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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
[I don't. I'm the boring one. My nickname to distinguish me from all the others who are also named Bella is 'Pattern'. Because I do not deviate from the pattern.]
bellfounding
[Oh, I picked the nickname myself. I didn't have a better idea. I might change it, later, when I see them again, something on the 'rings' theme, I did Saturn because no one else was doing Saturn.]
tearingup
[I can't believe that you're the only one with no distinguishing features. How do you know you don't deviate from the pattern if everyone else does?]
bellfounding
[Because they all deviate from the same pattern - imagine you saw a sentence written a dozen times and each iteration had a different word changed to something random, you'd be able to work out what the sentence was. Also, because the one of me who is the princess of a fairytale forest and can magically see template properties says so.]
bellfounding
She laughs. [For a certain reading of 'strange', maybe I do. I'm not completely indiscernible - like, I'm the only single one, I am the only Bell from a world that has a Gotham in it - they're not usual; most worlds have no Gotham and a more significant New York City instead - and anything I do with the knowledge of what the others have done, like starting on Saturn instead of Mars, is a chance to be distinguished. I just didn't start out with anything much beyond the fact that all the worlds are a little different and this one's mine.]
bellfounding
[The others mostly wind up with this one template - there are three and a half of them here, but one of them works for me, another one is basically her cuddle therapist, and the one and a half belong to the elf of me and got stranded here while they were helping me with the Saturn ecosystem, I'm not dating any of them. Although it is sort of tragically convenient that the one and a half are here because they're psychically bonded to Elf Bell and that means I can talk to her some. There was yet another one of this template who was born here, but by the time I un-died he'd already moved to Vampire Bell's world with his vampire boyfriend. And of the rest, most of them are dating or in one case married to one or both of this paired template which isn't here, and there are stray ones but I never wound up importing any or anything based on random party conversations, and then Vampire Me is the only one with a non-template significant other and they're Mystically Vampire Bonded.]
tearingup
He puzzles through this, then says,
[I'm not hearing a reason you, personally, are single.]
[I'm not hearing a reason you, personally, are single.]
bellfounding
[None of the things that cause Bells to have significant others have happened to me,] Pattern says. [None of them went out looking. They just sort of had these people fall in their laps and wound up being pleased about it.]
bellfounding
[It hasn't really been a priority. I sort of flirted with one of the stray Tonies at a Bell party one time.]
bellfounding
[- Does "stray" sound bad? It just means that he's from a world we're in contact with - when we're in contact with anywhere, although I bet Juliet can still talk to those worlds - but doesn't have a Bell of its own.]
bellfounding
[Well, an unBelled Tony, at any rate. Three of 'em appear with Bells, three of 'em appear only with their own template attachments, so far.]
bellfounding
[They're a flirty bunch, although not as much as the more common template I mentioned.]
bellfounding
[They've flirted with me, I just don't really flirt back with them. The Tonies are all named Tony, although I think it's short for a variety of things. The others have no name consistency at all - the ones here are named Queenie, Ghosty, Aianon, and Ansharil.]
bellfounding
[Aianon and Ansharil. They're the same template, which landed in two bodies in that world - Template-Things Seer Bell says the template couldn't decide which species to land in - and are basically one person.]