it's a dead man's party

[self_composed]

The guest list winds up being pretty huge.

To start with, there are now eight Bells. Pattern isn't bringing anyone besides herself, and Aegis no one besides herself and her Whistle, but everyone else -

Between Alice, the Joker, the rescued Queenie, Kas, Micaiah, and Sue, plus Ghosty who Amariah picked up on her way home, that's seven Whistles. (Stella thinks ahead: there is a soundproofed orgy chamber away from the main party awning. With a few nodes off of it in case more than one orgy forms; she can think of at least two other likely ones.)

There's an equally absurd number of Sherlocks and Tonies if you count them together. They have Juliet's matched set, Shell Bell's matched set, two other matched sets from Bell-less worlds (one with souled vampire, one both human), a stray Tony, and a stray Sherlock from Downside.

Amariah grabbed a random Libby on top of the random extra Whistle, but at least she's not incorporating anyone from home.

Golden's bringing much of her family and many of her friends - although Edward is staying home, that still leaves Elspeth and Jacob, Alice and Jasper with little Brandon, Rosalie and Emmett and little Henry, Nathan accompanying his mate and their child Kerron, Esme and Carlisle and their Lily, Addy, and Elena who'll get to see her brother. Golden claims that this is a conservative list and she could easily have produced another twenty enthusiastic guests. Stella doesn't doubt it. She puts up a few signs reading Please Conduct Adult Conversation Only Via Brainphone. Little Half-Vampires Have Good Ears And Perfect Memories. As a last-minute surprise, Golden has taken Elspeth's suggestion to bring Edward's deceased mother Elizabeth, too.

Juliet has, on top of her boyfriend and his - progenitor? - her tiny Libby, James, a tagalong thereto called Virginia, and a ghost called Minnie, plus Giles.

Angela's list is more modest: her, her husband, and their friends Alleluia and Caleb.

Shell Bell is responsible for half the Sherlocks-and-Tonies all by herself, a tagalong called Pepper, and also someone called Darcy and also Matilda. (Shell Bell is also the reason Angela is not inviting her brother-in-law.)

Stella herself is responsible for inviting Libby, Orfeo, Chris, Mary, Anna, Sandy, Eights, Chainsaw, Lazarus, Kolya (who is informed that it would be awfully inconvenient for a majority of Bells to all have to coordinate on pretending he doesn't exist when only one of them has even met him to be able to identify him in the first place, so he can simply stay home if he's planning to be hidey), and Bridget.

Stella sets up a name tag system. Everyone will have a tag stuck to them. Solo persons - a minority - will just have their names. People with template names and nicknames will have both stamped on automatically. ("Hi! I'm a Bell, and you can call me Stella!"; "Hi! I'm a Whistle, and you can call me Alice!" "Hi! I'm a Sherlock, and I don't have a distinguishing nickname yet but as soon as I pick one it will appear here!")

She conjures up a nice buffet of food and beverages which will stay its correct temperature until consumed, and assorted synthetics for the vampires (labeled not for human consumption), and dishes and flatware (all glass; even some of the food-eating guests might dissolve anything else) and fusses with the awning opacity until it lets in just the right amount of sun, and, what the hell, she throws in a stage in case Angela wants to sing or she decides to play the flute or someone decides to pentagon some other performative skill to entertain the crowd. She makes sure there are enough bathrooms for all the people who still need bathrooms.

She puts out a few tables here and there with little bowls of squares and triangles - a mix of her glowing red and Alice's shifty black - in them for everyone's convenience. She accumulates coins in those sizes faster than she generally uses them and has a great many, so there are plenty for anyone to dip and wish if something comes up. She double-checks to make sure the Martian ground rules prohibit any misuses available for those size coins.

Jane gets one of those high-tech holographic projectors, on wheels, which she promptly manifests in, drives around the floor, and makes faces through.

Comments

[pythbox]

"Manage what you want?" he repeats. "How am I meant to do that? And why should I need to? If you are nearly omnipotent and your ethics cannot prevent you from needless violations of other people's privacy and autonomy, that is a problem that you, urgently, need to solve."

[autokinetic]

"There's this thing we do," says Aegis. "We ask ourselves: What do I want? What do I have? How can I use the latter to get the former? And having more power lets us be more precise and nicer and more ethical at getting only what we want and not any extras that we don't need that we might not really, truly want. And we don't want to hurt people, or go around needlessly violating other people's privacy and autonomy, and with wishcoins we can avoid it even if something very, very important that might ordinarily conflict with those things is on the line. But at the end of the day it always comes down to what we want. Angela's god is false and Amariah's don't care and mine's probably going to send me a Mother's Day card - we answer to ourselves. I don't think wanting to know things that have no obvious application would ever tend to trump others' personal privacy. But if something were going to... curiosity is high up on things that motivate Bells. I'm not trying to scare you. I do think Juliet must like you, I'm not planning to pry into your head, and you aren't from my jurisdiction anyway. But for keeping conversations a little friendlier than this one turned out, you could consider not being conspicuously, temptingly opaque."

[pythbox]

"I fail to see at what point in this conversation I could have usefully been more inconspicuous, since you leapt down my throat the moment I failed to volunteer information about my personal history."

[cross_and_bow]

Juliet chooses this moment to wander by. "This looks distressingly hostile," she says. "What's happened?"

[autokinetic]

"Your Watcher got me curious and wasn't thrilled with the results," says Aegis.

[cross_and_bow]

"...Oof. Uh, I wasn't linked up and don't know you as well as the others do, are there special circumstances or are you garden-variety thereabouts?"

[autokinetic]

"Far as I know, no one has ever kept a significant secret from me specifically, that wasn't both relevant and being kept for reasons contrary to my interests, there's that," says Aegis.

[cross_and_bow]

"Okay. Maybe when your Whistle comes out you wanna ask him about getting a mindreading install like how Stella and Angela and Shell Bell have. And don't mind Giles. I think he gets it about relevant information. Giles, what's your half?"

[pythbox]

"I am still unclear on why she felt that the best response to my refusal to tell her why I am wary of mind upgrades was to start listing the ways she might obtain the answer without my consent," he says grumpily.

And to Aegis, he adds: "This information has nothing to do with you. Its only conceivable use to anyone, besides making me uncomfortable every time it comes up, is to corroborate a warning that a kind of magic you are never going to study has nasty pitfalls that almost certainly wouldn't affect you anyway."

[cross_and_bow]

"Also, reminding me of it could prompt me to ask if there's anyone you want pulled from the afterlife," Juliet says archly.

[pythbox]

"...I don't know," he says helplessly. "I will have that conversation with you later when I've thought about some things."

[cross_and_bow]

"Okay. Aegis, am I right in thinking that if you were trying to keep a secret from somebody you'd think it was very nice of them to tell you where they could get it besides from you?"

[autokinetic]

"Yeah," says Aegis. "And what'd happen if I didn't cough up, too. Otherwise maybe I piss them off not telling and they just find it out some other way and later I need them to like me and they don't - or maybe I don't tell and they're not mad but I never even know that they could've just looked it up someplace else and are capable of yea much restraint and I need an evaluation of their character later - or maybe I do tell because it turns out the alternative is getting drugged and half-paralyzed and gosh sure would've been nice to know that they wanted to know I could do this thing back when telling them would've been relatively painless, huh? - or maybe she's the admin Downside and she knows literally everything already and now I know how restrained she's not and also know not to waste time predicating any behavior on her being ignorant of anything - or something. Why wouldn't I want to know exactly how much my secrets were under my control?"

[cross_and_bow]

"Okay, but," says Juliet, "if one hasn't already thought through all that sort of thing, then learning something about how much one's secrets are under one's control can just sound like bad news or like escalating, they don't necessarily like learning it even if it was already true. If you - geez, you haven't interacted with civilians since you were six apart from the last twelve hours, have you? All kinds of shit probably goes without saying when everybody in the conversation's ranked and uniformed."

[autokinetic]

"Well - Renée and Charlie wrote, but, yeah," says Aegis. "Lot of explicit power structures. I have bad instincts?"

[cross_and_bow]

"I'm not gonna say they're complete shit, I'd have to talk to you a bit more to know that, but they're probably not well-calibrated. Giles isn't your C.O. just because he's old enough to vote. If he doesn't tell you something you're not going to wind up killing people on his say-so in the absence of critical information or running into some organizational incompatibility and ending your career."

[autokinetic]

Aegis considers this.

"I probably need, like, a month planetside before I'm decent company for anybody but Sue and the other child soldiers and copies of me," she remarks. "There were totally shades of mouthing off to a colonel back there. Different content same attitude. Sorry, Giles. I know you're not a colonel."

[cross_and_bow]

Juliet snickers. "Just don't do it to Renée. I can just imagine the look on her face."

[autokinetic]

"...I can't," murmurs Aegis.

[cross_and_bow]

"...Didn't you hex up perfect recall, doesn't she send pictures?"

[autokinetic]

"I did. She does. It's not the same, though, memories a decade out of date and still photos, is it? I can't picture what'd happen if I acted like she was Colonel Beckstead telling me I couldn't have access to ansible communications with the fleet."

[cross_and_bow]

Juliet hugs her. "She'd get huffy and tell you that she didn't mean anything by whatever prompted the attitude and that you were a very touchy young lady and maybe she won't bake those cinnamon buns after all," she says. "And she'd get over it in about fifteen minutes and hug you. And bake you cinnamon buns."

[autokinetic]

"Heh," says Aegis, and she hugs back tight.

[mind_game]

[Hey, Aegis,] says Jane, broadcasting to all three members of the conversation (as the newly installed brainphone upgrade informs them), [I think you have one of these at home. He's got a different name and doesn't wear glasses and I wasn't paying a lot of attention so I didn't notice right away but the face matches one in the I.F. personnel database.]

[cross_and_bow]

"Ooh, multiple Gileses belonging to sketchy bureucracies," says Juliet.