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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
[My personnel officer is hunting up an actual secretary to help out, but yeah, any emails signed 'Imperial Staff' are from bits of Jane's code.]
bellfounding
[Well, it has to be someone I can trust with most of my information, ideally without resorting to geases, and someone who gets along with me personally, etcetera. There have been candidates, I just haven't kept any of them so far.]
tearingup
[I have - how did Rayne put it - 'an unforgivable combination of bad manners and soppiness'.]
bellfounding
[I am having a failure of imagination in trying to figure out how those traits might combine.]
tearingup
[Nice when I should be nasty and nasty when I should be nice. Although given that that's Rayne's assessment, maybe I should be rethinking it.]
bellfounding
[Possibly. Though I'm not the embodiment of tact myself.]
bellfounding
[Nah. Not my strong suit. Personnel officer's better at that sort of thing.]
bellfounding
[Yeah. I have, you know, personnel, though, and she vets them, she picks out ambassadors who are good at ambassadoring, that sort of thing.]
bellfounding
[The secretary in particular is proving difficult, but I imagine someone will turn up; I could always go back to one of the rejected candidates if my email starts piling up too badly. I don't want you thinking Slipstick - the personnel officer - isn't good at what she does; it's just she's an import from another world and hasn't had as long as she'd ideally need to build up her network.]
tearingup
[This whole 'other worlds' thing is a bit of a leap for me to begin with,] he says. [Although, oddly, not as much of a leap as Saturn.]
bellfounding
[The other worlds are less of a leap than Saturn? Really?]
tearingup
[Haven't you ever found that when something incredibly, fantastically impossible turns out to be true, it's much easier to take than something that was only just barely impossible?]
bellfounding
[Nnnno, not really. I lived an unremarkable life, died at age seventeen, and then was woken up by seven alternate versions of myself, three of whom weren't even human, and they gave me lots of magic powers and we took over the afterlife together. I got dropped directly into 'fantastic', took it really well, and have not been much surprised since.]
bellfounding
[Oh, I forgot to mention, the other magical empresses I know all look exactly like me.]
bellfounding
[We're all of a template. Personalities - and faces and life narrative features - crop up over and over, and there are lots of me. They don't all look precisely like me,] she amends. [There is a boy one and an angel one and an elf one and a vampire one. And of the girls, two of them are shorter than the rest of us and one is taller due to childhood malnutrition and growing up in low gravity, respectively. And our thing is being magical empresses.]
bellfounding
[Well, last time I saw him he hadn't progressed to emperor, he was doing motivated capitalism - there are some questionably acceptable deity-things in his world, at least one of which is evil, and he isn't sure he's ready to have their attention.]