« Back
Generated:
Post last updated:
obstruction of justice
Permalink Mark Unread

She and Gem talk for a long time about how to safely search for Ardas. She is an indestructible magic rock who can teleport and can turn off pain, there is not much disastrous that can happen, but the whole reason they are looking for Ardas is that Ardas tend to have problems, and if she shows up while Eru is involved things could get even worse, so it is worth the time invested in precautions.

 

There are not many places in Arda that are reliably a safe place to land at any point in the timeline. Eventually they settle on trying a teleport to the air just outside Valinor (they considered targeting for Tol Eressëa, but that will miss Ardas where the Elves are still beside Cuivienen), while in the form of a swift.

She tests that if she is adjacent to an Arda this will work, and she tests that if she has no idea whether she is adjacent to an Arda (Gem teleports her somewhere unfamiliar) this will still work.

And she goes to each of the hundred sixteen worlds that have been discovered so far and she tries to teleport to the air just outside Valinor, and when that fails she tries to teleport to the air half a mile above a Bell, because while she is doing this she might as well check for alts.

(She should check for alts of the Noldor too, of course, but she is confident all Bells will react well to learning they are an interdimensional meddling collective of magic-workers and she is less confident about the alts of the Noldor so she only checks for alts of her wife. All non-Arda Finweans so far have cooccurred with a Bell anyway.)

She is in Aurum now. She tries to teleport to the air just outside Valinor. No. She tries to teleport to the air well above a Bell.

It goes.

Permalink Mark Unread

This is a dense city, Earth skyscraper-type architecture, bright electric lights shining through dramatically clearer air than Joy may expect Earth skyscraper-type cities to have, especially with that many cars driving around below. There are also more non-pigeon birds around than Joy may expect in Earth skyscraper-type cities (though there are plenty of pigeons too).

Bells chime loudly in the distance from several places at once: one measure of a song and then three low bongs.

Permalink Mark Unread

Ooohhh! She will swoop down to ground level to get a closer look.

Permalink Mark Unread

The city continues to be a city. There's a lot of animals around; not just dogs and such but apparently unattended bats and pandas and tigers strolling through the street. The signage is Chinese; so are the humans.

Permalink Mark Unread

Maybe a spellbinder planet like Hex?

 

Bella once told her she could claim to be from China. She finds somewhere without people around and shifts back.

Permalink Mark Unread

Indeed, she attracts rather few looks. She's still prettier than anybody walking around, but not actually by that much. She is awfully tall though, and the magical girl outfit's a little weird, and nobody else's hair is as long as hers.

Permalink Mark Unread

...she will nudge the magical girl outfit into something slightly more appropriate. And she will walk up to the nearest store and say "hi! I am looking for a Bella Swan, do you happen to know who that is or how I can look people up?"

Permalink Mark Unread

The shopkeeper blinks at her. "...Is this a trick question?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"You can assume I have been living in a really rural area and have not had internet access or anything! When I met Bella she was still living in Washington."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You know the Imperatrix?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...no. Unless that's Bella, is that Bella? ...that would totally be Bella. Gem's going to be so delighted - what's the Imperatrix, what is she in charge of?"

Permalink Mark Unread

The shopkeeper waves vaguely. "Earth? Is this one of those television shows where you mock people behind their backs for not knowing much about politics -?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Earth? Like, the whole thing?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"You really live under a rock, don't you. Your outfit's very fashion forward for someone who's spent the last five years farming canola and not watching the news."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What year is it?"

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"Is this a hidden camera reality show where you make fun of me for not figuring out you're an Andalite sooner?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...what's an Andalite?"

Permalink Mark Unread

 

 


"Where are you from?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Really far away, and I met Bella when she was living in Forks, and please these aren't trick questions I just want to know what year it is."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...it's 2010."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Thank you!!!" And she heads outside and looks for someplace with no people and vanishes, pop, back to Aurum and to outside the door of whatever room Golden is in.

Permalink Mark Unread

Golden hears her land, of course. Vampire. "Come in."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You're adjacent to an Earth where it's 2010 and Imperatrix Isabella rules the world - I asked 'what, all of it?' and got accused of living under a rock - and also there are possibly-sapient pandas and tigers and stuff in the streets?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...okay! That's exciting. Did you talk to her?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"No, I was not sure how to get an appointment with the ruler of the world and thought it might be worth the time to ask an alt. I can go fetch Gem if you're busy."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ruling the world is a busy sort of work. I have long enough to at least introduce her to the concept and find out who she'd be best served talking to. Where is she?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"China, want me to send you the picture or come with?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"The latter."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do you have the spell to go bird, I've been going in in the air as a bird, easy to spot a place where you can pop in person-shaped..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes, I do. I also have the spell to turn invisible, though." Which she does.

Permalink Mark Unread

And here they are back half a mile above the local Bell.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Beijing," Golden diagnoses. She prefers to fly by wizardry rather than turn into a bird and lose many of her favorite vampire attributes, as long as there are Huans to be had for occasional top-offs. "I wonder what she's doing in Beijing." She descends to the ground, finds a moment when no one's looking, murmurs for Elf ears but not loud enough for any humans to hear - "Ah, I'm going to stay invisible, I might be mistaken for her and that might inconvenience someone."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Makes sense."

She goes back to her normal shape and starts walking.

Permalink Mark Unread

Bella wanders along... goes into a convenience store with the door propped open... stops, looking at a world atlas.

"This Earth," she says softly, "is... dented."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hmm?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Look at the southeast of North America."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

 

"Yikes. That's - a lot of people, right -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Tens of millions of them."

Permalink Mark Unread

"So something bad happened to the world before Bella took over. ...something really bad. We probably can't ask without getting the same reaction I got earlier..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If it's before she took over. We know evil alts are a thing. Let's find a library."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Is sinking half a continent the sort of thing you think an evil alt of you might do?"

Library.

 

Permalink Mark Unread

"If it seemed expedient to take over the world? Possibly."

Golden's not as good with illusions as Loki but she can still more or less make herself look like Alice, of whom she has an excellent mental image, and go sit down at a computer and look some things up.

"...and she's based in China because China supplied nukes -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Which were - used?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Looks like. ...Not for the dent, though, that was something else - I don't have enough context for some of this to be comprehensible without more background research -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"And the stuff we read here probably won't be true if your alt's evil -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"- looks like there was at the time some confusion about exactly who dented the planet - yeah."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"Um. I don't know what to do -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"We get a Maitimo and have him meet her, I think."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay. Thanks for - coming by - I would not have thought to check that stuff -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I could have missed it too if there hadn't been that store between our convenient alley and the headquarters-looking building she must work in."

Permalink Mark Unread

She looks at some pictures of a hundred fifty nuclear bombs going off. 

She sighs. "Okay. Back?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah. Thanks for finding the world."

Golden puts them both back in Aurum and sends a message out through the network, attn: Maitimos, possible evil Bell ruling dented radioactive Earth.

Permalink Mark Unread

So he pops over to wait patiently outside the not-exactly-a-palace from which Kib and Aydanci rule Shine.

Can Cam or Epic get me documentation on dented radioactive Earth?

Permalink Mark Unread

Filtering for relevance, be there in a few.

And Cam goes and finds him and hands him a data stick.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Thanks. Want to come along? I'm inviting Kib once he gets out of this meeting -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Might be odd if two people who look like identical twins four years apart go," Cam points out.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, true. Edda's on the way to Aurum from here, I can drop in on you if Kib can't make it for some reason.

 

There are plenty of perfectly good reasons to detonate a hundred fifty nuclear bombs in Earth's atmosphere, I'm sure, but 'had a cancer cure, decided to give literally everyone cancer and then sell the cancer cure' is also consistent with the evidence - though that's stupider than I'd expect an alt of you to be -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"It seems to have been effective."

Permalink Mark Unread

"A united Earth is a hell of an achievement, if it wasn't achieved via a lot of mass murder - kind of even if it was -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"It doesn't look united united, there's still countries, but it's wending that way and not even hollering too much about it -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"And she's, what, twenty-two, assuming born the same time as the rest of you Earth Bells?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Count me impressed and really hopeful there's a good explanation."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Likewise. Grab me if you need me, I'll avoid picking up anything I mustn't put down." Cam pops away.

Permalink Mark Unread

Kib emerges. "What's up?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"There is a new Bell. She is ruling her Earth. Her radioactive Earth which is missing most of the eastern United States and the Caribbean, and which is radioactive because she detonated a couple hundred nuclear bombs, and that's all in the very-positive-about-her official records. There are aliens, including some on the Moon, and her title is Imperatrix Isabella and there's faster-than-light travel and she's 22."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...okay. Have we actually talked to her yet?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Nope! That's next, wanna come?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I assume you're going to check if she's evil and a Bell who doesn't look like her is useful for that?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"That is the plan."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, sure, the Pineapple Islands guy cancelled on me anyway."

Permalink Mark Unread

Hex Space Edda Shadow Aurum - "How do we want to go in?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Probably won't hurt anything to at least see how hard it is to get an appointment with her first?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Shouldn't, no, I meant more 'probably not by appearing at random in the middle of the city'."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, that. Well, do we know where she in fact is?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Joy aims for 'in the air half a mile above whoever she's looking for', so we know where she was a couple hours ago - big administrative building."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Assuming it's her administrative building and she wasn't there on an official visit, showing up invisible, finding someplace to de-invisible, and walking in and asking at something that looks receptiony should answer the question 'how hard is it to get an appointment'."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Alright." Invisible. Go.

Permalink Mark Unread

There's a place right next to the admin building behind a steamed bun truck where nobody's looking. In they go.

There is a reception desk. Kib asks if it would be prohibitively difficult to get a meeting with the Imperatrix today?

The receptionist blinks at the two of them very professionally and says she thinks she can fit them in in half an hour, would they mind waiting in the room over there? There are snacks.

Permalink Mark Unread

Well that was astonishingly easy.

They go wait in the room over there.

Permalink Mark Unread

Yeah. I wonder what's up with that. Maybe somebody canceled on her too.

Permalink Mark Unread

Or maybe her people have unfriendly mind-reading and noticed we were important, or some other kind of magic that flags us as such...

Permalink Mark Unread

Maybe we should have brought Boots.

Permalink Mark Unread

Has the problem where she looks like the local Bell - we're assuming, we haven't actually seen the local Bell - but still might have been a good idea. I could read the receptionist to check but not without significantly more provocation than 'they were really happy to schedule us a meeting'.

Permalink Mark Unread

She could've gone invisible. And yeah my thoughts exactly.

Permalink Mark Unread

The building's only tolerable but these are very pretty humans, for humans.

Permalink Mark Unread

Huh, they are, aren't they. I mean, not all of them, the steamed bun truck guy didn't look so great.

Permalink Mark Unread

My model of an evil alt of you does not go to particular trouble to surround themself with pretty people.

Permalink Mark Unread

Coincidence or side effect or instrumental goal.

Permalink Mark Unread

Yeah. ...maybe side effect of the cancer cure she distributed after giving everybody cancer.

Permalink Mark Unread

Could be, depending how it works.

Permalink Mark Unread

It would probably be conspicuous to read more of the files Cam gave me while we wait.

Permalink Mark Unread

A bit, I doubt they have chiplocked computers here.

Permalink Mark Unread

So they sit and talk politics and so forth while they wait.

Permalink Mark Unread

And eventually the receptionist says they're welcome to go up to the top floor and the Imperatrix's office will be clearly marked, the elevator's just there, please be advised that a biofilter is in effect and don't morph in the elevator.

"Sorry, what?" says Kib, scratching an ear.

"It'll let humans through," the receptionist assures them, "just don't morph in the elevator, it'll set off the alarm."

"Ah," says Kib. Enter elevator, teleport up?

Permalink Mark Unread

Yeah, we'd better. Or possibly just me, but let's be safe.

Permalink Mark Unread

I don't want to find out if the 'is human' test includes 'has navel'.

They go in the elevator and teleport up and over to land on the landing. The Imperatrix's office is indeed clearly marked. Imperatrix on one line, Isabella Swan on the next.

Permalink Mark Unread

He knocks.

Permalink Mark Unread

The door opens. She barely looks at Kib; Matirin, though, she obviously recognizes - "Oh my god! What are you doing here - you forgot your -" She flicks at one of her eartips. "Or is that deliberate - incidentally if you were trying to tone down the cheekbones you went way too far and in the wrong direction. You didn't tell me you were coming!"

Permalink Mark Unread

Joy didn't check for a you, did she.

Permalink Mark Unread

Must not have - to be fair, this is the first Earth to have one -

"Oh," he says, "that should have been my first guess as to how we got a meeting so fast. There's someone here who looks like me. Name starts with an 'M', oldest of seven, good at people?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"- beg pardon?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Long, complicated, and you're going to want proof. Can we come in?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sorry, who are you -?" She glances between Island and Kib in confusion.

Permalink Mark Unread

"There are parallel dimensions. They tend to have some of the same people in them. We are from a different one, and we're here to learn about yours, and we didn't realize that yours also has a version of me in it - there are ways to check, but they aren't perfect -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...I see." She stands aside to let them in. There are chairs opposite her desk. She sits down at her desk.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Thank you! I go by Island - my name is Maitimo, but a lot of me are named Maitimo - and this is Kib. It's a pleasure to meet you. Is there magic that demonstrably can't be done locally, such that I can do it and establish that I am from very far away?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I wouldn't want to presume too far on what various sorts of aliens might or might not be able to do, but you can establish at least 'very far away' with, I don't know, what can you do?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can teleport between dimensions and also across the room and so forth -" he does that - "I can make little illusions of the place I'm from -" here, have a Tirion, though no one can get Loki's resolution with these things.

Permalink Mark Unread

"...okay. The aliens I have met can't do those things. You are from very far away."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yep! Can you give us an overview of this universe and then we'll reciprocate with an overview of all the other ones?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...okay. This is Earth. It is the home planet of my species, humans - are you humans or did you fox the filter?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm a human but I'm a weird human, he's an Elf. We didn't want to risk it so we teleported up."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...okay. I don't really have a security measure that's robust against teleportation."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We've been very selective about who has teleportation, you should not need to worry."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Good. So, humans. And there are a couple relevant sorts of aliens, the Yeerks and the Andalites. Yeerks got here first. They're aquatic slugs yea big," gesture, "which can enter many sapient species' heads through the ear canal, wrap around the brain, near-instantly apprehend its contents, and control the associated body with almost perfect ability to hedge out attempts at interference from the host."

Permalink Mark Unread

Permalink Mark Unread

"They are not a threat to this planet at this time," she says. "And there's the Andalites, who are blue centaurs with an extra set of eyes on stalks and no mouths and blade-ended tails, and they're at war with the Yeerks. The Yeerks found Earth first and began quietly infiltrating it, mostly the United States. Their most substantial salient weakness is that they have to leave their hosts once every three days to swim around in a pool targeted by a specific wavelength, called Kandrona rays after their homeworld's sun; if they don't do that, they die, freeing their host if applicable. They had various covers for that set up, pools hidden wherever they were concentrated. Humans make unusually good hosts compared to most of the previously available options and there are more of us than there are of any other known sapient species. A group of Andalites showed up some years later to oppose the Yeerks here, and then quietly abducted a bunch of humans because they lack Yeerk advantages in figuring humans out without having to actually have conversations."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not a threat to this planet? Are there planets they are menacing?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"They continue to have the overwhelming majority of the populations of three other species infested, and are making known inroads on several others and may be presumed to be on the hunt for more."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...okay. Time-sensitive on the scale of a day in any way -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not to my knowledge."

Permalink Mark Unread

"So the Andalites arrived on Earth and kidnapped people -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes, a bunch of us, intending to quiz us all night, administer amnestics, and have us wake up in our beds none the wiser come morning."

Permalink Mark Unread

We haven't mentioned she has alts yet and she's not sure if she does or if we're just here because she's in charge, wants to see if we expect her to hate the amnestics thing.

Permalink Mark Unread

I am thinking 'Yeerks' are probably sufficient justification for everything she did but let's not just yet -

 

"How'd you end up learning that this happened, then?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I was unusually good at explaining humans, they were somewhat concerned that Yeerks might have a way to uncover forgotten memories, and my father had already been assumed into the Yeerk front organization and spent a good deal of energy trying to convince my sister and I to join it likewise. They'd screened us for infestation, and our mother because we lived in her household, but he was in a different state and they neglected him. I offered my human-explaining services in exchange for the opportunity to fake my and her disappearance and his death, get him uninfested, and confirm with him that they were telling the truth about Yeerks. Matirin - that's the person who looks like you, although he only looks like you in morph, the rest of the time he looks like a blue centaur etcetera - accepted this offer."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Fake your and whose disappearance?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"My sister. They'd abducted us both."

Permalink Mark Unread

"And 'in morph'?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Andalite technology includes the ability to acquire the DNA of people and animals at touch range and use it to shapeshift into a copy thereof, or, if you get several of the same or sufficiently similar species, a blend. Matirin's favored human blend looks like you, except... human. Which is very strange, although perhaps it's entirely to be expected, I don't know how alternate universes are supposed to work."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Weirdly. I would not have necessarily predicted that but I am not stunned. Does Matirin have six younger brothers and a bunch of half-cousins?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"He had six younger brothers. There's one left. I never inquired about his extended family."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ah."

Permalink Mark Unread

"At any rate," she says, "there ensued a war."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do tell."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Depending on how much detail you want we may be straying from information sufficiently public that it will appear in my forthcoming biography."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can promise discretion and if we are going to go try to end the interstellar war tomorrow we should probably be operating on accurate information when we do."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...does promising discretion usually get you classified information?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can actually bindingly promise things but inconveniently I can't prove I can bindingly promise things. Observing that I will be acting on whatever information or misinformation I have sometimes gets me classified things."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well," she says, "perhaps you can go visit Matirin; he knows everything about the war I do, at least, and if the resemblances are normally particularly striking you should be able convince him of your identity and good faith."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We might do that. Let's have the public-consumption version of the story first."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We tracked down the location of most of the Kandrona generators in the American continents. We blew them up. The Yeerks were alerted to our presence and we lost considerable freedom of movement; Andi, my sister, and I became even more useful than we had been for our ability to do things like spend more than two hours bipedal - that being the morphing time limit state of the art at the time. We had not found all the generators; there was one in the capital of the United States. Our operation attempting to warn the government was a failure. The Yeerks used their presence in the U.S. government to blame the terrorist attacks on some loosely plausible Middle Eastern countries and start a war and infest soldiers and the invaded alike. Some but not many Andalite reinforcements arrived and we regrouped in Australia. We determined that humans have a dramatically higher radiation tolerance than Yeerks do, negotiated with China about the use of their arsenal, and irradiated the planet. This killed most of the Earthside Yeerks. There is one strain of them with a natural resistance to the radiation and we hadn't done enough testing to notice the variance in the population, and many of those managed to consolidate in Syria. And there were still ships in orbit - a big one and a medium sized one - with unmitigated capacity to strike from there."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do you mind if I take notes?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"No."

Permalink Mark Unread

Getting Cam to check things?

Permalink Mark Unread

Yeah.  He pulls out a little stick which projects a little computer screen, writes "letter to Cam", writes a summary, asks 'can you check what you get for a model of a Yeerk and an Andalite, check who else there's alts of, send someone to give me an osanwë heads-up if anything fails to verify or anything urgent appears'?

Permalink Mark Unread

"Let me know when you're caught up."

Permalink Mark Unread

"All set, thanks."

Permalink Mark Unread

"There's a Resistance faction among the Yeerks, who prefer to take voluntary hosts and disagree with the way the Yeerk Empire conducts itself. We made contact with some of the Syria "cousin" Yeerks meeting that description -"

Permalink Mark Unread

Something about that was horrible for her personally.

Permalink Mark Unread

"- so as to hijack the Syria pool's communications with the orbiters, and we advertised a forthcoming cure for cancer, which is just morph. If you exceed the time limit you're stuck in whatever you morphed, but 'whatever you morphed' can be 'a healthier younger only slightly cosmetically different version of yourself'. The Yeerks hung out in orbit. They had some members of the cousin strain up there and bred them and waited until they were big enough to take hosts, and then obliterated the southeastern United States, Cuba, and a number of Caribbean islands -"

Permalink Mark Unread

Something personally horrible there too, somebody she liked died.

Permalink Mark Unread

"- blamed the Andalites to confuse public opinion, and used the distraction to land radiation-resistant Yeerks in Goa, India and begin the slow stealth infestation plan again."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm sorry." 

Something horrible - are we sure she's not -

Permalink Mark Unread

She... seems like a Bell to me? If a Yeerk got her it un-got her I think it depends how good they are impersonating people.

Permalink Mark Unread

If you think you'd prefer I check under the circumstances I will, if you think you'd prefer I not -

Permalink Mark Unread

Ask her what the protocol for checking people is.

Permalink Mark Unread

"How do you check if someone's Yeerked -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"An MRI will do it and there's a more portable faster version in the works. Morphing a Yeerk and trying to enter the person will fail if they're already occupied. Watching them for three days will do it. The biofilter will do it, if and only if the host is not morphed; if they are the Yeerk folds away with the rest of their original body and isn't present on the scan. There is a species called the Leerans who can read thoughts; morphing a Leeran allows the straightforward detection of an extra mind."

Permalink Mark Unread

We could ask Boots in, I bet she could do it without seeing anything else. Or maybe daeva can conjure by 'the Yeerk in someone's head'.

Permalink Mark Unread

We'd need an example of someone with a Yeerk in their head to tell if they can.

Permalink Mark Unread

"So they attempted a stealth infestation again?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes. ...Are you having telepathic conversations? It's not considered rude here or anything, just mildly surprising that thoughtspeak works for you."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Elves don't have thoughtspeak but we have something that must be functionally similar."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Huh. Okay. So they attempted a stealth invasion of India and also announced to the Andalites that they wanted the morph tech. They had exactly one Andalite and therefore morph-capable host, a fellow named Alloran hosting a Yeerk ranked Visser Three with lower numbers being higher ranking; Visser Three was heading the Earth project - and they wanted more morphers. They emphatically did not want an Earthful of humans friendly to Andalites and impossible to use as hosts for Yeerks, and had the ability to destroy the planet, outright. The Andalites brought a crippled morph box - it would allow exactly one morph, sufficient for curing cancer but only a modest combat asset - and rendezvoused with the Yeerks ten days' FTL travel from here. They attempted to take over the larger ship, and provided enough distraction to allow its secret Resistance second-in-command officer to assume command of the vessel and arrange to cooperate with the Andalites. She destroyed the medium-sized ship, reshuffled the crew until it was only loyal Resistance Yeerks who had hosts, and returned to Earth, where she announced her secession from the Yeerk Empire and established the sovereign state now known as Tide."

Permalink Mark Unread

Notes notes notes. "Does she have a name?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ristrell. Title is 'Sovereign'."

Permalink Mark Unread

"And is controlling a willing party?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...yes. Josefa is willing."

Permalink Mark Unread

That should be enough for Cam to test whether he can conjure by 'the Yeerk in this person's head'. He adds it to the notes with a request to please try it. "That sounds like pretty much the world as we encountered it; did that end it?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"More Andalites showed up after a bit. There are still some of them around in case the Yeerk Empire sends more ships, and occasionally there's tourism - they come for the food, mostly, Andalites don't have a sense of taste and go wild for human food. Matirin was reassigned; we haven't been told where as a matter of military classification; but maybe you can find him with your magic and 'magical alternate universe version of Matirin' seems like a pretty good reason to cut through military classification to me. That's the state of things now."

Permalink Mark Unread

She knows precisely where he is and doesn't like it and has to pretend that's what he told her.

Permalink Mark Unread

Yep, I caught that. I think she's clear. Well, at least, I think she is a standard Bell; can't rule out slug-in-head yet.

Permalink Mark Unread

Yeah, agreed. Or maybe the slug is the Bell and the host just looks like a Bell for the same reason Matirin's morph looks like you, namely 'alts: the fuck'.

Permalink Mark Unread

Can't see a non-evil Bell doing that - maybe with a consenting host?

 

Permalink Mark Unread

It'd have to be a consenting host but it could be that.

Permalink Mark Unread

Should we go talk to the me?

Permalink Mark Unread

Probably.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Did you have any other questions?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Any chance you could block out an hour this afternoon or evening for the 'welcome to the multiverse' talk and planning the war? We want to verify a few things and talk to my alt but if the story checks out we have lots of resources for you and could use your guidance on how to make the war end cleanly."

Permalink Mark Unread

She consults her computer. It is snazzy for 2010 but not as nice as the demonic model. "I can get you my dinner slot, seven to eight local time?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Thanks. How much security are they keeping my alt under, and are they set up to handle teleportation?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"They are not set up to handle teleportation. What's the range on your thoughtspeak thing?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Three hundred miles."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Then you probably want to land near but not right on top of him and ask him for advice on when and how to approach more closely."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Does he have a -" illusion Findekáno - "looks like this when he comes in humanoid -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"- yes. Assuming the 'happen to look like their alternate universe versions in favored blended human morph' thing is consistent. Finleran's here on Earth, do you want to talk to him?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Finleran. It's usually Findekáno but there's also Ferardrin and Finankar. I'm guessing he'll be likelier than you to explain to me what the story is and why it's a secret."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'll send him a message - when do you want to talk to him?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"At his earliest convenience. In the meantime, I don't suppose you have any really really trustworthy Yeerks on hand?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...for what purpose?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"We are indestructible - shooting me wouldn't do anything, an orbital strike wouldn't do anything, if I were in a black hole and couldn't teleport out for some reason I'd be really inconvenienced. Whether it protects against Yeerks seems like a fairly important question. I would take the Yeerk with me over to a planet where we have a precog, take an indestructible volunteer without any other magic powers over there also, intend to test whether indestructibility beats Yeerk, and learn the answer."

Permalink Mark Unread

"For that a morphed Yeerk would do, you wouldn't need a real one. Lots of people have Yeerk morphs available. Finleran has one, if the standard is trustworthy-to-you. It's possible the answer would depend on the target species and the structure of the ear canal."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Perfect, thank you."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You're welcome."

She types up a note to Finleran: Someone who looks like an even more stupidly pretty version of Matirin's human morph, and another guy, showed up claiming that the one is an alternate universe version of Matirin. Produced a picture of your human morph and wanted to know if there was one of you around. They appear to have magical powers and wish to talk to you at your earliest convenience.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Thanks for your time. We can get you the indestructibility too, but Hex'll need a couple days' notice - that's the place with the magic that does it - and I have no idea how it interacts with morphing."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It sounds like the kind of thing that might not interact well with morphing," she agrees. "Maybe the precog can check that too."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I will let you know. Do you have questions for us that shouldn't wait until we've verified this, or a way you'd like to verify us?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Verify away. I'm imagining you'll be more forthcoming with Matirin and if you're legit he'll tell us that we can trust each other."

Permalink Mark Unread

Where do they want to meet, and do you want to listen in?

Permalink Mark Unread

They can teleport, so I don't expect them to be very fussy about location. I would love to but it might be awkward in an 'operating in good faith' sense.

Permalink Mark Unread

All right. I am in the east-most Andalite-friendly computing station.

Permalink Mark Unread

"How much information do you need about your destination to teleport? Finleran seems not to be busy right now."

Permalink Mark Unread

"A visual or a distance and direction from here."

Permalink Mark Unread

There are security cameras all over the place; she pulls up a feed of the lawn near the computer station. "He'll be a bit past that tree -" Point.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Thanks."

Pop.

Permalink Mark Unread

<Hello.>

Permalink Mark Unread

Hi. Short version - there are lots of alternate universes, people co-occur in them, I'm your husband, this is our boyfriend, alternate universe versions of people aren't always the same but they typically have a lot in common, and I'm guessing you would be willing to tell me where Matirin is and why it's a secret and vouch for his - trustworthiness with absolute power, which we are kind of handing out. Also, I can read minds but I'm not doing it and I would like to check that you are not being controlled by a Yeerk.

Permalink Mark Unread

<Matirin violated Andalite directives about the handing-out of military technology to other species. Since he's so popular on Earth they agreed to call it a reassignment, but he is in prison. You can check that. Don't check Bella.>

Permalink Mark Unread

Have I mentioned yet this morning that your habit of using interchangeable pronouns for alts is weird. I am not literally all of the yous' boyfriend.

Permalink Mark Unread

'our' as in Findekáno's and mine, not 'the blue four-eyed centaur with a spiky tail's'. But sorry. 

 

He is not infested with a Yeerk. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Good.

Permalink Mark Unread

<I have no reservations about giving Matirin absolute power. ...can you resurrect the dead?>

Permalink Mark Unread

Not yet, unless the world happens to be near places where we're more powerful, and this one - teleport to Edda? Nope. Teleport to Limbo? Nope. Teleport to Wish? Nope. isn't.

Permalink Mark Unread

<All right.>

Permalink Mark Unread

Willing to take a quick trip offplanet with us and morph Yeerk to check if our magic protections prevent Yeerking?

Permalink Mark Unread

<I had to do it to my you once and he was traumatized by it. I do not want to ->

Permalink Mark Unread

So I have to be okay with it but it doesn't actually have to happen, long story.

Permalink Mark Unread

<All right.>

Permalink Mark Unread

You okay with a bounce back to Aurum to check that?

Permalink Mark Unread

Yeah, sure.

Permalink Mark Unread

Pop. "Golden, can we borrow Alice for a bit?"

Finleran's eyes swivel very fast and he watches Golden rather intently.

 

Permalink Mark Unread

"We'll find out in thirty seconds. What do you want her for?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"The new Earth? Was invaded by alien slugs that crawl in through your ear canal and can read your mind, pick up all your abilities, and impersonate you flawlessly. We're checking whether hexed-on and daeva indestructibility does anything for it - we can also check whether vampirism does, while you're at it -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Is the Bell -" The door opens and Alice bounces in "- okay? And/or evil?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"The Bell is not evil; either she is okay with some Bell-managed residual trauma from the war or she is flawlessly being impersonated, Kib thought she would not prefer that I check so I didn't. Boots should be able to check less invasively and Cam might too. Hi, Alice!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hi!" says Alice. "So the way this works is you have to intend on trying it if I don't interrupt you. This is compatible with being sure I'll interrupt you, but you do need to at least mostly intend to follow through if I don't."

Permalink Mark Unread

He does not actually anticipate he will be that messed up by letting a Findekáno get a complete read on him. "Okay."

Permalink Mark Unread

He makes an uncomfortable tail movement but then follows it up with one that should be interpretable even to a non-Andalite Matirin as 'well, I have never had any luck at talking you down from things' and then starts morphing.

Permalink Mark Unread

It's gross. Everyone stares in horrified fascination.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Can't move enough of the ear out of the way," Alice reports. "On an indestructible person or on a vampire either."

"That is a remarkably unaesthetic sort of power," Golden remarks of the partial morph-in-progress.

Permalink Mark Unread

He demorphs. <Our Andi is an estreen, a person who can make it very elegant.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Andi is your Bell's sister? You're the only one who has one of those."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, Loki has a sister, but Loki's adopted, is the new Bell adopted?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Golden, you immune to Andalite thoughtspeak too?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...did he say something? Apparently. Sorry," she says to Finleran.

Permalink Mark Unread

<She is not. She lived with her mother until it was necessary to feign her death, and rescued her father from being a Controller, and her mother died in the Atlantic strike.>

Permalink Mark Unread

He repeats this out loud. "Gosh, this will be inconvenient."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I used to have more gaps for convenience powers. They've tightened up. Possibly at some point someone should actually try this with Elspeth but Alice won't be able to see in advance, hybrids throw her off."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, Elspeth doesn't mind if people read her mind and spends most of her time around people who habitually do, so I doubt a Yeerk could infiltrate with her, but we can keep her well clear of Yeerks until we have a chance to test that."

Permalink Mark Unread

<We can get some animals to morph Yeerk - it will take some time and be inconvenient, but it could be done - and then she can run that test.>

Permalink Mark Unread

Repeat out loud for Golden.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sure."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Can you drop me off back in my world?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Of course. Thanks - " - directed at Alice as well - and then Finleran is back where he came from.

Permalink Mark Unread

He goes to find the Imperatrix.

Permalink Mark Unread

In her office, but she can send this guy to talk to Yue-yue instead, he doesn't need her personal attention - "Hi."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Hi. I think that could plausibly be an alternate universe Matirin. He said that he was married to his version of me and that they were both dating the other man. They teleported me to another dimension which had a you, only prettier - not in the same way the visiting Matirin was, she was also - paler, and had golden eyes, and looked generally terrifying. They invited someone else in, who was able as soon as we resolved to experiment to determine that indestructible people and vampires are not vulnerable to Yeerks. The other Bella does not have a sister; the Matirin said something to the effect that none of the other Bellas have sisters, to which the Bella corrected her that Loki did. I offered to get them an animal-morphed-Yeerk for possibly-fatal-to-Yeerk experiments at teleporting a host without the Yeerk, and they sent me back. If it was orchestrated it was very well orchestrated. How are you?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm fine. And intrigued by all this alternate universe business, I do wonder what they'll tell me over dinner. Vampires, apparently. Are they haring off to find Matirin now?"

Permalink Mark Unread

<They did not say, but I assume so. They made plans to tell you things over dinner?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes, they wanted an appointment to come back and tell me about the multiverse and I gave them my dinner slot. Do you want to be there?"

Permalink Mark Unread

<You can pass it on as seems appropriate, I suppose? I imagine they share more with the rulers of countries than just with other people who they happen to know across universes - the other Bella was also wearing a crown ->

Permalink Mark Unread

"They didn't tell me there were more of me at all, actually. I think I'm annoyed about that."

Permalink Mark Unread

<That seems like a reasonable thing to be annoyed by.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's weird that an alt of me wouldn't have a sister."

Permalink Mark Unread

<I am not clear on how alts work. They were speaking English in the other world.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Weird. Did you find out what she has a crown for, what she's running?"

Permalink Mark Unread

<I did not. I cannot talk to her at all. I will ask next time I see them if they have not explained themselves by then.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"You can't talk to her?"

Permalink Mark Unread

<She apparently has magic that makes all mental effects fail to reach her, including thought-speech. I could have morphed human but in an unfamiliar place I hate having only the two eyes.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Huh. Okay."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Let me know if you need anything, or can share anything of what you find out.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Will do. Thank you very much."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Of course.>

Permalink Mark Unread

Shall we go get Joy so we can conveniently find my alt? he asks Kib once they've dropped off Finleran.

Permalink Mark Unread

Maybe stop in and ask Cam if he's done the checks yet, then get Joy.

Permalink Mark Unread

Sounds good. 

Hop hop.

Fuck I'm glad we're immune to that one.

Permalink Mark Unread

So glad. What a terrible kind of alien, how does that even happen -

Permalink Mark Unread

Cam turns out not to have checked his mail in the last fifteen minutes, but he pulls up what they wanted and checks the things. It all checks out. Bella's Yeerkless.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Thanks. ...and Matirin, while we're at it?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"- also, uh, unaccompanied."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Then we can just tell your alt we are incredibly impressed by her successfully repelling an alien invasion and saving the planet and ending up ruling it and we are terribly sorry for not telling her at once that there's a whole peal of Bells to trade magic with."

Permalink Mark Unread

"And that she has to pick a nickname."

Permalink Mark Unread

Permalink Mark Unread

"And that we're going to rescue the three other species infested with Yeerks - Matirin'll probably know how best to accomplish that one, but I am guessing we will want a demon -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Gosh, do I know any demons?" wonders Cam, wagging his tail.

Permalink Mark Unread

The tail is adorable. "We'll catch you later," he says. "...actually, do you think we can get a crystal ball for Yeerkworld so we can keep everyone in the loop about Yeerk-war planning? Does Vanda Nossëo keep extras of those on hand?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, right by the eidetic necklaces."

Permalink Mark Unread

So they pop over to Vanda Nossëo and get three eidetic necklaces and a crystal ball and then pop all the way over to Mîr to find Gem and Joy.

Permalink Mark Unread

"...so, is she evil?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"No, just got handed a Bell-nightmare of a world." And he explains.

Permalink Mark Unread

"...wow, that is actually worse than mine."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do you want to come over and commiserate? We're probably going to want Joy a lot - we're going to take out the Yeerk empire -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can't stay for very long, I have a batch of wishes scheduled, but yeah."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We've got -" he checks - "two hours to talk to Matirin, then dinner with her - Imperatrix Isabella is actually an adorable title - I might just let you two Bell at the new one while I help Matirin and Finleran work out how to run the war -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Heh, 'Bell at'. I can be there for the first forty-five minutes of dinner and then I'll have to come back, would I add anything to talking to Maitirin?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Dinner's probably more important. And Bell is entirely an appropriate verb. For example, to be abducted by aliens and end up ruling the planet: to Bell. And the way you all communicate -" he is glowing fairly adoringly at Kib - "anyway, catch you for dinner -" he sends a mental image of the Imperatrix's building so she can teleport there.

Permalink Mark Unread

"See you then."

Permalink Mark Unread

(Kib is entertained very much by the definition of 'to Bell'.)

Permalink Mark Unread

And they borrow Joy and go back to Yeerkworld and teleport to a mile away from Matirin, invisibled. Joy then heads back to Beijing to explore, it was kind of cool.

 

Hello? Imperatrix Isabella sort of sent me, it is a long story, and I'd like to talk. When is a good time?

Permalink Mark Unread

<...visiting hours are 03:00 to 14:00 ->

Permalink Mark Unread

Oh, we don't need any kind of formal authorization to get in. Any time when you're alone would work.

Permalink Mark Unread

<...now is fine.>

Permalink Mark Unread

Pop.

Permalink Mark Unread

I wonder how long this one'll take to figure out who I am, I bet being an alien is a handicap in reading humans. "Hullo."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Hello. What - how - I am Matirin-Ashal-Nelinfir, it is a pleasure to meet you ->

Permalink Mark Unread

"My name's Kib and this is my boyfriend who is an alternate universe version of you and no we have no idea why your human morph wound up looking like him or indeed much of anything about how alts work, it's very mysterious."

Permalink Mark Unread

<...>

Permalink Mark Unread

I go by Island because my name, Nelyafinwë Maitimo, is shared by lots of interdimensional versions of me.

Permalink Mark Unread

<Nice to meet you both. Does one of your names perchance mean ->

Permalink Mark Unread

'my father's half-siblings are illegitimate'? Yep.

Permalink Mark Unread

"You're the only 'Matirin' so you don't have to pick a nickname. And if you did have to pick one you would have to delegate that because otherwise you'd probably do something tacky like pick a number."

Permalink Mark Unread

<...and you are an instance of the Imperatrix Isabella?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Damn, that was fast, I thought you'd be slowed down."

Permalink Mark Unread

<I spent five years trying to unite Earth under one world government. And also the alternate version of me is dating you and there are vanishingly few people I would date and Isabella is disqualified only by being the wrong species and gender.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Fair enough."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I gave mine a planet too."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Why are you here?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"We have a lot of magic which we would like to throw at the cause of Yeerks ceasing to infest unwilling people and the Yeerk empire ceasing to exist."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Also, if you would like to be broken out of prison, having gone quietly in the absence of better options, after being caught distributing technology unauthorized to less advanced species, this would not be a completely unprecedented thing."

Permalink Mark Unread

<...no? Do I get up to that often? I was a decade out from being on the council and able to change those laws, I would not actually have expected it to be a thing I ended up doing under many circumstances.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Nah, it was one of me. She grew up in a post-scarcity techno-utopian Federation with, like, two blind spots, and one of them was that under no circumstances would they interfere with anyone who had not invented that world's form of FTL yet, so she went around slipping the equations to plagiarism-inclined scientists on worlds that were a ways out from the discovery so they could pop out of their solar systems and say hi and join the Federation. She got caught. Another one of us wandered in from a neighboring universe and teleported her out of prison."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Good for her. Andalites used to go set up on less-advanced planets and teach them all we knew and that is how we made the Yeerks a galactic superpower and then we overcorrected.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"The Federation's motivation is supposedly not wanting to come over all colonialist, which is an overcorrection from different historical patterns."

Permalink Mark Unread

<...I think I will accept being broken out of prison. How is Bella?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Competently running Earth. She was overjoyed to see me. She's going to like interdimensional contact, everyone likes it but I think it does something for Bells in particular, knowing that the kind of person they are triumphs under so many conceivable conditions..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We're awesome!"

Permalink Mark Unread

And now they are all three of them back in Beijing.

Permalink Mark Unread

<...that was a very anti-climactic prison break - you have instantaneous travel ->

Permalink Mark Unread

"You have no idea how much magic we have, it's ridiculous. I am kind of daydreaming of dismantling the Yeerk empire with precisely zero casualties."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You are not conveniently located for it to take thirty seconds, unfortunately, universes have adjacency and some of the very best stuff only works close to home."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Do you have resurrection?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not yet."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not here, not generically. Loki's working on it. Loki's one of me."

Permalink Mark Unread

<I killed one of my brothers. Well, the Yeerk did, but I felt it and watched it ->

Permalink Mark Unread

"- fuck, I'm so sorry -"

Permalink Mark Unread

He shudders. <It's - I do not know how much Bella told you about it, it's awful, it's the worst thing imaginable ->

Permalink Mark Unread

He makes a slightly hysterical noise.

Permalink Mark Unread

"She didn't mention one had gotten you - we didn't tell her she had alts, so we were getting the public story - Loki'll have the spell in, well, a few decades, if we don't find anything sooner."

Permalink Mark Unread

<They pick up your personality and skills and so on permanently, it's not even just being able to see everything, there's a Yeerk on the Moon who reads people just like I do->

Permalink Mark Unread

"Something has it in for your entire template - somehow Iobel manages not to have hers constantly supervised just in case - ugh."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Sorry?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"All of the versions of us except the one - Iobel's - and Midnight but I don't think I mind if he does - got captured by an evil god and tortured for years. Even when other things happened to change the story. But we're at least all from Ardas - there are recurring worlds, Earth is one, so is Arda, Ardas suck - so we could have told ourselves it was maybe just something about Ardas..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ardas suck. They suck less when a Bell shows up, the earlier the better. One of us got to hers so early that it barely sucks at all. I come in second."

Permalink Mark Unread

<What ->

Permalink Mark Unread

"There's an evil god, the evil god is committing horrific crimes, the only person who can maybe invent something that can take him is our father, who's in the middle of a psychological breakdown over his father's murder and wants us to swear - we can swear things, bindingly - to retrieve the things he built to protect our people, from anyone and at any cost - the evil god has them, we were aware it might incentivize him to hand them out and were hoping for that outcome - none of this happened in my world, Kib would've slapped me, but if there isn't a Bell there by then we all swear to kill anyone who withholds the things. Then the evil god kills Father anyway, there's a six-hundred-year long futile war which ends with everyone on the continent dead some of them by my hand because binding oath to kill withholders of the magic jewelry, then the marginally-less-evil gods step in."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I wouldn't have slapped you! ...Well, I don't know, would yelling not have worked?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I have no idea if yelling would have worked. You had the prophecies, actually, made it easy, but even without that..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Anyway, I didn't derail things enough to keep him away from the evil god altogether," says Kib, a little subdued. "That has actually not been pulled off in any Ardas where you exist, again excepting Midnight's - the one who showed up early enough that her Arda doesn't suck appeared when your dad's alt was a small child and proceeded to approximately adopt him and it seems unlikely he will wind up with the same spouse and offspring."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Great. Well, I'm not qualified to evaluate whether being a Yeerk slave is better or worse than being tortured by an evil god, maybe I got lucky.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"There's a Bell who's a therapist. Eru knows we all need it. - Eru's the incomprehensible omnipotent deity of my world -"

Permalink Mark Unread

<Ours is supposedly called the Ellimist or Ellimists but I have no reason to think it or they exist.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Eru interacts with people sometimes."

Permalink Mark Unread

"And is appallingly bad at his job. This world is - stylistically Arda-like more than most non-Ardas, I think? A little too crowded, a little insufficiently musical and fated, but the - arc of things is about right?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Compared to the other worlds with non-Arda alts, yeah. Iobel and Mitros just - did not have anything horrible happen at all, and Materia's horrible in a distinctly un-Eru-like way, this world had a war with terrible odds against a far more powerful enemy. This world had a plot arc."

Permalink Mark Unread

<We might want to ask Ristrell how to dismantle the Yeerks. I think she would have valuable ideas and appreciate having a role in it.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"She sounds useful. We checked for alts here and it's just Bella and her parents - Bells are usually only children, my planet doesn't do reproduction at all - and your family, so she's nobody we know, but plenty of cool people are one-offs."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Then I recommend we send her a message - we will have to do that from the Imperatrix's building, I taught humans how to do computer security ->

Permalink Mark Unread

...Kib starts laughing. "They have computer security!" he tells Island.

Permalink Mark Unread

<Hmm?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"We have a demon. It doesn't matter how sophisticated your setups are; demons can conjure arbitrary matter."

Permalink Mark Unread

"They can't decrypt it, but you kind of have to know you're dealing with demons in the first place to do that well enough."

Permalink Mark Unread

<That is the most terrifying magic I have ever heard of - does anyone else have a demon ->

Permalink Mark Unread

"There are billions of demons, most of whom get extremely filtered information about the existence of worlds beyond their neighborhood," Kib says. "Also demons can't do minds or magic objects."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Escafil devices?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"If they're not magic, or intelligent - oh, and don't run on vacuum or antimatter - probably doable."

Permalink Mark Unread

<They are none of those. But maybe you've already got a better solution to aging?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"We have a perfectly lovely solution to aging which can be mass-produced but it's magic so it can't be mass-produced at demon scales. However, its interface is 'put on a necklace' so it has morph beat on distribution."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Yes, morph you have to tell people what they are doing. Have you tried it yet?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Don't know how it'll interact with some other stuff."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Fair enough. Is being an Elf substantially different from being a human ->

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, it's much nicer, we have indescribably better vision. And we're prettier."

Permalink Mark Unread

<May I ->

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, sure. What do you do -"

Permalink Mark Unread

<It just requires physical contact. You will go sort of - placid.>

Permalink Mark Unread

He sends Kib a glance that says 'if I am placid when I should not be you will handle it, right?' and then gives Matirin his hand. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Kib will handle it if something requiring nonplacidity comes up, yes.

Permalink Mark Unread

And he lets go -

Permalink Mark Unread

And the stalk-eyes slurp in and the bones melt and bend and - <Oh, the eyesight is astonishing> he says delightedly, Island's double in every respect.

Permalink Mark Unread

"That is weird. - how careful do I need to be of my DNA, if I do not want people who aren't literally me doing it -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not especially, the cells have to still be alive - now, with demons someone could probably impersonate anyone at all -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, they can do bodies, it's minds that's the trick. There's magic goggles that do the eyesight, incidentally, although you'd need something custom for the -" He gestures wiggly fingers over his head.

Permalink Mark Unread

"I might use this morph in place of the other one, being prettier seems to give me strictly more leverage with humans, but I might get goggles for when out of morph."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, and we have eidetic memory necklaces, want one?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes. Eighty million people died in the Atlantic strike - I promised I'd remember them all -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"- how were you even remotely planning to do that without an eidetic memory?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I have a hack with my translation chip."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Huh. Well, anyway, we've got necklaces." They are in Island's pocket but Kib grabs one out of it anyway.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Thank you. Do you want to pop over to the computers, we still have time to loop Ristrell in before your dinner appointment -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"We won't cause problems by being seen teleporting?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"We can just say it's a new invention."

Permalink Mark Unread

Pop.

Permalink Mark Unread

And he writes Ristrell - can we set up a time tomorrow for an in-person appointment? (I have decided that remaining in prison was not in my continued interests. I do not expect this to inconvenience you in any way, don't worry.)

Permalink Mark Unread

 

I can be available at 4:00 p.m. Beijing time.

Permalink Mark Unread

"All right, war council tomorrow."

Permalink Mark Unread

"New Bell may be a little annoyed that she's not being looped in in a timely fashion."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Should we interrupt her? She said seven."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm messaging her explaining that you two are trustworthy, I broke out of prison and am very much looking forward to seeing her soon, here's all I've pieced together from conversation so far, we're going to be on the Moon."

Permalink Mark Unread

"She doesn't have a way to follow us to the Moon."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Then Island can stay here and be her ride to the Moon, I do not think Ristrell wants to deal with two of me anyway."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Does she want to deal with two of me? Three, when Gem shows up?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think she likes you as much as she likes anyone, which might not be enough to enjoy having two of you around."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, I suppose I can leave if she seems to find me annoying."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I also think it will help to go there more or less willing to put all your cards on the table - or at least all the ones I know about, which is just the matter-creation and the teleportation - I will attempt to impress on her that you are not rightly pattern-matched to Andalites withholding secrets from inferior races but the fewer secrets withheld the more easily that is achieved. You can give us a briefing after the war on exciting magic goodies you do not want even trustworthy people within this world to have - and keep in mind that even trustworthy people within this could get Yeerked ->

Permalink Mark Unread

"We do try to be somewhat conservative with the teleportation distribution. It's very large-scope and if it were reverse-engineered it'd open up fairly arbitrary spell invention."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It might interact badly with morph, too. That can be your general reason for not handing out anything with dangerous potential in this galaxy."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Might it? How would teleportation interact with morph?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"When you morph your actual body is folded up into z-space and remotely puppets your morphed form. I have no idea what happens if you then try to jump dimensions."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What's z-space?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Does your home world have non-magic FTL?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Mine doesn't, but Space Arda and Warp do - differently. And Edda's probably got a dozen kinds."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We do it by taking shortcuts through z-space. I can get you a local physics textbook."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not my comparative advantage, but we can drop it off where it will be eagerly devoured."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Are there alive versions of my father anywhere?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Lots. Most of them are Elves, some of those used to be dead and got brought back because that's easy with Elves, one's a human, there's one who's a dead human in another place where we don't have generic resurrection."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think I am really going to enjoy teaching versions of my father physics. - I should probably let Cayaldwin do it, really, but perhaps we could split them - we will find it differently cathartic -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Which one's he - birth order's less fuzzy than name resemblance - anyway there are well over a dozen of your father if you count all the Space forks, Space Elves can fork, I think you can justify splitting it up. Especially if one of you is fonder of kids, because one of 'em's yea high -" He hovers his hand.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Really? I have no idea what to do with a human child. Or Elf child? Get him a proper Andalite technical education and absolutely no Andalite cultural education, I suppose. Cayaldin is my surviving brother. Fifth in birth order. He is the one who figured out a workaround for the major limitation of morphing so we could use it for immortality."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Elf child, although if you pretend to be under the impression that he's a demon he will be delighted, he's sort of enamored with the concept and has acquired wings and a version of the matter creation power to match."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...okay. Are we going to need to ask him for whatever we need to win this war, because that will add complications -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Uh, no, one of me is an actual demon, you can go through him if you don't want to ask Epic. Epic being tiny-your-dad, he's the only one who's picked a nickname."

Permalink Mark Unread

"My father got a lot of people killed before he died. It would be - complicated."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Epic might actually be less complicated than Cam, since, uh, Epic hasn't killed anybody at all and Cam found it necessary to drop a black hole on an inhabited planet."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If we could not save Earth we were going to kill everyone on it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Makes perfect sense to me. So, up to you whether to ask Cam or Epic for your arbitrary matter. If the arbitrary matter is not sensitive - so not morph cubes, but if you want a ton of diamonds or something like that - you can also get a demon by going adjacent to their world and summoning one, but there's some infosec around what demons in general are allowed to know. Long-term project on evaluating some for higher clearance is in progress."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I do not actually know yet what we want. The first solution that comes to mind is 'a fleet suggestive of a military power so far beyond Andalites and Yeerks that neither one will be silly enough to try picking a fight with it, which shows up and announces the terms on which everyone can surrender' but that assumes you could react fast enough to stop some vindictive or merely amoral-and-game-theory-inclined general from blowing up a planet. If you cannot do that - what is the range and capacity and specificity on the teleportation -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Range is... close enough to visual? You don't strictly have to be looking at a thing but you need about that much information about where it is. Capacity is 'we have seriously considered moving an entire planet a few dimensions over as an easy backup plan', specificity is basically what you want it to be."

Permalink Mark Unread

"So if you knew someone had a Yeerk you could teleport it out, but you could not go over to a planet and teleport all and only the Yeerks elsewhere."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, pretty much. However, you could get a demon to find where all the Kandrona generators were - they can do scale models of stuff - and then go to a planet and remove all of those."

Permalink Mark Unread

"So maybe we do that, offer that if Yeerks congregate we will evacuate them - that should visibly not be an Andalite endeavor - are there empty dimensions? Ristrell just keeps all the ones who did not have independent inclinations towards getting consent from hosts in the pool, but if they did not have a means of hurting any other species I would have no hesitations about just giving them all morph, they do not like being alone but they could pair up, and then once the culture's changed to favor voluntarism they can come back and infest humans - there are a ton of humans who think it is a great deal -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"There are no uninhabited worlds but there are some that have only one inhabited planet in them."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That does not thrill me. Any worlds full of indestructible people?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Four of 'em. Daeva worlds and Limbo. Limbo they're just indestructible, daeva are demons and two other things with different and only moderately less ridiculous powers."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Would any of those be acceptable places to put a lot of Yeerks, if morphing does work outside this dimension?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I wouldn't want to put them in contact with the Limboites or daeva because of demonic infosec - the four worlds all correspond - but Limbo is an infinite flat plane and most of it is not being used and it's got atmosphere all the way up, maybe that would make it prohibitive for them to go find people?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Probably - they could travel the distance but they wouldn't have a way to find them or even a reason to be looking -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"And 'the distance' can be 'insert absurdly large number of miles here', infinite means it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Then I think that sounds safe. Ristrell might have an even better solution, though, that is why I wanted to loop her in." He finishes writing his message to Bella - a summary of events, notification that he is back on planet and finds the alts believable.


He sends it.

Permalink Mark Unread

They sprung you out of jail?

Permalink Mark Unread

They did. Apparently there is an alternate universe version of you who was from a civilization with a similar policy and who went around sneaking tech to new civilizations. I thought I would have mixed feelings about it but we can end the Empire by the end of the week and my feelings are not very mixed.

Permalink Mark Unread

Marvelous. They didn't tell me I had alts, Finleran had to tell me that he recognized somebody they brought him to meet.

Permalink Mark Unread

Island expressed indifference as to whether our alt "Midnight" experienced horrible torture as is apparently typical for versions of me at some point in our lives, and lots of summaries of traits typical of my alts had a 'not counting Midnight' disclaimer. Tentative guess: there are bad alts and 'Bell ruling a radioactive planet after having commandeered and used its nukes' was worrying.

Permalink Mark Unread

Oh. Well. I'm glad they checked, I guess.

Permalink Mark Unread

You would think with ten of me around they could find a less clumsy way to do it. If that's even it. Anyway, the human with Island is an alt of you and there is one named Loki who will have resurrection in some decades and there is one named Cam who fed a planet into a black hole and those are all of them known to me so far. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Oh, is that why he wasn't talking, he thought I'd notice he was me? The one Finleran recognized is apparently called Golden and looks like me but scary and maybe a vampire.

Permalink Mark Unread

Apparently most of me are Elves or humans. I find the thought vaguely disconcerting. You should acquire an Elf morph, the senses are astonishing and you probably would not have the problem with the vague yearning to be somewhere much prettier and also to sing.

Permalink Mark Unread

That's an interesting set of instincts. Do I come in Elf?

Permalink Mark Unread

"Kib, is there an Elf Bell?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Nope. We speculate that we require free will."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...what?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Elves technically do not have free will, which is mostly not relevant on a day to day basis but means that there can be reliable prophecies about them and that they can swear metaphysically binding oaths. Standard-issue Ardas are all identical until somebody from outside the universe shows up and kicks it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What." (He writes this to Bella).

Permalink Mark Unread

"I really don't expect this to present a problem while you're morphing one or I would have mentioned it! Elves act entirely like regular people as long as they don't make any oaths and aren't patched into an undisturbed Arda."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Does the oaths thing work while I'm morphed an Elf?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"You ask as though I would know!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Can it safely be tested -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"You can say "I swear for the next minute I will not say 'elephant.'"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...I swear that for the next minute I will not say 'elephant'. Elephant.

...I am relieved but on the other hand that would be a useful ability to be able to turn on at will, we could have credibly negotiated with the Yeerks."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeerks'd have to believe you about it and it's also a really risky tool."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I mean, actual negotiations involved explosive vests and deadman's switch biological weapons that'd kill all humans."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes, and actual historical uses of oaths as a signal of intent involve all kinds of horrifying shit."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I will look forward to getting a history. Later." And to Bella mind meeting us on the Moon? I mildly expect Sovereign Ristrell to have more suggestions with more time to get used to the situation.

Permalink Mark Unread

If someone who can teleport will pick me up.

Permalink Mark Unread

Yes, I'm leaving Island. He has a interworld communications device and is writing up a summary for people - "Island, how should she find you -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"She just thinks at me - I'm telepathic with a range of a couple hundred miles, obviously I do not use it -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't think I got the telepathy either - unless you do something clever -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"If you're new with it you wouldn't be able to be selective anyway, continue not having it until we've taught this Bell how to block it. Though maybe it goes with the oaths, it never really occurred to me to wonder."

Permalink Mark Unread

Apparently, he writes Bella, you can just think at Island when you would like a ride. He can read minds but isn't.

Permalink Mark Unread

...but he'll hear me if I think at him?

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's selective?"

"No," Island says, "Bells are just best friends with a lot of casual mind-readers. Yes, it can be selective. I'll teach her how to keep us out, too."

 

He conveys this.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

Testing.

Permalink Mark Unread

Yep. Elf telepathy is very friendly, the way to block us entirely is just to make a mental habit of distinguishing public and private thoughts. Most people use some kind of metaphor or visualization for it - like, private thoughts are inside your head, things you send me are pushed outside your head -

Permalink Mark Unread

How do I tell if that's working?

Permalink Mark Unread

You'd have to ask me to check - or Boots could probably tell you, actually, if you'd rather check with a Bell, but all of you get it approximately right away so I expect you will too.

Permalink Mark Unread

Is that unusual, getting it right away? Conveniently Bella is already accustomed to telepathy. Things she wants to communicate are like thoughtspeak. Everything else: isn't.

Permalink Mark Unread

It takes most people a few hours' meditation to get it in the first place and then a few months of practice to be in the habit, but Elves we teach at a very young age so that might be part of the difference.

Permalink Mark Unread

Check me now?

Permalink Mark Unread

He checks.

Permalink Mark Unread

She's all set. Got the hiding her existence part on the first try, too.

Permalink Mark Unread

You're good. I have a crystal ball here with which I am updating  the multiverse; is this building the place to keep your interworld communications, or should we move it?

Permalink Mark Unread

How vulnerable are crystal balls to orbital strikes?

Permalink Mark Unread

We could make you an indestructible one if you really needed it - indestructibility takes assembling 36 magic users who know the spell at the stroke of midnight, it's a pain but not impossible - but by default a crystal ball will not survive an orbital strike. 

Permalink Mark Unread

So maybe put it somewhere else, assuming I can interact with it remotely.

Permalink Mark Unread

Works fine remotely if you're willing to switch to the kind of computers we've got format compatibility with.

Permalink Mark Unread

Are they better than the stuff we've got?

Permalink Mark Unread

Demon-proof. I am sure the engineers will quickly settle among themselves whether Andalites are better at anything and then grab it.

Permalink Mark Unread

How's it demon-proof?

Permalink Mark Unread

Interfaces with a chip in your brain, and encodes data based on regularities in the way you think at it, so if someone else conjures it it won't do anything for them.

Permalink Mark Unread

That sounds like it won't work in morph.

Permalink Mark Unread

Might not. Do you often need to use computers in morph?

Permalink Mark Unread

I frequently morph my sister to have access to thoughtspeak and am accustomed to being able to use computers while doing that.

Permalink Mark Unread

Then we might have to figure out how to get your systems compatible with a crystal ball and then you will be able to use it in morph remotely. You could also probably squared-hex on osanwë if you wanted it.

Permalink Mark Unread

I'm sure that makes sense to people more familiar with your array of magical powers.

Permalink Mark Unread

I could just give you the broad overview now, if you'd like.

Permalink Mark Unread

I think I'll wait for one of me to do it, but do mind my lack of context when suggesting things.

Permalink Mark Unread

If you are frequently inconvenienced by not having a magic trait that some of the rest of us have, there is probably a way to get it varying in opportunity cost from 'funges against making somebody indestructible' to 'once-in-a-lifetime-opportunity'. If you have a lot of people you can trust who'll do you favors, opportunity cost goes down. 

Permalink Mark Unread

I do have a bunch of those.

Permalink Mark Unread

It is fairly essential to running planets, in my experience.

Permalink Mark Unread

I noticed!

Permalink Mark Unread

And he types up the report on the crystal ball for anyone reading in from home.

Permalink Mark Unread

Gem confirms that she'll be there in a bit. No one else feels urgent about meeting the new Bell if they aren't needed specifically.

Permalink Mark Unread

They will decide tonight once the new Bell is caught up who they'll need for the war.

Permalink Mark Unread

Gem arrives in time for dinner.

She and Kib proceed to Bell at their new alt, who is dithering about nicknames.

Permalink Mark Unread

It is adorable. He does not have much to say to Matirin, who listens attentively, except later I'll pass you a database of names and faces.

 

Matirin's tail swishes happily.

Permalink Mark Unread

The Bells get through a rundown of the other Bells and their shticks, and significant non-Bell features of the multiverse, in that order, and then get down to figuring out Local Stuff.

Kib does not think that chiplocked computers as typically installed will work in morph at all, but it's possible that something could be hacked together between an identity-checking thoughtspeak interface and the protocols that chiplocks normally use to encrypt things. Since one is either in morph or not in morph and while in morph can use thoughtspeak and while not in morph has the chip if one's installed, they should be able to make something that always works.

There are other potential problems with morph, though. It seems moderately unlikely that the connections between z-spaced brains and morph bodies will persist if people try to leave the world (the new Bell doesn't have a name for that either yet). Since z-space locations do have (weird) correspondences with regular locations, teleporting, especially long distances, while morphed could also be a problem. It seems likely that magic rocks will not be able to pick up morph at all, or that they'll be able to morph their physical bodies but still be obliged to haul their magic rocks around (fortunately, magic rock people have telekinesis). Indestructibility, and natively being either kind of Elf (for different reasons - possible glitchy behavior of a z-spaced chip, possible glitchy behavior of a Flat Elf soul that is supposed to have control over the shape of its body) might also be contraindicated. Alice will be able to check that, since Escafil devices are almost certainly portable, or at least portable the one hop to Aurum. Alice can't check interactions between wolves and hybrids and morph/Yeerks/etc.

The fact that Yeerks can prevent hosts from unauthorized thoughtspeak raises the possibility that they'd be able to prevent other mental actions like the use of Loki's spells. Should've checked that when they were in Aurum, didn't, they'll make an appointment to go back later.

Permalink Mark Unread

If Yeerks cannot prevent hosts from communicating over osanwë then they can teach both Yeerks and hosts the private/public thoughts distinction and have an entirely non-invasive way of verifying the ongoing consent of hosts. The galaxy will have a lot of buyers for the things Vanda Nossëo is selling, but he doesn't know anyone still alive who would be good at navigating the markets for that. 

 

Can he give the list of powers to Cayaldwin, he might be able to think of a way to leverage them to get resurrection in less than several decades.

Permalink Mark Unread

Sure, Curufinwë alts are clear to know stuff.

Permalink Mark Unread

He sends it. Who all's alts are clear to know stuff?

Permalink Mark Unread

Bells. Nonevil this-one-extended-family. People Bells like and decide to tell things, who are mostly (excepting that family) one-offs, like Kib's husband.

Permalink Mark Unread

<That does not seem like the most systematic approach.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do you have a suggestion?"

Permalink Mark Unread

<I can only speak to this universe, I have not spent any time getting acquainted with any of the others. But humanity took the revelation that aliens exist and were fighting a proxy war over them astonishingly well, and are unambiguously the better off for having been fully informed. At least here, I do not see substantial risk from going public with everything. If you have ten of my father and they have not been able to reverse-engineer anything at all from the extremely dangerous and powerful spell, it seems vanishingly implausible that anyone else will, and while I respect being cautious with stakes that high how many countless hundreds of billions of people have died for lack of a perfect healing spell, or been stuck in bad situations for lack of a local teleport? Is there a number that would be too many? What has been seriously attempted to restrict spell reverse-engineering, beyond keeping it in very few hands? Can you lock the necklaces to one dimension, can you conjure for writing in the alphabet consistent with an effort to reverse-engineer it, can you do eidetic memory necklaces that offer only a few hours of perfect memory so you can commit the extant spells to memory but not do anything else?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Your father's alts haven't had long enough to make progress at reverse-engineering the sorcery alphabet. It takes longer than they've had to invent a spell even at Loki's pace, and she gets the alphabet making sense for free - and they've got a lot of projects underway and I don't think that one has been a priority. I don't see how dimension-locked necklaces would solve the problem; the sorcery system itself is not incapable of producing an eidetic memory spell, if someone was desperate to produce non-local trouble. Demons can restrict conjurations by alphabet but that won't find chiplocked work or anything where someone uses their own symbols or numbers instead. And one does have to memorize the symbol correspondences as well as the spell sequences to be able to cast; all a time-limited eidetic memory would do would be not grant you the added convenience of being able to remember everything else that's ever happened to you."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Or the ability to memorize new spells.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Necklaces are also not the only source of eidetic memory; that's not where I got mine, or where the vampires get theirs."

Permalink Mark Unread

<If the answer is 'some motivated people sat down in a room for a week and thought really hard about ways to make the universe safe other than 'secrecy' and tallied up the death toll from secrecy and concluded that there was no way to do better' I will respect that. My experience of people who decide secrecy is the only way to make the universe safe is that they usually have not done that to my satisfaction.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"The answer is more like 'some motivated people are not out of lower-risk low-hanging fruit'. Like, every month or two my wife finds us a new world in range of my wish-granting-thing and I end mortality there and do other spot repairs, I think this is actually pretty efficient compared to spell distribution which is both bottlenecked on telepathy and hideously dangerous. And even if we did decide that everyone gets all the sorcery, distribution would still be a logistics problem and we're laying groundwork that would smooth that out if we go that route."

Permalink Mark Unread

<There is also a lot of ground between mass distribution and "Bells and whoever they personally trust". I agree that Wish has better avenues.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Don't look at me, I spent a while refusing to do anything too useful because I thought I might still be a captive of an evil god and now I have a planet. Loki has two planets - sort of - and spell development to do - and Cam is running around meeting all our trustworthy demon needs - and Golden has a planet - and T'Mir and Boots are co-running a federated thing and Boots does spell development and high-trust therapy stuff - Iobel has a country and spell development - you are entirely welcome to make a case for stepping up distribution or trying it as a pilot program here or something but I don't think we're underusing our resources particularly. And it sounds like you may be slightly underestimating how many people Bells give stuff out to? Like, a bunch of orcs have the healing spell because they otherwise have a species-wide chronic pain problem and Loki can't personally poke every single orc from every single Arda, so there's orc planets and orcs on them with her spell."

Permalink Mark Unread

<No, that's exactly my point, all of you are tremendously good at leveraging your resources and there are not very many of you and any system built on personal trust is going to end up mostly ignoring any world that does not happen to have one of you in it. My objection is not that Bells underuse their resources but that Bells are way too busy to also be the bottleneck on resources. My concerns will be significantly alleviated if there are dimensions without personal Bell involvement that have since they were discovered become significant contributors to the project of improving the multiverse.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Worlds we have discovered mostly fall into the categories 'an Arda', 'has a native Bell', and 'boring'. There's one two steps from Wish with a neat magic system and I have people on looking for exploits on that but that probably constitutes personal Bell involvement?"

Permalink Mark Unread

<I will look around before I decide how concerned to be. would not try to run a multiverse off personal trust but perhaps Bells know a lot more people and are much better judges of character, obviously in our case the species difference is confounding.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Was that sarcasm? We do not and are not."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Feel free to present an alternative. One which doesn't lead to people running amok. We already have one Melkor running amok and have not yet been able to catch him."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Do you mind if I visit a few boring dimensions and try building institutions by which people acquire nifty interdimensional magic for achievements at improving local standards of living? Not nifty interdimensional magic that would make them any more dangerous than the average Pool ship, of course. If not, I will try that and revisit the conversation once I am better informed.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sounds like a perfectly reasonable project. There's a catalog of boring dimensions in the standard files. May be a confounding factor that most of the boring we've discovered is a hop from Edda or Wish - since that's where we've got the best advantages at fixing things - but there's also some boring off Shadow encountered in the course of chasing the runaway Melkor."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Thank you.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"No problem."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think the difference in perspective there is that we all started in worlds small enough that we actually could run them by personal familiarity, and this was not an astronomical waste of potential because people would rise to our personal attention even absent any institutional means for them to do that. I take it your world's bigger than that?"

Permalink Mark Unread

<...yes, I definitely could not have been sure that I was doing right by everybody if I tried working just off the ones I personally knew. The Andalites have a smaller population than Earth by an order of magnitude but we are distributed across a dozen star systems.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yep, we've got a smaller population than Earth by four orders of magnitude. Space's only two. And you're also the only one without obligations at home. Go ahead and give it a try."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Criminal waste, really, them causing you to have no obligations at home."

Permalink Mark Unread

<They were aware of that, actually. They just could not think what else to do. I could probably try to redeem my name once we have ended the war but I had a lovely time on Earth and it sounds like I can do that again in lots of different worlds and that sounds very much more fun.

 

Speaking of the war, which of those magics are you inclined to make known to this world and which will we need to win?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"If we operate openly at all it will be inconvenient and challenging to conceal the teleportation, we'd have to manufacture a lot of transit delays and so on. We could pass it off as pure personal transport and not let on about the extent to which it is more than that, but it does scope well enough that we could probably collapse a lot of explanation of how we're accomplishing a lot of things into 'they have snazzy teleportation'. Our divination type stuff - wizardry, demons, Golden's got a staffperson with magic perfect timing, might also be able to interest the friend of hers with magic planning stuff powers even though she's not on staff - I don't think we ought to explain at all, although it will probably be pretty clear we have some kind of intel advantage it is also pretty normal not to detail those. Osanwë's an excellent Yeerk-checking tool, or probably is, pending tests, and is only up to the best standards of consent if people know how it works, so that should probably be public."

Permalink Mark Unread

"No substantial planning of any kind should hinge on this but I would find it immensely personally entertaining to do magic in front of some Electorate folks and be questioned about it and wince and say 'I'm so sorry, the people I learned this from aren't ready to share it with Andalites yet'."

Permalink Mark Unread

Swish-swish-swish. <I approve of arranging for that to happen, probably after the war. The people with the magic planning and timing powers seem like the first ones to look to, here.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"The problem with the magic planning powers is that they give Siobhan no feedback at all. She didn't know she was a witch until somebody who can copy other witches' powers told her she was. So she might have an in-dimension limit, like Alice - she might have an adjacency limit too but that'd still let her work here - and she wouldn't know it, it'd seem just the same to her. So we shouldn't lean that hard on magic planning person. Timing person, Nathan, is confirmed to work without adjacency limit."

Permalink Mark Unread

<So we have teleportation, very good intel, and we can permit it to be assumed that we are bringing in our ships and so on from a neighboring dimension rather than having them made on the spot, unless we want to convey that it is silly to try to outlast us on account of our ability to make arbitrarily many ships.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"And Elspeth can do some Yeerk testing, she won't mind, she goes around broadcasting the contents of her head as loudly as is safe for people around her anyway. She's indestructible but indestructible people can let things destruct them if they want and she's not as baseline inflexible as a full vampire."

Permalink Mark Unread

Shudder. <And then we will know whether to publicize osanwë right away.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Morphing gives thoughtspeak to species that don't have it natively, it could maybe be passed off as an upgrade of that? Which isn't being mass-distributed because of the abuse potential."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Are we concealing the fact alternate dimensions exist? Are we planning to do so permanently?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"I've had fine luck with Wish's people knowing alternate dimensions exist, which was sort of necessary since my wife is from one, but I'm not forthcoming about how many except when I'm adding them as protectorates, and don't mention alts to the general public - I think people would have a lot of mostly frivolous interest in looking up their alts and alt-finding is not a mass-producible service yet."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We're a member planet of Vanda Nossëo, so everyone knows and I think there was in fact some frivolous alt-finding but within the Ardas that's more manageable."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Copying Gem's strategy, minus the protectorates and the wife, for the time being, seems reasonable to me."

Permalink Mark Unread

Swish swish. <So the rest of you will have to take some care to not go out in public.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Or get better at illusioning it, or maybe morph'll work fine with indestructibility or Finos will re-chart indestructibility to be more cooperative for this purpose."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Or they can just say they morphed me or partially morphed me because it is a sign of respect in their culture to imitate people, or something. There is a perfect local explanation for people looking alike."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Then everyone'll be doing it. But that would work.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not that many people have acquired me, and everyone knows better than to assume someone who looks like me is me. Andi does me-impressions on television all the time."

Permalink Mark Unread

<People could try to blend for it, though they'd have to be talented.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"And we are not going to wear our hair like you, the cultural explanation'll have to cover that."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Elf thing?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Little bit."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Elves have an unbraided hair thing the way humans have a nudity thing."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I had to explain the nudity thing! I woke up one night abducted by stark naked human-morphed aliens who wanted me to explain clothes and pizza!"

Permalink Mark Unread

<It was not at all intuitive how to acquire synthetic skin! Or pizza!>

Permalink Mark Unread

Gem laughs hysterically. "Why was pizza a priority?"

Permalink Mark Unread

<Andi woke first, and she thought she was having, ah, a dream, and she thought the dream would be improved by pizza, and requested some.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'll introduce everybody to Andi at some point. It's weird you don't have Andis."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't even have parents!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's weird that Andis don't come standard," amends the new Bell.

Permalink Mark Unread

<I would be very disconcerted to be told most of me only had three brothers> he agrees. <Also Cayaldwin wants to know if demonically-made brains contain all the information content of the brain but are just magically not minds, and if so if anyone has wished for the ability to make them start being minds.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"No one has wished for that. They might or might not; checking isn't as straightforward as it is with Space Elf chips. Boots doesn't read anything off basement-dwellers, neither does my emotion gauge, but I suppose that doesn't guarantee that the information isn't there."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Do you read anything off demonically made space Elf chips, before or after the procedure that makes them usable? Do you read them off people who are dead but whose brains are still intact and with all the information content present?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Haven't checked and no."

Permalink Mark Unread

<After the war is straightened out he may want to try that, then.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"That's a really good idea."

Permalink Mark Unread

<I will tell him that you said so.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"If he means to make the wish himself he'll want a backup in case it doesn't go through, there's a very brief window after noticing a failed wish in which you can fit a safer try."

Permalink Mark Unread

He sends this as well. He is rocking back and forth happily at the prospect of having resurrection in less than decades.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Cam tried braindeath-then-resuscitation and it didn't work but nobody thought of a wished power for it, how did we not think of that -"

Permalink Mark Unread

<Less motivation? Are we the first set with really-irrevocably-gone dead loved ones?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"T'Mir's dad is dead, and your human alt's grandparents..."

Permalink Mark Unread

<I hope it works.>

Permalink Mark Unread

Nod nod.

Permalink Mark Unread

<Do we want to conduct the osanwë experiments before we plan the war?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"That seems like it depends on whether we expect the war to involve having to check lots of people for unwanted Yeerks."

Permalink Mark Unread

<It seems like if we do a good job it really should not require that - there are tens of millions of Controllers, it would be quite a chore.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"So not urgent; there are ways already to do smaller numbers of checks."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Agreed.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"We can tell Elspeth no rush, then. You'll like Elspeth," she adds to Matirin.

Permalink Mark Unread

<She should be told that Yeerking people gets their procedural knowledge and skillsets and languages.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"This will not bother her. Elspeth is really into the free sharing of the contents of her brain. She contains some memories that are not her own and whoever's going in might not want to look at those - I mean, keeping them genuinely secret is a lost cause once Elspeth has them but they can at least be needles in a haystack - but she's not going to mind a bit about anything that's hers to theoretically mind about."

Permalink Mark Unread

<...all right.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Elspeth is great. If we ever figure out enough about how alts work to pull it off Mitros and Iobel want one."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Mitros and Iobel being the married, human set of us?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah. They're not romantically involved, you don't come in straight so far, but he had to get married to be king."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Interesting.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not that he was up front with her about this, so there was some early awkwardness!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Instances of me making a entertainingly bad first impression on our Bells is not quite a constant but it's common. I was horrible to Kib and Swift accused Loki of being a hallucination working for the enemy - for twenty years - and Mitros decided his future wife didn't really need to know he was gay and you apparently abducted Bella naked asking about pizza."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Andi woke up first but promptly realized the situation called for my expertise once she knew it wasn't a dream."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What's she like?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"She's... I've never really tried to describe... she's, um -" Pause. "She's a professional estreen, which is a form of dancing-and-morphing performance art you need to be a specific sort of talented at morphing to do because by default it's really gross-looking, and she loves it. She's not around right now because she's on tour, Dallas tonight, and she's way more normal-person than me but she's -" Vague gesture. "She's mine?"

Permalink Mark Unread

Swish.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Good, it's good you had one of those."

Permalink Mark Unread

"They come in not-twin?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"My husband, Golden's husband, Iobel's cat. Possibly Boots's boyfriend and possibly Loki's favorite orc but I'm not sure on those. Gem...?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Just shy of it, I think?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Your wife is?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah."

Permalink Mark Unread

He and Island look at each other. After a minute Island giggles and Matirin's tail swishes happily again. 

 

<All right, so it sounds like Bella has a plan for what she wants publicly known. How about what we want Ristrell to know?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"You need a nickname," Gem says to the new Bell, poking her in the arm.

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm thinking, I'm thinking. Uh, Ristrell doesn't seem like the type to go frivolously alt-hunting, at all, so we can probably tell her we're getting the stuff from alts..."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Agreed.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's possible she'll pattern-match 'and you can't have all of it right away' to, uh, Andalite behavior, but she's not stupid and she doesn't tend to adopt a particularly demanding posture in negotiations? I think she'd get that there are security considerations and be at most irritated about it if she can't talk us into trading for the information or the magic or whatever."

Permalink Mark Unread

<That seems fair. If we relocate most non-Resistance Yeerks to a faraway dimension where they cannot hurt anyone, do you think she is likely to want any part in eventual rehabilitation efforts?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Likely. I don't have a very clear picture of what social process exactly goes into Yeerks deciding to reproduce but it does seem kind of fraught what with the obligatory death of the parents, so the less fraught avenue of population growth for Tide is recruitment."

Permalink Mark Unread

<So then we will either need to give her the means to reach them, or have some other way of letting her be involved.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"She might want to appoint supervisory personnel or something."

Permalink Mark Unread

<I cannot imagine having objections there.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"So she can have people hanging out near the, the time-out pool in Limbo, and teach them to be better behaved, and will know about teleportation and alts and other worlds and relevant Limbo facts at a minimum."

Permalink Mark Unread

<And they can be a hundred million lightyears from any Limboites - unless new Limboites just show up around existing people in Limbo ->

Permalink Mark Unread

"...they show up near existing Limboites. We don't actually know if non-Limboite residents would do that, we should probably try that and see if any dead people show up..."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Yes, that seems worth verifying before something goes badly wrong.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"If population density matters a lot of people will need to hang out in Distant Limbo Place to be sure..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'd suggest installing a batch of orcs but we don't have one lined up waiting to be moved at the moment..."

Permalink Mark Unread

<And we could not just offer new Limboites who show up a ride to the other Limboites, not without it rapidly becoming known in all the daeva worlds that there are Yeerks in Limbo, from which the demons could learn a lot of other things...>

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think Yeerks would not be immediately obviously comprehensible to a new Limboite, but yeah. Maybe some Limboites want to move and we could just split the Limbo population as it stands?"

Permalink Mark Unread

<Their current infrastructure was sort of patched in around everyone's extant item, right. We could build them a nice modern city and hope lots of people are tempted. That does mean there is nowhere to put the Yeerks in the short term, though.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't they fairly harmless when in pools as nobody goes for a swim?"

Permalink Mark Unread

<They are.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"So unless pools or generators are magical/intelligent/antimatter/vacuum we can put them literally anywhere that people aren't going to trip into the pools, pretty much?"

Permalink Mark Unread

<And as long as we got them all or any rogue Yeerk-ships mid-journey to somewhere far away cannot find their people.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Out of the way, not necessarily in this galaxy, this dimension..."

Permalink Mark Unread

<That should do it.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Limbo might be not the best we can do anyway, Edda or its neighborhood or Wish or its might be better. I am sure we can find somebody to lay down a wish that'll make nonconsensual infestation impossible."

Permalink Mark Unread

Shudder. <I would do that.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sure. So we can put them in Wish somewhere, you or somebody else who feels strongly about it can make the wish, Ristrell can send us supervisory friendly-Yeerk missionaries and ship them back as they learn to behave, sounds like you have decent systems in place here to keep a population of appropriately acculturated Yeerks in line."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Can we make them a replica of their home star system in Wish?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, Lúthien can find approximately planet the right size the right distance from a star the right size and a wish'll nudge them all just right."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Perfect.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"My magic system is great."

Permalink Mark Unread

<I wish it worked here. Shall we go to Aurum and do tests of the interaction of morphing with magic rock-hood and teleportation and indestructibility and so forth?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sounds good. I'm even conveniently a magic rock."

Permalink Mark Unread

So they get an Escafil device and head back to Aurum with the list of things to test.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Who's morphing Yeerk to check Elspeth?"

Permalink Mark Unread

<I have no desire to but I can if Bella prefers not to.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"If she honestly doesn't mind..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"She not only honestly doesn't mind, she will make this transparently obvious within thirty seconds of your meeting her."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'll go track her down." Kib vanishes.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

He looks around at their surroundings, fascinated. 

Permalink Mark Unread

They are in a pleasant little beach town inhabited by hybrids and vampires. Some of the vampires are unobtrusively sniffing the air, probably trying to figure out what the fuck is up with the centaur alien.

Permalink Mark Unread

The centaur alien can't help them there. Well, he could morph human or Elf again but he is not overwhelmingly eager to do that.

Permalink Mark Unread

Alice turns up. "Magic rocks can morph," she reports, "but just their bodies, not the rocks, and the rocks won't go into z-space, so the morph has to haul the rock around. Teleportation interacts fine, at least within Aurum, I can't see out of it. And I go totally blank in seven minutes so that's probably when Elspeth shows up."

Permalink Mark Unread

<We should probably not attempt teleporting between worlds while in morph, just to be safe.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Agreed."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Can indestructible people morph?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, but they do have to exceptionalize the indestructibility for it... and... the indestructibility works sort of off what you consider part of your body so it doesn't work very consistently in morph." Pause. "And you can acquire vampires and hybrids but you want to morph full vampires only under really controlled conditions if you don't have New Bell's instinct immunity, we have some very antisocial instincts."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Do vampires find Andalites appetizing?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Marginally more appetizing than herbivorous animals, marginally less appetizing than carnivorous animals."

Permalink Mark Unread

<So safer to be around than humans, while adjusting to morph instincts?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, you probably won't snap and eat Andalites. Elves smell yummy though."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Good to know."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You didn't know that? Well, most of the vampires you're likely to meet will have the hex applied where we aren't thirsty constantly, don't worry about it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think I'll go acquire Golden. That's about as good as morphing an Elf for the senses, right, and it means I can keep my face mostly?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yup! She's in there, third floor, two lefts."

Permalink Mark Unread

Bella goes.

Permalink Mark Unread

"I haven't actually had the chance to come up here, I only decided to be indestructible a few weeks ago and there's been lots to do at home."

Permalink Mark Unread

"And my visions cut out about here," says Alice. "Plan on letting me know if you need anything else once Elspeth's gone."

And she traipses away and Elspeth and Kib appear.

"Hi!" says Elspeth. "I'm Elspeth."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Nice to meet you, Elspeth! Did Kib explain what we need you for?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yup! This sounds like a much less dangerous way of letting people have everything in my head than just blasting them with it."

Permalink Mark Unread

<It does have that advantage.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'll admit the slug-in-the-ear part is a little weird but it's not that much weirder than eating raw seagulls for breakfast, so I am a hundred percent okay with it. And I want to know what my witchcraft does with my head having somebody in it!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"New Bell will be back in a minute, she's acquiring your mom."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Are there other species we should acquire? Do Elf planets have interesting ecology?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Pretty human-planet-like selection there except in Valinors it's all weirdly - managed and friendly? There's some plants human planets don't have. Like the fluffy grass. I wonder if you would like the fluffy grass or if its virtues are principally textural."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Perhaps I will try some.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Island is so called because one time he decided to abandon all sense of proportion and terraform me an island and put fluffy grass on it. It's the best grass."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Awwww.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"I know, right?"

Permalink Mark Unread

New Bell emerges. "Vampire senses rock but the thirstiness thing is uncomfortable, I think I will probably not use the morph much until I can get that one hex. Hi, you must be Elspeth."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I am! And I don't mind being Yeerked a bit."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...I was told you were convincing, but wow."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Will the anti-thirst hex work between vampire morphs, do you know?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Golden thinks probably."

Permalink Mark Unread

And he waits for the result of the Yeerking-Elspeth test.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

Bella goes in.

Permalink Mark Unread

Elspeth proceeds to giggle a lot. Her - aura - flickers oddly; when she says things, especially in the first person, it's instantly obvious if it's her or not. There is some experimental teleportation.

Permalink Mark Unread

And Bella comes out and demorphs. "That was - interesting."

Permalink Mark Unread

<So no Yeerk would be able to impersonate Elspeth but it does work fine.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Except I'd have to let them in, 'cause, indestructible."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Is everybody indestructible?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"None of the space Elves are, because there's so many of them and they're resurrectable. I suppose we will leave them out of the war."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Most other relevant parties have it by now though."

Permalink Mark Unread

<You said you only got it recently?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"It would make it considerably more difficult, perhaps outright impossible, to kill myself."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

<Ah.>

Permalink Mark Unread

Handsqueeze.

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's a big multiverse and I am better-calibrated than most people on what losing is like -"

Permalink Mark Unread

<I was not challenging you. Though if they are going to have resurrection anyway ->

Permalink Mark Unread

"That was part of it, yeah."

Permalink Mark Unread

They seem done with Elspeth. She waves and teleports away.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Boots is good at psychic therapy."

Permalink Mark Unread

<I have had several years with nothing to do but poke at my mind. Once we have resurrection I will be fine.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay."

Permalink Mark Unread

<It was much briefer than either of you anyway.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Duration's not really the point."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Seems relevant. If we resurrect Alloran he will be much worse off than I was.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Suppose he'd want to be resurrected?"

Permalink Mark Unread

<I doubt it.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Inconveniently there is no way to check without resurrecting him."

Permalink Mark Unread

<And more inconveniently, when you resurrect him and he immediately kills himself that will not be strong evidence that he prefers to be dead, just that he assumed he'd somehow temporarily gotten an opening.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeerks don't do the hallucinatory rescue thing so he probably wouldn't react adversely to Elspeth, she could tell him he was safe..."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Unless you make sure he can't move he won't give her the time to get a word out. ...the hallucinatory rescue thing?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Melkors do a thing where one repeatedly hallucinates being rescued, which... substantially complicates actually being rescued. Elspeth's probably faster than he is and doesn't need to actually speak aloud to do her thing."

Permalink Mark Unread

<In that case it might work. 

That is horrifying.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yep. Yous come out fucked up but - functional? I, uh, was not functional. My alts had to bully me out of an Extremely Useless Captive thing I was doing to get me to... have... thoughts. And then I got sick of not being totally sure I was out so I got Boots to fuck with my head a bit, and, uh, she's scary, if the Enemy could do that it would be game over."

Permalink Mark Unread

<You can stop having thoughts?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Approximately. Under the right kind of stress."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Sounds...useful, if unpleasant.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"It was so fucking boring. In between the horrific torture."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Ah, you do not get to stop processing?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"I didn't come out flinching at random stimuli that once preceded unpleasantness, I wasn't learning, but I did not get to turn off basic stuff like 'pain', no."

Permalink Mark Unread

Tail-lash - <and one is still loose?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"The one from Shadow. The Space Arda Sauron had a deadman's switch that Cam was lucky to catch in time and it required Vala help to clean up completely, so Loki checked before killing the Shadow instances of Melkor and Sauron, but tipped them off enough that they ran off. We think they're one or possibly two hops from Shadow. Shadow's next to Materia, so random hopping from there isn't safe; Joy landing near Melkor is not safe even if he's somewhere otherwise stable, and he might be in Materia or one of its accessory worlds."

Permalink Mark Unread

<And wizardry does cross-dimensional summoning but you do not especially want to summon a Melkor and he could plausibly leave again anyway?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yep. And if he's in a Materia accessory world rather than Materia proper, we don't have a non-Materia vantage point from which to do that anyway."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Does conjuring fail to work on people within Materia even if the conjurer is not in Materia?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Preliminary results indicate that Cam can conjure things that are in Materia, although it's entirely possible that it's one of those things Materia is permitting to work until it gets mad, or permitting to work inconsistently - his powers were weirdly restricted while he was stuck in Materia."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Does conjuring for the world Melkor is in get you anything?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Doesn't work that way around, he has to know what worlds he's quantifying over - he can do 'all known' but not 'all'. Also Melkors are not known for their prolific writings, conjuring for Ainur per se gets nothing because they're not matter and don't have to be using physical bodies - Cam has tried to get conjurations of the physical bodies, which he can do, over various worlds, but we don't know what the negative result means, it could be 'not there' or 'not using physical bodies' or 'Materia's fucking with us' or something else."

Permalink Mark Unread

Tail-lash. <All right.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Why don't we grab everybody you want to give interdimensional magic, and then we can give you all eidetic memories and spells and Allspeak-as-relevant."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Me and Andi and Matirin and Cayaldwin and Finleran and - how inconvenient is it to do this in batches, how sure should we be that we don't need to add more people for a while?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"It'll take me a few hours but I have a delightful batch of attention enhancements that will let me do a few other things at the same time, and I do not mind coming down here to do it again if you identify other people who ought to have it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can think of some maybes - some of my staff, some of the other Andalites - but those are all the obvious definitelies."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Then we can start there. Maybies can also get just, say, healing and the teleport, which goes even faster. I think we only grabbed three necklaces, I can hop over to Vanda Nossëo and grab two more - or I can take you all over to Vanda Nossëo, you have yet to see an Elven city -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Are they very nice?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Matirin commented on how the Elf instinct set is apparently a desire to sing and intense distress at things only as pretty as your headquarters?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...so they're full of singing and prettiness, I see. All right."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Will we be interrupting Andi's performance in Dallas?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"She's probably not even at the theater yet, I'd need to look at a clock."

Permalink Mark Unread

<It is 7:28am in Dallas, assuming time passes at the same rate in different universes.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"...it does. Why do you know what time it is in Dallas? Weren't you in prison on a different planet for years?"

Permalink Mark Unread

<...yes?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Andalites have ridiculous time sense. Real Andalites; morphing them doesn't get it. Although to be fair this is on the upper end of ridiculousness. Anyway, at that hour she will maybe be having breakfast but not be doing anything time sensitive."

Permalink Mark Unread

<I did not have much else to do with my brain. Shall we go get her from Dallas?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah - although I don't think we should just appear in her hotel room, I'll call her first."

Permalink Mark Unread

"And Finleran is at your headquarters still?" Pop, now everyone's back in New World.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yep." Bella picks up a phone.

Permalink Mark Unread

Finleran, we're - he sends the surroundings - collecting everybody to go give magic. Can you join us?

Permalink Mark Unread

He does. He sees Matirin and leaps forwards and past him, and then circles back around; their tails twine. 

Permalink Mark Unread

Awwwwwwwwwww. "Hi Andi! Is this an okay time?"

(Elf ears will be able to hear: "Yeah, as of five minutes ago, what's up?")

"Things got weirder again!"

"Like, how weirder?"

"Like way weirder, but good weirder. Where should I meet you so you can receive magical powers?"

"Whoa, seriously?"

"Seriously!"

"Uh, I was about to see if the continental breakfast was made of food or just overdone bacon and sad apples, but I can go back up to my room?"

"Cool. Send me a picture of the room."

"Will do one sec -" Pause. "Here you go."

"Be there in a jiffy! Put up the do not disturb sign!"

"Okay!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Where're we going?"

Permalink Mark Unread

Bella finds the picture of the hotel room and displays it.

Permalink Mark Unread

He takes him and Kib and Bella; the Andalites would take up a lot of space and can Andalite for a minute anyway.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Holy shit it's you what are you doing here? And for some reason you decided you needed to be prettier, like, wow, give the teenage girls of the world a break, dude."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hello, Andi. I'm not Matirin, I am prettier than his human morph because I'm not human, Bella do you want to explain here or in Vanda Nossëo?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Executive summary - alternate universes, they contain versions of people, including me and Matirin, but not you it's weird and those other Bells are the poorer for it, magic powers, want to go see an elf city?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hell yeah I want to go see an elf city."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Great!" Pop back to pick up Matirin and Finleran. "So dimensions are adjacent to other dimensions, and Vanda Nossëo's a few hops from here - they'll be fast hops, but some people find it a little disconcerting."

Aurum - Shadow - Edda. Vanda Nossëo is built into the foothills of a mountain range, arches and rivers and bridges and elaborate auditoriums and concert halls, most of them open to the air, all in stunningly intricate stone.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Wow! So, Not Matirin, you're an elf? Do you live here?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Actually, no, I live on Shine, which is another Elf planet. There are five Earths and even more versions of my home world. This is the headquarters of a sort of interdimensional government of which Shine is a member world. One of the things they do is collect and mass-produce useful magic things and sell them for absurd amounts of money; if you need anything magic or anything money can buy you can come here and take it - they've got a running list somewhere of what else the money's doing, so you can assess whether you should do that, but Elves are really prosocial and so anyone can."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...just... show up and take... stuff?"

Permalink Mark Unread

He opens a door and ushers them into a building. "Eidetic memory necklace - you need it to learn our spells - unless all of you want the indelible version, instances of me get it because of paranoia but it takes ten times as long - might be worth it if it turns out necklaces don't morph with you - these give you Elven eyesight, try them on, they're very popular - I should have someone whip up a ring that glows in the presence of Yeerks, and in the presence of someone morphed, those should both be straightforward - we have rings for balance and stamina and energy and concentration and so on though Bella you'll want to fix your clumsiness with Loki's grace spell if you haven't already - these necklaces give you boundless working memory, they were mainly for the Hex crowd - and an Allspeak wand, boop boop now you can understand any language, here's the user manual."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I booped her with the grace spell already."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...wow holy shit, stuff. I could probably morph the necklaces if they were snugger? Do they come in choker?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"We don't have one like that here but I can get you one, it'd work just fine in principle. Gem, can you turn this necklace into a choker without messing with its native magic?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't know if that'd mess with its native magic, but I can try -" She picks up a necklace, fiddles with the shape of it until it'll fit tight.

Permalink Mark Unread

Andi tries it on. "Whoa. I will win Trivial Pursuit forever."

Permalink Mark Unread

So Gem tweaks more of them for the others too.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, excellent. Next stop is for chip-locked computers, which have our full repertoire of magic songs on them. There are some other items here, but they're mostly for sale, not for alt-equipping - immortality you can get as a hex or from your native morphing thing, breathing underwater is covered by indestructibility - and by morphing, I guess - there are rings for prevention of unintended pregnancy, which everyone not an Elf thinks was a silly priority -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I mean, does it have fewer side effects than the pill?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"It has no side effects in humans. We worked really hard on those things."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Cool, mine now." She finds one in her size and yoinks it.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Whenever Gem has time free some Elves wish for the ability to write instructions to magic items like Elspeth does, and we're up to being able to produce ten thousand a day, so if the Imperatrix wants to run a pilot program we can definitely spare some for that, even though regrettably we can't just hand them out like candy. Yet."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can prioritize Malawi-and-company, every time I give them something nice whoever's next in line promises me more free rein."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We probably have enough rings-of-no-unintended-pregnancy for the population of Malawi, though I do not know much about Earths and yours is probably different anyway - Andi, in the other four Earths it is respectively 2006, 2040, 2193, and 2284, and Gem's Earth got wished up nice and is accordingly pretty different from yours -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"So how come the stuff is magic and not sci fi stuff?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sometimes magic's easier - you can see if your partner's wearing a ring, if you want a child you just take it off - or has fewer prerequisites. Tech only really scales better if it can be manufactured within-dimension, otherwise we have to buy it in Warp or Revelation which are in the dark about the multiverse or we have to make more demands on Cam's extremely in-demand services - Cam is an alternate universe version of your sister who can just magically make stuff. Any stuff. He makes planets, he made all the teleportation hop-points, he makes Vanda Nossëo goodies to sell, he made Hex some islands."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...boy Bellas. Weird."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes, hello."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, are you him?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Nah, there's two, but the girls have us outnumbered. Also I was a girl in a past life."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I personally find it very disappointing that most Bells are girls."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...why?"

Permalink Mark Unread

Matirin, am I outing you -

Permalink Mark Unread

<I am not sure Andalites have the conceptual framework you are making reference to.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"I wish more Bells were boys because the mes usually end up getting along with them splendidly - after a few missteps - and all mes are gay."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do you not all have Finlerans, is that just our world too? Bella are you going to name it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Cube?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I like Cube! So far Finleran's template has existed in every universe I exist in but not vice-versa, there was a him without a me in Materia."

Permalink Mark Unread

"So like, if my Bella was a boy... and our you wasn't an alien... it still wouldn't work because there's Finleran?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes it could."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What happens, it transpires, is that within a day of meeting my Bell I develop a crush and then I spend hours every day secretly telling my boyfriend about my adorable crush and the way he plans economic solutions to pressing social problems and invents stuff and quips at me sarcastically and beats me at Governor, and my boyfriend puts up with this because he is very tolerant of me and also because I am entertainingly sexually frustrated all the time, and eventually, having been moped at long enough, my boyfriend decides he is also quite taken with this person and being more forward than me asks him out."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

Andi laughs. "...What's Governor?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's a game! It's sort of like Risk but with no dice and you make everything up and it's stupidly complicated and it's great."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Bells beat me half the time and no one else stands a chance."

Permalink Mark Unread

"That sounds like a Bella thing."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I have good reason to expect she would like it! Who wants a chiplocked computer, you can't use 'em in morph."

Permalink Mark Unread

<I would.>

Permalink Mark Unread

<I would.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Come to think of it we should probably check in Aurum whether it works on Andalites."

Permalink Mark Unread

At Andi's puzzled look New Bell explains, "There's somebody who can see the future but she only works in one of the worlds we hopped through to get here, so dangerous experiments like brain surgery on aliens are planned there and then they see what she says."

Permalink Mark Unread

"In that case I'm going to just give you the spells over osanwë instead of having you read them off your chiplocked computers, we can batch things that require Cam's attention. Want to - hmm, want to go to the concert hall and listen to some music while I read hours and hours of meaningless characters at you?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"This is my dinner slot, can we eat in there?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yep, definitely."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Awesome."

Food and concert and meaningless letters!

Permalink Mark Unread

The food will be handed out to them by random people on the street as they walk by: he can recommend some things Bells usually like. The concert is astonishing. The Andalites attract some stares. The meaningless letters are meaningless and there are a lot of them.

Permalink Mark Unread

After Andi has had breakfast can she dance, or is this not a dancing friendly hall.

Permalink Mark Unread

She can dance. If she does morph-dancing she'll attract quite a crowd but otherwise she will mostly be ignored.

Permalink Mark Unread

She's got a show tonight, can't wear herself out. Just regular dancing.

Permalink Mark Unread

The rings for stamina might help with morphing, hard to guess. ...he wonders what the Elf morph limit is. 

 

And once they have all their spells they can leave a note for Cam saying we're thinking we should do alien chip-locked computer installations with Alice supervising; everyone is here when you're free and head back to Cube to install a crystal ball and then head to Aurum for the brain surgery.

Permalink Mark Unread

Cam shows up a bit later. "Yo. Uh, you realize this is not very likely to work naively? The chips were invented by and for daeva, whose brains are shaped just like human brains, and it's dumb luck and/or Erus being not very creative that Elves are similar enough; you guys, uh, would've required more creativity." This one has a tail, look at it go.

Permalink Mark Unread

Oh good, having a tail makes so much more sense. Though it's bladeless, which is painful to even think about. <How significant are the information security concerns with using the computers we are accustomed to, at least until we have adapted this technology for our heads? We already have translation chips installed, it is certainly possible in principle.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"You have pretty good security-by-obscurity, I'm not going to pick through your stuff without a really good reason and Epic won't pick through your stuff unless he happens to particularly feel like it and other demons do not know you exist."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Unless he happens to feel like it?>

Permalink Mark Unread

<Epic is a twelve-year-old version of my father with demonic powers.>

Permalink Mark Unread

<Well, that is fantastic. I thought they were being careful about who they gave that kind of thing out to?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"One of us kind of adopted him and it turns out a key Parenting A Fëanor Skill is not refusing to let him have stuff very frequently. He did get briefed on privacy and making sure he has a way to get rid of stuff before he conjures a ton of it and so on, I was mostly being flippant."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Our version gave half his fleet coordinates for a black hole instead of coordinates for Earth.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Wow. That's actually worse than the setting the boats on fire thing, probably the closest analogue in Ardas that get that far sans Bell. But Epic is small and adorable and means you no harm."

Permalink Mark Unread

<I trust your judgment.> He twines tails with Matirin again.

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm mostly trusting Boots's judgment, here, Boots being the one who adopted him."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Epic's version of demonic conjuration has an adjacency limit anyway, so he'd have to be in Cube or Aurum to go through your things."

Permalink Mark Unread

<I am more worried about what our version could convince him to get up to - I am assuming Cayaldwin will be undeterrable from resurrecting him ->

Permalink Mark Unread

<He can do a lot of good, too, if pointed the right direction ->

Permalink Mark Unread

<And 'Epic' might not be the right direction to point him.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"...the nickname is a reference to a Materia-specific concept."

Permalink Mark Unread

"There's an Officially Evil Fëanor and he just hangs out with the Space ones inventing stuff."

Permalink Mark Unread

<I will be civil, I promise.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Should I just... avoid these people or something... on the grounds that while I can avoid the topic I do kind of take it personally that friendly aliens wanted to help my infiltrated-by-Yeerks-planet, my infiltrated-by-Yeerks dad, and half of these friendly aliens fell in a black hole because this was easier than solving a coordination problem."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...maybe? They're probably not going to go out of their way to come say hi and of them Epic is the likeliest to and he's, like, adorable and hasn't hurt anybody..."

Permalink Mark Unread

<And they certainly will not come if it's clear they are disliked, if they have anything in common with my father.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm not planning to put out a press release or anything."

Permalink Mark Unread

<I can mention the events to them.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Thanks."

Permalink Mark Unread

"In the awkwardness-around-alts-of-people-who-did-stuff department you probably don't wanna visit the planet Afterlife in Space Arda."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Okay."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Any of us, or specifically Bella?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"You'd be fine - or rather if someone there resented you it'd be about Elf racism or something rather than anything your alt actually did. I'm not actually sure how the Space Maitimos would be received. He participated but I'm not sure if anyone's told them. And I was the one who actually did it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"He told them."

Permalink Mark Unread

<If there hadn't been a way to save Earth we were going to make sure the Yeerks couldn't have it.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Which I understand entirely but I assume if someone then put the Earth back afterwards you would not make visits there. So. I don't go to Afterlife, Bells probably shouldn't go to Afterlife, they wouldn't necessarily recognize the girls but still."

Permalink Mark Unread

Tail-flick-nod. <I wonder if we should somehow make reparations for the Hork-Bajir genocide ->

Permalink Mark Unread

<I have been thinking about that too. Soon we can resurrect them. I - actually think they'll be okay - if Aldrea-Iskillion-Falan can tell me that we did the right thing ->

Permalink Mark Unread

"...context?"

Permalink Mark Unread

<Before they attacked Earth the Yeerks infested a planet of Hork-Bajir, tree-dwelling pacifist vegetarians. The Yeerks wanted them as shock troops; they are terrifying. We got there too late. We fought, for a few years. When all but around ten thousand Hork-Bajir had been infested we released a biological weapon that killed virtually all of them.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"I haven't gone and personally visited the preserve but from what I hear Hork-Bajir seem pretty chill? Who's Aldrea?"

Permalink Mark Unread

<The daughter of Prince Seerow, whose name you know from the laws prohibiting the distribution of technology. She got morph while it was still in early testing stages and fought the Yeerks after the murder of her family. She became a Hork-Bajir nothlit, married, and had a son, who lived out his whole life a Yeerk slave, as did his children and their children. Aldrea died of the bio-weapon.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ah."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Nobody from Afterlife has told Cam they get it. Loki wound up obliquely threatening not to resurrect the Space Valar to the Elentári Aulë who she'd consulted on the project to make sure Cam would be okay and they wouldn't go after him when she did."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Has Cam talked with my mother?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't go there at all now that they're all back."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Cam is extremely conscientious about making sure that nobody else has to deal with his emotional ramifications. Loki has mostly taken on the role of doing useful things like 'telling people not to fuck with him about it' since he's abdicated the option."

Permalink Mark Unread

<I apologize, are we fucking with you about it?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"You are not, or, in Loki's absence, me and Gem would have told you not to do that. I'm just providing context on how very much he is not going to turn up at Space Nerdanel's house and say hello."

Permalink Mark Unread

<And I suppose I can narrowly grant that she did not have enough information to make that inference and come find him.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Presumably."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Well. Given marginally more context about what is going on an alt of my mother would have come and thanked you for everything you did for her world. Is nudging her into doing that likely to be valuable beyond the value of the information that she would have done it?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's really not necessary."

Permalink Mark Unread

<The Andalte law is that if you do something like that you spend the rest of your life on restricted assignment and in disgrace. I - understand the reason for that law. But I have seen what it does and I do not think what it does is respect the right of the victims of calls made for the greater good to resent being used like that. At least with Andalites.

 

Somewhat off-topic but the Yeerk who infested me and murdered my brother with my body is my penpal.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"I didn't know that. That's sorta fucked up."

Permalink Mark Unread

<I wanted to kill him. I do not prefer to have the desire to kill people in vengeance, and - it wasn't exactly vengeance, but just the knowledge he had all my people skills, all my personality - anyhow, I thought that if we talked then I would stop desiring to kill him, and it worked. I want him to be happy insofar as that's possible without harming other people. I should want that for everyone but sometimes it's hard and I need a bit of help.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"I wonder what's taking Alice so long."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I suppose it's possible I have not sufficiently formed the intention to try experimental brain surgery? Name me something I can make with a map of the Andalite brain so I can consult that and form a clearer guess."

Permalink Mark Unread

He suggests a thing.

Permalink Mark Unread

Cam peers at the map, and a minute later Alice runs up. "Doesn't kill them but it doesn't work either," she reports.

"Thank you," Cam says. "What if -"

"Doesn't work either."

"Damn."

Permalink Mark Unread

<We can probably develop a version that does, given time.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"I do think you can probably get demonproof thoughtspeak-based interfaces, it'll just be a bit of work. Since you can always thoughtspeak that'll work for you, it's humans who need the combined solution."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Alice, will chip-locked computers work in morph?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Nope," says Alice.

Permalink Mark Unread

"You're still pretty safe. Don't write up any treatises on how to build a worldleaper, that's all."

Permalink Mark Unread

"They work fine out of morph," Alice says, "so the humans want them anyway."

"All right. Chiplocked computers for the humans," Cam says, handing them out.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Thanks! I have no idea what we're going to need to stop the Yeerks, yet..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Inconveniently, travel between here and Wish requires going through a world that doesn't have space, so we can't just drag all the afflicted planets to Wish."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Edda?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Or just Shadow, the Tesseract reaches Shadow. I'm not actually sure how well it handles things that need to be moved and reshaped? Probably just fine, I'm just imagining evicted Yeerks arriving at their destination still wrapped-around-a-brain-shaped."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think it does okay with that. What I'd worry about is getting the planets to spin and orbit correctly when we put them back, that's hard to do even if I'm making a planet from scratch."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I suppose we do have to put them back, since this world's crowded - otherwise I'd say just leave everything within a hop of Edda so we can tackle future problems -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"But the ex-hosts probably would like to be able to travel around within the galaxy they expect to occupy."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yep."

Permalink Mark Unread

"So, order of magnitude, how many Kandrona generators are there gonna be, is it in fact tractable to find them all with some combination of Joy and demonic triangulation and destroy them all?"

Permalink Mark Unread

<Earth was the Yeerks' third-highest priority. I expect between six and ten planets, probably hundreds of generators per planet but probably not thousands.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"And about how many Pool ships, because demons won't be able find and mass-destroy those?"

Permalink Mark Unread

<Fewer than thirty, likely fewer than twenty.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"If they need this specific sort of radiation they must have a way to get it without engineering projects?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...yeah, their home planet sun. And any matching suns they found."

Permalink Mark Unread

<That might explain what was a higher priority than Earth.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yep. And we probably don't want to go around destroying suns."

Permalink Mark Unread

<There is no particular reason to believe desirable suns would overlap with infestable species, it might be that the Yeerks on those worlds are not taking any hosts.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"I would expect them to be terraforming the places and having hosts that live there even if they're not native, and 'suddenly, no sun' is more of a problem than 'Yeerk has to surrender in the next immediately to three days depending on schedule'."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Not to mention that the rest of the galaxy will really panic at 'suddenly, no sun' being revealed to be a capability of yours.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes, that too."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not that surgical generator strikes should really be less terrifying."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...I might have a way to de-Kandrona a sun."

Permalink Mark Unread


"Oh?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"On our way to hooking up with the rest of the peal me and Joy found a world where the magic system works by moving properties between things. It's portable - you have to be from there to learn it but people who can do it can do it wherever. It's touch range, which means I will need to get someone who can do this hexed indestructible, and it might have some ceiling on object size or not work on plasma or something, but in principle if it works an indestructible troporter would just need to visit each sun with an also-indestructible thing that can theoretically emit radiation, and move the property of emitting that specific kind from sun to lamp."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Wow. Maybe we could make smaller Kandrona emitters to test on before we ask Hex to corral us some spellbinders."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, definitely. And it still might fail at the 'touch a sun' stage. But if it worked it'd work."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What are we sharing with Ristrell about our capabilities here?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Mm - alternate universes, alts, and magic exist, our alts brought us some magic, exact details are need-to-know, we have a plan to force the surrender or starvation of every Imperial Yeerk and would appreciate your help with integrating the surrendered into Tide in whatever way is most convenient for you, what do you need from us to do that. I... think she won't claim to need to know things she doesn't need to know."

Permalink Mark Unread

<I agree.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"She sounds so reasonable!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"We're not close personal friends but as people who could be running a colony of Yeerks on my Moon go she's nearly ideal."

Permalink Mark Unread

<She is a bit abrasive but I concur with the Imperatrix that there is no one better to handle a Yeerk resistance.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"You folks need me for anything else before it's time to hunt down all the generators?"

Permalink Mark Unread

<Are we trying the resurrection trick after the war is over?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"The what?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Wished-on power to add mind to a basement dweller. You get thirty seconds to kick yourself."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh Jesus fucking Christ - we need, we need a fucking comprehensive list of all the known limits to things and we need to go down it systematically checking for possible exploits, and over again every time we find new - fuck - okay, who's wishing it -"

Permalink Mark Unread

<My brother Cayaldwin came up with the idea.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"The Curufin template."

Permalink Mark Unread

"He have a backup if the wish won't go?"

Permalink Mark Unread

<The ability to make and adjust and vanish prototypes of his work at will. I told him 'arbitrary material objects' apparently goes through but he was not especially interested.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, the arbitrary material objects one doesn't come with vanishing, but that should be nice and safe. Let's try this right the fuck now, I can't believe I didn't think of -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Thirty seconds!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Did you stop at thirty seconds -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can stop time it doesn't count."

Permalink Mark Unread

He pops off to get Cayaldwin. 

 

 

He pops back, with Cayaldwin.

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think I'm redundant at this point and my cancellation time window's technically past gone but let me know how it goes -" Kib pecks Island on the cheek and vanishes.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hello I'm the wish-granter, I'm assuming you don't want to be a magic rock, it doesn't cooperate very well with morph, do you have an exact wording of your wish in mind - teleporting now - new Bell you coming? -" At new Bell's headshake Gem brings just the Andalites and Island and Cam. Shadow Edda Space Hex Stork Dreamward Luster Wish.

Permalink Mark Unread

<I do not, can you recommend one?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"How about 'I wish for the ability to fully awaken the whole and correct minds absent from mindless bodies'?"

Permalink Mark Unread

<Will it matter if I thought-speak it, should I morph a form that can speak aloud ->

Permalink Mark Unread

"Osanwë works fine, thoughtspeak should too and if it doesn't it won't foul the wish, you only need your backup if you successfully register the wish and it won't work."

Permalink Mark Unread

<All right. 

 

 

I wish for the ability to fully awaken the whole and correct minds absent from mindless bodies.>

Permalink Mark Unread

It goes.

Permalink Mark Unread

Prance prance prance prance - <so we need the demon to make the bodies...?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"That's me. Who first?"

Permalink Mark Unread

<My father ->

Permalink Mark Unread

Andalite Fëanor basement dweller, bam. (Anxiously pacing demon, bam.)

Permalink Mark Unread

And he walks up to it and sets his tail against his father's flank and wants him back, please, please -

Permalink Mark Unread

And his eyes flutter open and swivel frantically and he rolls to his feet and - <what->

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh my god it worked -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Thirty seconds!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do I get more than thirty seconds to be self-congratulatory?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes, that you can do - I will pull together a list of people out of range -" Computation ensues.

Permalink Mark Unread

While the three of them embrace and catch their father up on the war and subsequent events. <Gem, if you need it, I have a list of almost everyone who died in the Atlantic strike - we should get Bella's mother back first ->

Permalink Mark Unread

"What's Cayaldwin's schedule look like, I can put out ads for more people to wish this power but while I'm sorting candidates -"

Permalink Mark Unread

<I am very eager to learn other worlds' physics and technology but at a minimum I will do everyone who died for us in this war - Cam, my brothers ->

Permalink Mark Unread

Brothers.

Permalink Mark Unread

And alive, in varying states of panic depending how exactly they died. Talik refuses to believe that Matirin is all right.

Permalink Mark Unread

<And everyone else who left our homeworld to fight for Earth?> he says after a few minutes of joyful reunions.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Need a list."

Permalink Mark Unread

Matirin has one.

Permalink Mark Unread

And now there are lots of basement dwellers. It's somehow an even more awkward look on an Andalite than on a humanoid.

Permalink Mark Unread

Probably because Andalites pretty much never lie down, and also the stalk eyes do some funny stuff. He presses his tail-blade to one. Nothing happens. He scuffs frustratedly.

 

<I might need to know who it is?>

Permalink Mark Unread

Cam has an eidetic memory and was working off a list here they can all have nametags.

Permalink Mark Unread

And they all go, but notably slower than his family did. In some cases it takes a few minutes. There is some awkward Andalite glaring. Matirin explains to everyone what is going on.

Permalink Mark Unread

"...my magic system runs on emotions. If you're a magic rock you can hack that, if you're not you may have to separately generate them to use your powers? That could be why some of them are going slower. You might not be able to do strangers, or at least not without learning a lot about them or wanting to help their bereaved or something."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Ah. That would be inconvenient.>

Permalink Mark Unread

<I have notes for everyone who died in the Atlantic strike - what their families wanted us to remember about them - perhaps I should wish it too? Having strong emotions about strangers probably comes more naturally to me ->

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm happy to grant you the wish too. And I do expect to do some magic rock versions of the wish, and they'll be able to do arbitrary people on happiness songs."

Permalink Mark Unread

<What are the problems with becoming a magic rock as an Andalite?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Doesn't play nice with morph - rock won't fold into z-space. I suppose we should also make sure that songs work normally on Andalites, they should be universal but just to be sure."

Permalink Mark Unread

<All right. I will wish it without the magic rock part.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ready when you are."

Permalink Mark Unread

And he repeats the same wording of the wish.

Permalink Mark Unread

Granted.

Permalink Mark Unread

<Cam, how do I most conveniently send you the list of everyone who died in the Atlantic ->

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do you have it all in a file? We'll also need a place to put them - if there's been enough cooling since the nukes went off maybe I can just put most of the landmass back without flooding anything, I'll have to run a model."

Permalink Mark Unread

<I have it all in my head. I can write it up for you, though - Renee Swan, do that one now ->

Permalink Mark Unread

"Uh, no, I will do that one when her kids are around, she will look at Gem and be confused?"

Permalink Mark Unread

<The powers won't have an adjacency limit now that we have them?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Shouldn't. The wishes can only be made here, the powers work wherever you go with some exceptions that shouldn't apply here, and even if it turns out that your minding-bodies power only works in-neighborhood it's still worth getting new Bell and Andi here to explain stuff. I would feel very awkward about being hugged by a confused incorrect Renée."

Permalink Mark Unread

<She thinks Bella and Andi are dead, too. Alright. In that case we should probably return home and do everything else from there.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sure. Island, you still tagging along?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I was thinking of grabbing Epic and getting an inventory of the new world's sellable stuff for Vanda Nossëo."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sounds good."

Cam leaves Gem behind and hops all the Andalites back to Aurum - "Where in Cube will have room for everybody?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"- it worked, cool. Uh, there's a tourist field shown on the cover of Andalite's Guide To Earth which should be empty right now."

Permalink Mark Unread

Cam conjures the dust jacket, and then puts everybody there.

Permalink Mark Unread

The Andalites walk around and demand more complete explanations and then trot around and then gallop around and then morph and fly and so on.

Permalink Mark Unread

Does Matirin want to go give Renée back to her kids and maybe make a stop in Warp to give T'Mir her dad too or should Cam come back later after he's done modeling on replacing the missing landmass?

Permalink Mark Unread

Matirin would be delighted to do both those things right now.

Permalink Mark Unread

Back to Aurum.

Permalink Mark Unread

"So I'm not totally sure I'm keeping up with all this Bella stuff but does this mean we get our mom back?"

Permalink Mark Unread

<Yes. It means we can get everybody back, though it'll be a little slow going. But your mom we can do right now.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"She'll be in time to come to my show."

Permalink Mark Unread

Bella squeezes her sister's hand.

Permalink Mark Unread

And Cam supplies the basement dweller.

Permalink Mark Unread

And he would very badly like Bella and Andi to have their mother back, please.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

Their mother is disoriented, and confused that her daughters are older than they were, and hugged, and explained-to.

Permalink Mark Unread

Swish-swish.

Permalink Mark Unread

And eventually Andi wants the time in Dallas, please, she will stash Renée in her hotel room and comp her a ticket and then she has to be in the makeup chair, and off she goes, mom in tow.

Permalink Mark Unread

And he will hug Bella and say rather gleefully <I like this multiverse thing> and then <Warp?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Warp!" Hoppity hop hop Warp.

Permalink Mark Unread

And is T'Mir in?

Permalink Mark Unread

Yes, Gem sent word, hello, she hears that you also spent some time in prison for distributing technology before being sprung by supernatural alts, good job.

Permalink Mark Unread

<It worked out fairly well! Nice to meet you, Gem is planning to have some magic rock people who can do this at scale but I can do it for anyone I know enough about to personally care about them, is here a good place?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes. When it can be scaled up I will probably ask Cam to replace Vulcan, but as long as Chalek is ahead of everyone else here is good."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You pretty sure that even though this is a Bell you haven't met before and her Charlie's not a human like the one you may have encountered you're all set?" Cam asks Matirin.

Permalink Mark Unread

<It would surprise me if there are any problems.> Here is a person; he likes her, would like her even if she weren't an alt of Bella, people are fascinating and important and valuable, all of them - and T'Mir very much wants this to work, and Chalek will want to see the things his daughter has achieved...

Permalink Mark Unread

So here's a basement dweller Vulcan.

Permalink Mark Unread

Who ought to be alive, whose daughter has saved countless billions of people in his absence -

Permalink Mark Unread

Well, the billions were very much counted, but who's counting.

He blinks. He sits up, and stoically takes in the Andalite and the fellow with wings and the - young half-human woman who looks strikingly like his ex-wife?

Permalink Mark Unread

"Father," says T'Mir, holding out her hand.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

He mirrors the gesture, fingertips to fingertips. "T'Mir."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'll explain everything," she assures him, and she looks up at Cam and Matirin. "Thank you."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Our pleasure.> 

Permalink Mark Unread

Wag wag. "You're welcome." Glance at Matirin - "You done with me for now?"

Permalink Mark Unread

<I think so. Thank you very much. I will get you the list for the Atlantic.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"See you then." Pop.

Permalink Mark Unread

And he returns home. He stops by Bella before going to rejoin his family. <Do you need anything for the conversation tomorrow?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"A peal nickname. Do you have anything in mind -?"

Permalink Mark Unread

<Not especially. Have a favorite morph, or a name for Malawi that's more suited to nicknaming than 'Malawi' is...>

Permalink Mark Unread

"It used to be called Nyasaland but I don't especially want to name myself after Malawi, especially not its colonial stage. And 'Owl' isn't a very good name. I have some butterflies? I don't use them much but butterflies are natively morph-y, it's thematic, and Butterfly makes a better name than Owl."

Permalink Mark Unread

<That works. I am glad I do not have to pick one; I like my name. Well, Matirin. My third-name is apparently politically controversial with my alts too.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't think I've heard this story."

Permalink Mark Unread

<My grandmother suffered from complications when she bore her son which left her disabled. Andalites - do not look kindly on that. The custom is to live on your own somewhere far away so you need not be shamed by interaction with others. My father snuck out to see his mother, all the time. My grandfather remarried. My grandmother killed herself. My father was distraught, and ran away and lived alone for most of his childhood, and my name Nelinfir is by ancient titling custom a name you would give the first grandchild if you only had one child - so it is a way of calling my father's half-siblings illegitimate.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"...ah. I did piece together the disability thing. I remember deciding not to pointedly wonder aloud if everybody in the conversation was just politely ignoring the fact that out of morph I couldn't walk briskly."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Which is a bad thing that ought to be corrected, and if one can bear a child without such disadvantages one unambiguously should, but ill-treatment of the deficient once they already exist does not improve anything.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"I agree with you as far as that goes, maybe modulo the thing where apparently Bells all come with this problem and Bells are great and there may be other tradeoffs in that vicinity. A lot of humans take a more radical stance. I've had some juggling to do to keep tourist Andalites from offending people too much."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Bells seem to remain great when the problem is corrected. But I can imagine it would cause some problems, yes.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"What I mean is that we do seem to have to have it in the first place, so if you could detect it in utero..."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

<I see your point. I - do not want you to imagine that the Andalite position is that the world is poorer for having you in it.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, not anymore anyway. Got a spell for it. I'm not going to miss having to treat stairs as potentially lethal."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Stairs are fairly lethal. I have no idea how anyone does balance on only two legs.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"With more use of stairs than Andalites get to have, obviously."

Permalink Mark Unread

<I wonder if the grace spell would do anything for Andalites in morph.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Maybe. It's only designed to work on humanoids, but I don't know if the humanoid target being a morph would screw it up. Should be safe to try."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Perhaps later. Do you prefer I announce I am back, and if so with what cover story this time? Or should we wait until the war is over and then I can 'come back' and announce that and the two can be assumed to be related?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"How much trouble will there be with the Andalites over the jailbreak?"

Permalink Mark Unread

<They will be embarrassed and will probably for that reason prefer not to make a fuss. Someone might meet with you privately to suggest an extradition agreement, if there is not one in place.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"But they don't know I know you were in jail."

Permalink Mark Unread

<The news won't reach them for a little while anyway, and by then I will probably be elsewhere trying to set up institutions for distribution of magic and promotion of competent people.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Are they going to want to extradite anybody else? Are the people you and Cam just resurrected going to make themselves known to the homeworld?"

Permalink Mark Unread

<They might eventually, but none of them should be in much trouble with the homeworld - except my father, and he will not cooperate with being arrested...>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, I'm not planning to arrest him."

Permalink Mark Unread

<No, my people'd try.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"I mean he can be elsewhere without my obstruction by the time that occurs to them."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Would you prefer he be so elsewhere?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"It'd probably be convenient from an interplanetary relations front but I don't otherwise have very strong feelings about it."

Permalink Mark Unread

<If there were a convenient elsewhere I would preferentially do that, but the galaxy is short on places where he could drop in. I suppose we could send him to one of the other dimensions.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"The impression I get is that collections of him work pretty well together."

Permalink Mark Unread

<The other collections of him are all Elves, who presumably want to work indoors and so forth, but it is an option.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"I assume some sort of mutually agreeable workspace is not an insurmountable problem."

Permalink Mark Unread

<I'll find somewhere.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Thank you."

Permalink Mark Unread

<There aren't engineering problems you still need solved here, are there?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Still don't have a fix for nothlits or upgrades for people who took earlier morph versions solved. Is Cayaldwin likely to drop those?"

Permalink Mark Unread

<Cayaldwin is certain to go wherever my father goes. If he said he would do it he still will - assuming his collaboration with people here is not strictly necessary, or that they would also be willing to relocate ->

Permalink Mark Unread

"He said he was working on it; I don't think I actually have a guarantee of success. His team would probably mostly be willing to move, but not all of them."

Permalink Mark Unread

Sigh. <Humans will probably figure it out on their own soon enough, right?>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Probably. And maybe I can get a magic rock with a power to spot-fix anybody who gets particularly badly wedged."

Permalink Mark Unread

Tail-nod. <The problem is that Cayaldwin is very much preferentially going to work on things that benefit the society around him, and if he's budgeable from that it'd be in the direction of 'wherever the need is greatest', not 'where he started'.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, I suppose I can just deal with the Andalites trying to extradite your father. Maybe they can be convinced that if you spend long enough dead your sentence gets commuted or something."

Permalink Mark Unread

<I think I can have some people deter the Andalites from trying very hard on that, it just occurs to me that you might for other reason want me to find somewhere else for my father to invent things.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Even if he requires maintenance socialization like Cayaldwin the rest of your family is alive now too. I don't have to love everybody on my planet."

Permalink Mark Unread

<As long as he does not pick up on it, which he is not likely to across the species barrier.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'll ask my alts not to mention it."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Your alts like theirs. He is the reason for the eidetic memory necklaces and the worldleapers and the FTL and the immortality necklaces and so forth.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"I understand. It sounds like I'd probably get along with his alts. If there is ever a really compelling reason, I can probably get along with him too. If he's not going to expect my personal and friendly attention then I don't need to, to finagle nonextradition or anything else he's likely to need."

Permalink Mark Unread

<He definitely will not expect personal attention. Just the absence of visible contempt.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Contempt wouldn't be the thing anyway."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Then it might not be a problem at all, though there's still no particular reason for the two of you to hang out much.>

Permalink Mark Unread

Nod.

Permalink Mark Unread

<Need anything else at the moment? I want to spend some time with my family.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"I should get some sleep, actually. Thank you for everything."

Permalink Mark Unread

<I feel very thoroughly vindicated in putting you in charge of a planet. You've done wonderfully.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"Thanks! I'm pretty pleased with myself. Even now that I have all these alts to compete with who were suspicious of the condition of my planet."

Permalink Mark Unread

<The planet is in much better condition than you received it in.>

Permalink Mark Unread

"That seems to be what they concluded too."

Permalink Mark Unread

<Good night, Bella.> Pop.

Permalink Mark Unread

And Bella goes to bed too.

Permalink Mark Unread

The Andalites sleep together happily in a big herd.