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Bella's public facing email address (eor@eor.eor; many of the Bells are following similar protocols to Stella's, for web presence, and in Origin the relevant empire is called the Empire of Rings, after Saturn's feature) gets a lot of mail. Jane used to help with it; without Jane, there is still extremely smart filtering going on, and a program no one has noticed at work yet auto-responds to almost everything with canned but tweakable responses and links to the imperial website.
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.
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bellfounding
tearingup
[Is there a reason they didn't have names...? I seem to remember something about ten thousand years wandering naked on an island, is that related?]
bellfounding
[Jokers never keep their birth names. The demon had one, I don't know what; the dragon didn't, he just hatched all alone and wandered around till he found the demon. And they didn't need names until later, when they were interacting with more people.]
tearingup
[Okay then,] he says, in a slightly different tone. Ditching your birth name is nothing new to him.
bellfounding
[Where'd you get it? 'Cause I'm pretty sure it wasn't from Sarion's mom.]
bellfounding
[Do I want to know what exactly you are inclined towards ripping?]
bellfounding
[Yeah, I think so. Curiosity is a very strong impulse for us Bells, and as we know I am undeviating from template.]
bellfounding
[Also I don't feel like engaging in social interaction with him.]
bellfounding
[I assume he had some virtues that simply haven't been made apparent to me?]
tearingup
[Eh, maybe there isn't one. He's good to have on your side, most of the time. Nasty sense of humour, but funny nasty, not vicious nasty.]
tearingup
[Yeah. That's Rayne's idea of a nice gesture. I'm upset about our friend dying, but I'm not doing anything about it, so he fakes his own death to make me do something about it. In his mind, that makes sense.]
bellfounding
[Well, it nearly worked, I'll give him that. At any rate, my dead people waiting list cleared four hundred thousand this morning; I don't know how many at once a relevantly sized wish will do, but it's getting to the point where I'm willing to try one even at the risk of wasting some of its capacity.]
tearingup
[Isn't four hundred thousand dead people at once going to, I don't know, mess things up somehow?]
bellfounding
[You begin to understand the kinds of problems I get to play with. Yeah. I'll be storing them asleep on Titan and waking them up a few at a time.]