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

[calendarofcrime]

"She might."

[autokinetic]

[Hey Glass, your wife is confusing me!]

[thaumobabble]

Glass appears. "How so?" she inquires of Sherlock.

[calendarofcrime]

"I questioned her about her troubling assumption that you are going to overthrow my mother and she does not seem to comprehend the scope of the problem."

[thaumobabble]

"Wait," says Glass, "why is there such an assumption? I'm not going to do that." She thinks for a moment. Then she says, "Aegis, I moved here. On purpose when I was about your age during Marianne's reign."

[autokinetic]

"I didn't know that," says Aegis indignantly. "You didn't write in the Bellbook yet."

[calendarofcrime]

"It is a problem that the first assumption, absent special circumstances, is that a Bell living in someone else's kingdom will conquer it as soon as possible," says Steel. "It is a problem that that is viewed as the default course of action."

[autokinetic]

"Most of us don't live in kingdoms. There's Glass and Sarion and Rose, that's it, Rose is ignoring monarchs and Sarion's been fixing her brain so we don't know yet what her plan is. Angela's got a theocracy with term limits she can wait out, Shell Bell overthrew a technical democracy and Golden a shadow oligarchy thing. Amariah has some clan queens around but she didn't marry one's kid and live with her and I don't think they work like human queens anyway. The default course of action is to find leverage and haul on it. It's just, what that leverage looks like changes world to world."

[thaumobabble]

"I don't have a detailed plan yet, but I'm going to resemble Rose more than anyone, I think," says Glass firmly.

[calendarofcrime]

Steel shakes her head and kisses her wife.

[autokinetic]

"Well, yeah, I didn't know you moved here," says Aegis.

[thaumobabble]

"I'm not going to overthrow the king of Linderwall either!"

[autokinetic]

"What, seriously, you lucked into adequate hereditary monarchs, like, everywhere?"

[thaumobabble]

"Is that so bizarre?"

[autokinetic]

"Yes, what the hell, is your entire world made of cotton fucking candy?"

[calendarofcrime]

"No."

[autokinetic]

"I don't mean literally," says Aegis, rolling her eyes.

[thaumobabble]

"...I suppose it's certainly possible that this is a particularly high-quality world."

[calendarofcrime]

"The question as I understood it was, does this world fail to contain terrible people who do terrible things? The answer is no."

[autokinetic]

"Does your nifty aura thingamabob tell you the cotton candy ratio around here?" Aegis asks Glass.

[thaumobabble]

"If it did, that would be much faster than reading a lot of offworld history books... I think I'd need to see more worlds," says Glass. "Just a sec - I'll take a quick tour of the safe-to-visit ones - Jane -"

Glass disappears.

[calendarofcrime]

[thaumobabble]

Glass is back five minutes later.

"To a first approximation," she says to Steel, "compared to everywhere else, our world is made of cotton fucking candy. Although Samaria's not too awful."

[calendarofcrime]

Steel snorts.

[thaumobabble]

"I'm serious. I don't have a lot of fine detail, but those places - especially Sunshine, eugh - are not nice, and I can't really blame the other Bells for expecting me and my closest circle of friends to be the only remotely acceptable people within a stone's throw. That having been said, Aegis," says Glass, "this place is, yes, made of cotton candy, and so are the overwhelming majority of monarchs, and they can go on being so as far as I'm concerned; I have relatively minor work to do. Poor Juliet, yikes, that world..."