self-devising bejeweled minds!

[incanted]

Bella stays with Brilliance as long as he needs. She has one or two conversations with politicians by brainphone at the same time, but she doesn't leave till he tells her he'd like to be alone, and then she goes. (She tells Lexi that she may have sourced her a Device.)

Comments

[lexicality]

"Thank you, Master's Sister," says Persica.

[withmypowers]

Matilda grins. "I'm glad you two like each other," she says to Lexi and Persica.

[lexicality]

"Me too!" says Lexi.

Persica glimmers. "Yes," she agrees.

[incanted]

"Fun fact, so far I'm the only Bell we've found with a sister," remarks Bella. "The others are all only children."

[withmypowers]

"Interesting. Do other templates vary in number of siblings?"

[incanted]

"Jokers sometimes have little brothers. Who are usually bad news - Angela rescued her brother-in-law but the other ones we know about are serial killer types, one of them was part of the awful that was Shell Bell's time spent as a dead person. The others are onlies. I don't know if the other Matildas have any siblings; I get the impression it couldn't possibly matter less to them if they did. Some Tonies are twins with their Sherlocks, the others are singlets who clone themselves and get Sherlocks, except this one never got around to it," she points at Iron Man's coin color, "and this one is a solo Sherlock. And of course Bells have varying numbers of kids, who, when they have the same other-parent, also are alts of each other, and Angela has four and Rose two last I checked."

[withmypowers]

"I have a brother," says Matilda. "I haven't spoken to him since I was six. Sometimes I forget he ever existed."

[incanted]

"That could easily be true of the other ones too," shrugs Bella.

[withmypowers]

"It probably is."

[incanted]

"We haven't found any lone Lexis, but of course people haven't known to keep an eye out for as long," says Bella.

[lexicality]

"A Lexi without a Bella would be weird. But it's already pretty weird that there are Bellas without Lexis."

[withmypowers]

"I wonder why," Matilda says musingly. "Why all this. The templates, the varying numbers of siblings, all of it."

[lexicality]

"Glass knows stuff. At her Bellparty she was looking everybody over with one of her aura features, right, and saying things like 'I think I'm gay because my Sherlock and Tony are girls!' and so on. That's not really, like, explanatory though."

[withmypowers]

"It's a start."

[incanted]

"It's a cool party trick, anyway. Rose used to have a cool party trick but now we can all do it; comes with enchanting - enchanting works through mindscapes so we can check out our own and other people's and see what they look like."

[withmypowers]

"Mindscapes?"

[incanted]

"Yeah. Do you want me to have a look at yours? It does not constitute mindreading all by itself or everybody at Rose's first party would have declined. Well, all the Bells anyway, that's a thing with us."

[withmypowers]

"What exactly is a mindscape?"

[incanted]

"A visual representation of your mind. Mine is actually the rainbow-sand planet, right now - I don't know what it would've been before I saw the place. A lot of people just have houses they used to live in - Lexi has our mom's house - but Bells tend not to fixate on those."

[withmypowers]

"All right. I bet I know what mine is," laughs Matilda. "Is there a way you can show me?"

[incanted]

"I can look at it and conjure up an illusion, sure."

[withmypowers]

"Go on."

[incanted]

Peer.

[withmypowers]

It's a mansion. An old, pretty, cheerfully decorated mansion.

[incanted]

Illusion!