When he's done crying (and that takes a long time) he conjures for complete written works of the Bell and there is one, there is a Bell, everything is going to be okay, and then he conjures for a scale model of the Bell and their surroundings and -

- well.

That is not okay. 

He doesn't even bother going invisible. 

Pop.

...teleporting embroidered child!

Teleporting embroidered child will probably realize he'd rather be somewhere else presently.

No, actually, seems to be staying. Though he does not look happy. "Um," he says. "What is this place? Why are you all here, do you need anything?"

Aya does not really want to be the person who talks to the teleporting embroidered child. Nobody else seems to be doing it either though. "Um," says somebody, and he gestures at his heel, tattooed like all the others.

"I don't know what that means. Do you want to be here? If not I can take you somewhere else."

"No you can't," says somebody else.

"He's got a teleporting embroidery, maybe he's rich," mutters somebody. More of the slaves are starting to wake up now.

"Do you at least want - blankets and pillows and things? And furniture - this place is ugly -"

"What, like they'd let us keep them," says someone.

"Kid, you don't wanna be here," someone else says gently, "you'll get in trouble, nobody's supposed to come or go while we're locked up."

"...why are you locked up? Is this a jail?"

"Slave barracks," corrects the same person.

"Well. Slavery has been abolished. You are all free now and you can have as much money and whatever stuff you want and you can leave." He teleports the roof off and into space for emphasis.

None of the barracks occupants seem to find this very convincing.

...rest of the barracks will be gone, too, and instead of that he will build a nice pretty amphitheater from Vanda Nossëo. 

"Who else do I need to tell about slavery being abolished?"

He doesn't have room for an amphitheater. The barracks opens out onto a small yard and is enclosed on three sides by other buildings.

"Kiddo, you have a very nice embroidery but it doesn't mean you can just abolish slavery," says a slave.

"Fuck that, I want to teleport to Tsopix, can you do that," says someone else.

Well, he'll do the walls as stunningly pretty as he can manage them.

"Yeah, sure, what direction is it from here? And I can too abolish slavery, I can take everybody who thinks it's okay and put them on a different planet if I need to. Your government is stupid and evil and the Bell is in charge now - where's the Bell -" he looks searchingly around the room and sees Aya - "oh, it's an Aly face!! You're in charge of the world now. Who all wanted a teleport to Tsopix?"

"She's what?"

"In charge of the world now, apparently. Kid, we need sleep."

"Tsopix is northeast."

(The Aly-faced Bell blinks in confusion.)

"I can sing something for sleep." 

And he starts singing. And while he's doing that he finishes the walls. The skip-sleep song isn't very long. 

That prompts the Aly-faced Bell to say something, finally. "Sing something for sleep?"

(The voice is an exact match. If Boots spoke this language she'd sound like that.)

It should be obvious by the time he's done with the song. This song is magic and will make you feel like you just got a very restful night of sleep, he announces to everybody. I have so so much magic and I am using it to end slavery and the Bell is in charge of the world now. 

And to the Bell - do you want a crown? Or something? 

That would be very far down the list after an explanation. What do you mean 'the Bell'.

Your name has a 'bel' somewhere in it and you're a good person to put in charge of the world and I know because you're an alternate universe version of my sort-of mom. 

Okay, and how do you know that.

Magic. I'm a demon, demons can make arbitrary stuff, arbitrary stuff includes 'a scale model of the alternate universe version of my mom in this universe and her surroundings' and that was this place so I came here.

And 'Aly face'?

Alternate universe versions of my mom can look a couple different ways, you look like the version of her named Aly. Alymbel, really, all the names have 'bel' in them.

Is teleporting and making things and the song it?

Not even close. Some of the stuff I can make is from worlds way more advanced than yours and I've got touch healing and there are a lot more songs and I can't be seriously injured.

...and you want to put me in charge of the world.

I am putting you in charge of the world, alternate universe versions of you are really good at it and you will be too and it shouldn't even be that hard, unless this world has powerful magic that no one's thought to mention.

Everybody was assuming you were just embroidered; most of them probably still are.

Yeah, in some places saying I'm a demon would terrify people, what's the best way to explain it convincingly here.

Probably still saying you're embroidered. And not mentioning all of your powers at once because that makes embroidery much less plausible.

"...Were you going to teleport me to Tsopix," says the person who wanted to go to Tsopix, "or should I go back to sleep."

"We can go now," he says, and makes a scale model of the landscape, is there an obvious border -

Not obvious from the landscape features, no.

"Want to point me to where you want to go, or is anywhere in the country okay?"

"Uh, the capital?" says the slave.

He makes a scale model of that. 

The capital of Tsopix is a low-tech human city.

Yeah, he just needed a visual to aim for. Now he and the slave are there. "Here you go. Need anything?"

"...like...?"

"Clothes, food? I can ...teleport it to us from my house."

"...clothes and food would be good..."

...large bag of nonperishable nutritionally complete stuff, four exact copies of things various people around here are wearing, clean and folded.

"...thanks."

"Of course. If you need to reach me you can, uh -" notepad - "you can write on this and I'll see it."

"...no I can't."

"Why not?"

"Can't write."

"...oh. Well, you can draw on it and that'll work too."

".......okay."

He goes back. 

The slaves are all awake now. Some of them seem surprised that he reappeared.

"If anyone else would like a teleport to Tsopix I can take you too!"

General silence.

The Bell says, "Most of us don't speak any Tsopixi. It would probably be more efficient if you teleported the ink out of our tattoos."

"I can do that too, but I'll need to see them all to be precise enough not to hurt anyone."

...she displays her foot.

He tries teleporting out just the ink.

It's not magic ink or anything. The Bell scratches her heel.

Now everybody is aiming their marked-up feet in his direction.

Now none of them have stupid tattoos.

Some of them start laughing a little - some of them are crying instead -

Congratulations, magically disappearing tattoos are a slavery-negating thing.

Good. I can just go around and do that for all the slaves but there's probably a more efficient solution? Should we go off somewhere so I can list you everything I can do and then you'll be able to think of applications.

Yeah probably. Also I will think better warmer and better-fed. Let's drop this batch of people off somewhere with some cash and then go someplace else to talk. What do you need to know to go to a place?

Visual image or a distance and direction but I can do what I did for Tsopix and make a model and then use that as my visual image. 

He makes some bags of local currency to hand to people.

Four hundred seo per should do without being impossible to carry. Denominated in mostly fifteens and some threes and ones. And teleport them out of their collars. Drop them off - Place. Does this thing do pictures?

Yeah, it does, I got that. The bags will have the right kinds of coins. Everyone's collars will be teleported into the sun. And, pop to that place.

Aya tells them where they are and points out a nearby hostel - "does most of its business during holiday season, should have room if you triple up" - and then sends him a picture of another place.

And now they're in the other place. 

"So, hello, my name's Ayabel."

"Fëanáro. We pick nicknames to distinguish ourselves and mine's Epic. Can I have a hug."

"...if you like."

Hug. Wing-hug.

Pat pat.

"So what brings you here?"

Cling. "I had a teleporting accident and now I'm stuck and can't go home."

Hug. "Teleporting has accidents?"

"Not usually, but I was using a magic version and carrying a prototype of a technology version and somehow that - caused an accident. The kind I've been doing here is perfectly safe."

"Okay. Where's your home?"

"The world I'm from is called Telperion but the world I live in is called Warp and there are a couple hundred dimensions all connected to each other and we're kind of a big collective that runs around fixing them all. The Bells call themselves the 'peal'. Because collective noun for Bells."

"...Pun's not translating."

"Your world might not have a collective noun for bells, then. Okay. I can make you a handheld translator but that won't help with puns, I don't think. Anyway, there are lots of us and we have lots of magic and we go around fixing everything and my Bella adopted me because I was so sad all the time and it was really good, I'm really happy now."

"That's sweet. And you can tell I am one because you can specify things to make by them being Bells?"

"Yeah but if I couldn't have told that I could probably have guessed by now because you weren't, like, 'no, me, who would have me run the country' and you had sensible concrete suggestions on how to denominate the money and stuff and I'd definitely have guessed by an hour from now when you'll have heard everything you need to know and figured out how to end slavery."

"If you hadn't known I was one I'm assuming you wouldn't have declared me in charge of anything."

"Well, no. I'd have probably tried to work with the government of some country that doesn't have slaves, are there any of those? And I'd have said 'I will give all this nice stuff to anyone who stops with slaves' and seen if that did it."

"Tsopix doesn't have slavery and harbors runaways; that's why that one fellow wanted to go there."

"Good for them. Then I'd probably have started with them and made them ridiculously nice and then hoped other places were tempted by that."

"Is that what world-fixing usually looks like?"

"No but usually it involves grownups and people who are better at navigating politics and stuff than I am."

"I suppose that would make sense. Why can't you teleport home?"

"Worlds have neighbors. You can mostly only do stuff - jump, summon, find with magic - if it's in your dimension or the dimension next to yours. I jumped two - at least, I think that's what happened, and now I don't neighbor any worlds I know of. I checked them all."

"Are you stuck here forever, then?"

"I wrote them a note and they'll probably be trying to find me, but not very urgently once I tell them there's a Bell here and we're both safe for now and the world's not ending or an Arda or anything - it's not, right -"

"The world is not ending as far as I know, and I don't know what an Arda is. How did you write them a note?"

"There's a Bell who's a demon like me only mine is wished on and his is for real so he can conjure past adjacency limits - he can conjure stuff even if it's not in a dimension next to him - and I can't - and so if I write him letters he can read them by making 'letters addressed to Cam in the last day' and then he can pass them on to everyone else."

"...some of me are male?"

"Yeah, Cam and Kib, but Kib died and reincarnated and he was Aly in his first life, the one who looks like you."

"What do the ones who don't look like me look like?"

He sends the normal girl Bell face - "except Golden who's a vampire -" send - "and T'Mir who's half Vulcan -" send - "and the boy ones look like this -" send.

"Huh. There's nobody that pale around here. - You'll stick out too, but you would anyway with the wings."

"In humans I think it's usually far northern and far southern climates. With Elves the Noldor and Teleri are pale and the Vanyar are like you or darker."

"I suppose that makes sense. Are there a lot of kinds of non-human people?"

"Tons. Some closer to humans than others. Quendi are pretty close - the major differences are that if we swear something we can't break our word and we live forever and we age slower and we die of lots of things that don't kill humans - like slavery, wouldn't work at all - and we need things to be pretty and we sing a lot."

"Being a slave would just automatically be fatal somehow?"

"Being confined or imprisoned kills us. Not instantly but within a month or so, depending how badly confined."

"Huh.

Well, I'm not tired anymore but I could really use some dinner."

"Do you have favorites or should I make you Boots' favorites."

"...I am curious about Boots's favorites. Why is she called that?"

"There are a lot of them named Isabella so she had to pick a nickname and when she first arrived in Telperion she made herself magic boots that fixed her clumsiness and that she couldn't have made at home because her home world is mean."

"Mean?"

"It kills people if they get too much hubris and Bells kind of have a lot so she had to unlearn it and be a therapist. There was a me but he's dead because of hubris. And experimenting. The world also hates experimenting."

"How does a world hate things? Do most worlds have opinions?"

"No, just Materia - that's Boots' world - unless you count the gods in Ardas, but they mostly let us be."

"What are Ardas?"

"Some kinds of worlds happen over and over, and Ardas are one of those. Telperion's one. If nothing happens to them then they're horrible forever pretty much and if you land early enough you can save them without much drama and if you land late enough it's a horrible war."

"...'you' being 'Bells'?"

"One time it was Elspeth and one time someone from an Arda landed on a Bell but usually, yeah."

"Who's Elspeth?"

"Golden's daughter. She's the only Bell to have a kid so far."

"Except you?"

"I'm adopted, it's sort of different."

"I suppose. ...Were you going to make some food?"

Here are all of Boots' favorites from Tirion.

Yum.

"...none of your magic has a usage limit?"

"Nope. Uh, mana recharges and won't recharge here but none of the stuff I've told you about has any limits at all. Well, I can't make stuff that's much farther away from me than your sun is from here, but that's really far, and I can't make stuff arbitrarily fast but the limit on that's really big, too."

"I meant in terms of running out of ability to do it, not in terms of how fast you can do it." Nom. "What does mana do?"

"All kinds of things. Wizardry is Materia's kind of magic and I invented an interdimensional teleport with it and it's how Boots made her Boots and it's how crystal balls are made - we use them to talk between universes - and you can fly with it and stuff."

"But crystal balls are - limited to neighboring worlds, so you can't just make one of those and tell them where you are?"

"Yep. Pretty much everything's limited to neighboring worlds, luckily except making stuff if you're a real demon, so Cam can tell where I am."

"How many neighbors do worlds each have?"

"Probably not infinitely many, but we've never found all a world's neighbors and we know like ninety of Edda's."

"...so it will take them a long time to find you unless they find some kind of shortcut."

"Yes." Wing-hug.

Pat pat. "It's okay. Is there anyone else you should look for a version of here?"

"I checked for mes, there are no mes, there probably aren't any of my family either but I didn't check that yet -" he does - "and then most other interesting people are one-offs - I can check for all the Bell spouses -" he does that, too - "nope. And you don't have a twin? One Bell has a twin."

"...I don't think I have a twin."

...he checks for siblings of Ayabel's.

None.

"You don't. Also slavery is evil and we should end it right now."

"Yes, but I'm trying to think of a way to do it that's more efficient than trying to de-ink everyone before the laws are changed on that and less perverse than buying the entire supply and manumitting them."

"Teleport them all to a different planet and make it a really fantastic planet to live on?"

"You would still have to be able to find all of them. Not all of them are going to be in collections like that, some are privately owned."

"I could probably do it by conjuring for those stupid tattoos but it might take a while."

"The tattoos only work in this country."

"Oh. Then, yeah. What's wrong with buying them all and then letting them go, is it just that the horrible people would then have a lot of money?"

"They'd have a lot of money and there would also suddenly be a lot of money. I don't think a few thousand seo like what you gave out will hurt anything but buying everyone and then also letting them have something to start out with would add up to a lot."

"Could buy them out in technology from my world or something like that."

"Convincing people that the technology is what you say it is and not weird embroidered stuff would make it time-consuming to convince each person. Maybe sell the technology and then buy the slaves - or bribe the nobles - do I need to explain embroidery or does it translate idiom?"

"I gathered magic but that's all."

"Magic here comes in the form of a kind of place called, creatively, 'magics'. Things, animals, and people that enter magics have random things happen to them. Someone or something that has been in and out of a magic and changed in a way that is not totally disabling is called 'embroidered'. Someone who is totally disabled - turned into a rock or something - is 'sleeved'. Your wings make you look obviously embroidered, and having more powers makes you look even more luckily embroidered than that, but if you list a bunch of powers that don't seem obviously related and also nothing horrible has happened to you it loses plausibility that you got that way by going in and out of magics recklessly."

"Makes sense. So - wings and a teleport, maybe I just got lucky, but wings and a teleport and making stuff and healing and magic songs, now something's weird?"

"Yeah. If you also pretended to have had negative effects it'd let you stretch it a little, but you're obviously not turned into a rock and most random results are much more like 'turned into a rock'."

"I can pretend the making stuff is teleportation pretty easily, tell people I'm teleporting them the things from somewhere. The healing I maybe just won't mention except where relevant."

"The technology would need a separate explanation. What kind of technology can you make?"

"Um. Does this world have electricity yet?"

"No."

"Then it might make the most sense to just describe it by what it can do - anywhere in the world can talk to anywhere else in the world instantly, you can go visit the stars, which are all suns like yours, and some of them have planets around them and some of those planets have life. You can make copies of books faster than you can blink and fit a whole library onto a little card the size of my fingernail and make live moving pictures of things that are going on and keep those on cards the size of my fingernail too. You can build invisible walls and invisible walls that let some kinds of things through and not others. You can leap dimensions, you can destroy worlds, you can translate any language into any other one -"

"...are there a lot of worlds needing to be destroyed? Is that how you're speaking Esevi?"

"I'm actually speaking Esevi with magic, it's a bit more convenient when you've got both around. There aren't worlds that should be destroyed - not now, anyway, we've got better options - but lots of technology went to weaponry because that's how most species are motivated."

"I'd believe that."

"We shouldn't need to kill anyone to take over the world, if they're really awful I'd rather send them to a different planet and set it up really nice so they can talk with other people but not hurt them."

"That's very humane of you," she says approvingly.

"It's really nice being so powerful we can just - get exactly what we want. Without any compromising."

"I see the appeal."

"I don't have resurrection right now but we do back home and someday we're going to bring back everybody who ever died."

Hug.

Hug. "Is there anything else I should know about what you can and can't do?"

"Uh. I can't make anything smarter than a snail except there's a kind of person who keeps their brain on a - piece of advanced technology - and I could make that kind of person if we needed it really badly but it's not very ethical so I wouldn't want to do it without a good reason. I can make you a computer with the things I'm allowed to know about the multiverse and you could read it? I don't have access to all the Bell things but I think I am allowed to know most of the important stuff."

"Will you be able to teach me how to use the computer starting from 'what's a computer'?"

"I think so? A computer is the thing that holds whole libraries - here's one -" and he's holding something shiny and a few inches long - "and eventually you might want a chip-locked one but for now the standard kind will do -" and here is a table, and when the computer projects itself a screen it will also project a keyboard and touchpad onto the screen. "Ignore the keys, different alphabet, I'll teach it yours later." And he pulls up the approved-for-Fëanors version of the multiverse summary, and shows her how to scroll.

"...I only know how to read Esevi and Ancient Sudre."

"Right, sorry. I can run a translation program on it but it'll take a bit -" tap-tap-tap-tap several different screens flicker - "okay. It'll be done in a little."

"...done doing what?"

"I gave it the complete written works of your world and then I manually told it a couple sentences and how they translate and now it's learning how the whole language translates by comparing the words in it to rules about languages, and when it has a pretty good guess it'll tell me and then I can read through it and correct places where it made a statistically justified bad guess and then you can read it."

"...wow."

"I know, right? I come from a world that was just getting started too."

"How long did it take you to get up to speed?"

"A couple of months to be doing useful stuff, a couple of years before it wasn't obvious that I was from a low-tech world, I still don't know everything there is to know but I'll learn it all eventually somehow. But I had a head start because even before we landed in Warp Boots introduced some modern stuff from Materia."

"Like what?"

"Crystal balls are sort of like computers and also, like, writing and glass and the wheel."

"Well. At least we have writing and glass and the wheel."

"Bells'd be really unhappy in worlds that hadn't invented writing yet." His computer is done. He reads through a few pages and makes corrections and then runs it again using those.

"Yeah. I taught myself to read when I was little, a lot of people can't, especially slaves."

"I tried to explain to the guy who I teleported how he could get in touch with me and he couldn't read. Once we end slavery we can put libraries everywhere and have them serve meals."

"...that is not a usual combination of businesses here."

"That way people have a reason to go even if they can't read and don't think they'll ever learn."

"But why would eating in the library make them more likely to pick up reading?"

"There can be reading programs around, and computers which are easier to use if you can read, and if they bring their kids the kids'll grow up around books."

"I guess that might help. It seems like just getting more people into a few years of school would probably go a long way though, that's where most people who can read seem to learn it."

"Okay. Valinor didn't have school, I don't know much about how they work."

"Valinor is...?"

"A place in Ardas. The one I grew up in. It's safe and no one goes hungry and we don't have slavery but that's about all the nice things you can say for it."

"...those are pretty nice things."

"Yeah. They're important. Boots was really happy when she got there. But it also has gods and until things get explained to them really well they're kind of mean by accident. Worlds without gods can get all of the other things too and it's much nicer."

"How do you tell if a world has gods or not?"

"The gods in Ardas make themselves really obvious. You can, like, go up and talk to them. Materia has gods but they're way meaner and you wouldn't want to get their attention. Nowhere else has gods as far as we know."

"Some people think this world has gods."

"I can try conjuring to check but that doesn't always work with gods. Are they supposed to have personally written or created anything?"

"Aelare is supposedly responsible for the magics."

...scale model of things created by Aelare?

Nothing.

"What are you trying?"

"Scale model of things created by her. It might not produce anything even if she's real and made magics, I probably can't make magics -"

"You probably shouldn't anyway, there are plenty around if we need one for something."

"And they sound kind of horrible." Model of the surroundings of things created by Aelare?

Nothing. "It's not impossible that it would be worthwhile to drop a lot of objects into a magic and fish them out again and see if we get anything cool, but they're definitely not a good idea to jump into."

"I'm really careful, promise. ...I bet I couldn't be turned into a rock or something, but I'll be really careful anyway."

"I have no idea if magics are strong enough to beat whatever would normally stop you from being turned into a rock."

"We haven't found anything that can beat indestructibility yet although I don't know if Loki ever tried the Tesseract."

"What's that?"

"It's the most powerful magic we've got, Loki's basically omnipotent in her dimension and adjacent ones. It does - space. Anything to do with space. Like 'I would like this to be somewhere else' or 'I would like this to be reshaped without moving anything else' or 'I would like this thing to be in my hand now' or 'I would like to be close in this sense but far away in this other sense -'"

"...wow."

"Yeah. It only works in Edda and its neighbors but there Loki can basically do anything. It's how we have the teleport and the healing, too."

"But the teleport works here."

"Yeah, the Tesseract gave Loki a special kind of magic and she used it to make - illusions, and turning into a bird, and healing, and then the Tesseract thought she was being boring so it pushed her into a nearby Arda and the Arda needed saving so the me invented necklaces that give you a perfect memory even retroactively so Loki could remember enough of her physics textbooks to teach them advanced technology to fight Melkor with only even that wasn't enough so then Loki worked for decades with magic-song acceleration and the eidetic memory and developed an interdimensional teleport and got the Tesseract and killed Melkor with it. And the spells work for anyone who can remember them, so once we had the eidetic memory necklaces we could give them out to people we could trust enough."

"...it thought she was being boring."

"She also saved like so many people so it wasn't really a horrible thing to do even if it was kind of a stupid reason."

"I assume there's writeups of all this on the computer when it's done translating?"

"Yeah. It's almost done."

"Cool."

And it's done! Here is a fairly-mediocre-because-the-sample-of-the-local-language-is-pretty-small translation of the multiverse summary.

Aya starts picking through it. "...Is there a way to make it better at Esevi than it is right now?"

"Yeah, I can keep on correcting it and then letting it run with the corrections again, or I could just hand translate the whole thing, most computer translation is built for languages that have at minimum a couple exabytes of extant writings and you're not even close..."

"What is an exabyte?"

...he pulls the computer over and starts correcting it. "So imagine that you have an eidetic memory but you have to communicate and you could only do that by - nodding and shaking your head. And you had something complicated to say, so maybe you wanted to try spelling it out - one way of spelling it out would be to read all the letters in the alphabet to you and have you nod when you get to the right one, but that's really slow. A faster way is to have sequences, so the first letter of the Esevi alphabet is nod-nod-shake-nod, make sense?"

"Only if all the letters are also four head-movements long."

"Yup. And actually usually you say they're all eight, and then you can fit in lots of not-letter things - numbers, punctuation..."

".....huh. Okay..."

"So that's how computers talk. It's all - you'd be close if you imagine tiny depressions in metal which a little reader can read and register as a nod or a head-shake. If a book is on a computer, it's there with eight little yes-or-nos for each character. If a picture is on a computer, it's made of tiny squares with yes-or-nos specifying the color of each square. Eight yes-or-nos is called a byte. A thousand-twenty-four bytes is called a kilobyte. A thousand kilobytes is called a megabyte. A thousand megabytes is called a gigabyte, and a thousand gigabytes a terabyte, and a thousand terabytes a petabyte, and a thousand petabytes an exabyte, and that computer of yours fits about fifty of those."

"That's really clever!"

"Isn't it? Computers are so cool. I think your translation here should be better."

"Thanks!"

Read read.

He writes Boots a letter.

Eventually: "So no one is likely to bother us here, but it's not a good place to build a house or anything. You probably wouldn't be happy in a human dwelling?"

"Not usually, no."

"Okay... there's a hilly area around the city we dropped the others off in which isn't built up and might have a convenient tucked-away spot to put a house that suits you in it. It wouldn't be convenient to move large amounts of stuff to and fro, but that's without teleporting."

"Okay! Are we likely to attract enemies, should I try to make it safe?"

"Hm, what do you mean by safe?"

"I could surround the whole thing with invisible walls that don't let people through, or I could have very visible walls, or I could have it mostly underground in case - technologies you probably don't have yet - get tried that could knock down above ground buildings."

"We don't have very much technology but it's maybe a good idea to be prepared as though we did in case there's weird embroideries involved."

"Okay. We will have a underground palace with biofilters and state-of-the-art surveillance."

"I wasn't sure you could do underground - how does that work? If you teleport out the inside of a hill won't the outside of it collapse?"

"Yeah, I'd teleport out the whole hill and then put the building in and then put hill in around it. If I were very clever I could teleport out a bit at a time while I added foundations for the building but that'd be harder and I don't actually do this much so it's probably better to just clear it out and put it in. People won't have long to notice it's missing."

"How long is not long?"

"If I plan it all out before I start, twenty minutes?"

"Okay. Probably best to do it at night but that should be safe as long as we check for anyone out stargazing or something."

Nod. "I can do illusions but they never come out quite right for anyone except Loki."

"Yeah, I read that. It sounded like it might be easier to make it look like the hill is exactly how it was to begin with, if you look at it from a few angles first?"

"Yeah. I can go invisible and fly all around it."

"That should do just fine."

"Now?"

"...yeah, it's dark enough." She sends him a mental image of the hills.

They are invisible! They are in the hills! He sets to circling so he can illusion them convincingly.

Aya picks out a hill that is not particularly visible from the city but presents a reasonably doable walk thereto.

He layers an illusion of the hill exactly as it currently looks from a lot of angles over the hill. Then he teleportation-excavates the hill into space and puts in the foundations and then puts in a shiny soaring underground fortress-place with enough concrete supports for all the dirt that's going on top of it and then he layers more concrete for protection against unknown magic that could do bombing-like stuff and then he puts back the grass and the hill. 

And he teleports them in. The ground is like the palace in Tirion from an era later than his; ink-black with stars, like you're walking on the night sky. The ceilings are in black marble, lit with fixtures behind the walls so the light is nice and diffuse and glowy. 

"It looks a little bit like an evil palace," he says, "but an awesome one."

"...Is there an exit? I can't teleport, personally."

"I can make you a necklace but it'll take me a while. Exit's over here." Right through the illusion of the hill, on the side not facing the city.

"Okay, good. Wouldn't have suggested being near town if we were just going to teleport in and out. How long will it take to make a necklace?"

"I haven't done it before, but the computer has estimates -" he looks it up - "estimates that one at 2000 hours. So probably the thing to do would be to use the perception-speeding song, at the full acceleration where you don't want to drop out of it because it's really disorienting, and then not sleep, and then it'd be three weeks."

"You won't burn out or anything, doing that?"

"I'm a Fëanáro, we're kind of workaholics...does that translate? Anyway, I'll be lonely doing that but mostly because I'm lonely missing my family. It took me - I don't know the local years - the length of time it takes a human baby to grow to look older than me - to get the interdimensional teleport for Boots and at the end I was fine."

"It translates. All right. It sounded like you'd still be able to exchange notes and make stuff outside your perception-accelerated area while working?"

"Yeah. You can write me letters telling me stuff you need - or just in general, I like getting stuff to read - and I can write you back and I can make stuff anywhere I can see."

"Okay. I can spend three weeks reading up on politics and the slave economy and suchlike."

"Cool! The complete works of this world are on your computer, and there's a search function, I can show you how it works -"

"Yes please."

Here is how the search engine works, and he has the keyboard configured for the alphabet she's familiar with by now. He bounces. "There you go!!"

"Thanks. Anything else I should know before you hole up for three weeks?"

"Probably lots of things but I don't know what they are -" Hug?

Hug.

"I'll probably teleport out sometimes. Moving's really frustrating when you're that accelerated but teleporting's fine."

"What will you teleport out to do?"

"Just be somewhere other than right here? Look at pretty places in your world, maybe."

"If I think of any that are particularly nice I'll let you know."

"Thank you." And he unwraps himself and makes a desk with large pretty high-definition monitors for his chip-locked computer and gets the instructions and then puts on headphones with the stacked perception song. The headphones have to be spaced like so for the magic to work; they look a little ridiculous.

Little bit. Aya explores the palace and then sits and reads. Periodically Epic receives meal requests and little book reviews and, once, a lovely drawing of an embroidered birdlizard.

This is nice of her. He writes letters to Boots every objective-day. They are a bit boring. "Did another thirteen segments of the necklace enchanting. I think your alt is happy. Mostly because Bells are happy if you show up and dump magic on them, it's hard for me to guess if people are happy by looking. I am sort of tempted to drop a thousand ball bearings into a magic and teleport them out and see if any of them are stunningly useful or something. Tried another few ways to check if Aelare exists, didn't come up with anything. If you guys figured it out I will be annoyed and jealous."

Of course Boots cannot write back.

Yeah. 

He makes progress on the necklace.

Eventually one of Aya's letters mentions that there's been some hasty law-revision regarding the blessing-of-Aelare de-tattooing clause, won't work anymore, options now amount to theft or purchase, she's leaning "theft of newly enslaved persons" because that's bottlenecked at certain legal offices, and purchase of preexisting slaves, followed up by theft if anyone won't sell, but it will be important to not be suspected of thievery while operating as purchasers.

He writes back. Word probably got out that he was involved in that blessing event, so he is probably not a good person to do the purchasing?

Yeah. It is known that she was there too and wasn't with the main clump, but once she's got the necklace she can pretend to be embroidered invisible, and then they can start selling tech. Probably best to start out picking one tech thing that is easy to use without knowing it's not magical and pretend to have a thing she got in the magic that churns them out; prompts the fewest questions. Once slavery in Eseo is handled they can afford to be more conspicuously outlandish.

Flashlights are easy to use without knowing they're not magical, though even good modern batteries will only last a few - how long are local years exactly -

Ballpark of Earth-length years. It's amazing how common that is, almost as if someone tried having worlds with markedly different unEarthly calendars interact one time and then regretted it for years.

It's not weirder than the fact Ardas almost always have a Bell fall on them through completely different kinds of magical accidents.

He finishes the necklace. He comes out of acceleration with a headache and vertigo, like always. He bounces around happily anyways.

Here is Aya eating the breakfast he made her. "Hi!"

"Hi! You have an eidetic memory necklace now. Wow, I really admire my alt, he spent the better part of thirty subjective years in speedup inventing these."

"Wow."

"Loki spent even longer inventing the teleport to save the world. It was kind of a war that rewarded lots of isolated engineering in speedup. Satisfying when they won, though, and Loki probably likes her me best of all the Bells except Boots and that makes me happy."

Nod. "I considered reading the spells in advance since the memory's retroactive and it would work that way, but I figured it'd be easier to notice if my eyes skipped over something because they're boring and nonsensical if I did it while I already had the necklace."

"Yeah. And we're not in much hurry, are we? I mean, slavery is super evil, but not 'a few hours makes all the difference' evil."

"Right, that too."

And he sends her the symbols!

"Thanks!"

And she sets about reading the spells.

And he is still too dizzy for flying to be usual amounts of fun so he naps, instead.

There's a lot of spells, she's still chewing through them when he wakes.

There are. They just go on and on, it's very boring. He feels well enough to fly now; he teleports over the ocean and does that.

The ocean is so oceanic.

It's pretty! And soothing! He is proud of himself for being able to make an eidetic memory necklace in three weeks but it's not exactly very much fun. At least inventing an eidetic memory necklace would have involved thinking.

He flies in lazy circles for a while and then folds up his wings and dive-bombs the water and then swims until he's tired and then flies until he's dry and then goes back to their underground palace.

It's still there and still has Aya in it, but she's between spells and is now practicing illusions. "Hey there. Dinnertime?"

"Sounds good!" Hug?

Hug. "You are very huggy."

"It's been three months subjective."

Dinner spread!

Mmmm dinner. "You were kinda huggy before that too."

"I miss my Bell."

Squeeze. "I hope they find you soon."

"Yeah. Might get lucky. Anyway. What's the plan?"

"I think a good thing to pretend we have an embroidered object mass-producing would be simple music players that play a healing song. I can sell some in the square until I have enough money to rent a storefront. Meanwhile you can set up somewhere nice to put stolen slaves and any loved ones they want to bring. It might be a better idea to find or make an island than to terraform a planet, so they aren't indefinitely dependent on us for transportation."

"Okay. Dunno how to make an island without messing up sea levels, I'll look if there's a nice one somewhere."

"Sounds good. What are the constraints on what you can make a music player look like? Ideally it would look very silly for a music player, like a mushroom made of rock or something."

"It'd just have to be big enough. I could do a mushroom made of rock -" he does that, with the speakers on the underside of the mushroom and a battery that'll last a decade or so. 

"Excellent. Does it make it much more complicated for you to do them in assorted colors?"

"Not really, I can still make them way faster than you'll be able to sell them. Fancy patterns or just different flat colors?" He makes a couple more, refining the design. They're going to be pretty whimsical mushroom speakers.

"Patterns are good too. Magics do all sorts of weird things."

Bronze mushroom-speakers! Dappled ones! Sunset-themed ones! Ones with swirly silver detailing! He can't quite bring himself to do ugly ones.

That's okay. Sometimes magics do tasteful weird things.

Here are a hundred different tasteful mushrooms that are all continuously playing a healing song.

"Awesome, I'll get on pretending to be embroidered invisible and selling those tomorrow."

"Cool! I can make more - I can probably come up with a program to generate designs for me, that'd make it go faster, but if we're selling them individually -"

"I might get batch orders eventually. I'm not sure exactly where to price them, I'll be guessing."

"Okay! I'll make a program to do variants, then, so I can make them faster."

"Sounds fun."

"Everything is fun. I like being a demon so much."

"It does sound nice."

"Best magic." And he tries to teach the computer to make tasteful mushrooms.

Aya gets some sleep. In the morning after breakfast she packs up a bunch of singing mushrooms, turns herself invisible, teleports into town, finds somewhere unobtrusive, turns her clothes and the box of mushrooms visible again, and goes into the square to lay out a blanket and set mushrooms on it.

I could hide a camera somewhere so I can see if you're getting low on mushrooms.

I could also just tell you, she points out.

True! But then I don't get to see what's going on!

If you would like to look over my shoulder while I sell mushrooms you can have a camera.

Eeeee.

And he teleports into the sky well above, invisible, and puts a tiny camera in an alcove of a roof facing her, and teleports back, and searches for good islands to put people on.

There are some islands. They are various sizes and not all of them are inhabited already, although some of them show signs of being occasional stops for boats.

That wouldn't be a problem, might even help with the population-not-dependent-on-them thing. He wants a big temperate island so he can put Valian plants in, any candidates there?

Well, there's nothing huge, and only very small islands have no plants on them already. One of the volcanic chains with a dock and a suspicious concentration of edible plants and animals is pretty good-sized all put together though, if you don't mind the volcanoes.

He can probably throw a geology modeling program at the age of the volcanoes and likelihood they're still active?

They are... somewhat likely to be active! For one thing there are lava flows over there. They're pretty.

That's super pretty but maybe not good for humans. He should probably find some other island. Maybe he can expand a small one without too much sea level disruption.

There are plenty of small islands about.

...now this one'll be just a little bit bigger, without messing with the sea floor much at all, he's just raising a near-sea-level underwater segment of it to sea level. Cam would know whether this was likely to cause any problems but it doesn't seem very likely to.

There is some wave activity but it doesn't arc up and swallow a continent or anything.

Good. He gives the new bit Valian soil and then plants even if the original bit already has plants.

Now he has an interestingly patchy island.

That'll do for now. He goes home to check on Ayabel's mushroom-selling through the feed.

She hasn't sold them all, but she's down to a fraction of what she had.

Cool! Shimmery-mushrooms, speckled mushrooms, laquered-looking mushrooms, cloudy mushrooms, coppery mushrooms, enough for now and then he has another try at a program to do it.

Businesses in the square start packing up for the evening. She sells her last four mushrooms as the sun sets and then is one of the last to leave; she finds somewhere unobtrusive to teleport home.

"Hi! Found an island. Do we have a lot of money?"

"We have a month's rent for a little shop. People love the designs, I think a quarter of the sales were for knicknack purposes more than practical ones."

"Cool. I'm trying to teach the computer how to do variants that are just as pretty so it can put up tiles of designs and I can batch 'em."

"How's that coming?"

"Okay. I'll have it by tomorrow, probably."

"How long does it take to learn how to do that sort of thing?"

"Machine learning? Uh, writing programs to do this sort of thing takes local years and years to learn. But lots of programs you don't actually have to know what's going on under the surface, there are probably some where you'd literally just click the patterns you like and it'd make guesses off those and you could get it better at guessing - I'm doing something in between that -"

"Huh. What other things is it good for besides designing mushrooms?"

"All kinds of things - like, in particular, if you have lots of data and you want to notice patterns in it, you know there are some, but you don't have guesses about how the pattern'll show up in the data - like, if you were trying to teach a computer to recognize people. You know what people look like, but you don't know what to tell a computer to look for, but you can show it lots of people and not-people and let it figure it out. Or if we wondered if various kinds of scanner detect anything about magics, but we don't actually understand how to interpret the scanner output, we could teach the computer what results in the scanners magics produce."

"Huh. Well, magics are pretty visually distinctive - they're full of weird stuff - but I don't know if they... emit anything. Besides ambulatory weird stuff."

"And it might not be very important to check and if it were it might be obvious. But if we wanted to figure it out for some reason and it wasn't obvious we could feed the computer the data and it could figure it out."

"Cool."

"Yeah. Anyway, there are lots of procedural generation engines where you don't need to know anything about what's going on for the computer."

"How's it doing on mushrooms so far?"

He shows her some proposed mushrooms!

"Yours're prettier."

"Yeah, I know. It'll get there eventually, though."

"Neat. Dinner?"

Dinner!

Yum. "You're much better at making food than I am, and I used to do it a lot."

"I cheat." Rather gleefully.

"You do. And it's delicious."

"I can just make whatever some really fancy restaurant somewhere is making, if I want."

"Is that what you've been doing?"

"No, I've been making things Boots likes. But I could."

"Boots has good taste. I've never been to a restaurant so I wouldn't know what to suggest, anyway."

"I think Bells mostly like the same things. Not sure though."

"I'm also not a very picky eater."

"Slavery is stupid and we're going to end it."

"...yes, that too, is that related somehow?"