cross_and_bow | we are an underrated tourist destination

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."

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

"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?"

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

"Okay, so you've got Cam and Amariah and Shell Bell and Amariah's boyfriend and one of his alts all prowling the afterlife, checking the place out, talking to the shades of the dead, looking for harpies - the alethiometer warned them about harpies but it was really vague, it explained that there was some thing in the afterlife that 'hungered for truth' and 'had knowledge' and 'caused suffering', you can see why they would not immediately think 'harpy with guilt-screech attack'. And then Shell Bell found one. And it screamed at her." Bella pauses dramatically.

"Oh no!" says Ike, obligingly.

"Now," says Bella, "of the Bells - Shell Bell wins at Traumatic Past. The details are another story - it's not a secret, if you're curious and like sad stories, but it'd be a distraction from the Story Of Alethia's Afterlife right now - but anyway, she has been through, and I do not exaggerate, hell. And in the course of being through hell she's done a couple things she's not proud of. Nothing awful, but she felt bad about it, and the harpy grabbed that and yanked. The other four who were in there tried to go after her, but, surprise! Alethian afterlife is topologically screwed up, teleporting doesn't work there - you can teleport out, but not to any point within. They could fly around looking for her, but had no guarantee of finding her anytime soon. That wasn't good enough for Shell Bell's girlfriend. Shell Bell's girlfriend is an alt of my boyfriend - they're Sherlocks - and the name is not just for decoration. So Sherlock put down Shell Bell's screaming crying unhappy duck daemon and picked herself up and flew across the river and left behind a hawk daemon she didn't intend to acquire and went looking for Shell Bell. And she found her, and picked her up, and got her out. Shell Bell was down for the count after that. The other four decided to find each other and travel in a group after that."

"Wow," says Ike. "I hope Shell Bell is okay now!"

"She usually is, but she was a yummy target for a harpy, apparently. They eat - information about people's histories, basically. They like all kinds, but the only kind they can take regardless of whether you feel like telling them stories or not is stuff you feel guilty about - they scream, that dredges it up, they feast. They were made like that. They were there to punish the dead. Not even a subset of the dead, just everybody. The other people down there appeased them by telling them stories. And eventually they were much friendlier and agreed to work for Amariah in the new afterlife she was going to build. But first, she wanted to figure out who had decided to build such a thing. This is where the angels come in."

"The terrible angels," says Ike, nodding.

"Yeah, there's another kind of angels from another world who are not terrible, they're just genetically engineered humans with wings, one of me is those. But Alethia's angels are these wispy fragile things, and most of them work for an angel called the Authority - also known as God. Amariah and company went and paid him a visit him where he lives, on this big floating Clouded Mountain that can traverse subworlds."

"I see," says Ike. "How did that go?"

"The Authority is older than the hills and in much worse shape. When Amariah found him, he was curled up in a crystal box, could barely stay awake, and almost died when she tapped on the glass. She's leaving him alone. But he had this helper angel, who was stronger and more solid than the other ones, and he blasted her and her boyfriend and Cam. Cam's as durable as anybell, he wasn't hurt, but he hit the ground really hard. Kas, Amariah's boyfriend, just torched in midair - that's a reset we can do when we encounter otherwise-lethal situations. Amariah recovered, since she's been flying since she was little, and went back up and got a knife into the pissed-off angel and offered him a surrender and he said die and was about to blast them again and she killed him. While all this was going on, one of Kas's alts - who looks like this -" She replaces the Cam illusion with an Aianon illusion - "was mobbed by a flock of lesser angels, I'm sure you can see why angels might attack him. They couldn't hurt him, but we didn't know yet if we wanted to kill them, so he was sort of letting them tow him away from the mountain; he couldn't have flapped a wing without shredding a few. Fragile. So, Cam was already down there, he followed them and tried to talk to them, it didn't work very well. They started attacking him, he teleported out of range, and then Kas got the alethiometer to tell him the Clouded Mountain agenda, which boils down to - every world in the sheaf, every thinking being in all of them, united in unthinking obedience to the Authority. This was not on. Cam started killing angels when it was clear they really, really didn't want to talk. Meanwhile Amariah figured out that while our all-purpose go-to magic didn't work on the Clouded Mountain, another kind did; she whipped up an angel aquarium that sucked the live ones up and trapped them there. And she parked the mountain, and the angels still wouldn't talk to her, so they're all just hanging out now. She'd resurrect the dead ones if there was anything to resurrect them for besides living in an aviary eating angel food cake."

"That is the most demony demon I have ever seen," says Ike, blinking at illusory Aianon. "What's his species called?"

"Demons," snorts Juliet. "Or Endarkened. There's only the one kinda demon on Thilanushinyel - that's where he's from. He's psychically attached to a dragon -" Illusion! - "and also to the elf one of me, but less so, he and the dragon are basically the same person."

"Those wings are amazing," he observes. "Both of them, actually, but the Endarkened's are cooler-looking."

"The Endarkened is the last of his kind," intones Bella. "The dragon's an endangered species, but they're working on that, and Sarion - the elf me - will probably help. She's getting better. She also has some Traumatic Past Problems and she's mostly recovered now but it's been slow and we're not sure what she's going to do with her world yet. Anyway. So the angels were handled, the harpies were on board with the program - oh, by the way, in the Alethian afterlife space time runs about six thousand times slower, or faster, I'm not sure how to count it, as on the outside. I mean if you spend a second in the outside world, it's almost two hours in the afterlife. So one of these guys -" She waves at the dragon - "they have an alt who's a ghost, she was hanging out there telling the harpies stories while everything else was taken care of. And then Amariah had the run of her worldsheaf, no interfering horrible angels! But our primary magic things? Don't work in the afterlife. She decided she wanted to make one from scratch. She had to ask another alt of these guys to help her out - I won't trouble you with the details of how it works, but anyway he agreed and she got some heavy-duty magic and made her own subworld in Alethia over which she is God, and the conditions are much nicer there, and live people can visit dead ones while dreaming, and properly vetted dead people can go back to where they lived when they lived if they want. And then she made a door between the old afterlife and the new one."

"You guys do a lot of stuff," Ike observes.

"We do! We are awesome like that. Sunshine hooks up to Downside nice and friendly - in fact, it was already like that when I got here - so I don't need to do that particular dramatic thing, but dramatic things are underway. You guys get front row seats 'cause you're helping."

"I like front row seats," says Val.

"I'm so glad!" Bella is still taking in the Siathe scenery appreciatively.

The Siathe scenery is still gorgeous.

The dirt road becomes a road of glittering black gravel that crunches under their feet.

"We almost at someplace more inhabited? Eminently stealable flora aside, I'm mostly interested in the local people."

"Yeah, it's not that far a walk," says Val.

"Cool. If it were a very long walk I might want to teleport or at least fly."

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject