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Bella teleports to where Sherlock is and flops down somewhat lapward. "Just checking," she says, "if I disappeared for several decades I would not come home to an unexpected alt of Carinna, right?"
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cross_and_bow
"Nah. Hey, speaking of Wellspring magic, apparently that is the mysterious way in which Wellspring is related to Sunshine worlds. Same kind of magic, except Sunshine has icky 'patterns' stuck to it. We might have a Matilda-type guest seeing if she can unglue them here at some point. My magic system switched from Sunshine, which my opacity wasn't letting me use, to Wellspring, which it will, when a Matilda floated me for long enough. I got better than Cam and not as good as Glass."
eversomuchfun
"Fascinating," he says. "Does Wellspring also have demons, or are those separate?"
cross_and_bow
"Separate. Probably responsible for gluing on many of the icky patterns."
cross_and_bow
"Glass also thinks that Bells are intensely susceptible to magic addiction wherever it's possible, so even though that's not something that should technically happen with Wellspring patterns in place of Sunny patterns, I went ahead and made a wish against it before doing any -" She crooks a finger in the direction of a rug's edge, rolling it up. "Of that."
cross_and_bow
Subsequently:
"So there are sixteen of me now," Bella says, draped lazily across Sherlock's lap. "Three new. The next party's going to be ridiculous."
cross_and_bow
Bella counts off on her fingers. "There's Tab. She named her world Gift. We found her when we ran into Elspeth and Elspeth wanted to go rescue Harley; Gift is where he wound up when he uncontrollably Sueported to a random place, and there he was nonconsensually mind-controlled and more-consensually tortured and eventually spent five years torching repeatedly in the sun; when Elspeth pulled him out my aura had some work to do to keep his residual heat from incinerating the room. Tab's Libby has already taken over Earth and they get along surprisingly well considering the mind control thing, so Tab is going to colonize space with dead people."
She ticks off another finger. "There's Aether. She's the one the welcoming committee was originally trying to fetch, her world broke Jane. She's a psychic sorta thing they have in Materia, which is what she named her terrible anticausal world, and she was studying to be a therapist because that is what psychic Bells in terrible anticausal worlds do apparently. She has a Joker who goes around naked all the time for religious reasons and is also a garden; he now has censor bars. His name's Celo."
And a third finger. "And there is Etty, who is the peal's second lesbian, turns into a swan occasionally, had a nasty if not Shell Bell level time of it with her Joker's dad until he got dead, and has a grotesque magic system. Her Joker is girl-shaped, apparently from the beginning and not with the assistance of grotesque magic, and is called Nona."
She ticks off another finger. "There's Aether. She's the one the welcoming committee was originally trying to fetch, her world broke Jane. She's a psychic sorta thing they have in Materia, which is what she named her terrible anticausal world, and she was studying to be a therapist because that is what psychic Bells in terrible anticausal worlds do apparently. She has a Joker who goes around naked all the time for religious reasons and is also a garden; he now has censor bars. His name's Celo."
And a third finger. "And there is Etty, who is the peal's second lesbian, turns into a swan occasionally, had a nasty if not Shell Bell level time of it with her Joker's dad until he got dead, and has a grotesque magic system. Her Joker is girl-shaped, apparently from the beginning and not with the assistance of grotesque magic, and is called Nona."
eversomuchfun
"Turns into a swan, you say. Of all things. Have you ever considered the theory that the circumstances of the peal are one big cosmic joke?"
cross_and_bow
"Well, she was one of a long string of people who got turned into swan-people by Nona's dad," says Bella. "It's not like, aside from the name, we are otherwise swan-themed as a group. No recurring swan daemons or swan-related magic powers or whatever, some of us don't even have the surname. Etty can just turn into a swan."
cross_and_bow
"And as a side effect of the spell the dress she appears wearing when she turns back into a human is made of white feathers. I don't know, we can ask Glass if it's related." She picks up her Janegem and flicks it on. "Hey, Jane, can you ask Glass if she got a look at Etty to see if the swan thing is related to the name attractor?"
mind_game
[Sure.] And a moment later, [She says they're separate and basically coincidental, the swan transformation thing is a completely different kind of attractor, similar to Beast turning into a cat-monster - Etty was supposed to turn into a swan and Beast was supposed to turn into a beast in about the same way.]
eversomuchfun
"This does nothing to put a dent in my 'cosmic joke' theory," Sherlock observes.
cross_and_bow
"I am so pleased. Anyway, latest word on the horrible Janebreaking world that I heard is that Aether's aura will fix it within a limited area, so she can go home, with a Janegem, but not install a Janepoint."
cross_and_bow
"Causality. Science - not tech, science - doesn't behave there. If you look at the world's moving parts too hard, or you annoy something sufficiently epic, or it looks like you're cheating, or the universe feels like it, the reliability of induction bids you an impolite goodbye."
