intelligent nametags

[thaumobabble]

Jane alerts everyone to the existence of a new Bell, the nature of her wives and children, and the presence of her mother-in-law.

She stands ready to move in anyone who wishes to attend this new party.

Glass stands ready to receive them.

Comments

[pleasantsurprise]

"I'm starting to follow this general undercurrent of 'wait, there is a queen and it is not Glass?' I'm detecting from my eavesdropping."

[nonbird]

"The fact that there is a queen who is not Glass is mildly unusual," says Lazarus. "But I'm not sure why it deserves all this attention. Stella didn't overthrow the President."

[pleasantsurprise]

"I mean, Glass certainly never objected to the fact that her wives don't care for politics and that left her as default actually-doing-things queen when Marianne passed on - but that didn't stop her from spending most of her spare time on trying to figure out immortality."

[nonbird]

"Marianne is probably not going to pass on," Lazarus observes. "I wonder if she'll retire?"

[pleasantsurprise]

"No idea. I hope Glass doesn't wind up fighting with her about it. Glass is my best friend and Marianne frightens me sometimes and the twins and the wee ones love them both and I don't think it could possibly end well."

[nonbird]

"Doesn't sound like it," says Lazarus. "But maybe they won't. Bells do seem to get along with reasonable political leaders."

[pleasantsurprise]

"Glass likes Marianne, they get along really well."

[nonbird]

"Then they probably aren't going to fight."

[pleasantsurprise]

"That's good!"

[thaumobabble]

Glass wanders by. "Hi! You're Stella's magic-seeing-guy, right?" she says to Lazarus.

[nonbird]

"Yes!" says Lazarus. "That is me. I am that."

[pleasantsurprise]

"He sees magic, and apparently has better modulation than your specs," Kanim says. "Seeing as he's not clutching his face and yelping."

[thaumobabble]

"Ooh, lucky," says Glass, pulling out her specs but not putting them on. "These things are great for anything native to the world, but all my alts just scream magic, I'd go blind if I tried to look right at them even through one lens at a time."

[nonbird]

"...May I see those?" he asks, blinking in fascination at the specs.

[thaumobabble]

Glass hands them over. She enumerates where all the lenses' magic came from: "Witch spell with-cat, witch spell without-cat, got that out of a wizard staff, this one too, this I got a wizard to cast for me, we've got some reformists in the woods, Tony helped me with this dwarf spell, this was the first royal magic I ever got to work for me after I married Tony and the forest double-counted me, this is a dragon spell, that's a different one, this is elf magic..."

[nonbird]

"Goodness," says Lazarus. "That's a lot of magic."

[thaumobabble]

"You can see why I couldn't pick just one," laughs Glass. "And that's a sorceress bit, and this is a unicorn spell, and this is an adaptation of a fire-witch property, and I have some spare lenses that aren't as useful in my sleeves for specialized applications."

[nonbird]

"I wonder if I could design you a lens that does something similar to my power," he says. "I'm not sure how useful it would be. My power is very me-ish."

[thaumobabble]

"I'd have a look, but I'd have to wish my eyes better and I wouldn't learn much," laughs Glass. "Rose thinks I might get something about all the myriad kinds of local magic when I get an aura. Apparently a lot of us did."

[nonbird]

"Do you want a my-power-ish lens, for all the good it may or may not do you?"

[thaumobabble]

"I'd like one, yeah!"

[nonbird]

Lazarus thinks carefully, and then makes a wish. Glass's specs acquire a new set of lenses.

[thaumobabble]

Glass carefully flips all her existing lenses out of the way, and the new ones into place, and sets the specs on her face.

[nonbird]

Her visual world is now very different.

There's a kind of background fog, very greenish, with spots of flame dotted along the ground. Objects and people only exist insofar as they are magical; Liselen is a silvery-blue glow in the shape of a unicorn, Lazarus himself is layered with complex patterns. Mints show up in their coin colour, as though they are enormous self-minted coins. Enchanters' auras surround them with symbolic representations of their specialties, some very abstract, some perfectly mundane - Jellybean has a corona of candy.

It's all very orderly. Ingot powers appear in this way, the enchanting ability like so, auras like that, witchcraft in yet another. Magic created by wishcoins has a very different aspect from magic created by enchanting, although the details of what exactly each bit of magic does are not always clear.

[thaumobabble]

"Oooh," breathes Glass. "It'll take me a long time to learn to interpret all this, but it's sure pretty."