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]

"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."

[withmypowers]

Matilda giggles.

[incanted]

"Oh, and colonizing space, we also do colonizing space."

[withmypowers]

"Space has been pretty thoroughly colonized in this universe."

[incanted]

"I don't see anybody living on the other planets in this solar system. Do you mean just conventionally habitable space?"

[withmypowers]

"I mean that if you take the goal of 'colonize space' to be 'put humans on more planets than Earth', which people on Earth tend to when they're discussing it theoretically, it has been done. There are something like a thousand inhabited planets across all the dimensions we know about, and plenty of room for expansion."

[incanted]

"Well," says Aurora. "This is gonna be interesting. Anyway, I'm also motivated by alleviating crowding on Earth itself. And any other crowded planets I run into."

[withmypowers]

"What's gonna be interesting?"