festive rainbow mirror summoning!

[incanted]

There are now one dozen Bells.

They and most of their friends are all here on Planet Rainbowsand II, to celebrate the addition of Sarion, the elf one, and Aurora, the one with a sister.

Comments

[bellfounding]

"Are they really."

[toblameforit]

"Yep."

[bellfounding]

"Extravagant Christmas present? A kickass find on your most recent archaeological dig? Inheritance? Built them yourself out of spare parts?"

[toblameforit]

He giggles helplessly.

[bellfounding]

"Ah, I see, you annexed the laws of physics, stuck a flag in them, and gave the natives smallpox."

[toblameforit]

"That is terrible," snorts Tony, "that is a terrible joke, also isn't that what you guys do to your entire universes?"

[bellfounding]

"Stella's the only with an actual flag design, and Mars had no natives," says Pattern, waving a hand. "Golden and Shell Bell are revolutionaries against unjust governments, Angela plans to take office in a manner perfectly typical for her planet, I think Aegis actually plans to try getting elected, Rose is licitly a marquise by marriage and if she's annoyed her monarch yet I haven't heard about it, Amariah's doing diplomacy to witch clans, Cam and Aurora and Sarion haven't taken anything over yet, I guess Juliet is being sort of annexy but I'm taking a leaf out of Stella's book except for Mars read Saturn."

[toblameforit]

"Okay, sure," he says. "Like, I don't think it's bad necessarily, I just definitely get the impression that you guys are kind of proprietary about your worlds."

[bellfounding]

"We talk about jurisdiction and not stepping on each other's toes and so on, and we do feel entitled to name them, but that's pretty much just to cooperate more effectively. If Sarion never recovers enough to take care of her world, she'll let us help. If Golden's husband kicks it and she has to abdicate in her daughter's favor, we'll help Elspeth. We don't have it worked out yet what we're going to do about worlds that haven't got Bells in when ours are running smoothly. Especially since it's not impossible that the other worlds will have Bells crop up in them later. I have no clue what we'd do if we found a very small Bell, come to think of it, it's not impossible, Shell Bell found Milliways when she was six."

[toblameforit]

"...Or, like, a world that's doing fine without you guys," Tony suggests, "I'm pretty sure that's theoretically possible."

[bellfounding]

"Yeah, sure, one of those we'd want to, like, talk to it, set up trade and a Janepoint and so on, but we wouldn't have to run it if it was really fine and populated by happy peaceful immortals."

[toblameforit]

"Do you know what you'd do if somebody popped up in one of your worlds who was better at running it than you are?"

[bellfounding]

"Would probably depend on the world and the other person. If somebody popped up in my Origin who was honestly a better person for the job, I'd probably move, there's like seventy worlds hooked into Downside with no Bells, I checked them, I could go set up there. If somebody showed up who could do all our jobs put together better than us, we'd, I don't know, read a lot, get kind of antsy, I'd probably start looking for a boyfriend on purpose around then."

[toblameforit]

"A boyfriend to, what, distract you from the excruciating boredom of not running a universe?" he teases.

[bellfounding]

"Yes!"

[toblameforit]

He laughs.

[bellfounding]

"I mean, perhaps I could've settled into something less grandiose if I'd never met the peal, if I were just stuck in a nonmagic world and didn't know there was anything else, maybe I'd go to med school or do engineering like you, I don't know, but now it'd be such a step down."

[toblameforit]

"That's cute," says Tony. "And possibly unhealthy. But cute."

[bellfounding]

"Which part of what scenario here would be unhealthy?"

[toblameforit]

"Uh... it would kind of suck if you couldn't deal with not being world dictator or whatever?"

[bellfounding]

"We need things to do. We can entertain ourselves, to a point, but I want to accomplish stuff, not just mess around."

[toblameforit]

"...Isn't that going to really suck in like a thousand years when you don't have any problems left to solve, though?"

[bellfounding]

"So far we're finding stuff faster than we're accomplishing it!"

[toblameforit]

"...That's terrible, though!" says Tony. "Either you spend the rest of forever knowing you have so much work to do you will literally never get it all done, or you finish it all and then get bored? Oh my god that's so depressing!"

[bellfounding]

Pattern laughs. "The work is good, though, the work is fun, never getting it done is only a problem insofar as a lot of the work involves helping people who ideally wouldn't have to wait on us but as long as we're the only game in town we can live with it if they keep coming. And, you know, in the course of all this finding-stuff we are also acquiring more things to do with downtime, I might get antsy but I wouldn't technically be bored with a few million universe's supplies of books and movies and games and people and tourist destinations, you know? They make those faster than we can use 'em up, even boosted for speed. Besides, does your endgame look any less depressing than that, do you think there's literally infinite things to invent?"