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

[pythbox]

[Thank you for trying,] Heimdall says gravely.

[she_sells_seashells]

[You're welcome.] She teleports back to Darcy, and re-visibles. "Well," she sighs. "Now I know."

[sailorheavymetal]

"Yep." She shrugs. "It was a long shot anyway, right?"

[she_sells_seashells]

"I thought it might work. Stars can do a lot. They can have big effects over entire planets. I guess they can't do this one thing." She shrugs. "Thank you for holding the door." She goes into Milliways.

[sailorheavymetal]

"See ya," says Darcy, and she closes the door.

[she_sells_seashells]

Shell Bell dutifully writes down her findings in the Bellbook, but the Tower is empty; she goes home after.

She goes looking for Sherlock, solemn.

[sicaria]

Baking cupcakes.

[she_sells_seashells]

Bell sits in the kitchen and watches thoughtfully. "Found Darcy again," she says.

[sicaria]

"Oh?"

[she_sells_seashells]

"Yeah. I went back to her world for a bit and fixed a bridge that she needed to commute between planets and there's a Tony in her world, who I met. He's thirty-seven and has a Jarvis but no Sherlock, twinned or cloned. And then after Darcy was bored holding the door for me, I tried resurrecting a guy who'd died in a war they had recently, to see if it'd work - and it doesn't. Not with a star, anyway, I don't know about Stella's 'evils'."

[sicaria]

"Unfortunate," she murmurs.

[she_sells_seashells]

"Yeah. I'll push the immortality programs a little harder, I guess." She dismisses her illusion crown and picks up her real one from where it's sitting on the kitchen table.

[sicaria]

Sherlock pauses briefly in the cupcake process to give Bell a kiss.

[she_sells_seashells]

Kisses are so nice.

"Well, I'm supposed to go meet Coin on that depopulated continent, talk colonization," says Bell, waving a hand. "I'll probably be back before the cupcakes are frosted, she can only take so much of me at a time. I love you!"

[sicaria]

"I love you too," she says fondly.

[she_sells_seashells]

Bell teleports.

She waits a bit. [I wonder,] she says conversationally to Sherlock, [if Coin would be late to fewer things if I just gave her a teleportation pow]

And that is all.

[sicaria]

Reflexively, she checks up on the named location with her perception-of-physical-structures power.

[she_sells_seashells]

A mushroom cloud is billowing in the way that mushroom clouds are known to do.

[sicaria]

Sherlock stands very, very still for a very, very short amount of time.

Then she sends her power looking for Coin and brainphones Tony.

[I need a hundred thousand triangles of pain. Right now. I'll explain later if I can.]

[ferratus]

[What—] he starts, but he knows that tone of voice, and he trusts her.

So he turns on the agony beam to the requested amount.

[she_sells_seashells]

Coin is sitting in her office, looking perfectly innocuous.

[sicaria]

Sherlock cannot deal with her right now.

Sherlock can barely deal with the coin she is trying to make.

It turns out that the pentagon that modified her perception of pain was not... quite... sufficient.

But she can't take the time to readjust. She summons the concentration to make coins out of what she's feeling, and as soon as she summons the concentration to stop, she tells Tony [enough] and spends a declawed star to declaw one of her new eight-pointed coins.

Her wish is extremely specific. She wants Bell back. Not a version incompletely reconstructed from her own knowledge or any other secondary information, but the same person who was destroyed in a nuclear explosion a minute ago. She wants Bell back, right here, unharmed and unchanged and with complete memories of her life up to the point where she was murdered.

[she_sells_seashells]

[-er,] Bell finishes her sentence, then blinks. "...Sherlock?"

[sicaria]

"Coin just assassinated you," Sherlock says flatly.

And she expands her perspective on both Coin and her own house, so as to spot any more threats before they arrive.

[she_sells_seashells]

"...Assassinated me? But I'm here. How did I get here?"

There's nothing incoming on the house.

(Coin doesn't, actually, know where Bell's magic comes from, or she would never have done something so incomplete and foolish.)

Coin is receiving a report that the bomb has gone off and as near as anyone in Thirteen can determine it got its target. "Thank you," she tells the report-deliverer, "that will be all."