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

[mind_game]

Jane shares.

[self_composed]

"...About the new worlds that show up periodically. Are all of ours attached? We only know about Shell Bell who's not here, and Golden and Juliet and Template. What about me and Angela and Aegis and Amariah?"

"I should really think of a better name," muses Template. "Not much of a theme, is it."

[ending_of]

"Yours are," she says, pointing to Golden, Juliet, and Template. "And the one you mentioned who isn't here. None of the rest are. I could connect to them, except yours," she says, indicating Amariah. "You have an afterlife that's taking precedence."

[autokinetic]

"...So on our worlds there's just nothing? If you connect us do you get people who've died in the past or just going forward?"

[dark_light]

"...Can you tell anything about mine besides that it exists?"

[ending_of]

To Aegis: "Past, present, and future."

To Amariah: "No."

[dark_light]

"Well," says Amariah. "I suppose we may have another project on our hands."

[self_composed]

"Hook me up," says Stella, "it's better than nothing - at least it is now."

[autokinetic]

"Me too."

[jovahs_heiress]

"Agreed."

[luminous_regnant]

"First things first, Amariah," says Golden dryly. "This is already a multi-year project and we are not patient sorts. Yours can be next. Perhaps it is lovely and not urgent at all and all it needs is a loop back so that people can interact with their dead."

[dark_light]

"...Maybe. I'm unsettled by the way daemons disappear where humans and witches leave corpses, though, I don't know what to make of that now."

[ending_of]

"I've connected all requested," she says. "There are a lot more dead people in the queue now."

[luminous_regnant]

"As long as we can order them sensibly, we can get the urgent ones out of the way soon enough," says Golden. "And have the process streamlined in time for the others."

[she_sells_seashells]

The Bells hash out to-do lists.

Those with stable empires - Shell Bell, Golden, and Stella - will set up processing on their end for receiving and repatriating dead people. Golden's going to have to accelerate her unveiling process a bit; Stella will have to work a bit harder on integrating with the governments of Earth which she has thus far left largely unmolested.

Golden will set Elspeth to writing instructional materials for those who'll awaken in the catacombs going forward. (Nathan is induced to door to Aurum and fetch her so she can be linked up and summarized at. She begins work on a first draft.)

Template (who still hasn't settled on a better nickname, but is considering "Pattern") will take a while collecting representatives of each world connected to Downside, and going in with them to install a Jane-point therein; she'll then return to her own world, find a way to explain herself to her parents, and catch up with everyone else in terms of empire-building.

Juliet, Angela, and Aegis will work on their empires, and whenever it is possible they'll set up their own processing intakes.

Amariah will have no dead natives to process. She'll act as support and be the first port of call for appeals processing.

Jane's going to acquire the ability to see life histories and worlds-of-origin at a glance, and she'll flag anyone who's not only "sketchy" but also dangerous; these will only go to worlds fit to hold them, if applicable, and otherwise be shunted into Downside-at-large, newly inhospitable to unfriendly violence.

Once all the Bell-operated worlds are smoothly reintegrating the dead, they'll take what they've learned and start branching into the worlds that have no such leadership, starting with the worlds in which they already have friends to help show them the ropes and moving out from there.

[mind_game]

To avoid latency issues, Jane's going to want to do most of her processing about dead people locally. She whips up a design for a few vast floors' worth of sweet hardware - hybrid designs, part Jehovah, part Tony's inventions, part her own wishful thinking - to put under the cliffs, more than enough to support everything she's going to do there with only occasional pings to her hub in the Belltower even after the administrator blesses her with judgesight. There's a few racks of ansibles in there too; she doesn't want to be bandwidth-limited to the point of pinching off a part of herself. She's going to have cameras and microphones and projectors everywhere, and she can wake up anyone she wants based on when they died, where, and how easy they'll be to reintegrate. Everybody will get the latest edition of Elspeth's pamphlets when they wake up and can talk to Jane if they need to be processed with a loved one to make decisions about where to go - she can of course send them back to sleep to wait for people who have not died yet. Also she now speaks all the languages that there are.

I think I might be God, she muses when she starts pouring into the new swag.

[autokinetic]

Am I the Virgin Mary?

[pythbox]

Sue snickers.

[ending_of]

Even the administrator is amused.

Speaking of inhospitality to unfriendly violence, she empowers every Bell present to freely distribute the choosiness-toward-injury power, in addition to having it included with the torching package in everyone who arrives here through normal channels.

[autokinetic]

"Nice," says Aegis. "You can be Persephone. ...Wait, do you have a name?"

[ending_of]

"I don't prefer to use one," she says.

[mind_game]

I want to be able to do that too, Jane pipes up as she starts hunting for initial emissaries for Pattern to follow into Milliways. She pokes Jarvis about his door-opening trick. She wants it.

[self_composed]

"Do you care if we refer to you as Persephone?" inquires Stella.

[ending_of]

"I'd rather you didn't," she says, obliging Jane's request.

[poeticterms]

He suspects, but has never been able to directly prove, that it has something to do with being-a-house in the body/identity sense. He'll happily transmit the mostly-unconscious difference between the action of opening a door and the action of opening a door to Milliways, but he's not sure how much good it will do Jane, who is thoroughly not a house.