whether and when he breathes. "Also which way is north from here?"
"Mr. Giles may be exhibiting his crust, but to a certain extent he's right," says Sherlock. "It's fairly well accepted in some circles that merely being a habitual magic user makes you tend to attract supernatural hazards. Of course, in those same circles it's fairly well accepted that being the Slayer has the same effect at ten or a hundred times the magnitude, so if Mr. Giles were operating with all the facts he might have a different recommendation. And then again, I've never heard of a Slayer who was also a witch, so there may be some traditional or actual barrier in effect there."
"Oh, the ones I've found with stuff that seemed benign and didn't require locust wings prepared under the seventh moon of a prime-numbered lunar year or some crap like that all go like, 'Divine Hecate, behold my will, grant me this boon' and so on and so on."
"Stella and Golden's worlds both just have people with innate powers crop up sometimes, so Stella's an 'ingot' and Golden's a - well, they call them 'witches' apparently, but it's not the same thing as me. Angela doesn't think she has it at all, and Shell Bell knows she didn't before she met Stella and got magic loot. I don't know about you."
"Stella wrote that Golden's 'witchcraft' let her daughter communicate with her until her daughter tried to send useful information in a quantity that would have been incapacitating for a while," volunteers Amariah. "Stella was briefly worried that when her Whistle got a brain upgrade, her mindreading would stop working if she didn't boost herself to match because it would've been overwhelming. Are the senses or the dreams - unpleasant? Do they interfere with other stuff? I bet the battle instincts only come up when you're in a fight and then they'd be a strict improvement over whatever you started with."
"Okay, this is if nothing else a reasonable working hypothesis for why I can't cast spells I've tried and why half the Slayer properties didn't stick to me, but I still don't know where the original opacity came from," says Juliet. "Sherlock, do you know anything about - random magical powers people sometimes have? Is that a thing?"
Training ensues. Amariah doesn't prove particularly useful as a stabby prop, but the blessings she cast are definitely helping. Juliet is less tired, less bruised, barely scratched, more alert, and surer on her feet than before, and it adds up to a definite edge above and beyond the revisions she's been making to her "autopilot".
Sherlock violently encounters the wall on more than one occasion.
When Juliet's done for the night, Amariah gives Sherlock a hug, and then casts the quick verse-and-parsley notice-me-not spell so that she won't attract attention from bad guys, nosy neighbors, or Charlie. She walks home with Juliet and parks her cloud-pine, its hammock, and herself outside her alt's window.
Including to Mr. Giles when study hall rolls around and Juliet goes to return the books she's gotten through and talk magic.
"Hey, maybe you can answer a theory question for me," she says, when she's recovered. "You said I was lucky the only way I've had a spell fail is by not working at all. Does magic do a lot of uncontrolled stuff? Swirl around in random eddies breaking the laws of physics at random, stick to people who didn't especially solicit any, escape from poorly-worded spells and turn the local wildlife pink? Or is it all spells and sometimes exploding spells?"
"It depends," he says. "Any spell that invokes a deity or demon—the difference isn't always perfectly clear—runs some risk of the named entity, ah, failing to cooperate. The results of that can be catastrophic, depending on whose attention you caught and how powerful and capricious they might be. Some spells, especially powerful ones, can backfire on the caster if done improperly. And magical artifacts of various kinds can have unpredictable effects. In general, no, magic doesn't do anything unless someone somewhere was trying to use it."
"A lot of the spells I saw invoked deities-or-demons - they're basically the same, really? - but that just pushes the question of how the magic works back one step farther. Do the deities-or-demons do their own magic when no one's bothering them to do someone else's? And what's this about artifacts, let's hear about artifacts," says Juliet.
She - with Amariah following after and giggling - departs the library.
After school she returns, with a slip in her pocket signifying her transfer to Latin, which she attended for the first time not ten minutes ago. "Latin," she announces, "gets entirely too fancy with its nouns." And she plunks the next book in her lineup onto the table and starts reading-and-notetaking.
Amariah decides to take advantage of her unnoticeability and peer behind the desk, where Giles keeps his personal stash of books. She doesn't walk around behind the counter, but she can lean on it and dangle her hand over, with Path clinging to it, and he can read the titles.
"It's closer to accidentally activating an artifact than accidentally doing a spell," he says. "A book of magic, or a book about magic, will tend to get... suggestible... with age. And Latin for some reason seems to be particularly, er, suggestive. So combining the two can have unpredictable effects."
"Do people ever come in here after hours besides me...? I guess I'd know better than you would, I've been here longer. Okay. Amariah, do you know any kind of spell to - you know what, nevermind, this is Sunnydale and everyone here has their certificate in advanced rationalization. But please don't break your notice-me-not by screaming this time. Do something else."
"Don't touch the owl," Amariah adds. (This has become its own word, all strung together, she's been in Milliways warning people away from her daemon enough now.) "Um, so, I'm an alternate of the Bella you know from another dimension. I can't teach her magic because my kind only works for my species, but I came here to help her out by casting a few blessings on her, and now I'm hanging around until I can get back home."
"Okay, I'll spare your librarian's sensibilities and omit the fine details," snorts Amariah. (This is code for okay, I won't.) "But in the non-fine-details department - the interdimesional hub collects alts of lots of people. I've met three others of us and heard about a couple more beyond that. This isn't even the first one I've visited at home."
"If you ever open a door and it appears to lead to a bar, instead of whatever you were expecting," says Amariah, "that's probably Milliways. Right now, no time is passing in my home world at all. When me or Juliet finds a door back in, I'll just visit the room our template shares to make some notes in the guestbook and let myself out, and my boyfriend'll be waiting for me at home like no time has passed."
"Yeah, we know why Bella can see me. Shell Bell or Stella or Golden would've been able to, too," says Amariah. "But you're unexplained. If there's a hole in the spell I should work out something heavier-duty or just find someplace to hide out instead of accompanying her."
"I'll recast, leave the room, and come back without Path and you say when you think I've done that," decides Amariah. "If you can tell, then it's not him. Dried parsley," she says. She takes the parsley handful from the air, tosses it, and mutters her non-English spell. Then she lets herself out, Path finds someplace out of the way to sit for a few moments, and, after a minute's wait, Amariah walks back in alone.
"Rats, that's not it then," says Amariah. She holds the door open and Path flies to her arm and she pokes Giles again to break the spell so he'll be able to converse with her unimpeded. "Do you have any ongoing magical - properties?" she asks. "Do you care if I invent a verse-and-herb to check for it if you don't know? My kind of magic is perfectly safe unless I don't want it to be."
"I'm a witch. It's a species where I come from. Sort of, I mean - witches are all women, if we're going to make more witches we pretty much have to find mortals to cooperate, so my dad is just a human. Our sons are mortal, our daughters are witches. I've been doing simple nursery-rhyme level spells since I could talk, although I didn't start learning systematically until I could fly." She has her cloud-pine with her; there's enough scary stuff in this town that she wants to be able to put Juliet on it as a passenger and zoom out of wherever she's at at two hundred miles an hour without having to retrieve it from somewhere. She gestures with the branch. "When I was not quite six."
"Well, in my case, it does, but our alt Angela kept saying 'mortals' too and she just means people without wings and boasts no special lifespan herself, so good on you for asking. Witches live until we - well, there's not an exact understanding of how it happens, but it looks like barring death by violence we live until we're too bored or too lonely."
"Oh, I'll be able to do it. We have these devices -" she gestures to indicate the size. "That dispense objective truth in complete - sentences, so to speak, although it has to talk through symbols, they're really not very well designed, and the device says I can. I just have a research project to complete first."
"It is! Unfortunately, I've tried it outside my universe and the functionality's not portable. When questioned back home they say they run on 'dust' that isn't anywhere else." She shrugs. "Still very glad I have them. Well, I have one, my boyfriend has the other. He's an intuitive reader and he's much better at communicating with them than I am, so he wanted his own. There's only six in the world but two were lost; I found the first with a spell and he asked it where the other was."
"Do you want any conveniently consequence-free spells on you or your house or whatever, as long as I'm loitering in this world and you're helping my counterpart here?" Amariah inquires. "The whole set I gave Bella includes four protective tattoos, which take a while, but if you wanted to skip those it'd only take a couple hours to go through all of them. I have tea tree oil and stuff left."
"I don't mind. I have time to kill, and Bells without their own magic can use all the help they can get. I mean, maybe she'll meet Stella or Shell Bell her first time through Milliways and whatever I do will be redundant, but maybe she won't. Here, I've got a list I wrote for Bella." Path pulls the paper out of her bag for her, and transfers it to her hand; she unfolds it and hands it to Giles.
"Enh, it's a bunch of spells, but they only add up to so much," demurs Amariah. "Even Golden, let alone Stella or Shell Bell, would be more help than me. If Bella wanted to undergo a species change. - Golden's world has a different kind of vampire than this one. A dramatically superior and less inherently problematic kind of vampire, sounds like."
"Golden's kind of vampire - I haven't met Golden in person, I've read Stella's notes about her in the guestbook in our shared room in Milliways, but according to the notes - Golden's kind of vampire is immortal, has no inconvenient allergies, can go weeks without eating, don't sleep, are almost physically indestructible short of fire and even then Golden's survived being pulverized to bits and then set on fire twice, and they are way, way faster and stronger than the vampires you have here. And they have perfect recall, and enhanced senses, and they think fast enough to process all this stuff plus the super-speed, and on top of all of that they are super pretty. The only drawbacks are that they mate for life and that's really serious business, female vampires can't get pregnant, and they feel pretty thirsty a lot of the time - but Milliways sells synthetic blood that they like just fine and Golden has her R&D department reverse-engineering it. And Golden managed to have a kid anyway, egg-harvesting before she turned."
"Wishes. She can make nearly arbitrary wishes, and they come true," says Amariah. "The fucked up part is where wishes come from, but she's got a copy of my boyfriend for her own, and that template is all over it. I'll spare your librarian sensibilities the details of what they are all over."
"Bella's always home at sundown, and I'm trying to stick with her, because my phone is from 2013 in another world and does not get service here and I want to know if she finds a door to Milliways," says Amariah. "Should I run and get the ingredients for spells to be added to your person, or would you rather set up a time to do that some other place than the school library?"
"Mr. Giles, when he was young and stupid, used to indulge in demon-summoning for recreational psychological effects, and this left him with something on his arm that let him see partway through Amariah's notice-me-not and also a dead friend," reports Juliet, handing over the blood and bending her head to breathe through the fabric of her t-shirt sleeve. "So we had to explain her, but at least he didn't curse first and ask questions later. He wanted to know who or what he, she, or it was and whether we were on good terms."
"What, a history of recreational demon-summoning? I suppose it's lively except insofar as it wound up being anti-lively," says Juliet. "I promised him never to use magic primarily for recreational psychological effects. I half-suspect I couldn't even obtain same, actually, but even if I could it'd be a trivial promise, I am apparently less reckless than Mr. Giles was at my age."
"I'm not sure if that will be long-term viable," says Juliet, hefting her messenger bag and starting down the sidewalk. "Is there some set of criteria he could meet such that it'd be okay to reveal you, or are we just going with he-can-never-know! until that falls apart or I stop interacting with him for some reason? Or I could introduce you to him and react to any suspicion by rolling my eyes and suggesting offering you a glass of water with a drop of blood in it. Hide you in plain sight, like."
"He was very reasonable about me," says Amariah optimistically. "Took the explanation pretty much at face value, let me cast a divination on him to see why he could see me, wasn't hostile or anything. Even though I'm pretty far-out. Am I less far-out than a non-asshole vampire?"
"To be more exact, he has fewer prejudices about extradimensional witch alts than he does about local vampires," says Juliet. "I think that he could tell that you were there, and that was enough for him to tell that I could tell you were there, but he didn't know what you were, just that I was not alarmed - and there are more nasty things than benign things to explain any given weirdness, but benign explanations aren't as unheard of as nice vampires."
There's the crypt! Combat practice time. Juliet ramps up to two-minute sequences, bolstered by all her new blessings, but sometimes they don't last that long due to repeated enactments of Sherlock, Meet Wall, or sometimes Sherlock, Meet Floor With The Slayer Sitting On You Bending Your Arms In Ways They Are Not Supposed To Bend.
The next day, Amariah brings her "groceries" to school with Juliet, and after school they go to Mr. Giles's house - the modification Amariah invented to the notice-me-not applies to him as well as to Sherlock. She casts blessings and a slightly different combination of less compatible charms and, after he accepts with great trepidation, a line of protective tattoos on his previously unmarked arm.
"- Something just occurred to me," says Amariah. "On my world, you'd want those tattoos visible, because people are less likely to attack someone a witch has decided to protect, and because a lot of people, even humans, are magically sensitive enough to tell they're there even if they're not in a visible location. But here, those advantages don't really exist. I can hide them, if you want. Though I personally think the bayleaf one and the sun-shaped one are both very decorative."
"Nah, although the -" She addresses her cornucopia. "White vinegar and honey!" - she speaks normally again - "will need to soak through your shirt if you're going to leave it on. They'll disappear after, though, so you don't have to worry about laundry and Mr. Giles should not complain if you lie down on his carpet."
"Hey, do you want blessings and stuff too?" Amariah asks him when he shows up. (She hangs back. She doesn't like the smell of blood either, although her distaste is about on the level of Juliet's after Slayer activation; she's had to get used to it for sacrifice components.)
"Well, this is going to wipe me out of the ingredients that I can't conjure, but I think I have enough of everything to do one more person, anyway," says Amariah. "I don't think it's worth even trying to ask Charlie, is it? I mean, mine's used to witch stuff, but I'm imagining mine if I brought home - I don't know, aliens?"
She sits on the floor, and then she smirks and holds up her injured hand.
"If you want dessert," she says, "I won't begrudge."
She wants peroxide for her next experiment in moving magic, and her cornucopia won't make that. Charlie's not home yet. She finds the spare key to the backdoor wedged in the mailbox (predictable, Charlie) and opens the back door to swipe some.
But there is Milliways instead.
Well, she can't reach them. Path can fly the key back to where it goes while she keeps the door open. She conjures up a little honey and writes going home! by the door, and she steps through.
Sherlock does not encounter a wall. He encounters the floor, face up, pinned in what is (if one thinks about it hard enough) really a very compromising position.
And he receives another kiss.
It really is getting late. Bella eventually peels herself off of Sherlock. (In the process of so peeling a hand may just skim over the surface of a certain shirtless chest.) "I'd better get home," she says. "Or I won't be rested for my all-important English class."
There's her house.
"I don't know if Charlie's looking out the window, but - lemme find out some way to explain you to him before risking it, okay?" she says ruefully, letting go of Sherlock's hand. "It might take me a while to come up with something sufficiently likely to leave your next favorite coat intact."
She wonders if it's a Britishism, calling people "love" regardless of emotional content. (Giles doesn't do it, though.) (It could be regional, or just Sherlock, and still not mean -) (Or it could go right ahead and mean that, and would this be so bad? It wouldn't. He was unproblematic about liking her. He'll be unproblematic about loving her. All right then, so it doesn't matter beyond its being sweet. For now.)
She doesn't find Amariah, does find - and clean up - the note left in honey, and goes to bed.
She shows up at study hall the next day with only the progress made on her borrowed books that Mr. Giles saw her make at his house while Amariah did spellcasting.
"Hi! Hey, is it just a coincidence that the kind of person to have his own personal demonology collection wound up at the Sunnydale high school library? Or are you here for some Sunnydale-related reason?" she asks, while writing a chapter heading in her notebook.
"When one Slayer dies, the next is called," he says. "She can be anyone of the right gender and age. Sometimes it takes a few weeks or months to track her down and explain her destiny. But it's always been possible to find her. This time... as far as anyone scrying for the Council can tell, there is no Slayer."
(Someone who does not know what she does about the Slayer and the Council would make these guesses and would think it sounded nice. She's looking forward to seeing if Giles contradicts her.)
"I'm not clear on how one person has any significant deterrent effect on the worldwide demon population, however good she is at throwing fireballs," says Bella. "I mean, if she's here where you're looking for her, then how does that matter to a family of demons in Beijing?"
"She has symbolic value," he says. "The mere knowledge that there is a Slayer somewhere, even if she's not an immediate threat, has a quelling effect on demonic activity. There are records of previous times when the line of succession was cast into doubt, and none of them make good bedtime reading."
"Watchers," he supplies. "It's the Watchers' Council. Before you ask, no, I don't know why. And our job is to train and prepare the Slayer for hers. We do the research; we study the demons; we help her develop her technique; we keep her informed of everything she needs to know. Assuming, of course, that we can find her in the first place."
"I have never seen records of a Slayer joining the other side," he says carefully. "As for the rest... one of those previous times I mentioned involved a Slayer running away from the Watcher who found her. She kept ahead of us for several years. No one knows what happened to her exactly, but we know when the next Slayer was called."
"You said it was more important that the missing Slayer reveal herself to the demons than to the Council," says Bella. "She was known to exist, wasn't she? With a whole council full of people with access to all kinds of information and magic I'm stunned they tried to ask anything more of her than that she spend the rest of her life with a target painted on her jugular vein. I'm stunned they used all those resources to hunt down one terrified, fleeing girl instead of trying to learn more about neutral demons or subsidize the development of sunshiney lightbulbs with motion-detectors for use over patios or just coming up with large-scale spells that, sure, maybe they'd eat a few people, but they'd be informed volunteers and they could save way more. I bet something toothy murdered that Slayer when she was twenty-something and then all your colleagues were very relieved because she was in the way and then she wasn't anymore. I can't imagine why anyone would bolt at the first sign of attention from the Stalkers Council, can you?"
"Two different powerful demons claimed to have found and killed her, but as far as later research could tell, they were both lying. For those few years, there effectively was no Slayer. All the resources that weren't put into finding her were put into dealing, inadequately, with the chaos caused by her absence."
"Have you considered lying? Tell the Council 'found Slayer, but she's shy and wishes to remain otherwise anonymous', let them publicize the misinformation, produce occasional reports. You don't need to be the Slayer to cut the vampire population. I got hold of a key to the morgue and I've been surreptitiously pounding slivers of wood into every cadaver that passes through police hands practically since I moved here."
"How do the demons usually find out, if the Council isn't issuing a press release or anything? Lie to whoever tells the demons. I mean, she's super-powerful, more efficient as a source of demon control apparently than anything else the Council could be doing with its time, I'm assuming bitey things don't usually tangle with her and live to tell the tale until one manages to actually kill her? Fights to someone's death all, yes?"
"I've only lived here a couple months," says Bella. (But except for Sherlock, who is special, she's never confirmed a vampire's vampirehood without dusting it. Although she supposes some demons did run from Sherlock. If Sherlock were a girl like Shell Bell's version, would rumors be circulating even now about a Slayer in town?) "...Am I just completely off base on the fireballs thing?"
"The entire demon world is terrified of someone who is good at punching things," says Bella flatly, deadpan skeptical. "That is ridiculous. Vampires are good at punching things, eighty percent of demons are good at punching things, is she even appreciably better than them or does she just have an unusual affordance to get training on how to punch things?"
"So if her existence and approximate location are public knowledge from all those demons who flee from her approach chattering into the grapevine, wouldn't she just scatter the bitey critters, not drive them into outright hiding? She can't teleport, she can't do one thing in Munich and another in Sao Paulo at the same time. Why can they coordinate well enough to spread the word but not well enough to do whatever they want with sardinelike safety in numbers?"
"How're you going about looking for the Slayer? I mean, I guess a high school's a good vantage point, but I can account for an awful lot of your time."
"To be perfectly honest with you," he says, "I'm hoping she shows up and makes herself obvious somehow, because I am out of other options. I'm a Watcher, not a spy. I'm good at, at cataloguing books and deciphering illuminated manuscripts. I'm not good at questioning teenage girls to see if they've developed superpowers recently."
Bella blinks at him owlishly. "Yeah, but I mean - being the Slayer, openly, seems like a crap deal. Are you going to tell your boss about her? Will she ever have a minute's peace again? Is she liable to spend half her life on a series of airplanes from hotspot to demonic hotspot and the other half in mortal combat? 'Cause if that's the deal and I find her before you do I might help her skip town."
"I would have to tell my boss, yes," he says. "And then I would become her Watcher. It's very likely we would stay in Sunnydale, since it's one of the biggest demonic hotspots around. Slayers aren't sent across significant distances on missions very often, and the last two times it happened, it was to thwart an impending apocalypse in this very town."
"Asked Mr. Giles a lot of questions about the Slayer. I think he knows it's me but doesn't have enough concrete evidence to realize that he knows. And he comes down on the Council side regarding the treatment of a particular Slayer who ran. They chased that poor girl until she died and she never wanted any of it but of course she was the strongest defense against evil because she was good at punching things! This entire system is so idiotic. If I beat up some demons in front of some other demons at that bar you mentioned and they tell all their friends, this is supposed to quell demonic activity. Worldwide, apparently."
"Then the rumors about the Slayer will say that she has a friend with her," Bella points out. "And I told you I think Giles knows it's me, even though I didn't tell him. If he decides to confront me about it - or, I don't know, he throws something heavy at my head and my choices are duck or catch it or get brained - how will I explain that?"
"I suppose the option exists. It would be easy to find you starting from me, though, a Mexican wrestler mask will throw off demons but Mr. Giles is faculty and he has access to my home address. All he'd have to do would be watch you show up at dusk, or, if you stopped walking me there, follow me to the crypt. Do you have a plan for that?"
"I had no plans to. I don't think a scenario that winds up with you having to beat up any number of Watchers in self-defense is something I should aim at. Mr. Giles isn't exactly Charlie, but I'd be disappointed in an outcome that got him badly hurt. Although I'm not going to tell you to let him shoot at you without reprisal either, because, again, not Charlie."
"No. He lets me come to him - which admittedly I do twice a day, so I don't know how much information that is - and he answers questions but he doesn't lecture, I'm way more likely in any given conversation to run into the end of his patience than he is to run into the end of mine. He hasn't been issuing veiled threats to the missing Slayer or anything."
"Maybe. I think I'll come clean tomorrow after school. Since I do think he already knows on some level. And if he doesn't flip out or immediately turn all stern-crusty-bossy-Watcher on me I'll bring you up right after as though I never intended to leave you out."
Practice continues roughly as normal until it's gotten late, at which time his dear Juliet takes her next win and turns it into kisses, as the previous night. "I wonder," she murmurs against his jaw after a slightly meandering kiss, "if I'm in danger of producing bad incentives."
Bella lets him up. But this time she doesn't wait for the attack; she tries a (clumsy, relative to her other moves if not to the general population) first-closing move. "Can't always be waiting to get jumped," she says between exchanges of kinetic energy.
They encounter a demon on their way home! It has been hiding in some shrubbery, although Sherlock might notice it anyway before it jumps out and jogs towards them. It seems extremely confused. It also seems hungry.
"Let's see how I do," she says after a quick check for onlookers. "I recognize this one," she adds, stepping in front of them and leaping at the demon. "Long - unpronounceable -" The demon fights back, but she's faster - "name with - lotta H's in - and you have to -" She pulls off a sacrifice throw; the demon goes flying and she rolls up to her feet again - "twist anything you wanna -" She uses its attempt at an uppercut to vault to stand on its shoulders and grab hold of its head. "Remove," she says, twisting. "Also they eat human livers and they dissolve into soap bubbles when they die!" she adds, sounding like a tour guide on a tame safari ride while she hops off its shoulders and drops the removed head onto the rest of its collapsing (and indeed dissolving) body.
"The soap bubbles thing is convenient," she says. (She's taken to carrying a water bottle to practices and she didn't drink it all tonight; she pours a little on the dissoluble demon to help it along with running down a storm drain.) "These guys sometimes travel in packs but a pack would've joined us by now. Thank you, Mr. Giles's Stalling For Time Homework. Anyway. Onward."
"Was that thing unusually incompetent or am I just awesome? Trying to determine a timeline for appearing at a demon nest and letting some of them live for worldwide symbolic power. I'd rather emerge from same with all my limbs. In fact, all my digits, too, I'm fond of those. I might want to drive to L.A. first if there's a good place to find demons there, so not everyone who wants to prove themselves by taking on the Slayer descends on my hometown."
She pauses.
"Oh, oh damn, I gave Angela all my bigger coins, I don't have anything left for you - my Sherlock's not here, she went home, I can poke my head out and check for her but I think she'll be asleep -"
She opens the door.
[Sherlock?]
Shell Bell tries the square. It doesn't have that range. Argh. She shuts the door and teleports back up. "I'm so sorry," she says to Juliet and Sherlock. "...I can give you a supply of squares and triangles. I can make those just fine. But without a pentagon I can't even give you a particularly safe way to keep them so you'll have to be careful."
"I really wish they were awake. Then we could make more coins - and you could meet my Tony - and - maybe I should - I don't know, Stella made at least a few pentagons before she could mint Alice, pentagons don't have to be that bad - maybe I should find some way to -"
"Relax," sighs Juliet. "If you happen to break your arm in some unrelated way and make a pentagon to wake them up with, I'm hardly going to turn you down, and I do want to stick around after you leave for a bit in case you manage to get ahold of another door, but you don't have to hurt yourself more than you can comfortably - so to speak - do."
"Well, there's three of us who have it now, and my Sherlock and Angela's Micaiah and Stella's Alice, and if you run into any one of them, or me again, you'll be all set. I'm going to write a note reminding us never to get caught in here without any hexes or our help," says Shell Bell, taking up her pen again and resuming writing. (She writes blurrily fast.)
"Sparring," Juliet clarifies for Shell Bell before she can ask. "I'm not dismembering him or anything, and I get hit too, although - Sherlock, are you still pulling punches for me? If you are maybe I don't have an accurate picture of how physically uncomfortable it is on your end."
"The units it works in are called triangles. One to nine of those makes a triangle - for a mint, anyway - and ten to ninety-nine is a square, and so on," says Shell Bell. "And it comes in flavors because the original design is for Alice and that's just what he's like. If you want to try it..." She shrugs.
"I can read my Sherlock's mind," volunteers Shell Bell. "It's nice. Oh - we were thinking that Sherlocks should have nicknames too, since you tend not to have themes the way we often do, and you have name consistency where the Whistles don't. Do you have any ideas on that?" she asks Sherlock.
"I don't really mind," Juliet tells Sheromeo. "And whether vampires are dead is a pointless matter of technical quibbling. They walk, they eat, they think - some of them - but they don't properly respirate and their hearts don't beat so some people apparently consider it meaningful to declare them 'not alive'. Probably contributes that for most of them the transformation involves a period of inactivity followed by personality change."
"Me and Juliet here both have Sherlocks instead," says Shell Bell contently. "I'm Shell Bell. I'm a mint like Stella, but I don't have any of my big coins with me so I can't help Juliet - Stella didn't write about minting you, but she did give you some coins, didn't she?"
"Yes, I saw," says Golden, coming to the end of the filled-in book and picking up the pen. She writes in a profile and returns it to Juliet.
"Because I don't want to say 'hey, why not come hang out with me in Hell-Orifice for a while', and also the Hell-Orifice is a specific location within the world in general," Juliet says, writing up her profile on the page after Golden's.
"Oh yes. Short of stranding us on the moon or otherwise managing to starve us to death, the only way to kill my sort of vampire is with fire, albeit not solar sourced fire. This is traditionally much easier if we're pulverized into small chunks first, though. My witch power is sufficiently interested in my mind's continued existence as well as its integrity to force me back into a survivable configuration if someone manages to attempt this on me. Twice."
"Thank you," says Golden. "I'm glad I'm alive too. I don't imagine being set on fire would have been any more comfortable if my enemies had succeeded at what they had in mind, after all. Although there are drawbacks to finding such extreme conditions survivable. The previous occupants of my position as secret vampire world leader found it convenient to keep people with useful witchcraft stored as heaps of rubble in a dungeon, including my husband and my sister-in-law, for five years."
"Mm. Mates are special, but not - infinitely special, so the sympathy's likely informed, regardless. Elspeth occupies a similar priority for me compared to Edward. But this is largely because my mind is safe. It's not true for Edward comparing me and our daughter. His original relationship with her was destroyed years ago. It's better now. But it'll never be the same."
Golden nods. "She has his hair," she murmurs. "She used to complain that I wouldn't let her cut it until it swept the floor. When the relationship-destroying witch came along she chopped half of it off." Pause. "The relationship-destroying witch is the only person I have ever personally killed."
"I have killed quite a number of people," says Sherlock, "but the first human was the man who hid a gang of vampire assassins in our basement and thereby caused the death of everyone I had ever loved. I expect even if I had my soul pinned back on, I would still stand by that one."
"Sherlock named me Juliet because at one point we had a conversation through my window, I'm sticking with it," says Juliet. "And that one's Golden. I live in Charlie's house, which I don't really expect him to be willing to remodel, but there's a fair number of abandoned buildings in Sunnydale, maybe Shell Bell could conjure up stuff to pawn and I could buy one on the cheap and we can remodel it by magic?"
When they pile through the door, what's on the other side is a spacious, tastefully decorated living room with plenty of comfortable couches.
"Hi Jarvis!" says Tony. "This is Juliet, Shell Bell, and Golden. And a vampire Sherry but I promise he's nice. We're both dead in his world and I kind of want to hug him forever."
"I haven't been the Slayer very long. Also, thanks to the Bell mental opacity thing, no supernatural senses. At all. Found out I was the Slayer when a Power That Is showed up, in my bedroom, uninvited, grumbling about how I didn't get some dreams I was supposed to get. Sherlock figured out I was the Slayer from the way I walked, I started shooting at him -" She pats her messenger bag. "I missed. A lot. He, obviously, didn't kill me. I called Charlie, Charlie drove me out of there, I kept seeing him around and he kept not being sociopathically hedonistic as expected, he offered to be my bodyguard, I put him on a one-week trial period where I didn't let him within ten feet, and I determined that if he was up to something it wasn't gonna be something I could figure out. There was sparring. Later, there was kissing."
"We don't have one picked out yet, so that'd wait for another trip to Milliways, and if we didn't have Shell Bell along anymore by then, we'd have to hope we guessed right about the number of squares needed to fix it up and install your copy," muses Juliet. "I mean, my first choice would be the old brick thing about halfway between school and Charlie's house - do you know the place, Sherlock? - but I don't know if we can get it."
Bell bites into the side of her cheek and hands a small handful of squares to Tony. "He can probably do this better than I can," she says. "Wishes are pretty smart and they're good at copying stuff - if there's one that's already around that's exactly what you want, that's easy - but probably better for Tony to do the wishing."
"It's possible I should ask Stella to mint me the next time I see her - or you when you've got more coins, Shell Bell, or Angela maybe if I meet her first. Just for the triangles and squares. Perhaps pentagons. Being a vampire doesn't do anything directly to my pain tolerance, but the boosted brain capacity makes it easier."
"I'd say it's like having my soul walk around outside my body," she says instead after a moment, "but given that Amariah exists, perhaps that's not the right comparison; Edward is like having my soul walk around outside my body in the sense that we can operate like extensions of each other and neither of us can function without the other's safety. Elspeth is more like..." She's stumped. "I stopped notebooking before she was conceived, let alone born; I know what it's like but I haven't put it into words."
"She's not reckless or helpless. She keeps Jacob with her, she can incapacitate or obliterate anyone outside of a couple dozen inoculated people by thinking about it, I believe she's safe at home and when she's in Milliways she doesn't walk through the door with anyone who she can't sincerely tell Jacob they're harmless. But she's been through more than she should've been, and she grew up so terribly fast, and I love the person that she is but she's not who I would've designed if that were how children worked. I'd never have wanted my baby to go on to casually discuss murder and mental rearrangement and torture as things that she's seen and experienced and gotten accustomed to thinking about."
"I wasn't originally going to have her that early," says Golden. "At the time I didn't expect her to be in danger, and it would have been problematic to wait. And we were ready as parents. But society, at least supernatural society, was as you say - not fit to have a child in then. I miscalculated, badly, and paid for it, and five years later she did too."
"I'm forty-three," agrees Golden. "Chronologically. It's a matter of some debate, to what extent development is relevant or even frozen at all in someone who turns in their teens. Turning small children, though, is forbidden for a reason. But I was just barely eighteen when Elspeth was born."
"I don't think it's us. Well, I don't think it's most of us. I had a crush on my Tony before I even worked out how to make things happen with my Sherlock and my Sherlock is, you know, special circumstances. I think we just attract non-monogamous people who are interesting enough to make the hack worthwhile. Except you, Golden."
"When I met Stella it was one thing - there weren't any duplicates but us, I could explain to myself that in a world without vampires Edward would've died of the Spanish flu and of course I would have found someone else, but now there are so many duplicates I'm beginning to wonder what's going on," says Golden frankly. "If Whistles can show up in multiple versions of Earth - with different birth years; Amariah's parents apparently met later than typical or something and the picture of Kas still looks about her age - and also on Samaria, and if Sherlocks can appear with not only different genders but also in two neighboring Earths and the obviously far-future Panem... why is there only one Edward, why aren't there two or three of him too? I'm not saying I want there to be. I'd find that nearly as confusing as he finds my alts. But I wonder why there aren't."
"Well - what are the features that crop up a lot? We all look the same, except Angela's wings and Golden's recoloring - but not everything's universal. The template would have to start out with mental opacity. That random little town in Washington comes up a lot too - Sunnydale has its reasons for attracting interesting goings-on, but Forks doesn't, there's no reason for it to be repeated unless it's in the template. So it's not Shell Bell or Angela and it's not me."
"I think it's probably one of the two of you, yeah," says Shell Bell. "You share a lot of features with each other straight across, you both took over your worlds without extradimensional help - I think Amariah could've too, but she found us before she did - and Stella's got a duplicate boyfriend, but you've got a duplicate... supernatural element. Of sorts. Since you and Juliet both have vampires."
"However this works," Juliet says, "it has to base who we meet on something other than who the template met, since there are duplicates but not all the same duplicates. The Sherlock and Whistle templates are doing some of the work at arranging for us to encounter each other too. If that makes any sense. So I don't know if Edward being non-duplicated is even a point against Golden as the template. It might be a point in her favor."
"We're assuming that there is a template, though," says Golden. "Instead of just - a collection of features that often come together at a sufficient concentration to turn into one of us. We're assuming that if there's a template, we've met her - that there won't appear in the future a mentally opaque Bell with an Edward and Sherlock and a Whistle and - that poor Edward, goodness - and some manner of vampires who took her world over without outside help. Or that we're not just missing her forever because she doesn't go to Milliways."
"There's a lot of features that show up and don't seem essential, though," says Shell Bell. "We talk in our sleep even though Golden's not less Bellish for not sleeping anymore, we all start out straight even though I'm not less Bellish for having adjusted that. If it's just Essence Of Bell floating around the multiverse creating an - attractor, for worlds to fall into, then why would Essence Of Bell contain that stuff? We wouldn't turn away a Bell from the Belltower who didn't ever talk in her sleep and was gay for as long as she could remember."
"Wings and extra body heat and a spectacular singing voice that I do not have," says Shell Bell, "I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have it even if I blew a pentagon on singing pretty to cheat at all the training and practice she's put into it. I guess a really clever engineer could've done that and nothing else, but it having just happened is farther-fetched. Then again, she's got a god in her world."
"I watched her pray for stuff, and stuff fell out of the sky. Or clouds parted or the air warmed up or whatever. It wasn't a coincidence, there was a palpable difference in the air after a few lines of the songs, let alone after a complete prayer. I watched an 'oracle' talk to the god in question and get an answer. On a computer, which was weird, but it seems to work for them."
"Amariah's goddesses produce results when she recites poetry at them," Juliet adds to Golden. "And on my world, there are demons-slash-deities who do the same thing - except not to me because the spells are all 'divine Hecate behold my will' and my will is invisible. Also a Power That Is showed up in my bedroom. Have a little confidence in your counterparts, we're not going to believe in divine beings without observing them to do stuff."
"You have to admit that it sounds a little funny when combined with the angel thing. If Angela weren't claiming divine status I'd figure 'angel' for a translation of whatever word means 'person with wings' where she's from, but adding that in..."
"I've picked up some things. I've been going to Milliways since I was six and staying as long as I could and talking to everyone and watching and reading stuff from all over. But it's an irregular cross-section," agrees Shell Bell. "And sometimes I'm not sure if something I've learned is an Earth standard or if it's someone's oddball world's thing."
"And he wants to fuck you," Sherlock adds. "Yes. Everything I have told you about him is the truth. In my world, after I found out he arranged that collapsed road, he hired a gang of vampire assassins and concealed them in our basement. They killed you and Jarvis and turned me."
"You want another square?" asks Shell Bell, biting into her cheek. "You wanna check? Square'll give you a short burst if that, but I bet it'll let you check." She offers him the mother-of-pearl coin, not taking her eyes off Snow-Obie. "Maybe I'll get Golden or Juliet to break my arm ve-e-ry carefully..."
Juliet... finishes her sandwich. And drops loosely into a ready pose, because while not much is likely to happen and Golden can probably handle anything that does better than she can, this seems like a good situation to be ready for other possibilities in.
"Chelsea had a witchcraft power. She could build up - or destroy - relationships. Except for mine, because of my own power, and except for mate bonds in vampires and imprints in werewolves." She closes her eyes. "My daughter was not so defended. Nor my husband's own affection for our child."
Meanwhile, Juliet turns to Golden. "Do you mind if I try socking you in the face to see what happens to my hand? If my hand survives the experience and I don't need one of Shell Bell's squares to fix it I might want to try sparring with you, later, when we're not all thinking about variously recent death."