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Everyone pops in. All the Bells, all the Jokers - except for the Joker, who is missing for some reason - and the Bells immediately, without having to speak, divide their tasks amongst themselves. Stella and Angela and Pattern and Cam start brainstorming solutions - not implementing them, yet, just generating ideas that might work depending on what they're dealing with. Golden, as the one who's actually had her mind read by a loved one - albeit under more controlled circumstances - is working with Shell Bell, the other previously broken-beyond-recognition Bell, on coming up with a plan to help walk Isibel through recovery after they fix this somehow. Cam eventually folds into this conversation from the other since he's the one with a talking notebook; if they can find Isibel's old books they might be able to turn them into something that could help more actively. Rose is peering into Isibel's mindscape, looking for visible damage that she can just heal directly. Amariah's popping back into Milliways and forcing the door to the elf's world so she can drop a Janepoint in the cave to keep it temporally synced, then coming back and joining Juliet and Aegis in interrogating the demon and the waking dragon about what exactly they have done to Isibel.
"I can do it if I stop thinking at all," says the demon. "But it's hard. I can't stay that way for long. And when I'm thinking of nothing but how much I love her, then her mind is full of my thoughts and she can't do anything else."
Amariah clenches both fists in her hair. "There has got to be a way to do this. We just haven't been thinking hard enough."
"It's not even the case that we can tolerate zero mindreading. I routinely allow Edward to read me - it just has to be under my control, is all."
"Can we edit the bond to - require consent, maybe, add a filter that the demon won't use but Isibel will...?"
"Wouldn't that amount to the same thing? Maybe not. If we just knew how it worked... you know what, I'm waking up Lazarus, this is important enough to wake him up for. Jane?"
Stella drops herself outside Lazarus's apartment and spends the triangle to wake him. [Lazarus. I remember giving you a no-need-to-sleep power, this is recreational, we have a disaster on our hands and I need you, please let Jane bring you to Atlantis to have a look at this elf Bell and her dragon.]
[We found an elf Bell. She is wrecked. She's got this bond thing that's like a cross between being daemons and being vampire mates and something else, with a dragon and a demonic Joker, and it makes them read her mind, and we have no prayer of getting her patched up if they can't stop, but we tried sending her through Downside and as soon as she woke up it was back, and we tried wishing it away outright but that broke the dragon.]
They appear in Atlantis. Stella gestures expressively at the sleeping Isibel and her Jokers. "Help."
"That's a mess, all right," he murmurs. "Um, let me see. Have you had any bright ideas besides the ones that didn't work?"
"I can find nothing in her mindscape, so I could attempt nothing there - it doesn't block me, it's simply empty."
"If Isibel has opacity it's not very good opacity. We could - theoretically - edit her. But no," says Stella, "I think she'd rather just sleep forever. Or would if she were still whole and was looking at her choices."
"Editing the bond to not incorporate mindreading, even with half a dozen backup channels between the demon and dragon, flips the dragon off like a lightswitch," says Juliet. "But if we could just incorporate some kind of - filter, gate, toggle, something to give control to Isibel - but we don't know how the bond works, that's what you're here for, we don't want to wreck the demon-dragon-unit again in the process of trying to help Isibel, she loves them."
"...It should be possible," says Lazarus. "But you'd have to be careful about it. Maybe I should be the one to make the wish. Everything in there," he gestures to the dragon's head, "is very - sensitive. Intricate. Tangly. This bond thing is fascinating, I'd be excited if it weren't so tragic."
"I'm not sure what kind of flexibility there is to edit this thing. What can you do?" Stella asks, extracting a hex from her aura. "Bare minimum she has to be able to think and keep them out at the same time; the exact design beyond that matters less."
"If you give me parameters everyone can agree on, I can probably implement them," he says. "The tricky part isn't that a lot of things are impossible, it's that anything is complicated."
"Pushing thoughts only on purpose like in a Sue-link is probably the best mix of privacy and the kind of - intimacy, communicability, that she might want again when she's got anything left to push," Aegis says.
"I assume there's no reason to block her from reading anything she likes in you?" Shell Bell asks the demon-and-dragon.
"Of course not," says the dragon. "But she should be able to look away when she wants to." The demon nods.
"So," says Lazarus, "how about this: a symmetrical barrier between her and the rest of you, where anyone can choose to 'speak' and anyone can choose to 'listen' but information only crosses the circle when those are both happening on the appropriate sides?"
