we can live wherever we find ourselves

[dark_light]

Isabella takes awhile catching up with her parents, and the queen.

She is back at the house late that night, not tired but a little ragged. Path alights on her shoulder when she reappears.

She inspects her house.

"I'm going to keep this place, since people sometimes use it as a landing pad to get daemons, and sometimes I want to be able to receive visitors from within the world," she decides, "and a castle in the afterlife won't do that, but I'm going to go build a castle in the afterlife, who wants to see it?"

Comments

[telesonorous]

"Okay, I won't tell," she says.

[dark_light]

"She doesn't have one, so acquiring one would be about what she could do with him that she couldn't otherwise; he looks terrifying but she doesn't live in a place where that gives her any advantage in, say, a fight - which is particularly relevant to Juliet - because there aren't any other daemons for him to engage with and anyone else she meets at home won't know that they mustn't touch him, or if they found out they'd have an entirely incorrect reaction to the information. She has no strong incentive to separate, so she doesn't expect to be able to send him on errands without inconvenience and unpleasantness she could more easily skip. The only thing she could do with a daemon that she can't without is send him to snuggle up to her Sherlock. I think she's waiting to see if Steph will touch her."

[telesonorous]

"Oh," says Helen. "That does make sense."

[dark_light]

"After a fashion, yes, but I suspect Sherlock would feel pressured if he figured it out. If he hasn't already."

[telesonorous]

"Well, maybe he doesn't know about the name. Or maybe he's trying not to," she says hopefully. "Because aren't they supposed to be really good at figuring things out?"

[dark_light]

"Sherlocks are extremely good at figuring things out, yes."

[telesonorous]

"Goes with the name," says Helen. "Which is also peculiar."

[dark_light]

"Yeah, they're a weird case. Some of them actively model themselves after the book character - well, the version found in their worlds' literature, without a Stephirashal attached - but some of them just sort of happen."

[telesonorous]

"Other worlds are funny that way. - Wow, and of course their books wouldn't have daemons in them either, I hadn't even thought of that."

[dark_light]

"I imagine it must make casting actors for television shows and so on a lot easier."

[telesonorous]

"No kidding," she laughs.

[dark_light]

"But I haven't watched any offworld TV, so I don't know how much it matches or fails to match. I'm more than half a century behind on media from this world."

[telesonorous]

"I don't watch a lot of movies, so I can't recommend anything," says Helen. "Are you going to start going after the people who make bad movies about you?"

[dark_light]

"For what value of 'going after'? I'm not going to hurt them or anything. They might get made fun of at a press conference or something."

[telesonorous]

"I was thinking getting them to stop. You don't seem to like it very much."

[dark_light]

"I have no idea what the current legal state of public figures not wanting movies made about them may be. And I have no power to change that. So there's not a good way to stop a determined person, but I can make it clear that I don't approve and hope that torpedoes ticket sales."

[telesonorous]

"Here's hoping," says Helen.

[dark_light]

"Yep. And I will probably accumulate legal power over time, anyway. And maybe I can find a decent filmmaker who wants to make a not-terrible movie about me and help them out and hope that crowds the market."

[telesonorous]

"People will probably want a movie about you with you actually in it more than they'll want ones without," she muses.

[dark_light]

"I don't know if I'd go so far as acting in the thing. But I would endorse a decent movie."

[telesonorous]

"What would a decent movie about you be like?"

[dark_light]

"Mmm... depends on how much interdimensional stuff I want to disclose, I guess, which I won't know until I'm up to speed on what's been going on in my absence."

[telesonorous]

"Well... what do you want to know about what's been going on?" she wonders.

[dark_light]

"What do people think happened? How is the new afterlife affecting things? What's politics like at this point, culture - is there any intersubworld exchange going on to speak of - what's happened with tech?"

[telesonorous]

"There are some people talking to shades from other worlds," says Helen. "I don't hear that much about them, but they're there. I think maybe mortals are more affected by the afterlife than witches, or maybe it's just that the mortals I've met are usually younger than it is, and the witches sometimes aren't - I've known witches who forget once in a while about revenants and shade-dreams and things, and mortals don't do that so much."