dark_light
Veron is installed in a nice house in Seattle with the help of Isabella's staff.
The colony gets big enough that Isabella sculpts herself an ice crown and applies permanency to it so it won't melt. She makes Adarin one too out of cypress branches, wired into shape, magicked to stay alive and shaped like that, and then freed of the wire. She wears hers on Earth sometimes, as well as on the colony. Her queen elects not to comment.
Various people are resurrected. Isabella hires more people to sort more requests; she's not going to be able to handle this via descending on charities. (She extracts longer-term promises of help - and nonviolence - from the clans she shares this spell with, though.) She opens an office near San Francisco, puts a lot of poultry in the back yard and makes a deal with an egg producer to save the otherwise unwanted males till adulthood for the purpose in future months, arranges regular deliveries of all the necessary herbs and ashes, and has someone carve out an enormous stencil of all the runes to speed up the process: the diagram may now be drawn with a broom, as long as it's still a witch doing it. (She also has stencils of the immortalization spell made.) There is always some witch in residence, working off their favor to her a few hours at a time, and a security team to prevent unruly demands, interference by religious protestors, and a receptionist or two to make sure the people coming in actually have appointments (or standby arrangements, in case of no-shows) to collect loved ones.
She gets into a bit of an argument with the United States military about resurrecting fallen soldiers. While she originally had no intention of discriminating against soldiers, she insists that resurrected ones be considered honorably discharged and that their re-upping be optional, and absolutely refuses to approve any systematic preferential resurrection of people who are just going to pick up guns and walk into war zones again.
Normally, there would be some clan with access to the spell who'd cut a deal.
On this occasion, with this particular Olympic witch having come up with three (really two, but the portals are still officially credited to her, with everyone understanding now that she's proprietary about the process and capitalistic about the disposition to fund her anti-death projects) revolutionary spells in fewer years than that, they're a little concerned that they won't get a look in the next time she publishes, if they do things she doesn't approve of.
Isabella threatens to move her resurrection office to New Zealand. The military backpedals. Resurrections proceed.
(Isabella does open a second resurrection office in New Zealand. And one in Finland and one in India. There are witch clans all around the world and they are all beholden to her.)
Insurance companies freak out, then remake their actuarial tables and throw lawyers at their contractual language and calm down again. Isabella's insurance company of choice has a small head start. Isabella's insurance company of choice loves her.
Luzia gets her son back. She dithers for a bit about the husband. She gets the husband back. The husband is kind of taken aback by Luzia's activities since then but decides that Zeviana "doesn't count" as cheating. It's up to Zeviana whether she wants to call that close enough and continue carrying on.
Isabella and Adarin have no such problems. They continue to be deliriously happy.
Then, there's a relatively slow day. Isabella flops across her husband's lap on the couch and says, "Want to start looking for places to plague with utopias?"
The colony gets big enough that Isabella sculpts herself an ice crown and applies permanency to it so it won't melt. She makes Adarin one too out of cypress branches, wired into shape, magicked to stay alive and shaped like that, and then freed of the wire. She wears hers on Earth sometimes, as well as on the colony. Her queen elects not to comment.
Various people are resurrected. Isabella hires more people to sort more requests; she's not going to be able to handle this via descending on charities. (She extracts longer-term promises of help - and nonviolence - from the clans she shares this spell with, though.) She opens an office near San Francisco, puts a lot of poultry in the back yard and makes a deal with an egg producer to save the otherwise unwanted males till adulthood for the purpose in future months, arranges regular deliveries of all the necessary herbs and ashes, and has someone carve out an enormous stencil of all the runes to speed up the process: the diagram may now be drawn with a broom, as long as it's still a witch doing it. (She also has stencils of the immortalization spell made.) There is always some witch in residence, working off their favor to her a few hours at a time, and a security team to prevent unruly demands, interference by religious protestors, and a receptionist or two to make sure the people coming in actually have appointments (or standby arrangements, in case of no-shows) to collect loved ones.
She gets into a bit of an argument with the United States military about resurrecting fallen soldiers. While she originally had no intention of discriminating against soldiers, she insists that resurrected ones be considered honorably discharged and that their re-upping be optional, and absolutely refuses to approve any systematic preferential resurrection of people who are just going to pick up guns and walk into war zones again.
Normally, there would be some clan with access to the spell who'd cut a deal.
On this occasion, with this particular Olympic witch having come up with three (really two, but the portals are still officially credited to her, with everyone understanding now that she's proprietary about the process and capitalistic about the disposition to fund her anti-death projects) revolutionary spells in fewer years than that, they're a little concerned that they won't get a look in the next time she publishes, if they do things she doesn't approve of.
Isabella threatens to move her resurrection office to New Zealand. The military backpedals. Resurrections proceed.
(Isabella does open a second resurrection office in New Zealand. And one in Finland and one in India. There are witch clans all around the world and they are all beholden to her.)
Insurance companies freak out, then remake their actuarial tables and throw lawyers at their contractual language and calm down again. Isabella's insurance company of choice has a small head start. Isabella's insurance company of choice loves her.
Luzia gets her son back. She dithers for a bit about the husband. She gets the husband back. The husband is kind of taken aback by Luzia's activities since then but decides that Zeviana "doesn't count" as cheating. It's up to Zeviana whether she wants to call that close enough and continue carrying on.
Isabella and Adarin have no such problems. They continue to be deliriously happy.
Then, there's a relatively slow day. Isabella flops across her husband's lap on the couch and says, "Want to start looking for places to plague with utopias?"
royal_pain
"... Oooo! Possibly better than a pony, if it makes Edarial stop being mopey. What'd you find?"
He hops off of his bench and looks at them expectantly.
He hops off of his bench and looks at them expectantly.
royal_pain
"Ooo, people. I bet they're spellbinders, you and Edarial would not be excited if they weren't magic. Did they give you charts on fancy, fancy spells?"
royal_pain
"... Okay, so I am kind of confused about why you are excited, but I will roll with it. Are they fun people? Or boring?"
royal_pain
"Ooo, okay. Interesting but not necessarily fun. Hmm. What's interesting but not necessarily fun..."
royal_pain
"That's no reason to not try! Are they another set of monarchs that are going to help you monarch or something? Ari's mentioned wanting allies, is it that?"
come_midnight
"Sort of," agrees Iobel. "But that's not why they're interesting."
And she knocks on the door and says in Cricket's language, "It's us, with Edarial's brother."
And she knocks on the door and says in Cricket's language, "It's us, with Edarial's brother."
prodigal_miser
"Oh boy," laughs Adarin in English. "This'll be strange. Love, ready to meet my other me's male replacement of my sister?"
royal_obligation
"Zevros, this is a second set of - us. From another - what did you call it? World?"