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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
bellfounding
"Golden's daughter. She has magical truth-telling powers and runs Golden's PR department; if she tells you something true you're going to believe it. I imagine she's very effective at shutting down unwanted rumors."
bellfounding
"Yeah, except then, and then I suppose Elspeth's silence would be fairly damning. So perhaps it's just as well I don't have one, especially since by all accounts her father's not such a prize. I haven't gotten to meet him because Bells who aren't his wife make him uncomfortable, except Cam, who doesn't count."
tearingup
Ripper laughs and shakes his head.
"I could listen to you talk about your other universes all day."
"I could listen to you talk about your other universes all day."
bellfounding
"It's nice to have an audience who doesn't already know it all. The staff are mostly imports from other worlds already, or the multiverse doesn't fall under need-to-know and we don't hang out socially."
bellfounding
"Not a bit. I will, however, eventually run out of stories."
bellfounding
"There are twelve others of me," she concedes, "all of whom are more interesting than I am and told me all the highlights."
bellfounding
"One of them," says Bella, "is a naturally immortal witch whose soul takes the form of a talking screech owl. She has assassinated a president, defeated an archangel in single combat, rescued all of the dead shades from her Downside-incompatible worldsheaf from an eternity of sleepless despair, and co-founded the Belltower that allowed us to all find each other."
tearingup
"But," says Ripper, "she's not standing here telling me all this." He winks. "And she's not single."
bellfounding
"And that's more interesting than the owl soul thing?" Pause. "I checked to see what my soul would be if I had an external one - they're a thing you can get, if you go to that world. I'm a firefly."
bellfounding
"Do you want to see what yours would be, if you went unprotected to Alethia?"
bellfounding
"I think that's some kind of kingfisher, but I don't know what kind," muses Bella. "I could conjure up one of the books of possible daemons to look it up and what it's supposed to mean, if you like."
