we are an underrated tourist destination

[cross_and_bow]

Bella has just been to visit the Mikleeeeeeeee. It went well, after she flared aura and shouted abuse at the crown prince. (Demonstrating this form of "heedless confrontationalism", it was explained by a quarter-Mikleeeeeeeee girl James found for her to talk to, an essential part of the species' diplomatic process. This held up under lie-detection, but Bella found a few examples via pastwatching before actually doing it.) They have a treaty; they're going to get back to her with revisions they'd like made to their dimension and they're going to end the five hundred year "human season".

Now she's between tasks, hanging out in one of the Jarvises.

Comments

[grabsthebutt]

And she gets a brainphone call from Val.

[Hey, you busy? Me and Ike can take you to see Siathe now if you want.]

[cross_and_bow]

[I am between things, now totally works. Shall I just pop in to where you're at?]

[grabsthebutt]

[Sure!]

[cross_and_bow]

Pop!

"Hi there."

[newtimov]

"Hi!" says Ike, waving. The twins are in their living room.

[cross_and_bow]

"I have a cool boosted teleportation power that will let me travel to other worlds in this sheaf, no extra charge," says Bella. "Are you guys ready to go now now? Is there anything I should do before landing us all - where exactly shall we land, I should know that, but anything else?"

[grabsthebutt]

"Probably easiest to just put us on the other side of the Toronto gate," shrugs Val. "We pack stuff for long trips, but if we're just gonna be there for a few hours showing you around, there's no point."

[cross_and_bow]

Siathe side of the Toronto gate it is. Bella looks around curiously.

[grabsthebutt]

They are standing on top of a small hill, between two large boulders of an unfamiliar type of rock with colourful stripes. All around them is an expanse of equally colourful grass - green and red and blue and purple and orange and pink and white and yellow and so on and so forth, clumped in like-coloured tufts. It smells a little peculiar, to a human: a mix of natural and industrial. Insects with sparkling white shells buzz busily among the grasses. Behind them, the haphazard grass gives way to an obviously cultivated field of similar grasslike plants, arranged in like-coloured stripes; to either side, grass merges into scrubby bushes which merge into a forestlike arrangement of tall spindly trees with no visible leaves but plenty of branches; up ahead, there is a path through the grass, which eventually widens into a dirt road.

Val heads that way.

[cross_and_bow]

"Cool flora, I might copy it for Mercury when I get around to setting up there," says Bella, following Val. "The beetles are pretty too."

[newtimov]

"...You're going to set up flora on Mercury?" says Ike.

[cross_and_bow]

"Yeah, all the cool Bells are doing it - I mean copies of me from other worlds, not members of your family - and by 'it' I mean space colonies, not Mercury in particular, I picked Mercury in particular because it is not yet spoken for in any world and we copy each other but not that repetitively."

[newtimov]

"I think if you were a boy I would have a crush on you," Ike declares, giggling.

[cross_and_bow]

"One of me is!" laughs Bella. "You guys were asleep last time we all got together and had a party, but I can invite you next time if you're available whenever that is. We party when significant things happen, usually when we find new ones of us."

[newtimov]

"One of you is? Well now I think I have a crush on him," giggles Ike.

[cross_and_bow]

"Yeah, he is, he goes by Cam," says Juliet, "looks like so," she whips up an illusion of Cam, "has a magic notebook that can turn into a bird now, he has all the standard Bell powers but also he is a thing called a wizard that does magic via diplomatically convincing stuff to behave. He is also on the list of Bells With Friendlier Auras Than Mine. And you might be pleased to note that he and his boyfriend are in an open relationship."

[newtimov]

"Oh dear," says Ike, blushing. "Is he horrible in some way? People I get crushes on seem to turn out to be horrible in some way most of the time."

[cross_and_bow]

"I like him just fine. I mean, he's a me, we all get along even when one of us has to come translate Aegis into something socially acceptable. He killed some angels? Is that horrible? They were kind of terrible angels and Amariah can get them back by magic if she ever thinks of anything clever to do with a passel of terrible angels."

[newtimov]

"If you say that killing some angels was probably not horrible then I probably believe you," Ike decides.

The dirt road is opening up a little more now, curving around the forest on the right. There still aren't any people visible.

[cross_and_bow]

"He stopped after Amariah whipped up something to trap the remaining ones instead. This was when he was helping her with the afterlife for the Alethia worldsheaf. They were part of this angel conspiracy to - how interesting is this story to you?"

[grabsthebutt]

"It's interesting as fuck!" calls Val over her shoulder from in front of them. "You should keep telling it!"

[cross_and_bow]

Bella laughs. "I can start from the beginning, howabout? So Alethia is this worldsheaf - this where we live is also a worldsheaf, as evidenced from the fact that we are not in the same dimension we were in an hour ago but could travel here without recourse to Milliways or Jane, and this worldsheaf we're in is called Sunshine, for reference, and it has close relatives unlike most worlds. The Alethia alt goes by Amariah. Everybody on her subworld in the sheaf has an animal who is their external, talking, ambulatory soul, called a daemon, and these are Very Important. If you go there, without protective magic, one will appear for you. And Alethia couldn't hook up to the afterlife that most of the worlds we know about can, because there was one in the way. She has these artifacts that dispense objective truth - but only about things within Alethia - and her boyfriend is good at reading them, so she got him to quiz them about the Alethian afterlife to see if it was any good. And the answer was hell no, everybody in the afterlife was cold and insubstantial getting routinely screamed at by harpies with this horrible guilt-inducing screech and also they were missing the part of them that is your daemon if you have one, which I'm given to understand is an extreme sort of misery. So yeah, place was no good, and Bells do not hold with that sort of thing."

[newtimov]

"That is a lot of knowledge," Ike remarks. "Okay, so what did you do about the horrible afterlife?"

[cross_and_bow]

"I wasn't there, I didn't want a daemon - and the afterlife won't let daemons in. If you try to go there, and your daemon-part hasn't been destroyed already via dying-in-Alethia, then it will sit on the dock by the river that surrounds the afterlife island and wait for you. But Cam had his magic notebook and was pretty okay with her possibly turning into a bird and being his daemon, and Shell Bell was also willing to go and get a cute little duck thing daemon, and Amariah already had her owl because she was from there, and there were a couple non-Bells along too who had or wanted daemons. The alethiometers - those are the truth-telling devices - could tell them some things, but not a complete guided tour amount of things, about the afterlife, so they had to go scope it out in person. Also, the place was hostile to some of our magic - they could use their built-in powers, but not come up with new stuff on the fly. Also also, if you are physically far apart from your daemon, it hurts really badly, until you get far enough away to sort of snap the tether and then you can both go anywhere you want. Cam was able to get that over with instantly - he put his notebook down somewhere, walked the requisite distance away, and magicked her into his hawk, and she was already at snapping-distance so he barely felt a thing. Amariah was already separated because she's an Alethian kind of witch and that's a thing they do when they're kids. Shell Bell was in for a rough time, so she brought her girlfriend to hold her duck-thing for her because that would make them feel better about the separation. Are you still with me or do I need to go back and put more things in context?"

[newtimov]

"No, I'm with you, go on!" says Ike, fascinated.