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

[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!

[withmypowers]

"Yep," says Matilda. "Jenny's house."

[incanted]

"Might be the same for the other Matildas, I don't know. The Sherlocks and Tonies all match the others in their sets where applicable," she adds, "which is cute. Except Glass's set have slightly different focuses in their forest that they are princesses of."

[withmypowers]

She laughs.

[incanted]

"You want to see everybody?" She looks around the room. "It'd be crowded for full size illusions but I could half-size 'em and they can all float."

[withmypowers]

"As amusing as that would be, I think I'd rather meet them in person when I get the chance."

[incanted]

"Okay. With any luck it's a short outage. I have better coin output than average and a few of the Bells without Jokers lean on me for larger coins - and Brilliance is the only person who can do the ten-pointers. They have some, but if they're stranded too long they might run low and have to cut corners on important Belling."

[withmypowers]

"You made yourself a verb," Matilda observes.

[incanted]

"We did. It's the whole curing-diseases-resurrecting-the-dead-playing-politics-ushering-in-post-scarcity bit we do when we get our hands on decent magic."