This still leaves a lot of emails every day she has to deal with herself, although some of them allow her to make gentle adjustments to Jane's program to handle future inquiries of the same kind. The number goes up over time. Slipstick's still on the lookout for a suitable secretary type person to help out. Until then, Bella leans on super-speed.
She has had to address the rumors about being able to raise the dead. It's a frustrating, narrow line to walk, between lying, explaining too much, and getting everyone's hopes up. Currently the FAQ has a section that looks like this:
Can you raise the dead?
Eventually, I'd like to be able to do that for everyone's departed loved ones. I'm working on it as fast as I can, but today all I can deploy are public health measures and, on a smaller scale, immortality, for people who are currently alive.
I heard you were dead and brought yourself back to life / I heard someone else was dead and you brought them back to life!
This is an exaggeration. I'm immortal; if I suffer lethal damage, the thing I do is called 'torching', not 'dying'. The same is true of other people who I've made able to torch.
I want to be able to torch.
There's a waiting list, but this is something I can do. Just fill out the form and my staff will process your application; if everything checks out the current wait time for getting into a torching batch is about four months.
I don't want to torch, but I want to stop aging.
This is also available, but the waiting list is longer; apply here.
Are you sure you can't raise the dead?
I really, really wish I could do that for everyone who asks. I maintain a waiting list of people whose resurrection has been particularly requested so that as soon as I have this capability I'll know who to use it for first.
[Oh, the king agreed to recommend against nominating me to the committee, but it's anybody's guess whether they'll do it anyway. How are you doing?]
[I'm glad you like it! A bunch of my alts and some Jokers swung by to enchant it with me, it was a fun group project and we got auras that way.]
[There is a lot of it. I only have the Bell-standard kinds, since there isn't any from around here and I never got around to asking the unicorn how to safely copy elf magic like I was planning. I should maybe ask Aianon to ask Sarion to ask him for me.]
[There's an entire population of them - actually two worlds have unicorns, but Thilanushinyel is the one with elf magic I wanted to copy and also the one I can currently talk to.]
[I don't need it for any specific effects, but insofar as it does things, it does things without running down any finite resources.]
[Yep. In Thilanushinyel, you get it by, one, being an elf, and two, being psychically bonded to a dragon, and the dragon serves as a power source; the unicorn showed up to warn us that if I just naively copied the magic I'd wind up stealing it from the elves, so I have to work out a design for the duplication with him, or possibly another unicorn but most likely the same one. Unicorns in that world go around reporting on what the Wild Magic has to say, and it knows stuff.]
[We're not totally clear on that; it won't talk to us directly, even Sarion, and it's kind of vague with the unicorns too. I think it's like a cross between an instantiation of magic in general in that world - although only one of several kinds of magic user is actually called "Wildmage" - and maybe a god, but not an omnipotent one or anything.]
[On a personal level, no idea. In terms of stuff it's motivated to do, not awful - it cared that I was about to accidentally steal elf magic, it told Sarion what she had to do to save the world. It has a history of telling people to do things to save the world.]
[It mostly puts people where they need to be to save the world; she intends that the world cease to need saving. Although I suppose it will continue to supply Wildmages with their powers indefinitely.]
[...If saving the world is a regular enough thing there that it's someone's job to arrange saviors, how's she going to do that?]
[Well, it needs saving from a specific set of things that no one has managed to completely eradicate. And this world-needs-saving thing only occurs about once every thousand years, so she has a while to figure it out.]
[Demons. Aianon's the last regular one, and he in particular is fine, but there are demonic spirits of various sorts, spooky dark things.]