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

[ending_of]

Unlike Downside, it has plants. And real, alive-looking landscape in between the sparsely distributed residential streets.

[luminous_regnant]

They'd like to see the equivalent of Downside's guides. Golden goes invisible before they teleport again; she's probably opaque enough that no one can read her life story. Angela's life story's pretty innocuous.

[ending_of]

Downside and Upside share many of the same guides; the catacombs let out into the same room no matter which vertical direction you're headed from there.

Currently, there are a man and a woman sitting behind the desk, chatting quietly.

[jovahs_heiress]

"Excuse me," says Angela. "I'm new here." Behind her wing she conjures appropriate papers; even squares are pretty good at filling in appropriate gaps like that. They might notice she's not dead, but she is, technically, new here.

[ending_of]

"Oh!" says the man, jumping up. "I'm sorry. Let me see where you're headed." He holds out his hand for the papers.

"Did Simon forget to mention he was sending somebody up again?" wonders the woman.

[jovahs_heiress]

Angela spreads her hands in an unhelpful gesture of I'm-new-here-and-don't-know-what's-what, and hands over the papers.

[ending_of]

He inspects the conjured pages with their conjured residential code and conjured highlights of notable deeds.

"Oh, Upside!" he says. "Even Simon usually says something when we've got one of those... well, come on, the elevator's this way." He leads her to it.

[jovahs_heiress]

Angela folds her wings neatly and follows him in, with Golden lurking lurkily behind.

[ending_of]

"My name's Edgar," he adds over his shoulder. "Sorry."

The elevator ascends. Edgar leads the way out of it at Upside's ground level, into a very nice-looking lobby, and then out of that into a wide roughly-circular grassy area surrounding the tower they just left.

"Careful of the cliffs," he says automatically as they cross the lawn, heading directly away from the cliff edge. Then he glances at Angela and laughs self-consciously. "Well, maybe they're less of a problem for you. But people have fallen off before, and it's not very much fun."

[jovahs_heiress]

"I'm Isabella," says Isabella politely. "And yes, I could catch myself if I fell off a cliff. I lived up on top of a mountain and it's easier than taking a running start."

[ending_of]

"Yes," says Edgar, "I saw that on your papers... aha, here we go."

They step between two pillars and under the roof of a train-station-like facility with exactly one solid wall, into which are set a number of elevator doors to either side of an electronic map. He inputs her conjured res code into the map.

It does not work.

Edgar frowns.

[jovahs_heiress]

Oh, dangit. Can she conjure herself an appropriate house and hook it up?

[ending_of]

Well... technically, yes she can.

Yoink.