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

[she_sells_seashells]

"Yeah. So what do you do? I bet some kind of engineering, but I mean specifically." She glances around the house for clues. "I'm pretty clueless about what my Tony gets up to in the basement with the gadgets, and I know less about what it'd take to write a Jarvis, which mine didn't do." Pause. "Hm, the only Tony with no Jarvis is the one who had a Sherlock all along, I wonder why, maybe the writing Jarvis and the cloning are both about being lonely or something."

[pythbox]

"...I do pretty much every kind of engineering," says Tony. "And some superheroing on the side."

[she_sells_seashells]

"Ooh, superheroing. Need any help, as long as my friend holding the door isn't impatient yet?"

[pythbox]

"Nah," he says, "I'm good, thanks."

[she_sells_seashells]

"Okay." [Hey, Darcy, I've just been referring to you as "my friend who's holding the door" so far, do you care if you come up in conversation enough for identifying you to make sense?]

[sailorheavymetal]

[...Nah, not really,] she says. [Wait, are you actually talking to him? He didn't just blow you off?]

[she_sells_seashells]

[I went through Jarvis; when I just teleported invisibly to where he was he didn't look ready to have a visitor right then. And Jarvis wanted to know if my time here was limited and I said it was so my guess is that mattered.]

"My friend who's holding the door is learning to be a superhero, too," volunteers Shell Bell, since this is apparently okay.

[sailorheavymetal]

[I'm impressed,] says Darcy, although she doesn't specify by what.

"Really?" says Tony. "And here I thought I was the only one."

[she_sells_seashells]

"You did? I could maybe introduce you, but I'd have to take you to where she is, since if she leaves the door it closes and I have to wait to find a new one and that will take months, possibly many. I'm not as lucky with the door as some people."

[D'you wanna meet him if he's up for it?]

[sailorheavymetal]

[...Sure!]

"Where, in fact, is she?" wonders Tony.

[she_sells_seashells]

"Asgard," says Bell. "...Is Asgard public knowledge? I think it may be another planet. I went home with her so I could fix their bridge."

[poeticterms]

"Asgard," Tony repeats, and shakes his head.

"Traditional home of the Norse gods," volunteers Jarvis.

[she_sells_seashells]

"I met a person called Sif there and another one called Heimdall who appeared to have been supervising a previous conversation without having been present? Is that informative?"

[poeticterms]

"Yes," says Jarvis.

Tony shakes his head and smiles.

[she_sells_seashells]

"I don't tend to get mythological references and so on, I have a spotty and culturally impoverished education. I've been going to Milliways since I was six and staying until I ran out of seashells to trade for food, so in some ways I'm very cosmopolitan albeit without much information about what things are and are not common across worlds, but I spent the rest of my childhood in a beach town pretending to be slightly crazy, attending an underfunded school designed to turn out docile fisherfolk, working on a clam boat, and generally existing in a context that has lost all its previous ties to Earth history that isn't a fictionalized version of the Roman Empire."

[poeticterms]

Tony blinks. "Okay, that's impressive."

[she_sells_seashells]

"...Which part?" Bell asks, tilting her head.

[poeticterms]

"Being an empress, on a resume like that?" he says.

[she_sells_seashells]

"Oh, I could stay in Milliways for a long, long time if I brought enough seashells and didn't eat much," says Bell. "I talked to everyone and read a lot and watched a lot of video and learned everything I could. And after your alt and Sherlock put me on their tab instead - they're rich, you got a lot of money for winning on the TV show, everyone else outside the Capitol was dirt poor - then I stayed for months instead of weeks until I faked my death and stowed away on their train to move in with them. It's possible I'm actually twenty now by subjective time, but I've never added it up."

[pythbox]

Tony shakes his head. "Yeah, no, still impressed."

[she_sells_seashells]

"All right, be impressed, then," laughs Shell Bell. "So do you want to come meet Darcy?"

[pythbox]

"Darcy... your superhero friend?" he hazards.

[she_sells_seashells]

"Yeah, she has a magic space hammer that only lets the worthy lift it that she calls Mewtwo because she can't pronounce whatever its real name is and she is learning superheroing from her friend Sif."

[poeticterms]

"Mjolnir," supplies Jarvis. "In all likelihood."

[she_sells_seashells]

"That doesn't sound very much like Mewtwo at all," Bell remarks.