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]

"Do we know why they didn't want her to go home?"

[eversomuchfun]

"Because once she opens the gate, she is under no obligation to close it, and may instead choose to lead an army of demons out of it and conquer the planet."

[cross_and_bow]

"Ah. That would be bad."

[eversomuchfun]

"I agree. Not relatedly, Tony wants to know if you'd like someone to talk to about all this."

[cross_and_bow]

"That would be spectacular, but I'm skeptical that anyone wants to listen to me unless there is someone I know well enough to pour my heart out to but not well enough that I ever 'mentioned' having a sister." She shakes her head. "Is there a reason to want Glory not to be home that is unrelated to the gate? Like, should I not give her a lift if that seems expedient?"

[eversomuchfun]

"Tony wants to listen to you and has explicitly offered to do so. I suppose it's up to you whether or not you know him well enough. It's possible that if Glory goes home she might make life even more unpleasant for the demons who live there, but it's very unlikely that anyone from that dimension could leave it again without the Key."

[cross_and_bow]

"So that's an option if I get a nasty surprise about how difficult she is to manage at some point, I guess. I kind of expect that if I talk to anyone who likes Soph and I'm not self-censoring to the point of rendering the exercise useless they will quietly hate me."

[eversomuchfun]

"Tony is not going to hate you."

[cross_and_bow]

"Maybe."

Right now she's not sure if her boyfriend hates her.

[eversomuchfun]

"I don't hate you either," he adds. "But I'm not the right person for you to talk to about Soph. The situation feels very personal for me in exactly the wrong way."

[cross_and_bow]

Bella nods.

[eversomuchfun]

"But Tony can listen to you, I promise."

[cross_and_bow]

"...Okay."

[eversomuchfun]

He hugs her.

[cross_and_bow]

Hugs.

Check on Ben/Glory.

Teleporting to Tony.

[toblameforit]

Tony is sitting by himself in his room in the original Jarvis.

[cross_and_bow]

"...So apparently you signed up to listen to me process my feelings aloud, but I don't think Jarvis did, and I'm going to wind up saying a lot of things I don't endorse so I'd rather limit the audience."

[poeticterms]

The door closes.

"I won't listen," says Jarvis.

[cross_and_bow]

"Okay."

Bella rearranges her hair edgily. "How much did you hear about how Soph and I, er, met?"

[toblameforit]

"Apparently you found her in your room and freaked out and teleported her to Canada?" says Tony.

[cross_and_bow]

"Yeah. And I guess she brainphoned Sherlock for help, and - to the extent that there were sides he was not on mine - and I'm talking to you instead of him now because I guess he identifies with her or something? But like - I feel like I've faceplanted into an expectation that I treat my mental opacity like it is the problem here, like, we'd all be a happy Soph-including family if only I'd had the courtesy to be brainwashable? And instead I am the only person I know who has not been brainwashed, and the problem Sherlock chose to address first after concluding that I wasn't crazy was that I wasn't being nice enough. Like - is it just me or is that a complete failure of perspective-taking - what would he do if he woke up one morning and discovered that - I don't know, that his cloning retroactively yielded an extra that everyone remembered but him? Soph was alternately defensive and quiet, I have no actual personal beef with her, but - Sherlock."

[toblameforit]

"Aww, man. It's not your mental opacity that's the problem!" he says. "Do you want me to explain Sherry? I can, I'm good at that."

[cross_and_bow]

"Yeah, explain me some Sherlock."

[toblameforit]

"If Sherry woke up one morning and there was an extra clone in the family that everybody remembered but him, he'd get right into figuring out what the hell was going on, but he'd treat the extra guy like family unless he found out he was some kind of camouflaged assassin or something. He empathizes way, way too strongly with the whole 'brand new extra person' situation to do anything else."

[cross_and_bow]

"...Okay. I don't know how to do that, though, I'm not Sherlock, I can't derive a reasonable picture of her personality from ten minutes of talking to her and her tacky taste in jewelry, she's not even an alt of Lexi. Soph had the idea that I should act like she's some other Bell's sister, which was a good idea. Which I can do because I met Lexi and didn't find her deeply bewildering. If Lexi were stranded here, I'd know how to react to that - I mean, it'd involve a lot of trying to get her home to Aurora, but I don't imagine anyone would complain about how I treated her in the meantime. But - that isn't what happened. Everyone else changed too. I don't know how much splicing her in has affected your memories or the Jarvises' or Sherlock's - let alone my parents, god, Aurora's on record speculating that she has the worst relationship with her parents of any Bell specifically because she wasn't an only child and it made her neurotic. Do my parents now remember raising a neurotic standoffish child who was never confident that she was loved enough? And I mean, Aurora is noticeably different from the rest of us, she has an exactly standard backstory right up to 'move to Forks, find magic and a significant other' but she still acts - off-center. Not in a bad way but in a different way. I don't expect this to add up to much with people I don't interact with socially on a regular basis, but my parents - And Sherlock! Now he remembers meeting and being interested in and teaching and engaging in Slaying with and - all that - a Bell with a sister. The fact that the Bell he remembers now never existed and I do instead doesn't mean it's really me he remembers. Having a sister a year younger than me would've affected me. I don't know who all the brainwashed people remember. I'm not her. For a distressingly large fraction of all practical purposes, he met me earlier today, in Canada, shouting at his friend."