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]

"I can tell!"

[incanted]

"Anyway, I assume you are very busy, I don't want to tie you up talking about how cute it is that my boyfriend eats a lot of pie if you have other things going on and only meant to drop by for ten minutes to see if Lexi and Persica got along."

[withmypowers]

Matilda laughs.

"All right. I'll get back to you about the perfect recall thing," she promises, and Adularia shimmers, and they teleport away.

[incanted]

Bella goes back to her articles on Eastern Europe.

When she is between articles some fifteen minutes later, she decides to try for a Libby again, by brainphone this time. [Testing -]

[prima_sequentem]

[Excuse me?]

[incanted]

[Oh! Cool! You exist! Hi. Uh, I haven't had to explain magic-and-so-on from scratch before, where do you want me to start?]

[prima_sequentem]

[Your name would be nice.]

[incanted]

[Bella,] laughs Bella.

[prima_sequentem]

[Where you know me from, next.]

[incanted]

[I don't know you. I have met four alternate-universe versions of you and only just now thought to check to see if this world had one. And it does!]

[prima_sequentem]

[How are we currently communicating?]

[incanted]

[It's called the brainphone, it is made with offworld magic. It also has a text channel, busy messages, and conference calls.]

[prima_sequentem]

[What exactly do you mean by 'offworld'?]

[incanted]

[I mean, there are lots of worlds and worldsheaves - universes and collections thereof, not planets - of which this one and the dimensions that it is possible to reach with local magic is only one sheaf, and I have been to some more of them and met people from more still.]

[prima_sequentem]

[And these people included alternate-universe versions of me? Who made a good enough impression on you that you then decided to see if you could dig up a local copy?]

[incanted]

[The four of you work for four of me. There are more of me than of you so far, though, although I don't know if anyone else has actually run sweeps of their worlds for copies, the others ran into theirs through more coincidental means.]

[prima_sequentem]

[And what is it that you do?]

[incanted]

[Have you noticed all those bewildered newspaper articles about oncologists being able to take simultaneous vacations all of a sudden? Among other things, but I think that made the biggest media splash.]

[prima_sequentem]

[I mean in the context of me working for you. What is it that you do?]

[incanted]

[Oh, the other Libbies are on the books as personnel officers. Bells take over the world, is the concise way to put it - there's nuance, some of us don't actually do that, but that's the basic idea.]

[prima_sequentem]

[I see. Maybe now you'd like to explain what you mean by 'magic'.]

[incanted]

[Do you even know about the local kind? Stella's Libby and Juliet's James knew about their local kinds. Pretty sure Slipstick knew about her original world's too although she's since moved worlds, not sure about the Aurum one.]

[prima_sequentem]

[Assume that I don't.]

[incanted]

[I'm going to take that as a "yes, I had my suspicions, but I feel like seeing how much you want me to know". Or possibly a "yes, my aunt is a mage, but...". Okay, well, local magic exists, there are people who have mana capacities and can do magic; I'm one of those, but I lean on it less than my offworld kinds lately. Apparently the word for us is "mage". There are also artificial Devices of intelligence levels varying from "amoeba" to "smart human" who can do or help mages do magic. I know less about the local system than I'd like because until the other day the only people I knew who had any were me, an equally underinformed sister, and a Device whose info is four hundred years out of date, but I recently found a Matilda-template in the Time-Space Administration Bureau and we've been talking, I bet she'll give me books on it if I ask nicely. Would you rather have this conversation in person?]

[prima_sequentem]

[Not particularly. I'm actually kind of busy right now. Go on. What can mages do? What can you do?]