Bella is hanging out in a Jarvis - the familiar one - handwriting a nonaggression proposal-slash-bribe. Has to be handwritten. Damn fussy demons. At least it's okay for her to conjure rather than personally harvesting the weird ink she's supposed to use.
"It's a joke on a popular series of video games," he says. "And it is a joke - I'm in contact with Yggdrasil, Apollo, and Helios, and they are respectively suffering 'error 6008: missing 1s in binary code', 'error 2: cannot count', and 'error 909: out of memory, all alone in the moonlight'."
"There's not even a keyboard in here!" she shouts ineffectually at the error display.
The tower's otherwise uninhabited. She tries a few wishes. Nothing works. She tries a tenner and it won't go - it would make her supreme over an entire subworld but it cannot fix Jane.
What the fuck.
Bella's about to force the bar door to Peace when she remembers that Aegis was on the new Bell's welcoming committee.
Juliet hasn't been wherever Aegis went. She can't force the door thereto. (It doesn't even always work when you have been wherever.)
She loiters in the Belltower for an hour, trying wish designs, physically poking at the hardware, and not only does she fail to get Jane running again, she doesn't see any other Bells. Not even Shell Bell, who should be able to get a door whenever she wants it. Either Milliways is having more fun with the lost timesync than usual, or something is wrong even more deeply than suspected.
Juliet leaves a note in the tower, explaining what she tried, and the error Sunshine and the other Jarvised worlds got.
And then she leaves.
"No good," she reports darkly. "The Belltower reports 'error 0: problem exists between chair and keyboard' and I can't fix her. Not even with a tenner. There was no sign of any other Bells - I left a note, I bet they would have too, I was probably the first one on the scene."
Eventually the writing is done, she's handed it over for review, and she decides to head home, get a mug of hot cocoa the old-fashioned way, and sit in her room and revise her future plans to accommodate more limited high-end coin output.
There's someone in her room.
She doesn't drop the mug, but she does shriek. "Christ! Who are you and what are you doing in my room?"
There are bunked beds.
There are clothes on the floor that don't belong to her. And a sweater that does, but which she hasn't worn in two months. A box of tacky jewelry that definitely isn't hers, including an array of costume-colorful crosses.
"Who the fuck are you and what did you do to my room?"
"Who are you?"
[She - she doesn't know who I am, I thought she was fooling the first few times she asked me who I was and what I was doing in her room but I think she's serious. She's interrogating me in some random - place - it's cold as balls - she says she doesn't know anyone named Sophia.]
"Do you know who this is? Because I don't, but she was in my room anyway, and there was an extra bed in it, and stuff that doesn't belong to me, and I know I haven't been home as much since I stopped needing to sleep but I'd think Charlie'd tell me before taking in a boarder."
Bella looks skyward. "What, you want to go talk about this in a Jarvis, I have no idea what she is, because she's not my sister, I have a completely coherent set of memories from where the perfect recall kicks in all the way through ten minutes ago with no sister, frankly I don't want her anywhere near a being I like that physically can't torch while we can't get Downside."
"And I have a perfectly clear set of memories from the day I met you that include your sister, and I assume your sister can say something similar, and here she is. Until ten minutes ago you've never had a problem acknowledging her existence. Something has changed, but before we find out what I am not going to advise treating Soph like a hostile fucking demon."
[We've met Soph,] says a Jarvis. [You can watch the video yourself. I don't know of any spell both powerful and sophisticated enough to alter my recordings. A mind-affecting spell might alter my personal memories, but the data I have on file is a separate matter, and I'm verifying the records as we speak.]
Since the weather dispute is getting nowhere, he spends a coin to raise the local temperature to something Soph would find more pleasant.
"Oh, come on, I could do that with a star, maybe an evil, if I had any reason to want to," says Juliet. "You know what I couldn't do with a star or an evil, I couldn't edit my brain, I'm next least friendly-headed after Golden and not even Stella can make mental edits!"
"If she were my sister she would have coins on her, I would have given her some, and I have fewer than I should, but I never gave anybody coins, but if she's immune to hexes and up she can't have a sorting wish and she'd have a bandolier, and I wouldn't have made it invisible to me."
"If Juliet's memories do prove correct, I don't think this can possibly be the work of a coin," says Sherlock. "Coins are powerful but they're piss-poor at narrative, as far as I can tell; I would be noticing contradictions already. I'd believe enchantment first, and local magic before either. But I shudder to think how much power a local witch would have to put in to get this kind of far-reaching effect. And then there is the question of motive."
"But - but - but I remember it. There's - mud on the floor in the front hall from where I came in after I got the mail. There's my bed in our room. There's - I know you and you know me, you've known me since March, I still have the laser pointer you gave me, I made you listen to me talk about episodes of House for an hour and a half after I found out who you were, you got me my magic belt for my birthday -"
"I remember having my room to myself, and not having to worry about any Sunnydale-dwelling family members apart from Charlie, and driving to school alone - not to mention stopping in the morgue to stake all the corpses first! - and coming back from the dead to confront my murderer and protect the next Slayer and show Charlie I wasn't dead, but not you -"
"I didn't even know you'd died till after you came back! Charlie couldn't figure out how to tell me in the, what, an hour - and half the time I staked the corpses for you and the other half of the time I stood watch - and you were the one who convinced me to move there! Because of Mom and Phil, you said, they needed space, we could just go live with Charlie!"
The robed person addresses her by titles such as 'Your Radiantishness' and 'Your Awesome Majesty'. They aren't discussing anything especially important; she wants him to bring her better skin care products, and he agrees that of course her every whim must be carried out immediately and it will be done at once, and so on, and so forth.
"And here she is looking in the fridge but apparently not finding anything she likes, and here she is reading a school copy of The Great Gatsby, and - thirty seconds before that there's no her, no bunkbeds, no tacky jewelry, no Great Gatsby. Looks like she popped into existence with all her stuff an hour and fifteen minutes ago."
"No - no before that I was on the phone with Barb and before that I was - what did I - before that I was doing my math, and before that you picked me up from school and complained about me not being able to teleport without spending a coin every time and I said you could just give me more coins and you said maybe if Jane weren't down - and - and before that I was in school, I got peanut butter on my shirt but Carrie loaned me this one -"
And then the spell ends, and the glowy green light winks out, and the monks clutch each other in relief.
"Yes. Another reason to be upset Jane's down, I guess we didn't have enough." Bella nibbles her lip. "- I know you're conveniently immune to all kinds of things," she says to Soph, "so you're not a mint and you've never been to Alethia, but what did you get in your fake memories when I presumably checked out your counterfactual daemon and coin color?"
She spends another square on reproducing Soph's counterfactual daemon in illusion form.
She looks through the book, silently, swiftly, following the identification key.
"Shiny cowbird," she reports.
"Or perhaps," says Sherlock, "to put it another way, they are laid as eggs in the nests of foreign species and are dependent on the host family for sustenance and protection until they grow to adulthood. Two hours ago you did not have a sister, dear Juliet, but now you do."
And he shakes his head and sits down by Soph.
Soph shifts uncomfortably. "I dunno, you could - pretend I'm somebell else's little sister? And you have to look after me for - for her, because I'm stuck here. You want to look after me for the one who had a - me. And you should - expect me to know about that many things about how you are and that I grew up in a Sunshine family world and that sort of thing but - I dunno. That's the only idea I have."
"It's effectively true," says Sherlock. "With one small alteration: Juliet is the one who is, for most purposes, stuck in the world of another Bell who is like her in every way except for having a Soph. This means that, for example, if Soph is rigged to explode and does so, you can expect a funeral at which your parents will cry."
Bath Lady killed all the monks, then threw an enormous tantrum in front of her cowering minions about how the monks had managed to conceal the Key before she got there and now she'll have to find it and she doesn't know where on Earth they could possibly have hid the thing. Around the time that Juliet was discovering her new sister, Bath Lady was just winding down her tirade.
Meanwhile, Bath Lady's minions are bringing her a human, who seems generally confused about where he is and what he is doing there.
"For me?" she exclaims, clasping her hands together. "Oh, Minion, I could just kiss your yucky face!"
She stands up, dusts her hands off cheerfully, and grabs the man's head. Her fingers sink into his skull as though it's partially insubstantial, doing no obvious physical damage but causing him to scream.
"Clean that up," she commands, waving her hand dismissively at him. The minions rush to obey, taking the man's arms and steering him out of the room while he wobbles and moans. She sits down on her couch with a pleased little sigh and goes back to her fashion magazines.
[The bath lady's name is Glorificus, Glory for short; her alter ego is Ben, a perfectly ordinary human except for occasionally turning into her. She seems to derive power or sustenance from sucking... something... out of people's brains. Her past victims can be cured at a pentagon per, but I only did the most recent one. The rest are either dead or in mental hospitals.]
And:
[Hey, Giles, two things. One, can you please see what there is to see on the subject of a hell god named Glory or Glorificus, her relationship to her mortal vessel, and anything to do with the Key? Two, Soph did not exist until a couple of hours ago, I am the only person unaffected by the corresponding memory-alteration, and there is some interpersonal fallout as a result.]
[...I'll, er, I'll look that up,] says Giles.
[I have an aura of menace. It's very impressive and makes people who don't know better think I'm a hellcreature of some kind. You'd have to really stretch the definition to qualify me as one, though. Slightly less cheaply, I can conjure up arbitrary nonmagical physical objects. Or magic ones, but they're trickier.]
"Nice to meet you properly. Welcome to Nevada. I'm not going to strand you here, but in case it makes you more comfortable, there is a highway, three miles that way -" she points. "With a rest stop not far from there. So, yeah, this is me, I'm a human, I'm very magical." She hops into the air and spins around again.
"So it would seem, yes. I don't suppose it helps any that I clearly could do something awful - to you, to anybody - and instead I'm spending my time poking around powerful hellgods because they've been making mental patients of innocent people? This doesn't suffice to demonstrate that I have benign motives?"
"Glory brain-sucks people a few times a month," says Bella. "I don't have very long to gain your trust the old-fashioned way by hanging around and not doing anything evil, and she will definitely notice me if I teleport her next victim away, and I don't currently know how entangled she is with you, so I don't know if my first idea for dealing with her in a crisis situation will hurt you or not. Resurrecting the dead is more inconvenient and time-consuming right now than usual, and even the victims who don't wind up dead are a hassle to fix and don't look like they have a pleasant time on the way there or subsequently, so allowing her to go about her business is not on the table. If you really want rid of her, you want to talk to me."
"Look. Ben. I'm sure having her intermittently possess you is very annoying and you just want it over with without having to endure any further hassle. But I don't think you would want me to just teleport you to Mercury and attempt to pull her out of you there if you thought about it. I don't know what will happen if I do that. For all I know, you will die as soon as I do it because of some kind of dependence between you and then I have to go haul you back which could take me a while, or she'll triple in power and be strong enough to give me a difficult afternoon once you aren't attached to her, or she'll go terrorize her original subworld and then I have a difficult rebellion project on my hands, or something. Some of those outcomes are not great for you."
"She can't get back to her original hell dimension," he says. "And I thought you said your magic could split us. Either you can do the impossible or you can't. How am I supposed to know exactly what impossible things you're claiming you can do when you won't tell me what they are or how you're going to do them? If you don't even know that I can live through it, why are you suggesting it at all, and especially why did you suggest it without mentioning that up front? This is not helping with the trust thing!"
"Dude," says Bella, pinching the bridge of her nose, "I told you, multiple times, I don't know if I can do it till I try it. I can do all kinds of wild things, but neither I nor my friends have encountered the specific scenario of 'hell god possessing human' before. And I'm trying to find out whether you can live through it, so that if the answer is 'no', I can find another solution. You aren't helping with the 'find out' project, so I'm trying to explain why it is important and you should wish to be helpful. That doesn't mean that I'm going to charge blindly forward in the absence of the relevant information."
"Offworld magic," sighs Bella, looking skyward. "There are lots of worlds, you know that already 'cause Glory's from one, but Glory's from one in the same collection as this one we're standing in. I got some magic from some friends who are from other world-collections. What else do you want to know about it?"
"Think of the wishes as magical computer programs," Bella says. "If I wish 'unstick Glory from Ben, put Glory on Mercury', then this will either work or not, but if it works, something I haven't thought of could cause something I don't expect, just like computers don't always behave even though no one expressly programmed in any bugs. That's why I have to think of all the things that might go wrong first. What will Glory be able to do when she's unstuck? How fast will she be able to do it - faster than I can stop her? Are you, in some way you have not chosen to tell me about, attached to her in such a way that you will come to harm in her absence if I don't specifically wish around it? I know some people whose lives are dependent on external souls that are shaped like animals, it would not be the weirdest thing I've heard if your life is in some way dependent on Glory's occupancy and I can probably work around it but I have to know how to be sure."
"I have a research guy who's investigating assorted books. I can spy on the past, if I know when and where I want to look. I have a crystal ball, but I have to interpret what it shows me in light of whatever I already know. I can wish up other information-gathering abilities if I know what sorts of things I need to find out."
"So, I can poke the hellgod into turning into her mortal host with a pentagon, the mortal host doesn't trust me and doesn't know much, I've got Giles looking up Glory and - relevant topics, and I'm going to check on Glory-or-Ben every few minutes so I can intercept if she's about to eat somebody else."
"And I will be on Mercury," she mutters. (Because where else is she going to go? Soph's bedroom? The other Jarvis?)
And she goes to Mercury. She's gotten as far as putting a nice breathable atmosphere and temperature and humidity on it, she's just been waiting till she has a look at more demon dimensions she might want to model aspects of the place after before she commits to any architecture or landscaping that would be expensive to replace. It's habitable.
Just boring.
She sits on Mercury and looks at the sky and looks in every few minutes on Ben/Glory.
"The Key is a kind of magical artifact with no fixed physical form that can be used to open a gate between worlds. Glory's home dimension is unusually difficult to access; she wants to use the Key to go home. The monks we saw were trying to keep it from her, and when she discovered them they cast a spell to hide the Key in the safest place they could think of: under the protection of that undead ex-Slayer with mysterious powers who's been making diplomatic overtures to so many demons lately."
"That would be spectacular, but I'm skeptical that anyone wants to listen to me unless there is someone I know well enough to pour my heart out to but not well enough that I ever 'mentioned' having a sister." She shakes her head. "Is there a reason to want Glory not to be home that is unrelated to the gate? Like, should I not give her a lift if that seems expedient?"
"Tony wants to listen to you and has explicitly offered to do so. I suppose it's up to you whether or not you know him well enough. It's possible that if Glory goes home she might make life even more unpleasant for the demons who live there, but it's very unlikely that anyone from that dimension could leave it again without the Key."
"So that's an option if I get a nasty surprise about how difficult she is to manage at some point, I guess. I kind of expect that if I talk to anyone who likes Soph and I'm not self-censoring to the point of rendering the exercise useless they will quietly hate me."
"Yeah. And I guess she brainphoned Sherlock for help, and - to the extent that there were sides he was not on mine - and I'm talking to you instead of him now because I guess he identifies with her or something? But like - I feel like I've faceplanted into an expectation that I treat my mental opacity like it is the problem here, like, we'd all be a happy Soph-including family if only I'd had the courtesy to be brainwashable? And instead I am the only person I know who has not been brainwashed, and the problem Sherlock chose to address first after concluding that I wasn't crazy was that I wasn't being nice enough. Like - is it just me or is that a complete failure of perspective-taking - what would he do if he woke up one morning and discovered that - I don't know, that his cloning retroactively yielded an extra that everyone remembered but him? Soph was alternately defensive and quiet, I have no actual personal beef with her, but - Sherlock."
"If Sherry woke up one morning and there was an extra clone in the family that everybody remembered but him, he'd get right into figuring out what the hell was going on, but he'd treat the extra guy like family unless he found out he was some kind of camouflaged assassin or something. He empathizes way, way too strongly with the whole 'brand new extra person' situation to do anything else."
"...Okay. I don't know how to do that, though, I'm not Sherlock, I can't derive a reasonable picture of her personality from ten minutes of talking to her and her tacky taste in jewelry, she's not even an alt of Lexi. Soph had the idea that I should act like she's some other Bell's sister, which was a good idea. Which I can do because I met Lexi and didn't find her deeply bewildering. If Lexi were stranded here, I'd know how to react to that - I mean, it'd involve a lot of trying to get her home to Aurora, but I don't imagine anyone would complain about how I treated her in the meantime. But - that isn't what happened. Everyone else changed too. I don't know how much splicing her in has affected your memories or the Jarvises' or Sherlock's - let alone my parents, god, Aurora's on record speculating that she has the worst relationship with her parents of any Bell specifically because she wasn't an only child and it made her neurotic. Do my parents now remember raising a neurotic standoffish child who was never confident that she was loved enough? And I mean, Aurora is noticeably different from the rest of us, she has an exactly standard backstory right up to 'move to Forks, find magic and a significant other' but she still acts - off-center. Not in a bad way but in a different way. I don't expect this to add up to much with people I don't interact with socially on a regular basis, but my parents - And Sherlock! Now he remembers meeting and being interested in and teaching and engaging in Slaying with and - all that - a Bell with a sister. The fact that the Bell he remembers now never existed and I do instead doesn't mean it's really me he remembers. Having a sister a year younger than me would've affected me. I don't know who all the brainwashed people remember. I'm not her. For a distressingly large fraction of all practical purposes, he met me earlier today, in Canada, shouting at his friend."
"Yeah. Now I have homework. And - it's a lot of homework, it's seventeen years of homework, I can watch most of it at greater than the original speed and I can skip over parts where we're just sleeping in our twee little bunk beds and so on, but if I'm at all thorough it's years of homework. And - I asked, I grabbed, responsibility for the whole world. I don't resent having to deal with Glory, or talk to demons, or eventually interface with human governments. I don't resent the obligations that I volunteered for when I helped myself to ludicrous amounts of power. But I resent the - personal imposition. If someone does something and then I have to go kill them or undo it or find their creation a nice quiet subdimension to peacefully live out its days, that's fine, that's part of the job, I signed up for that, I clock in and clock out at highly irregular hours but I can clock out of that. If I even start with Soph I don't get to live with her being my 'sister' some limited number of hours every day, or only when there's a crisis, or only when I feel like it, and I didn't sign up for that and I am not used to it from earliest toddlerhood and that's my life and I want to decide what goes in it without demands like that. Like, at least if Renée and Charlie improbably had a baby right now, I would get used to the baby from a starting point where its primary needs involved its physical safety and we'd work out our more complicated interactions over a longer period of time, from scratch, bit by bit. Soph already has some set of expectations for how having a sister works for her, and what if I hate it, what if I do all my homework and whatever she remembers only works if I'm a year old when I first encounter her and she's little and cute at the time?"
"Maybe. It's very tempting to just give up. Not bother. Wish Soph the best of luck, act extremely awkward around Charlie and Renée, get on with my life. Move officially out of Twee Bunkbed Room and be out of her way, Sherlock can pass her coins under the table if he wants, he's the one who makes them. Screw the homework, I have a world to patch and a Mercury palace to design, you know? Except I'm pretty sure if I did that I wouldn't have a boyfriend any more and that is not helping me evaluate the possibility on its own merits or dismerits."
"He wouldn't be happy," Bella says. "I guess if he's gone this long without dumping me he probably isn't going to, but - ugh, sometimes I feel like our entire relationship is a string of new reasons to be tense and uncomfortable. This wouldn't help. But I'm not sure if that's even a good reason to consider being all - sisterly, with Soph."
"Yeah, I guess." She sits back in her chair. "So there's Soph herself, who near as I can tell is an innocent victim of sorts, who does not deserve to go through the subjective experience of losing her sister, and whose actual - so to speak - sister I have no hope of producing from the depths of Downside Jane or no Jane. She's probably entitled to some attention from me on that basis alone, but I don't know her well enough to know how to do that short of actually doing my seventeen-years-of-homework bit - which even if I decide to do it, I can't do it instantaneously, so there's the question of how to act in the meanwhile. There's Renée and Charlie - I don't even know whether to tell them that their younger daughter is an extremely convincing fiction."
"It's a lot of homework," mutters Bella. "Also I have to figure out how to go about it. Learning to read my own notebook cipher and counterfactual pastwatching will do reasonably well up to the point where we got the brainphone, but after that for a complete picture I'm going to have to read my counterfactual mind, and I'm - well, for one thing I'm not sure how the fact that these events never happened will interact with the fact that even in the false history I was mentally opaque, and for another I'm not sure how I feel about reading somebell else's mind whether she really existed or not. Like, she didn't walk around doing things, but the things she would have done have had effects on you and Sherlock and Soph and Charlie and Renée and so on."
It shows one of her, then two of her; they stare at each other, perhaps brainphoning; there is the one of her.
"Crystal ball suggests I can," she says.
"In the absence of being able to ask Mary or Alice, or even consult Glass or Lazarus about how my opacity works, I think trusting the crystal ball is the best bet." She looks up at Mercury's sky; during the day it's a pleasant lilac but right now, where she is, it's nighttime. "It'd be a big change, though."
"Apparently Sherlock's memories match up pretty closely, but he would've only known you since March and only through me, so. I'm looking at a bigger shift. And..." She shrugs, shifting her weight. "I don't know who I'd be shifting for. I don't know you yet."
"I'm..." Soph shrugs. "I try to be nice, I try to be smart, I'm not as - as verbal as you are, I think I'm more social, I have a bunch of school friends who don't know about magic and stuff... um, you didn't have any trouble getting me to move here, when Mom got married... I don't call them by their first names when they're not listening except sometimes to you? And I sometimes greet people by saying 'how's tricks' and I can't remember where I picked it up."
"I used to be into whatever Renée was into, I'd follow her to whatever church she was going to or work on whatever craft she was halfway through. Lately I've mostly been just doing - school stuff, hanging out with my friends, listening to you talk about all the demons you're meeting."
"You do most of the talking," shrugs Soph. "Sometimes I, like, come up with useful metaphors. You talk to me a lot actually. I'm a pretty good listener, I dunno if I'm as good as Tony but you - knew me better. We'd do all kinds of random stuff. Sometimes you'd watch movies with me, I like movies... after you got Slayer powers I dragged you to a bunch of stuff like ice skating, weekends during the day..."