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

[self_composed]

"Coming up on twenty million. We could have waited a bit until we had more impressive empires under our collective belt, but this seemed fairly urgent, what with all the torture."

[autokinetic]

"Doesn't a riot without violence add up to... peaceful protest?" says Aegis innocently. "Oh no, the horror, that's much worse than people being tortured?"

[cross_and_bow]

"And it'd only be non-consensual violence we'd cut, anyway, if people want to spar for fun or torture each other for the enjoyment of everyone involved we don't take issue with that sort of thing."

[ending_of]

"Eliminating only non-consensual violence is significantly more complicated with what I have available than you are claiming it would be for you. But it does have the advantage of restricting the immediate widespread unhappiness to people who want to engage in nonconsensual violence."

[dark_light]

"What is it that you have available, exactly?" asks Amariah brightly. "Perhaps we can help."

[ending_of]

She looks thoughtful.

Then she says, "Try this," and imparts to everyone present the ability to understand the prototype that is now represented by a point of greenish-blue light hovering in the exact centre of the room: to be given to everyone who is currently in any part of her domain, the capacity to decide on an individual basis whether or not to be affected by any injury that would otherwise occur, and to set separate preferred defaults for injuries caused by accident, by people in general, or by specific people.

[self_composed]

"Beautiful," says Stella. "It'll piss off your torturers, I imagine - why did you install those? However much complaining there was from the judges?"

[ending_of]

"The judges felt very strongly about it."

She implements the change. The prototype-light reports this fact and then vanishes.

[luminous_regnant]

"Well," says Golden. "I approve. As far as that goes. Have you got opinions either way on letting us siphon off people who can in all but the technical sense return to their lives?"

[ending_of]

She implements another change. This one goes unannounced.

"Siphon away."

[cross_and_bow]

"And for the ones who can't, who've been dead too long, if some of 'em are suited for Upside and their loved ones aren't, are they going to get to see each other again?"

[ending_of]

"Technically Upsiders are free to visit Downside, find their loved ones, and visit as much as they want," she says. "People don't."

[dark_light]

"I suppose you announce to the Upsiders that they can do this?"

[jovahs_heiress]

"Are the Upsiders safe Downside - or rather - have they been in the past?"

[ending_of]

"The information is available. And that, I think, is the problem: they usually weren't."

[self_composed]

"...I do have to wonder. You're being way more reasonable than we expected the literal inventor of Hell to be. If you could've made the place safe to start with why didn't you? Why didn't Shell Bell wake up in a perfectly satisfactory sort of afterlife as afterlives could conceivably go and reunite with the rest of us saying not 'this place has got to go' but rather 'let's see if we can get a meeting with the admin, I sense a kindred spirit'?"

[ending_of]

She shrugs.

"I didn't design this place all at once, and it's been a while since I made any major changes."

[autokinetic]

"What do you do with your time?"

[ending_of]

"In what way is that your business?"

[luminous_regnant]

"We are a curious people," says Golden dryly. "Do you have any objection to our setting up various structures hither and thither to make siphoning go more smoothly?"

[ending_of]

She frowns.

"Tell me more."

[cross_and_bow]

"The population here has got to be outrageous. Even if fewer than one percent died recently enough in their worlds' timelines - which don't necessarily match up with the local timeline; Shell Bell spent about seventy years here before returning to her home world and finding that only a few months had gone by - that's going to be a lot of folks. We'll want an equivalent of the Crescent for it, and a computer system installed in it to handle transit so we're not just eternally propping open one bottlenecked door to Milliways."

[autokinetic]

"How many worlds does this place hook up to, seventy-three? The first representative from each one we don't have tapped yet will need to go through Milliways to show one of us the place, but that's only a few dozen trips, we can leave Template here to do it maybe since she doesn't have an empire yet."

"Sure," says Template, "I don't even know how long ago I died, back home - I do want to go back, but a couple weeks won't make a difference."

[jovahs_heiress]

"And something to handle people who need to be special-processed because something about the way they died left them duplicated. I don't know how relatively common that will be, but at least some worlds have it as a recurring issue," says Angela.

[cross_and_bow]

"Yeah," shudders Juliet, "I wonder if we can set up something automatic - it's an evil to merge one, but maybe an arrow to set up a permanent fix for it? Will that allow custom parameters? Can Jane make wishes?"