many people move here to start families

[cross_and_bow]

Bella is hanging out in a Jarvis - the familiar one - handwriting a nonaggression proposal-slash-bribe. Has to be handwritten. Damn fussy demons. At least it's okay for her to conjure rather than personally harvesting the weird ink she's supposed to use.

Comments

[cross_and_bow]

"I'll pastwatch the people in the crystal ball, I guess, assuming we're collectively trusting me to produce accurate pronouncements about my observations now whatever I was saying yeterday."

[eversomuchfun]

"Whatever you get, it will be information," says Sherlock. "Go ahead."

[cross_and_bow]

The crystal chose to show her a lady in the bath; it is inscrutable but not random. She looks for the end of that bath, after the lady's decent.

[pythbox]

She is wearing a dressing gown and drying her hair while she speaks with a grey-faced, stringy-haired, obsequious individual in a shapeless brown robe.

[cross_and_bow]

"Bath Lady consorts with demons, that's something." Bella listens in.

[pythbox]

The robed person addresses her by titles such as 'Your Radiantishness' and 'Your Awesome Majesty'. They aren't discussing anything especially important; she wants him to bring her better skin care products, and he agrees that of course her every whim must be carried out immediately and it will be done at once, and so on, and so forth.

[cross_and_bow]

"Demon appears to worship her and do her shopping. I'm going to skip ahead."

She skips an hour.

[pythbox]

The minion has gone, presumably to shop; the lady is going through her closet to pick out a dress.

[cross_and_bow]

And another hour?

[pythbox]

The lady is nowhere to be seen.

The man from Sherlock's consultation is driving down a Sunnydale road, looking mildly disgruntled.

[cross_and_bow]

"...Following the lady too far forward gets me Showering Dude. I'm going to skip backwards, see if I can catch the changeover..."

[pythbox]

And there it is: after the lady put on her dress, before the man got in his car, she glowed briefly and transformed into him, complete with a change in wardrobe. He looked around in apparent disorientation and then walked away.

[cross_and_bow]

"...Bath Lady can glow and turn into Shower Dude. Apparently what they're wearing is tracked separately. I don't really know what to make of that."

[keyed_up]

"Well, look, if they were in the crystal ball they'll be important but that doesn't mean they have anything to do with me - why don't you pastwatch me -"

[cross_and_bow]

Bella squints at Soph, then shrugs and moves her pastwatching focus.

"Nothing if I look for you a month ago," she reports. "No results, like if I was looking for the Tooth Fairy."

[eversomuchfun]

"Track backward from the present," says Sherlock.

[cross_and_bow]

Bella nods.

She does.

"Here she is with us in Canada, there she is in my bedroom with the bunkbeds, there she is sorting through her tacky jewelry -"

[keyed_up]

"Hey!"

[cross_and_bow]

"And here she is looking in the fridge but apparently not finding anything she likes, and here she is reading a school copy of The Great Gatsby, and - thirty seconds before that there's no her, no bunkbeds, no tacky jewelry, no Great Gatsby. Looks like she popped into existence with all her stuff an hour and fifteen minutes ago."

[keyed_up]

"No - no before that I was on the phone with Barb and before that I was - what did I - before that I was doing my math, and before that you picked me up from school and complained about me not being able to teleport without spending a coin every time and I said you could just give me more coins and you said maybe if Jane weren't down - and - and before that I was in school, I got peanut butter on my shirt but Carrie loaned me this one -"

[cross_and_bow]

"An hour and fifteen minutes ago the room was how I remember it. But let's see if I can track backwards from when you appear and see what made you."

[keyed_up]

"Our parents made me! You brought a sample of me to that party where Jane was doing gene sequencing and I'm your sister!"

[cross_and_bow]

"Nope," says Bella absently, tracking backwards almost frame-by-frame.

The view shifts, dizzyingly, and she's "followed Soph" to something that doesn't look like Soph at all.

[pythbox]

It looks glowy and green, and surrounded by worried-looking monks. The monks appear to be hurriedly casting a spell.

[cross_and_bow]

"That glowy green-ness you saw in your crystal ball," says Bella. "There's a lot of that, and there's monks around it, casting something. I'm gonna skip back to the beginning of the ritual and pentagon the language they're casting in..."