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

[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.

[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."