Today, after eight months, she does.
She makes sure that Sherlock and Tony are both awake, finds that they are but do not want to join her in the bar today unless she finds something interesting, checks her coin supply and finds it sufficient, and steps through.
"If someone where your door is would hold the door for me, I could come through, teleport you where you want to go, maybe fix the bridge, and teleport back to go through the held door," Shell Bell says. "Actually, if whoever would be willing to hold the door long enough I'd be really curious to meet your Tony."
"Well, long story short—the old king was in a coma, so the heir apparent took the throne, but he decided to work out his daddy issues by starting a war of the non-civil variety and almost blowing up a planet, and I had to kick his ass," says Darcy. "The whole thing was over in like two hours."
"Well, what I mean is that as long as I'm going to your world, if someone will hold the door, if it's not more than -" She makes a quick count of stars on her bandolier - "a couple dozen people, I could try and see. If they've only just died then there won't be a question of there being someplace for them to go because they could just as easily have not died. But I can't promise it will work. It might be too big a job for even a star."
"Maybe just a few people, then. But it's sad when people die and if I can undo it I should. I can afford to wait in my world because all the people who have died there will still have died there in six months and then I'll have figured out how to reintegrate them. Everyone who lost the Hunger Games, everyone who was executed as a political dissident, and then I'll start taking special appeals when we've gotten through all those - if it works."
"We'll see, I guess." She glances at the door. "Okay, so if I take you to Asgard, will you try to fix the bridge? Because otherwise I don't actually think taking me back to Earth would help. Unless Sif wants to go too. But I don't think she does. And it would be," she smiles ruefully, "complicated."
Shell Bell sips her milkshake. "Is there a lot you'd want done as long as I'm there? Should I bring my girlfriend along? I can't make more significant magic without her, it's actually kind of a problem, the last time I met one of my alts I couldn't pass along the nifty magic because I was all out of coins from meeting the last one before that."
"Sif!" says Darcy, waving. "This is Shell Bell, I found her in Milliways, she says she can maybe fix the Bifrost, do you want to hold the door for us so we can go talk to Heimdall about it?"
"You have the most interesting friends," Sif says dryly, coming to take the door from them.
(She has quite forgotten that she illusioned up a crown - she'll remember if reminded, of course, but it's slipped from her attention without the weight on her head to remind her.)
There is a man in elaborate golden armour standing on the very end, gazing out into eternity.
"Heimdall!" says Darcy. "This is Shell Bell."
"I heard," says Heimdall. "Can you repair the Bifrost, Shell Bell?"
"You can talk to Heimdall," says Darcy. "He's cool."
That's a weird thing in his chest. She wonders what it is.
Also, he doesn't seem really prepared to receive visitors. She hops to just outside the house, and attempts to add the local Jarvis to the brainphone; this'll simply fail if there isn't one, but she thinks her world is the odd one out there.
[Yep, could you see me anyway? I do that when I'm teleporting somewhere unfamiliar. I apologize for appearing in Tony's room, but I didn't know where he was and the way the teleportation works is I specify a unique location, like 'near Tony'. I have one of him on my world and I heard that this world had one too so I have come to be sociable, but since he doesn't seem ready to receive visitors right now I thought I'd go through you, figuring there was probably a you too.]
"Mine, you mean? I call it Atlantis, and it has a one of you in it, only he's my age and he has a twin sister. It's in the future relative to here, and it was until recently a pretty nasty totalitarian state where it wasn't just post-apocalyptic, but I have since acquired magic and fixed the place up a bit."
"Oh, did I leave that there? This is only an illusion crown, I left my real one at home." She waves her hand through it by way of illustration. "Yeah, I go around wearing a crown, calling myself Empress of Atlantis, putting bad guys on the moon. There's lots of me, in various worlds, too, and this is a thing we do is take over worlds and be nice to them."
"One of me did wait until she was twenty-three, but she had a bit of a setback with the previous rulers of her world, she didn't have such nice magic to work with," says Bell. "And if you'd said that to her, given that she still looks seventeen, she'd raise one eyebrow like so -" Bell demonstrates - "and say that she's in her forties, so you've only made a lucky guess that I am in fact nineteen as of recently. So what? I'm doing a dramatically better job than the last dictator. He was evil. He propped up a system that had teenagers killing each other on live national television for populace-quelling and fun and profit. Your alt was on the show, so was his sister, they both won but they had to kill all the other contestants to get out alive."
"Yeah. I wasn't on it, I got picked in the lottery once but my district had this system to train particularly - likely-looking kids to go, so everyone else would be safe and they'd have a reasonable shot," shrugs Bell. "But anyway. I'm glad I didn't wait to take over the world until I was the right age for an empress. I was ready to do it when I was thirteen, if I'd had what I needed then. I probably could've done it younger, but thirteen is when people started recognizing me in Milliways and saying I looked like any of various Her Majesties, and then I knew I could."
"Yep." She pauses. "I wonder if you have an alt of the last president here, too. There were two other worlds that had yous in them and also had hims. You never cloned yourself, did you? In my world you've got a twin, she's called Sherlock, but in the others you clone yourself when you're twelve and get alts of Sherlock instead, only mine's the only one who's a girl."
"Did you even think about it? But anyway, clearly alts don't all come together since you haven't got a Sherlock - I've met a Sherlock without a Tony but he had one originally, his died and his Jarvis too but then another Jarvis copied and another Tony installed the copy in his world so he'd at least have him, he was a wreck about it, the matched sets are all really close... Anyway, the last president of my world was named Coriolanus Snow but he had a different name in the other two worlds, Obadiah Stane."
"In another world he actually did kill you, and Jarvis, and turn Sherlock into a vampire, and in mine there was the whole being an evil dictator and also really fucking creepy prostitution backroom deals, and yeah, it's a bad-news template. But hey, all the ones I know about are gone now. What's the thing in your chest?"
"My magic works around wishes. I take a wishcoin, I wish for the problem to be gone, if it doesn't work I try a wishcoin with more angles on it, if the seven-pointed star doesn't work I can't do it but I bet if you're fixing it with a little glowy thing I can fix it better with a pentagon or a hexagon. The wishes are pretty smart but not all that smart, so if the problem is at all complicated you probably want to actually tell me what it is first. If, hypothetically, you wanted it taken care of," she shrugs.
"I actually managed to take over my entire world without anybody trying to kill me and without having to personally kill anyone, which was way better than our initial projections. Although one of my alts came for a visit and killed someone for me. And I burned down a couple of buildings, but I chased everybody out of them, I didn't catch them on fire."
"Yeah. So what do you do? I bet some kind of engineering, but I mean specifically." She glances around the house for clues. "I'm pretty clueless about what my Tony gets up to in the basement with the gadgets, and I know less about what it'd take to write a Jarvis, which mine didn't do." Pause. "Hm, the only Tony with no Jarvis is the one who had a Sherlock all along, I wonder why, maybe the writing Jarvis and the cloning are both about being lonely or something."
"My friend who's holding the door is learning to be a superhero, too," volunteers Shell Bell, since this is apparently okay.
[D'you wanna meet him if he's up for it?]
"I don't tend to get mythological references and so on, I have a spotty and culturally impoverished education. I've been going to Milliways since I was six and staying until I ran out of seashells to trade for food, so in some ways I'm very cosmopolitan albeit without much information about what things are and are not common across worlds, but I spent the rest of my childhood in a beach town pretending to be slightly crazy, attending an underfunded school designed to turn out docile fisherfolk, working on a clam boat, and generally existing in a context that has lost all its previous ties to Earth history that isn't a fictionalized version of the Roman Empire."
"Oh, I could stay in Milliways for a long, long time if I brought enough seashells and didn't eat much," says Bell. "I talked to everyone and read a lot and watched a lot of video and learned everything I could. And after your alt and Sherlock put me on their tab instead - they're rich, you got a lot of money for winning on the TV show, everyone else outside the Capitol was dirt poor - then I stayed for months instead of weeks until I faked my death and stowed away on their train to move in with them. It's possible I'm actually twenty now by subjective time, but I've never added it up."
"I was floored when I heard about that. When I was little I lived for trips to Milliways - I'm sure I'd be brain-damaged from malnutrition by this age without it, actually - and it would only come by after months, sometimes longer. I was so jealous. But neither him nor Sherlock started finding it until after they won their respective Hunger Games."
"If you ever open a door and it leads to a bar instead of where you thought you were going? And it's decorated for - you have Valentine's Day here? Lace and pink and red and white and -" She makes the heart shape with her hands. "If you find Milliways and it's decorated with that crap you bolt."
"Good good." Pause. "Hey, I should probably apologize - I didn't know where you were, so earlier, I just teleported to the-place-you-were, invisibly - I have to specify a unique location or I can't go anywhere. I wound up in your bedroom, but I left to outside the house right away and talked to Jarvis. I don't know if he told you or not, but he noticed me, invisibility notwithstanding."
Square! Illusions! She includes all the ones she's met, just for fun, standing grouped, and points around. "These are mine, and this is Juliet's Sherlock, who's a vampire, and this is another pair from a world without a Bell in it, that's the Tony that copied their Jarvis for Juliet's Sherlock to bring home, and this is another vampire Sherlock from another world, who does have a Tony at home but he wasn't there when I met him, and this one unlike the other vampire one has his soul attached still."
"I have no idea what doing it at your age would wind up looking like," Shell Bell says frankly. "You might not even get a Sherlock; maybe Sherlock is only what you get if you clone yourself when you're twelve or have a twin naturally, maybe you'd get some complete other personality for a clone you made now. I'd suggest putting you in touch with Juliet's Sherlock so he can have a complete set, but he's pretty attached to Juliet and she's sort of a superhero in her world and really oughtn't leave, and you're probably pretty attached to here, and besides there'd be two Jarvises which could be weird."
"That too," Shell Bell acknowledges. "The relevant Jarvis was pretty even-keeled about it as far as I could tell, but I guess that's a little different? Also the worlds are closer neighbors -" She gestures at the relevant cluster of Sherlocks and the one displayed Tony. "These three all seem to have the same kind of vampire, similar magic systems, that sort of thing, my set's the odd one out in more ways than one. All the Bells are from very different worlds. The most similar pair are Stella and Golden, who had identical histories until they were seventeen, moved in with their versions of our father, and Stella encountered magic like what I have now and Golden encountered a different kind of vampire."
"Yeah, there really are. Stella thinks Golden's kind is neat so she turned her boyfriend into one." This is punctuated by illusions of all three named parties - Stella, Golden, and Alice. "This guy's template also crops up a lot. We call them Whistles - bells and whistles, it's apparently a saying some places? - and three of us have them."
The room is looking crowded. She dismisses excess Tonies and Sherlocks. (She keeps her Sherlock. She likes having her there.)
"It's possible I should work out a way to boost the teleportation power so it can live with complicated algorithms like 'on the far side of the nearest door to so-and-so', but that doesn't rule out the possibility of somebody being naked in that room," Shell Bell says.
"I haven't actually had that problem because of the way the teleporter interprets 'where so-and-so is' - I mean, you would have noticed if I'd appeared literally on top of you, and bathrooms are usually too small for me to show up in one with a person," Shell Bell says, "but it's probably worth installing anyway, in case I'm ever hunting for somebody with unconventional architecture."
"Then I am also glad I did not appear two hours ago. I apologize for not having added all these tweaks to my teleportation power before. I copied it directly from Stella and I have the impression that she usually knows plenty about where she's going and doesn't need this installed on the magical level. And is only visiting people she's already put on the brainphone network so she can call ahead anyway."
[It also does text channel. And busy messages that pop up according to arbitrarily complicated algorithms, although since in this world I've only added you, Jarvis, and Darcy, I don't think you'll need those unless you want me to throw a dozen of your friends in too.]
"My real name is Bell. The shell part is a nickname. Remember how I was bringing shells into Milliways since I was six? It doesn't warn me when it's going to give me a door, and having shells on my person or not was the difference between staying three days, starving, or staying three weeks, getting a reasonable meal every day and more time to learn things and look for some magic or tech I could take home and be that little bit safer. I left bags of clamshells near every door I ever went through and pitched a fit if someone moved them. The rhyme just made it even more obvious."
She laughs. "I'm not optimistic, if I can't do it with a star - although Stella's boyfriend has made even pointier coins, so maybe those can, although the big wishes are kind of mean - it's not even safe to use stars unless you know a certain secret - so she hasn't tried doing anything with them yet, she even calls the class of coin 'evils'."
"It's not a good idea to make people mints just because. One of the things coins can't do is unmint a person. I trust my Tony just fine, but he doesn't tend to go for jaunts in other worlds like I've been doing lately, he can just ask me or Sherlock for whatever he wants, and also he wouldn't be a particularly effective mint - I have the power so I can make my own triangles and squares new wherever I am, but all my big coins are from Sherlock and the other Bells who are mints get theirs from minted Whistles, because -" Pause. "Are you, like, squeamish?"
"The coins are made of pain," says Shell Bell. "More of it gets a pointier coin and a bigger wish. Whistles love it like candy; Sherlock liked it enough that it didn't take a lot of magic to get her to hexagon- and star-making on the regular. Most Bells - though not me or Angela, we come from totally nonmagical worlds - have a sort of inborn mental opacity power that won't let anything alter our brains, and even me and Angela don't like the idea, so even we take help where we can get it."
"One time I met an alt of me - that was Juliet - and I had just run into Angela, and I gave Angela all my big coins including the hexes, which are how one makes more mints, and including the pentagons, which would've been enough to wake up Sherlock and call her over without losing the door. I shouldn't have done that, Angela has a Whistle, she only needed two hexes to start, not anything else... And Juliet of course did not insist on breaking my arm for the sake of getting magic even though the magic in that cluster of worlds is nasty, addictive, dangerous stuff that she's been advised not to try. So I just visited her for a while and made her a big heap of squares and helped the one Tony install the copied Jarvis and then I went home."
No dice.
She tries a few wish designs - naive "make him alive", then "restore him to his condition as of just before he died" intending to patch any other injuries with lesser coins, then "reconstruct the mind that used to live here, put it in a new, living body" -
No dice.
[It doesn't work,] she tells both Heimdall and Darcy apologetically. [I'm sorry.]
"Yeah. I went back to her world for a bit and fixed a bridge that she needed to commute between planets and there's a Tony in her world, who I met. He's thirty-seven and has a Jarvis but no Sherlock, twinned or cloned. And then after Darcy was bored holding the door for me, I tried resurrecting a guy who'd died in a war they had recently, to see if it'd work - and it doesn't. Not with a star, anyway, I don't know about Stella's 'evils'."
Sherlock can barely deal with the coin she is trying to make.
It turns out that the pentagon that modified her perception of pain was not... quite... sufficient.
But she can't take the time to readjust. She summons the concentration to make coins out of what she's feeling, and as soon as she summons the concentration to stop, she tells Tony [enough] and spends a declawed star to declaw one of her new eight-pointed coins.
Her wish is extremely specific. She wants Bell back. Not a version incompletely reconstructed from her own knowledge or any other secondary information, but the same person who was destroyed in a nuclear explosion a minute ago. She wants Bell back, right here, unharmed and unchanged and with complete memories of her life up to the point where she was murdered.
There's nothing incoming on the house.
(Coin doesn't, actually, know where Bell's magic comes from, or she would never have done something so incomplete and foolish.)
Coin is receiving a report that the bomb has gone off and as near as anyone in Thirteen can determine it got its target. "Thank you," she tells the report-deliverer, "that will be all."
Bell continuing to be dead was more unpleasant than the amount of pain required to make her stop. And Sherlock could not be quite certain that there wasn't a time limit involved, that any second spent tuning her masochism and experimenting with Tony to find a more pleasant delivery method might not be the particular second that carried her out of reach forever.
"Moon," says Bell. "Public trial for her and her accomplices. I don't know if we can get her to admit to anything, and of course whatever vid I put out the smart people will know I could've magicked no matter what happened, but it'll go some way towards not making it just look like I'm picking on a rival for no reason."
Hugs all round. "So now I have to deal with the assassins - Coin and whoever actually planted the nuke and whoever else was involved - and also figure out a form of invulnerability that won't interfere with emergency coinmaking. I guess it could just go on and off at will like the regen does. Although Stella found it really useful to be able to make a hex unexpectedly that once, we're not looking at the exact situation that would make that relevant..."
"Yes. But there could easily be a very small number of District Thirteen folks that I ever need to bemoon, and I'm concerned about them all eventually hating each other. The ground rules should prevent actual harm, and the ex-Capitol population is much larger, it'd be easier for them to be absorbed. Maybe I should make them an - attached suburb sort of area that I can close off if there's too much friction."
"...Er," Bell says, holding up a finger, and she squares off two of the evils from Sherlock's chain, declaws them, and gives them to Tony. "Hold onto these for the next few minutes, if we don't check in... I don't think Coin has anything prepped for us appearing right now and if she did it probably wouldn't get around the protection newly added, but I'm all paranoid now, I literally just died."
Teleportation into the new moon-neighborhood occurs.
Coin still has nothing to say, apparently.
"How?" blurts Coin.
"Magic," Bell snaps.
There is a silence, and Coin starts muttering names, and, at Bell's look when she stops, says, "That's everyone who knew."
Bell's lie-detector is quiet. She wishes all the named individuals up without further ceremony. "Reports of my assassination have omitted certain details," she says loudly to the assembled half-dozen people. "Such as that I'm not dead. Such as that I do not appreciate people trying to kill me. Such as that the obvious, obvious consequence of antagonizing the Empress of Atlantis is getting put on the moon. Welcome to the moon, I hope you like it, you do not get to leave. You get the same letter-writing privileges as the ex-Capitolites, your mailbox is over there, you may enter the ex-Capitol proper if desired but if you get into fights with the other moondwellers I will seal off your section, more detailed trials intended for general broadcast and summary appeals of the sentence will begin when I have calmed down."
And she teleports herself and Sherlock back to the kitchen where abandoned cupcake batter continues to rest on the counter.
"I don't understand why they'd do that," mumbles Bell. "By any sane measure all their lives were getting better with me around. I really wasn't going to challenge Coin's presidency until she was up for reelection and that was years away. I don't understand."
When she has managed it and deems the calm stable, she goes back up to the moon, impresses up on everyone who has just been moved there that she can tell when they're lying, conjures up video cameras, and interviews them about the events leading up to her assassination, although she implies throughout that it never worked in the first place. She then collects all her videos and takes them to her PR manager. He and most of his staff were hired from District Thirteen, so she has a chat with him about the content of the videos, first, and finds him mercifully to fall on her side of the issue (apparently, he didn't vote for Coin). She turns over the video for editing and context-addition and broadcast, and she goes home again.