To start with, there are now eight Bells. Pattern isn't bringing anyone besides herself, and Aegis no one besides herself and her Whistle, but everyone else -
Between Alice, the Joker, the rescued Queenie, Kas, Micaiah, and Sue, plus Ghosty who Amariah picked up on her way home, that's seven Whistles. (Stella thinks ahead: there is a soundproofed orgy chamber away from the main party awning. With a few nodes off of it in case more than one orgy forms; she can think of at least two other likely ones.)
There's an equally absurd number of Sherlocks and Tonies if you count them together. They have Juliet's matched set, Shell Bell's matched set, two other matched sets from Bell-less worlds (one with souled vampire, one both human), a stray Tony, and a stray Sherlock from Downside.
Amariah grabbed a random Libby on top of the random extra Whistle, but at least she's not incorporating anyone from home.
Golden's bringing much of her family and many of her friends - although Edward is staying home, that still leaves Elspeth and Jacob, Alice and Jasper with little Brandon, Rosalie and Emmett and little Henry, Nathan accompanying his mate and their child Kerron, Esme and Carlisle and their Lily, Addy, and Elena who'll get to see her brother. Golden claims that this is a conservative list and she could easily have produced another twenty enthusiastic guests. Stella doesn't doubt it. She puts up a few signs reading Please Conduct Adult Conversation Only Via Brainphone. Little Half-Vampires Have Good Ears And Perfect Memories. As a last-minute surprise, Golden has taken Elspeth's suggestion to bring Edward's deceased mother Elizabeth, too.
Juliet has, on top of her boyfriend and his - progenitor? - her tiny Libby, James, a tagalong thereto called Virginia, and a ghost called Minnie, plus Giles.
Angela's list is more modest: her, her husband, and their friends Alleluia and Caleb.
Shell Bell is responsible for half the Sherlocks-and-Tonies all by herself, a tagalong called Pepper, and also someone called Darcy and also Matilda. (Shell Bell is also the reason Angela is not inviting her brother-in-law.)
Stella herself is responsible for inviting Libby, Orfeo, Chris, Mary, Anna, Sandy, Eights, Chainsaw, Lazarus, Kolya (who is informed that it would be awfully inconvenient for a majority of Bells to all have to coordinate on pretending he doesn't exist when only one of them has even met him to be able to identify him in the first place, so he can simply stay home if he's planning to be hidey), and Bridget.
Stella sets up a name tag system. Everyone will have a tag stuck to them. Solo persons - a minority - will just have their names. People with template names and nicknames will have both stamped on automatically. ("Hi! I'm a Bell, and you can call me Stella!"; "Hi! I'm a Whistle, and you can call me Alice!" "Hi! I'm a Sherlock, and I don't have a distinguishing nickname yet but as soon as I pick one it will appear here!")
She conjures up a nice buffet of food and beverages which will stay its correct temperature until consumed, and assorted synthetics for the vampires (labeled not for human consumption), and dishes and flatware (all glass; even some of the food-eating guests might dissolve anything else) and fusses with the awning opacity until it lets in just the right amount of sun, and, what the hell, she throws in a stage in case Angela wants to sing or she decides to play the flute or someone decides to pentagon some other performative skill to entertain the crowd. She makes sure there are enough bathrooms for all the people who still need bathrooms.
She puts out a few tables here and there with little bowls of squares and triangles - a mix of her glowing red and Alice's shifty black - in them for everyone's convenience. She accumulates coins in those sizes faster than she generally uses them and has a great many, so there are plenty for anyone to dip and wish if something comes up. She double-checks to make sure the Martian ground rules prohibit any misuses available for those size coins.
Jane gets one of those high-tech holographic projectors, on wheels, which she promptly manifests in, drives around the floor, and makes faces through.
Aegis sort of wishes she were as far along in empire-building as some of the others. At least she's not completely on her own like poor Pattern, but her only guest is off in a pile of himselves. Oh well. Everybody here is filtered for being potentially interesting to people like her! There's a guy standing alone with a plate of food looking around with bemusement. She dances over in his direction. Her exo's been rendered quite redundant but she hasn't taken it off yet, so she's still all-over copper. "Hi -" She read his name tag. "Is that pronounced with a hard G or a soft G? Or like a J?"
Aegis grins. "I'm lucky, I had warning. Whistles like my Sue sometimes dream their way into Milliways, so I've been hearing about alts and mints and stuff since I was ten, even if I didn't buy it all as a real thing since it was just Sue telling me about a dream he had where there were more of me and one of 'em had wings."
"Yeah, that was in the executive summary I got when I met up with the peal, Slayer's like a supernatural draftee versus monsters. Gets superpowers, but mostly combat ones, not magic. Sue visited Sunshine once, but Juliet made him spar with her first to make sure he'd be able to handle himself if they met anything and he gave her a bloody nose and she was really impressed, so they must be pretty good combat powers. He said she was easier to hit than me, though, just tougher."
"Yeesh. Did she piss them off or something? She kind of glossed over how she got to be one of the technically dead trio in all the excitement. I don't have as complete a picture of her as some of the others - Sue can't link her. Golden either. Their versions of our power won't let him in even if they try."
"I was keeping it secret that I could link with Sue, because my telepath-blocking mutation is the only reason I was allowed to have this," says Aegis, flicking the copper webbing on the back of one hand, "but then they really wanted me to be able to do it for the war we were supposed to wage, so in the middle of the night they gave me an illegal mutation suppression drug and took my exoskeleton - and I was almost paralyzed without it before magic happened. But I fessed up about having been able to let Sue in all along and they gave me an antidote and my exo back."
Aegis laughs. "They weren't a monolith. I hacked into the fleet psych files and there were some people who were shouting at some other people about fucking with us like that. But yeah, now the war's over and I'm an admiral and a mint and I've got Jane and I don't even need my exo anymore, I just haven't bothered to take it off - and some things are gonna change about my world."
"I'm still an admiral and a war hero and the best friend of the only person who can translate for the aliens. Whoever's elected will have to listen to me, or at least Sue. If I can't be Hegemon, I can probably at least get awarded governorship of a colony, and make covert little improvements to the rest of the world the way Angela's doing while she waits to order her god to name her Archangel."
(She is, Giles may notice, the youngest Bell in attendance.)
"I didn't say I was going to ask her! But the vast majority of people who've made it their business to keep shit secret from me were hiding facts like 'we have been reading your diary since you were four' and 'that computer game you've been playing is a psychological evaluation tool' and 'the asshole who knocked your head into the corner of your bunk and could've given you brain damage was actually a plant and we could've stopped him anytime but we didn't' and 'we're graduating you early to use you as leverage against your best friend' and 'that game you just played involved real soldiers, four of whom died after giving up their lives on Earth to relativistic space travel and didn't know they were putting their lives in the hands of fifteen- and sixteen-year olds, and we were never going to tell you but our psychologists convinced us it was strategically necessary'. And I don't like it."
"There's this thing we do," says Aegis. "We ask ourselves: What do I want? What do I have? How can I use the latter to get the former? And having more power lets us be more precise and nicer and more ethical at getting only what we want and not any extras that we don't need that we might not really, truly want. And we don't want to hurt people, or go around needlessly violating other people's privacy and autonomy, and with wishcoins we can avoid it even if something very, very important that might ordinarily conflict with those things is on the line. But at the end of the day it always comes down to what we want. Angela's god is false and Amariah's don't care and mine's probably going to send me a Mother's Day card - we answer to ourselves. I don't think wanting to know things that have no obvious application would ever tend to trump others' personal privacy. But if something were going to... curiosity is high up on things that motivate Bells. I'm not trying to scare you. I do think Juliet must like you, I'm not planning to pry into your head, and you aren't from my jurisdiction anyway. But for keeping conversations a little friendlier than this one turned out, you could consider not being conspicuously, temptingly opaque."
And to Aegis, he adds: "This information has nothing to do with you. Its only conceivable use to anyone, besides making me uncomfortable every time it comes up, is to corroborate a warning that a kind of magic you are never going to study has nasty pitfalls that almost certainly wouldn't affect you anyway."
"Yeah," says Aegis. "And what'd happen if I didn't cough up, too. Otherwise maybe I piss them off not telling and they just find it out some other way and later I need them to like me and they don't - or maybe I don't tell and they're not mad but I never even know that they could've just looked it up someplace else and are capable of yea much restraint and I need an evaluation of their character later - or maybe I do tell because it turns out the alternative is getting drugged and half-paralyzed and gosh sure would've been nice to know that they wanted to know I could do this thing back when telling them would've been relatively painless, huh? - or maybe she's the admin Downside and she knows literally everything already and now I know how restrained she's not and also know not to waste time predicating any behavior on her being ignorant of anything - or something. Why wouldn't I want to know exactly how much my secrets were under my control?"
"Okay, but," says Juliet, "if one hasn't already thought through all that sort of thing, then learning something about how much one's secrets are under one's control can just sound like bad news or like escalating, they don't necessarily like learning it even if it was already true. If you - geez, you haven't interacted with civilians since you were six apart from the last twelve hours, have you? All kinds of shit probably goes without saying when everybody in the conversation's ranked and uniformed."
"I'm not gonna say they're complete shit, I'd have to talk to you a bit more to know that, but they're probably not well-calibrated. Giles isn't your C.O. just because he's old enough to vote. If he doesn't tell you something you're not going to wind up killing people on his say-so in the absence of critical information or running into some organizational incompatibility and ending your career."
"I probably need, like, a month planetside before I'm decent company for anybody but Sue and the other child soldiers and copies of me," she remarks. "There were totally shades of mouthing off to a colonel back there. Different content same attitude. Sorry, Giles. I know you're not a colonel."
Juliet hugs her. "She'd get huffy and tell you that she didn't mean anything by whatever prompted the attitude and that you were a very touchy young lady and maybe she won't bake those cinnamon buns after all," she says. "And she'd get over it in about fifteen minutes and hug you. And bake you cinnamon buns."
[Hey, Aegis,] says Jane, broadcasting to all three members of the conversation (as the newly installed brainphone upgrade informs them), [I think you have one of these at home. He's got a different name and doesn't wear glasses and I wasn't paying a lot of attention so I didn't notice right away but the face matches one in the I.F. personnel database.]
[Rupert Merryweather,] reports Jane. [He's out of work now, since the Battle School system is shutting down, but he worked on getting kids into it through unconventional avenues. Including Aegis, who didn't take standard psych tests and couldn't be read by monitor. And he was also one of the principal people yelling at everyone about not giving her any bullshit.]
"I'd wanna consult Sue first. I wonder if he's done yet," Aegis says, peering around in search of Sue. The door for him she added to her wall still has a bird-activated doorbell of sorts so she can brighten to solicit attention, which is probably less intrusive and more comfortable than brainphoning. Bird?
[Okay. So Giles, if you were a military recruitment officer who worked mostly with super-genius six-year-olds and your livelihood had just been rendered moot, what would be the best way for me to invite you to a party on Mars in Eos on behalf of one of your erstwhile charges? Jasper, if you were a military psychologist who liked yelling at bureaucrats - same question!]
[Lots of universes,] Jane says chattily, [have copies of people from others. There's a you here. He's friends with another of Swan.]
(Both Jaspers are now nametagged as Jaspers who have not chosen distinguishing nicknames. Jasper Cullen peers at his, and shrugs, and it turns into "Jazz". The Ruperts are labeled as Ruperts who may be addressed by their respective last names.)
"There was a ton of fighting on Eros, me and Sue were locked up in our room to wait it out, some people got in, we fought but got tranqued and Sue woke up first and Jane learned her teleporting trick and put us in touch with Shell Bell and then all the others and put the other kidnap victims in the Hegemony complex. Was this not on the nets, any of it?"
"Speaking of which," Jasper "Jazz" Cullen says to Whitlock, "do you want to meet my wife and our son, or would that be weird for you?"
"Only sometimes," says Brandon. "You're another Papa," he observes of Whitlock.
"Little half-vampires are super-cute," says Aegis. "So, there's you with your kid, Golden, and there's Angela expecting with her Whistle, I guess all that's left is for somebody with a Sherlock to get knocked up and we'll have collectively tried all the known combinations? Juliet, who do you think'll be first, you or Shell Bell?"
"I don't know, we haven't exactly sat down and discussed it, but she's the one with the stable empire, I have like five thousand species of demons to individually evaluate and handle before I can claim anything like that," shrugs Juliet. "I'm also not sure kids are a want for me? For us in general?"