Bell Swan Ω "Shell Bell"

The Bells are assembled, except the ones missing into the unknown world.

Shell Bell opens her aura up as far as it will go. (Back in Atlantis, Neptune glows with the spillover, snuggled up to Tinia.)

She reaches for the door.

She gets Atlantis.

She tries again and gets Downside.

"It doesn't look like I can get it," she says softly. "It looks like they're stuck until -"

The door opens, again.

"Thank fucking everything," Aegis says, "hello. Aether, Celo - these are - everybody and then some."

"Tab," supplies Tab.

Meanwhile, Glass staggers in the direction of the bathroom. [THAT IS NOT A NICE WORLD.]

[We fucking KNOW,] says Aegis, [how broke is Jane?]

[Very broke,] says Juliet, [tried a tenner, didn't go.]

[I might be able to do something now you're here,] Stella says, [with aura.]

Shell Bell's not anywhere near the Janepoint, nor talking to Jane, when the node in the palace starts beeping like it's getting paid. It will go right on tirelessly beeping until someone pays attention to it, but it doesn't have to be Bell.

Shell Bell goes home with her Sherlock and puts a Jane-point in her floating palace. There's no Internet to speak of in Atlantis right now, but there's a little snack in the moon city - Jane gets a half-ansible plugged into a deserted office terminal and uses Shell Bell's ring to pull away the other half into her Belltower hub - and some in District Three - another half-ansible to this largely self-contained network, this one in Tony and Sherlock's house.

She'll figure out how to announce the imminent return of the dead soon. First, there's a stray Sherlock back in Milliways who may need a merger - depending on how he came to be dead - and who may have a Jarvis at home to be networked with the other one. There's also at least one Jarvis that she's the only Bell to have met - the one belonging to the lone Tony who has no Sherlock to match - and so she's the one who's going to go extend the offer to that one. (And politely inquire if Jane may eat that Internet, too, less Jarvis, and have an ansible point installed. There's no reason for Pattern to have to do all the work. That world might not even be hooked up to Downside already; she should check in with that Tony and with Darcy and perhaps Heimdall about the subject.)

Also -

[Hey, Bells, after we're all settled down some, let's throw a party to celebrate fixing Downside.] Jane can relay through their ansible gems; she counts as being in every world she's got her tendrils into.

[I'll host on Mars,] Stella volunteers at once.

Shell Bell smiles.

She gives her Sherlock a kiss and asks to go back to Milliways to see about some Jarvises.

Jane, ever-obliging, picks her up and puts her down.

Bell goes a-hiring. Magic is of considerable use in sorting applicants; she narrows thousands down to manageable dozens before she even meets them.

The fact that she has abolished the Hunger Games - she for some reason had to make an announcement about this; people were unclear on the concept of benevolent dictatorship - means that the Career facilities have been abandoned by their students and their staff are out of work. She writes a retraining pamphlet, but here at least are a handful of school-shaped locations where she can start to funnel Capitol children. They don't have room for everyone. She hires caretakers and teachers; she magics up another building in the hole in the ground where the Capitol once sat.

(She will put facilities there, but not her own capitol; for capitol purposes this is tainted ground. For the time being she's still operating out of Sherlock and Tony's house, not that she's made this public. Ultimately she plans to transition into an artificial island. Which will habitually sit in the water, off the coast of Four, but will be possible to render airborne as desired.)

She casually renders tracker-jackers extinct on the first occasion she thinks about it.

When there are places to put each Capitol minor, she formally declares everyone age fourteen and under innocent, and situates the ones willing to leave where they're at and all the ones who can't form preferences yet divided between the three ex-Career schools and the new one. They'd all fit in the new one, but this way personality conflicts or similar can be handled by simple transfers, and the ones in the District are better situated to put the kids in contact with potential adopting families anyway.

Kids fifteen and up have sometimes started internships. She expects to find most of them innocent too - heck, she expects to find most of the adults innocent - but that is the age at which she begins trials.

The trials - such as they are - are fairly summary. A decent fraction of Avoxes committed actual crimes. These have their tongues restored - she is not a barbarian - but they have to stay on the moon, with everyone protected by the new ground rules. The others are sent back to wherever they came from, if all they did was try to run away or sass a Peacekeeper.

She takes down the fences.

She hands out cornucopias like they're confetti.

She consigns every Capitol resident who worked on the Hunger Games in any capacity except - grudgingly - the stylists and prep teams, to a life on the moon.

She interviews the stylists case-by-case and finds them personally repellent but not, probably, dangerous, and they get to go home.

Everyone in Snow's administration, with the exception of one pathetic intern who spent her one month on the job working on a proposal to offer more generous tesserae terms in what seems to have been a genuine if twisted attempt to be helpful: mooned.

Most of the useless typical Capitol people: not mooned. (Although she does screen them for bad behavior first. Unless their "employees" decide to put in personal appeals, everyone who has ever hired the intimate services of a coerced Games victor: is mooned.)

She magics up another building. This one is sort of a hostel for those who leave the Moon and are not of an age to be likely to find adoptive families. And by the time she needs to staff this one, she has District Thirteen employees, courtesy of Coin, to man the place and provide slightly more lucid career counseling than what the reeling District residents could produce. Careers per se are not going to be strictly necessary anymore, but people do like to have things to do with themselves.

Not everyone's thing to do with themselves can be being the Empress of Atlantis. On a floating island with a castle made of coral and stained glass. With a beautiful consort by her side who radiates love and magic.

(Bell makes herself her Coral Palace by the end of week two of the Capitol's relocation. She is not really patient when she does not have to be.)

Shell Bell is dancing on literal air when they leave Milliways.

Stella is an even more fortuitous find than Amariah was, and Amariah was amazing. Stella has given her everything she needs. Stella is a Space Empress and Shell Bell is going to follow right after her, probably with slightly less Space.

The fact that Shell Bell has to torture her girlfriend to accomplish anything in this department is a mood dampener, but she went and had a look at the memories of those "tastes" Stella provided and - well. They're bordered pale, even the big one. She's spooked about looking any closer; she managed to neglect to ask Stella before she went back to her Empire if looking at pain-related thoughts hurts. She looked at the square-sized memory and it was... too close to call. Stella might not even know the answer - mental opacity could easily interact somehow with mindreading. Stella might be protected against painful reading where Shell Bell, with only a wished-for imitation, might not.

But Sherlock seems content, and so -

"We're gonna take over the wo-orld, we're gonna take over the world, we're gonna take over the wooooorld," Bell sings, dancing into the house from the bar. (She can dance now. She is not in the least danger of tripping, wouldn't be even if her feet were touching the ground, and if she does anyway, she will float.)

Shell Bell tries not to think too hard about Tony's sketchy Capitol friends or why they'd send him a train. She stows away for the short trip. She wears her godawful stupid dress. She paints triangles over her eyes and her cheeks, and squares around them, and she irons ringlets into her carefully divided hair, pins it up, and attaches the hat to the heap of white and blue.

She tucks her amulet under her neckline - the chain is fine enough to look like some more conventional piece of jewelry.

She holds her stick in her hand and stuffs her hand in her pocket.

It's early when they get there, barely dawn. The poll workers are setting up, but voters haven't accumulated yet.

She scopes out a starting place.

Leaning on a wall of a building across the street, pretending to be bored, forgetting not to chew her lip and tasting makeup - she finds one.

There are decorative torches, here and there, and that one has a bit of the Panem flag dangling quite near it in the calm. The flag has a cord. The cord touches the arch of the dome. From there she can get everything.

She waits for Sherlock to find where they'll duck when the panic starts. And when she gets the nod...

She assumes control of the torch. Yes, it's real fire, that's useful.

It flickers, it sways, it leaps.

It touches the flag, and maybe it wouldn't have caught, normally, but she makes it catch. The flag goes up in smoke; the cord catches and burns.

She sends the fire a quarter of the way around the circle at the base of the domed roof, first, before letting it climb any higher. She can still see all of the borders of the fire, but it's going to be implausible for her to keep it that way much longer.

People have started to notice - a poll worker, someone walking her dog. They don't seem to know what to do about it.

"Time to duck out of sight?" she murmurs to Sherlock in her best imitation of a Capitol accent.

A reasonable amount of time later, when the Belltower is presentable even to magical Empresses of this or that, Bell and Sherlock and Tony take Isabella and Path and Kas and Petaal home with them.

"You're going to have to show her what she needs," Bell says to the Starks. "I don't know which locations or objects are relevant. Or which of you is going to be her someone-he-met focus."

Shell Bell doesn't get off the train immediately when they hit District Three. Tony has one last miserable speech to deliver, and the train will then stick around long enough for everything to be unloaded. Bell sits tight in Sherlock's compartment with the TV on, keeps her wits about her, and awaits cues from either Stark twin.

The second time ever Bell finds to Milliways, she is better prepared. She has a bigger bag of shells with her, and she knows that she'll need to pace herself with the food to stay as long as she can.

She is still six. As far as she can tell, she is the only child in the place - everyone else is an adult or at least in their mid to late teens.

Except - oh, there is a girl her age, over there. (Only maybe not. Last time she was warned that appearances can be deceiving.) But she's certainly worth investigating.

Bell drags her shells over in that direction.

Shell Bell finds Milliways once when she is eighteen. She has been there for two days now, setting up her sign ten minutes out of every waking hour, wiping down tables for her quarters in the staff area, eating buttery potatoes (she has been told that this is a complete nutrient package, for humans). Her wand is holding a bun of hair in place on the back of her head. Her shells are stashed safely in her room; she's budgeting carefully and she'll pay her tab when she leaves.

No one's talked to her due to the sign yet. They don't always. She sets it up anyway, like clockwork, so everyone gets the chance.