in between moments

[she_sells_seashells]

Shell Bell has not found Milliways by herself since the occasion on which she first met Sherlock.

Today, after eight months, she does.

She makes sure that Sherlock and Tony are both awake, finds that they are but do not want to join her in the bar today unless she finds something interesting, checks her coin supply and finds it sufficient, and steps through.

Comments

[poeticterms]

[One moment, please.]

[she_sells_seashells]

Bell waits patiently, invisibly, outside the house.

[poeticterms]

[You may teleport into the living room,] says Jarvis. [Visibly, please.]

[she_sells_seashells]

Shell Bell visibles and teleports at the same time into the living room.

[pythbox]

Tony is dressed and sitting on the couch. The arc reactor glows faintly through a black T-shirt.

"So," he says, "what kind of other world are we talking about here?"

[she_sells_seashells]

"Mine, you mean? I call it Atlantis, and it has a one of you in it, only he's my age and he has a twin sister. It's in the future relative to here, and it was until recently a pretty nasty totalitarian state where it wasn't just post-apocalyptic, but I have since acquired magic and fixed the place up a bit."

[pythbox]

"Good for you," he says with a quirk of a smile. "Just so we're on the same page: by 'fixed up' you do mean 'took over'? The crown's a hint," he explains.

[she_sells_seashells]

"Oh, did I leave that there? This is only an illusion crown, I left my real one at home." She waves her hand through it by way of illustration. "Yeah, I go around wearing a crown, calling myself Empress of Atlantis, putting bad guys on the moon. There's lots of me, in various worlds, too, and this is a thing we do is take over worlds and be nice to them."

[pythbox]

Tony laughs. "Aren't you kind of young for an empress?" he asks, half-smiling.

[she_sells_seashells]

"One of me did wait until she was twenty-three, but she had a bit of a setback with the previous rulers of her world, she didn't have such nice magic to work with," says Bell. "And if you'd said that to her, given that she still looks seventeen, she'd raise one eyebrow like so -" Bell demonstrates - "and say that she's in her forties, so you've only made a lucky guess that I am in fact nineteen as of recently. So what? I'm doing a dramatically better job than the last dictator. He was evil. He propped up a system that had teenagers killing each other on live national television for populace-quelling and fun and profit. Your alt was on the show, so was his sister, they both won but they had to kill all the other contestants to get out alive."

[pythbox]

Tony blinks, head rocking back slightly, like this news is a physical blow.

[she_sells_seashells]

"Yeah. I wasn't on it, I got picked in the lottery once but my district had this system to train particularly - likely-looking kids to go, so everyone else would be safe and they'd have a reasonable shot," shrugs Bell. "But anyway. I'm glad I didn't wait to take over the world until I was the right age for an empress. I was ready to do it when I was thirteen, if I'd had what I needed then. I probably could've done it younger, but thirteen is when people started recognizing me in Milliways and saying I looked like any of various Her Majesties, and then I knew I could."

[pythbox]

"That is a shit deal," he says.

[she_sells_seashells]

"Yep." She pauses. "I wonder if you have an alt of the last president here, too. There were two other worlds that had yous in them and also had hims. You never cloned yourself, did you? In my world you've got a twin, she's called Sherlock, but in the others you clone yourself when you're twelve and get alts of Sherlock instead, only mine's the only one who's a girl."

[pythbox]

"...No," he says, looking at her a little strangely, "I have never cloned myself."

[she_sells_seashells]

"Did you even think about it? But anyway, clearly alts don't all come together since you haven't got a Sherlock - I've met a Sherlock without a Tony but he had one originally, his died and his Jarvis too but then another Jarvis copied and another Tony installed the copy in his world so he'd at least have him, he was a wreck about it, the matched sets are all really close... Anyway, the last president of my world was named Coriolanus Snow but he had a different name in the other two worlds, Obadiah Stane."

[pythbox]

"We had one of those," says Tony, with a closed-off tone and expression.

[she_sells_seashells]

"You got rid of him? Good. They're trouble. In at least two worlds he killed your parents."

[pythbox]

"In this one," Tony says flatly, "he almost killed me."

[she_sells_seashells]

"In another world he actually did kill you, and Jarvis, and turn Sherlock into a vampire, and in mine there was the whole being an evil dictator and also really fucking creepy prostitution backroom deals, and yeah, it's a bad-news template. But hey, all the ones I know about are gone now. What's the thing in your chest?"

[pythbox]

He looks down at it, up at her.

"Arc reactor," he says. "It's a power source."

[she_sells_seashells]

"What's it for?"

[pythbox]

"Keeping me alive," he says, lightly, like a brush-off. Except not at all.

[she_sells_seashells]

"...D'you want me to fix whatever it's protecting you from?" she asks.

[pythbox]

He gives her an intensely suspicious look.