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

[keyed_up]

"You recognized him, or was there, like, a clue in the crystal ball?" Soph asks, offering Bella the crystal ball casually till she remembers what's going on and flinches.

[cross_and_bow]

Bella snatches it away and frowns at Soph.

[eversomuchfun]

"I recognized the shower. I suppose you could call that a clue."

[keyed_up]

Soph applauds.

[cross_and_bow]

Bella is deeply unsettled.

[eversomuchfun]

Sherlock sighs.

[cross_and_bow]

"If you were -" Bella is checking her coin-sorting wish. "...I'm missing coins. I'm missing coins, I know how many I had."

[eversomuchfun]

"If who were what?"

[cross_and_bow]

"If she were my sister she would have coins on her, I would have given her some, and I have fewer than I should, but I never gave anybody coins, but if she's immune to hexes and up she can't have a sorting wish and she'd have a bandolier, and I wouldn't have made it invisible to me."

[keyed_up]

"I don't carry a lot of them," says Soph slowly, and she reaches for the small chain that she wears under her shirt. "Just a few for emergencies. I can't leave the world, you're always around in case I get in trouble..." She shows Bella the coins.

[eversomuchfun]

"If Juliet's memories do prove correct, I don't think this can possibly be the work of a coin," says Sherlock. "Coins are powerful but they're piss-poor at narrative, as far as I can tell; I would be noticing contradictions already. I'd believe enchantment first, and local magic before either. But I shudder to think how much power a local witch would have to put in to get this kind of far-reaching effect. And then there is the question of motive."

[keyed_up]

"But - but if Bella remembers right - I exist, look, look at me existing, Sherlock," says Soph, "how could she be remembering right?"

[eversomuchfun]

"You clearly do exist," says Sherlock. "My judgment is suspended on the question of whether or not you existed half an hour ago."

[keyed_up]

"But - but - but I remember it. There's - mud on the floor in the front hall from where I came in after I got the mail. There's my bed in our room. There's - I know you and you know me, you've known me since March, I still have the laser pointer you gave me, I made you listen to me talk about episodes of House for an hour and a half after I found out who you were, you got me my magic belt for my birthday -"

[cross_and_bow]

"I remember having my room to myself, and not having to worry about any Sunnydale-dwelling family members apart from Charlie, and driving to school alone - not to mention stopping in the morgue to stake all the corpses first! - and coming back from the dead to confront my murderer and protect the next Slayer and show Charlie I wasn't dead, but not you -"

[keyed_up]

"I didn't even know you'd died till after you came back! Charlie couldn't figure out how to tell me in the, what, an hour - and half the time I staked the corpses for you and the other half of the time I stood watch - and you were the one who convinced me to move there! Because of Mom and Phil, you said, they needed space, we could just go live with Charlie!"

[eversomuchfun]

"Oh, believe me, I remember the episodes of House," says Sherlock. "And the magic belt. It's obvious enough by now that you have an internally consistent history. —Juliet, do you write your notebooks in code?"

[cross_and_bow]

"No. Aurora does that. I never had to. If you present me with a notebook in code I won't have a clue how to read it."

[keyed_up]

"One time when I was nine I read them and I didn't even understand it but you spent all month developing a code I couldn't read anyway," grumbles Soph.

[eversomuchfun]

"When you showed me your notebooks, you taught me the cipher," says Sherlock. "Shall we consult them?"

[cross_and_bow]

"At this point it won't surprise me in the least if notebooks in a cipher I cannot read exist and refer to Sophia here," says Bella.

[eversomuchfun]

"Fine," he says. "Back to the spying."

[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.