i am the oncoming storm

[autokinetic]

There are three Bells in Milliways.

They want a fourth. A fifth. A sixth. A seventh.

And then Downside is going down.

Comments

[autokinetic]

"We ready to go?" She pauses, snaps her fingers. "Amariah - can you tuck Path away like Sue can Ivy? Be safer that way."

[dark_light]

"Path's had enforced personal space against people in general since about a minute after I got minted, but good idea anyway," says Amariah. "Is it completely under Sue and Ivy's control when she's in and when she's out or should I do something other than copy it directly?"

[toblameforit]

(Bar has no problem with him adding a modestly sized tower out back in his location of choice. He stops by the peal to grab some coins from anybody who feels like dispensing them—he should only need a couple of hexes and a handful of pentagons, and he doesn't expect to use all of them.)

[pythbox]

Ivy appears, wrapped around Sue's shoulders as a bright yellow snake.

"Sometimes I come out or go back in our sleep," she says. "But other than that, we only do it on purpose. And it always works."

[dark_light]

"All right." Amariah kisses Path's head, and makes a little wince while he hoots softly, and wishes, and Path is tucked away.

[self_composed]

Stella already has a design for a tower-shaped Belltower socked away; she bounces it to Tony as long as he's going to be making one.

[autokinetic]

"You and me go in, make our wishes, see if they work? If they don't, if the admin can see us no matter what, what do we do?" Aegis says to Amariah.

[dark_light]

"...If it doesn't work, maybe only one of us should risk getting near her," Amariah says. "Or on the other hand maybe it's worth sending three people and we should take Golden with us on the suspicion that Upside's relatively safe."

[arenaria]

"If it doesn't work," says Shell Bell, "then you two - go to the catacombs, see if there's any alts of us or people we don't know still in pre-processing who we can get out even if we can't help everyone. We can make a dent in the place and regroup even if it turns out not to be safe for us to knock it all down."

[self_composed]

"I should get Mary." Stella opens the door. [Hey Mary! Me and some Bells are going to conquer an afterlife, you'd be useful, c'mere?]

[pythbox]

[...Sure,] says Mary, and she goes there.

[toblameforit]

(Tony edits the Belltower design appropriately to merge it with his Jane installation, shows the result to the Bells for approval, and heads out to find somewhere to put it.)

[self_composed]

(The Bells approve.)

"You don't need to be in a world to see stuff in it, right? You were here in Milliways when you consulted for Golden and the Joker. Sue, patch Mary in, would you?"

[pythbox]

He patches her in and relays appropriate summaries.

She frowns.

"...Giant blank spot," she reports. "I get a little around the edges, but it's all very short-term. Mostly it's 'no answer'."

[toblameforit]

(And lo, there is a tower. It comes equipped with four times as many ansibles as they actually need to link up the existing array of worlds; that way there'll be spares for later. The ansible room, two floors below ground, and the meeting room on the floor above it both have cameras and mics and Jarvis-style projection equipment for Jane, and the main common room on the ground floor has a computer she can access.)

[mind_game]

Jane plugs in ansibles to her stations in Samaria, Aurum, Alethia, Sunshine, Eos, and her original unnamed world; she hasn't got her hooks into Atlantis yet. She pours into the new hardware happily; if she's ever going to run out of capacity to grow, it's not going to be soon. "Hi!" she says to Tony, showing off her chosen face.

[self_composed]

"Well, crap. What do you get around the edges? Has anything like this happened before?"

[luminous_regnant]

"I wonder if it's worth trying Alice. I'll fetch her."

A moment later Golden's Alice is fetched. She, unlike Mary, does need to be in the world that she's looking at, but the moment Shell Bell offers up Downside, she recoils. "That world and my sight do not get along. That's worse than looking at hybrids and wolves before I patched those holes." She uses one of the glowy gold squares on her not-invisible necklace to fix her headache. "Bleah. Sorry, Bella."

"It's all right. You can go home," murmurs Golden.

[pythbox]

"Not on this scale, but I do get blank spots sometimes," says Mary. "I can usually just work around them, or make reasonable guesses like everybody else."

And since the link is right there, she pushes into it a rough sense of the distributions she's getting around this venture - no matter what they do, the Bells are going to end up in the blank spot if they enter Downside; before that point, they may tend to express various levels of positivity and negativity about the results of the expedition, depending on details of their plans that aren't clear to her; around the edges of the blank spot itself, the clearest constant is that Shell Bell is going to be nervous and unhappy for a while, and all the Bells are eventually going to leave Downside. The blank spot swallows up what kind of condition they'll be in when they do, and when exactly that might be for each of them.

[luminous_regnant]

"We all get out eventually," says Golden. "That's something."

[arenaria]

"Maybe I should get Sherlock. Just to hold onto," murmurs Shell Bell.

[self_composed]

"Does anything meaningful that you can see change if fewer of us go through, or if we handle our jobs in different combinations?"

[pythbox]

"Some effect on Shell Bell's mood," she reports, "but getting Sherlock has a much bigger one. No effect on you all coming out eventually, that's still as certain as it gets."

[temporal_affairs]

"...I get out too, right?"

[she_sells_seashells]

Shell Bell wastes no further time in dooring to Atlantis and calling for Sherlock.