People on the Internet complain that she is technically an absolute monarch who has not, in fact, limited herself with a Constitution of any kind, only posted about what she does and does not expect to want to do on her website. Other people on the Internet point out that she seems to want and not want to do those things just as predicted and that it doesn't really affect anyone's quality of life if she happens to wear a ringcrown while she does it. Still other people point out that even if she wrote up a Constitution and swore to uphold it, this would not, in any way, shape, or form, cut her magical power in such a way that anyone could make a practical objection should she change her mind.
A lot of dead people come back to life. She does not make a particularly big dent, but it's enough to give hope, and the fact that the resurrected immortals don't suffer unusual levels of existential dread or lose their ability to appreciate classical music leave a lot of those who have never died more willing to try immortality.
Time passes. The Empire of Rings is the new normal. She still gets attention, but she's not nearly as memetic anymore. Her spotlight continues to shed spare interest on Ripper and his musical career.
There are things he likes and things he doesn't like about being somewhat more famous. Being able to teleport away from overeager fans is a big plus. Living on a planet that actively guards its inhabitants against unwanted media intrusion is an even bigger one. Without those, he thinks he might quit - but he has those, and he likes getting on stage in front of thousands of people who want him to be there.
So, all in all, he's okay.
And plenty of people have seen him mostly naked by now; his album covers are still distinctly... themed. Not to mention the fact that performing shirtless is so routine for him that he has been good-naturedly booed for wearing a jacket to an outdoor venue on a cold day.
Ripper has finished playing the guitar, and has apparently decided to tempt fate, because he's having a cup of tea while he goes through his archive of mostly naked pictures of himself. (There are a lot of them by now. He thinks he might go back to that original graveyard shoot for his next album cover; he hasn't used any from it yet.)
Bella insinuates herself into his lap. There is still no sign of her. She watches pictures go by and leans her head on his shoulder and is a snuggly ninja. She waits for tea to be put down. She decides to see if his earlobe tastes like anything right now.
And it turns out that it will hedge out all experience of her that isn't those nibblings and her hands. No weight on his lap, no tickling hair on his unshirted parts, just nibbles and slightly wandery hands.
Bella tries to catch up with Sarion a minimum of twice a year if nothing she just has to tell a fellow Bell about comes up in the intervening time. After about six months have elapsed, she asks Aianon and Ansharil if either of them (and, of course, Sarion herself) are free for such a catching-up.
Isibel listens, and replies with the enchantments she has been doing - and also what Lycaelon and Liselen have been doing to help. Lately she has adjusted the parameters of her enchanted village to accommodate the needs of centaurs, a few families of which have moved in. It sounds like both of their worlds are doing quite well.
[Not by much. Me and Golden share a birthdate; I died the February I was seventeen and she faked her death the subsequent October. I suppose it could be relevant that she was pretending to have died in a fire and I kicked it in a hospital after getting creamed by the same car that got Stella and almost got Golden. Might be relevant that Golden was married and telling her mom that she was pregnant at the time, I guess, although I can't see how that would help.]
[It's the most obvious difference between my case and Stella's. Or Juliet's. Juliet also died, but she came back way quicker than I did, her parents didn't find out. Stella got hit by the car, didn't avoid it altogether like Golden, but Alice patched her up before she would've died.]
[Sure, but that doesn't mean you being dead was what broke them up, directly. So whatever it was about you being dead that made the difference, it just might not have come around like that with Golden. Or, I don't know, maybe it did and half the time when that happens your mom gets a divorce and half the time she doesn't and you're seeing one of each.]
[I suppose. Or, I dunno, maybe it's some knock-on effect of the magic in the other worlds that didn't take place here, or conversely something about Gotham, or some different template that appears here or there but hasn't made itself obtrusively relevant yet. But it's not as tempting an explanation - we have disturbingly similar childhoods, we can recite the exact same conversation about why blue raspberry exists as a flavor from when we were six, and that seems much easier to perturb than anyone's marital status.]
[Different reasons per parent - I think Charlie would find it overwhelming and Renée would want to meet everybody I mentioned as examples. I have no idea what her and any one of the Jokers in the same room would do. I might get around to it eventually, if it comes up, if they ask prying questions.]
[Oh, sure they have. All under very different circumstances - in particular most of them were combining the 'hi, Mom or Dad, this is a Joker' visit with the 'hi, Mom or Dad, this is my boyfriend' visit. Sooner or later, anyway - Aurora went the other way around but she has a noticeably different parent-child relationship from everybody else because of her sister. Stella was friends with Alice first, but Alice was a fellow high school student at the time, not her mysterious magical staffperson, and also Stella's Charlie was friends with his family's housekeeper.]
[Foreign Renées and Charlies milling around with miscellaneous otherworldly species, gossiping about us with each other, Charlies being conspicuously uncomfortable, Renées wanting to go visit each other without getting how a lot of us are working under secrecy constraints, both of them trying to be parental at Bells who don't belong to them? Yes. Weird.]
"Hello, Bella! And this must be Ripper," says Renée, "it's good to meet you! I'm Bella's mother Renée."
"Pretty good. Spent most of yesterday in Lebanon. But I also took enough of a shine to a historian who kept emailing me that I pastwatched some things for her, that was fun."
"I'm sure she appreciated the help, though. Maybe you'll do more of that sort of thing once the politics are all sorted out," says Renée.
"Yeah, probably my focus'll shift over time when politics settles down. Politics and also the bottleneck in torching, I'm hoping for demographic shift to cut the birthrate so I can eventually get everyone who wants in. Bigger groups of people are signing up for torching now and just because I can do as much as I want doesn't mean it's instantaneous. At least I've offloaded most of the screening process and can basically fly down a line every time I do a batch."
"Why do you call it torching?"
"It looks like going up in flames," says Bella.
"Why not?" says Bella. [I actually have no idea,] she adds to Ripper. [Should maybe ask the admin when I can.]
"I suppose. Well, go on, eat up," says Renée, and she takes some salad and then starts ladling soup into everyone's bowls. "And leave room for cake."
"Mmm," says Bella appreciatively.
"Well, of course," laughs Renée. "I used to make these recipes all the time - and then I started trying to eat less fat but it doesn't matter anymore, does it?"
"It does not," agrees Bella.
"I think Shipley is a fine name. I didn't know how else to pick from the list of places with open homes that had people living in them. And I didn't want to move in somewhere empty," says Renée.
"Two days ago," says Renée, "we got a trampoline park, I didn't know there were any of those floating around but apparently there were, and we got to meet people from three other bubbles that were also attached to it and jump around like five-year-olds, it was lovely."
"Glad you like it," says Bella. "Yeah, there's only the one of those so far, next time I expand I'll put in another one or two."
"Occasionally," shrugs Renée. "Not a lot."
Eventually cake is gone, and coffee is offered, and there is chat about other common-area bubbles that may visit Shipley or Ripper's bubble at some point, and then Bella and Ripper take their leave. She teleports them to his hallway, and knocks on his door, smirking at him.
Months go by. The waiting list for resurrection is long; she torchables a lot of people but there are billions of them and they keep dying. Bella gently wheedles Aianon for niners as often as seems prudent. She revamps the interplanetary transit system when enough people have significant quantities of stuff they want to import and export. Another Olympics happens; a Cronian skier wins silver in two events. Bella is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize over her objections, gives all of the prize money to a Cronian charity that does social work on both inhabited planets, and wears her medal to formal occasions. There are more political cartoons; she starts collecting the cleverer ones, trading small magical favors for the originals, and keeps them on walls in her palace. She catches up with Sarion again, newsy little exchanges of how their worlds are going (Sarion is not an "empress", so it cannot be "empires").
And then:
[Charlie wants to meet you, now.]
Presently, Charlie opens the door. "Bella," he says, and he hugs her. "And - 'Ripper'? Everyone calls you that?"
Breakfast is conjured - Charlie says, "Wouldn't inflict my cooking on a guest". Bella gives him squares so he can do the honors; he supplies omelets for everyone, and also bagels and fixings, and bacon. Plenty of bacon.
Bacon. It is time for bacon.
"You ever going to move to Saturn, Dad?" Bella asks.
"Maybe if cops become obsolete," snorts Charlie.
"I do seem to be improving the Earthly crime rate, although perhaps not in the department of graffiti and shoplifting."
"I haven't seen much dent in either. Maybe an uptick in vandalism. People move offplanet, they leave houses empty to be taken apart, you've messed up the real estate market some."
"I'm not gonna apologize for that, I don't think," grins Bella.
Brunch-dinner continues in a similar vein, until they're picking at the last crumbs of bagel and bacon and Bella's agreeing to go with Charlie to see some movie the following Saturday. Eventually she and Ripper make their goodbyes and she teleports them to his hallway. (And knocks.) "What was it that I was supposed to ask you later about?"
"Saturn doesn't have cops," she points out. "And my interaction with Earth cops is mostly Charlie; it is probably fair to say that I'm biased, I guess, but still. There are bad cops, but there are also bad kindergarten teachers and bad retail workers and bad doctors and people don't think unkind thoughts about those professions as groups."