cross_and_bow | we are invariably pleased to welcome tourism

Sherlock is usually very puncutal. He's only one minute late, but that's still not quite as punctual as usual. Bella peers out the window, not yet allowing herself outright concern.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

pythbox

"There are perhaps four other people alive who share this distinction," he says with a gesture indicating the upper part of his left arm, "and last I saw any of them was in London."

From:

cross_and_bow

"Sunnydale is in California," Juliet supplies to Amariah before Amariah can ask.

From:

dark_light

"So not near London, then. Okay. Existing precautions adequate."

From:

pythbox

"Glad that's settled," mutters Giles.

From:

cross_and_bow

"...I promise never to do any magic that's primarily motivated by recreational psychological side effects," volunteers Juliet tentatively.

From:

pythbox

"Thank you," he says, looking away.

From:

cross_and_bow

Right. Done talking about it. Books and notetaking and setting a timer on her phone to get home before curfew.

From:

dark_light

Amariah works alongside her. They take such similar notes, there's no reason not to divide the work.

From:

pythbox

Giles watches them with a certain amount of curiosity. Dimensional alternates is new.

From:

dark_light

"...Do you want to quiz me about my home dimension, or something?" Amariah offers. "I mean, I can also take notes, but she's got to read them to know the contents anyway, it doesn't save as much time as it looks like."

From:

pythbox

"...You've mentioned that your magic isn't teachable," he says. "How did you come by it?"

From:

dark_light

"I'm a witch. It's a species where I come from. Sort of, I mean - witches are all women, if we're going to make more witches we pretty much have to find mortals to cooperate, so my dad is just a human. Our sons are mortal, our daughters are witches. I've been doing simple nursery-rhyme level spells since I could talk, although I didn't start learning systematically until I could fly." She has her cloud-pine with her; there's enough scary stuff in this town that she wants to be able to put Juliet on it as a passenger and zoom out of wherever she's at at two hundred miles an hour without having to retrieve it from somewhere. She gestures with the branch. "When I was not quite six."

From:

pythbox

"I see," he says. "That's... fascinating on several levels. Does 'mortals' imply what I think it does?"

From:

dark_light

"Well, in my case, it does, but our alt Angela kept saying 'mortals' too and she just means people without wings and boasts no special lifespan herself, so good on you for asking. Witches live until we - well, there's not an exact understanding of how it happens, but it looks like barring death by violence we live until we're too bored or too lonely."

From:

pythbox

"Not a bad deal," he muses.

From:

dark_light

"Well, it means that we tend to last until we've gone through about four husbands, which takes a few centuries but not literally forever. I'm just planning to find a way to make my boyfriend immortal instead."

From:

pythbox

"Good luck," he ventures.

From:

dark_light

"Oh, I'll be able to do it. We have these devices -" she gestures to indicate the size. "That dispense objective truth in complete - sentences, so to speak, although it has to talk through symbols, they're really not very well designed, and the device says I can. I just have a research project to complete first."

From:

pythbox

"...Now that sounds useful."

From:

dark_light

"It is! Unfortunately, I've tried it outside my universe and the functionality's not portable. When questioned back home they say they run on 'dust' that isn't anywhere else." She shrugs. "Still very glad I have them. Well, I have one, my boyfriend has the other. He's an intuitive reader and he's much better at communicating with them than I am, so he wanted his own. There's only six in the world but two were lost; I found the first with a spell and he asked it where the other was."

From:

pythbox

"Remarkable," murmurs Giles.

From:

dark_light

Amariah grins at him.

From:

pythbox

He smiles back.

From:

dark_light

"Do you want any conveniently consequence-free spells on you or your house or whatever, as long as I'm loitering in this world and you're helping my counterpart here?" Amariah inquires. "The whole set I gave Bella includes four protective tattoos, which take a while, but if you wanted to skip those it'd only take a couple hours to go through all of them. I have tea tree oil and stuff left."