though you turn your face away
Feb. 25th, 2013 11:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jovahs_heiressThey leave Milliways, eventually, and tell Rinnah and Charles about Zion-or-Damaris, and Isabella resumes her usual routine. Singing. Socializing. Interceding about weather or other needs of petitioners. Assisting Delilah. Showering Micaiah with affection. Coaxing Nathaniel out of his shell. (He seems to like Rinnah, and she finds him precious.) And slowly, thoughtfully, carefully - magic.
She is not as quick to add powers to her repertoire as her counterparts, and will install one only after spending a day or two noting instances where it would be useful and determining that the best way to handle this class of problem is with this magic power. She acquires teleportation, but not boosted physical speed; she acquires a perfect memory, but nudges her cognitive processing capacity upwards only gently. She has no "agony beam" but her voice and she goes on sleeping on a nightly basis and her defensive powers are only present because of the unknown hazards that may roam Milliways, not because of any threat she fears in Samaria. She fears no shortage of coins - Micaiah steadily outputs squares just from being in the room with her and a distribution of the larger wishes whenever she practices masses or has harmonics or brings him along for prayers - but exercising circumspection and judicious restraint will surely show Jovah that she is not abusing her permission to use magic, that she does not seek the power for its own sake but to do good in the world.
She is more generous with magic that is not about granting herself more abilities.
Isabella's work is beginning to be noticed.
She is doing nothing overt. She claims no miracles. But everyone is having such a run of good luck these days. The weather is as ever - drought here, flood there, duststorms elsewhere - but there is an established system for handling those things.
Isabella's working elsewhere.
Ships do not sink anymore, and this was never terribly common to begin with or no one would sail - but there is a terrible storm through a fishing harbor off the Jordana coast, and not a single craft capsizes, let alone goes under.
Plague is mysteriously absent - there are, admittedly, prayers for this too, but they bring medicine, they don't prevent the initial lost work, suffering, death. Plague was never so common either, but no angels have seen a flag that was raised for its traditional purpose for a month and a half, now.
Locusts have begun to leave crops unmolested as though of their own accord. Priests dedicating children to the god find their surgeries met with less weeping, and no infections. Nothing in the whole of Samaria will catch fire without someone intending to set it alight. The primitive cars that carry goods from here to there do not skid on ice or flip on rubble.
Angel-seekers, and those who lie with angels for less mercenary reasons, are surviving their attempts at bearing winged babies with astonishing regularity. Isabella isn't adjusting the species ratio, as she suspects it may be a purposeful test of angel-seeker character to give them mortal children and she's mindful anyway of Micaiah's concerns with the children already being this or that - but they don't kill their mothers coming out. No babies are born motherless anymore, in fact, but it's most obvious at the holds, where the most historically dangerous births are undertaken.
And Isabella begins to think, if I have wrought this, and Jovah sees it is good and does not strip me of my wishes for my hubris or command me to stop for my presumption or even contrive to display before me a warning that shows me some terrible consequence of my actions -
then why did he not make the world this way himself, when we settled it, why was I not born into a world already free of famine and disease and pain and babies who grow up without their mothers and destroyed vehicles that kill everyone aboard and infected Kisses that sicken with fever?
She thinks this, but she does not write it down, or speak it, or change anything she is doing in response to the question.
Today.
Or the next.
Yet.
She announces her pregnancy to the hold, and is made much of, and Phebe sends her a bowl of flowers that might be sniping or might be a genuine gesture of conciliation.
She's not the only pregnant angel in the Eyrie. Abjah, a golden-angel type in her thirties who has three children already by assorted fathers (all mortals), is much farther along, and a few weeks before Isabella's wedding, she gives birth.
To a lucifer.
The screaming brings concerned friends and neighbors - there is always screaming during births, but not usually a sudden chorus of it, not usually cries of horror instead of pain. Isabella is one of them, but she's not just there to stare and gossip. Whatever is going on, she can help, and she shoves herself past wings and bodies and sees what's happened.
The thing is twisted. It has - well, several limbs, at least four, maybe eight or ten depending on which protrusions count, and feathers in places feathers don't belong, and it has lungs enough to bawl a suffering screech like no infant Isabella has ever heard.
"Someone has to kill it," says Abimelech, and "who's the father, who besides Abjah has been putting wing to wing?" says Eliou, and "I never thought it would be so horrible" says Zelpha and then someone repeats -
"Someone has to kill it."
"No!" screams Abjah, sprawled in mess and barely covered by her blanket, reaching towards Rhoda, the mortal Eyrie midwife who has the lucifer held in her hands.
"Someone has to kill it," Zelpha agrees, and Isabella pushes forward again and blurts, "Give it to me."
"You? Isabella?" says Eliou.
"Give it to me," Isabella repeats. "I'll take it away."
No one else is leaping to volunteer. Abjah is only weeping softly.
But why should it be that putting wing to wing results in this misery? Why was Isabella born in that world, and not in another?
Well, she can wonder about that all she likes, but she can see to it that this suffering thing isn't born into a world like that. Rhoda hands it over. A pentagon will kill its pain, whatever's hurting it; it screams on, but softer, and there's a stifled murmur from Zelpha while Isabella carries the lucifer away.
"You're going to kill it, not just leave it exposed to cry itself to death," Eliou says, "right?"
"First," says Isabella, "I'm going to pray. But I will not leave it to cry itself to death."
They get out of her way. She cradles the thing in her arms and makes for the nearest takeoff point and flings herself into the air until she's so high that no one will be able to see what's happening.
She can't even determine the lucifer's sex. If it has one at all, it's not displayed in a conventional way.
Isabella does pray first. She has no song for this, just the air around her and her tuneless voice and her incomprehension.
"WHY?" she screams into the blue expanse. No one can hear her here, the air is so thin it won't carry, but her shout is ringing in her ears and the lucifer whimpers. "Why is this something that can happen? Why does Abjah's mistake and her lover's mistake condemn this baby who has made no mistakes until I step in? Who am I? What are you doing? You place it in my path, but there have been lucifers now and again for centuries and no one saved them then! Why? Jovah is good, Jovah is merciful, Jovah makes babies so confused by their own warped bodies that they cry without ceasing even when they've stopped feeling any pain, why? Tell me why and I'll do as you say! Tell me why and I'll see the wisdom in it, Jovah, you gave me a mind, it's not so tiny and ignorant as all that, tell me why and I'll follow your guidance forever, tell me what I'm meddling with so I'll know better how to go! Tell me!"
There is no response. There is never a response to an unsung prayer, one which isn't from the standard books, one which doesn't simply ask for weather or seed or medicine. Weather seed medicine weather seed medicine weatherseedmedicine weatherseedmedicine that is all he can do, that and issue cryptic answers to questions through oracles and make Kisses burn and glow, that is all. Five things. She could count them on the fingers of one hand.
The lucifer is still crying. All her importuning of the god has not erased its deformities.
And it only takes a pentagon to turn it into a healthy angel. A boy, as it turns out. One medium-sized coin. Micaiah makes them easily if she holds a note for longer than a second.
...He made them in Milliways, too, where Jovah was not. Jovah did not even answer a prayer for weather when she tried it there, but the Kiss still worked.
Isabella looks down at the angel baby in her hands, no longer crying, but blinking unfocused eyes, confused.
There is simply, simply, simply no way in which this would not have been a better way to arrange things from the start. Let Abjah have an angel lover if she can't resist, let her get with child by him, and let the baby simply be an angel like Nathan's and Magdalena's daughters were save Tamar. Why should that not work? Why should Isabella have had to bring offworld magic in to do what Jovah - ought to have done? Ought to have woven into the workings of bloodlines when he made angels to begin with? Ought to have seen better, made better?
If he is not going to stop her, if he's not going to strike her where she hovers and the ex-lucifer with her because there is some hidden flaw in the change she's made, then he is not saying she is wrong. And if she is not wrong, then he is.
Something is the matter.
But not with this baby. This baby is now perfectly fine. She will tell everyone that she prayed, and then the child was made whole, and no one will ask her any further prying questions. She'll claim she can't remember the words.
Isabella descends.
She is not as quick to add powers to her repertoire as her counterparts, and will install one only after spending a day or two noting instances where it would be useful and determining that the best way to handle this class of problem is with this magic power. She acquires teleportation, but not boosted physical speed; she acquires a perfect memory, but nudges her cognitive processing capacity upwards only gently. She has no "agony beam" but her voice and she goes on sleeping on a nightly basis and her defensive powers are only present because of the unknown hazards that may roam Milliways, not because of any threat she fears in Samaria. She fears no shortage of coins - Micaiah steadily outputs squares just from being in the room with her and a distribution of the larger wishes whenever she practices masses or has harmonics or brings him along for prayers - but exercising circumspection and judicious restraint will surely show Jovah that she is not abusing her permission to use magic, that she does not seek the power for its own sake but to do good in the world.
She is more generous with magic that is not about granting herself more abilities.
Isabella's work is beginning to be noticed.
She is doing nothing overt. She claims no miracles. But everyone is having such a run of good luck these days. The weather is as ever - drought here, flood there, duststorms elsewhere - but there is an established system for handling those things.
Isabella's working elsewhere.
Ships do not sink anymore, and this was never terribly common to begin with or no one would sail - but there is a terrible storm through a fishing harbor off the Jordana coast, and not a single craft capsizes, let alone goes under.
Plague is mysteriously absent - there are, admittedly, prayers for this too, but they bring medicine, they don't prevent the initial lost work, suffering, death. Plague was never so common either, but no angels have seen a flag that was raised for its traditional purpose for a month and a half, now.
Locusts have begun to leave crops unmolested as though of their own accord. Priests dedicating children to the god find their surgeries met with less weeping, and no infections. Nothing in the whole of Samaria will catch fire without someone intending to set it alight. The primitive cars that carry goods from here to there do not skid on ice or flip on rubble.
Angel-seekers, and those who lie with angels for less mercenary reasons, are surviving their attempts at bearing winged babies with astonishing regularity. Isabella isn't adjusting the species ratio, as she suspects it may be a purposeful test of angel-seeker character to give them mortal children and she's mindful anyway of Micaiah's concerns with the children already being this or that - but they don't kill their mothers coming out. No babies are born motherless anymore, in fact, but it's most obvious at the holds, where the most historically dangerous births are undertaken.
And Isabella begins to think, if I have wrought this, and Jovah sees it is good and does not strip me of my wishes for my hubris or command me to stop for my presumption or even contrive to display before me a warning that shows me some terrible consequence of my actions -
then why did he not make the world this way himself, when we settled it, why was I not born into a world already free of famine and disease and pain and babies who grow up without their mothers and destroyed vehicles that kill everyone aboard and infected Kisses that sicken with fever?
She thinks this, but she does not write it down, or speak it, or change anything she is doing in response to the question.
Today.
Or the next.
Yet.
She announces her pregnancy to the hold, and is made much of, and Phebe sends her a bowl of flowers that might be sniping or might be a genuine gesture of conciliation.
She's not the only pregnant angel in the Eyrie. Abjah, a golden-angel type in her thirties who has three children already by assorted fathers (all mortals), is much farther along, and a few weeks before Isabella's wedding, she gives birth.
To a lucifer.
The screaming brings concerned friends and neighbors - there is always screaming during births, but not usually a sudden chorus of it, not usually cries of horror instead of pain. Isabella is one of them, but she's not just there to stare and gossip. Whatever is going on, she can help, and she shoves herself past wings and bodies and sees what's happened.
The thing is twisted. It has - well, several limbs, at least four, maybe eight or ten depending on which protrusions count, and feathers in places feathers don't belong, and it has lungs enough to bawl a suffering screech like no infant Isabella has ever heard.
"Someone has to kill it," says Abimelech, and "who's the father, who besides Abjah has been putting wing to wing?" says Eliou, and "I never thought it would be so horrible" says Zelpha and then someone repeats -
"Someone has to kill it."
"No!" screams Abjah, sprawled in mess and barely covered by her blanket, reaching towards Rhoda, the mortal Eyrie midwife who has the lucifer held in her hands.
"Someone has to kill it," Zelpha agrees, and Isabella pushes forward again and blurts, "Give it to me."
"You? Isabella?" says Eliou.
"Give it to me," Isabella repeats. "I'll take it away."
No one else is leaping to volunteer. Abjah is only weeping softly.
But why should it be that putting wing to wing results in this misery? Why was Isabella born in that world, and not in another?
Well, she can wonder about that all she likes, but she can see to it that this suffering thing isn't born into a world like that. Rhoda hands it over. A pentagon will kill its pain, whatever's hurting it; it screams on, but softer, and there's a stifled murmur from Zelpha while Isabella carries the lucifer away.
"You're going to kill it, not just leave it exposed to cry itself to death," Eliou says, "right?"
"First," says Isabella, "I'm going to pray. But I will not leave it to cry itself to death."
They get out of her way. She cradles the thing in her arms and makes for the nearest takeoff point and flings herself into the air until she's so high that no one will be able to see what's happening.
She can't even determine the lucifer's sex. If it has one at all, it's not displayed in a conventional way.
Isabella does pray first. She has no song for this, just the air around her and her tuneless voice and her incomprehension.
"WHY?" she screams into the blue expanse. No one can hear her here, the air is so thin it won't carry, but her shout is ringing in her ears and the lucifer whimpers. "Why is this something that can happen? Why does Abjah's mistake and her lover's mistake condemn this baby who has made no mistakes until I step in? Who am I? What are you doing? You place it in my path, but there have been lucifers now and again for centuries and no one saved them then! Why? Jovah is good, Jovah is merciful, Jovah makes babies so confused by their own warped bodies that they cry without ceasing even when they've stopped feeling any pain, why? Tell me why and I'll do as you say! Tell me why and I'll see the wisdom in it, Jovah, you gave me a mind, it's not so tiny and ignorant as all that, tell me why and I'll follow your guidance forever, tell me what I'm meddling with so I'll know better how to go! Tell me!"
There is no response. There is never a response to an unsung prayer, one which isn't from the standard books, one which doesn't simply ask for weather or seed or medicine. Weather seed medicine weather seed medicine weatherseedmedicine weatherseedmedicine that is all he can do, that and issue cryptic answers to questions through oracles and make Kisses burn and glow, that is all. Five things. She could count them on the fingers of one hand.
The lucifer is still crying. All her importuning of the god has not erased its deformities.
And it only takes a pentagon to turn it into a healthy angel. A boy, as it turns out. One medium-sized coin. Micaiah makes them easily if she holds a note for longer than a second.
...He made them in Milliways, too, where Jovah was not. Jovah did not even answer a prayer for weather when she tried it there, but the Kiss still worked.
Isabella looks down at the angel baby in her hands, no longer crying, but blinking unfocused eyes, confused.
There is simply, simply, simply no way in which this would not have been a better way to arrange things from the start. Let Abjah have an angel lover if she can't resist, let her get with child by him, and let the baby simply be an angel like Nathan's and Magdalena's daughters were save Tamar. Why should that not work? Why should Isabella have had to bring offworld magic in to do what Jovah - ought to have done? Ought to have woven into the workings of bloodlines when he made angels to begin with? Ought to have seen better, made better?
If he is not going to stop her, if he's not going to strike her where she hovers and the ex-lucifer with her because there is some hidden flaw in the change she's made, then he is not saying she is wrong. And if she is not wrong, then he is.
Something is the matter.
But not with this baby. This baby is now perfectly fine. She will tell everyone that she prayed, and then the child was made whole, and no one will ask her any further prying questions. She'll claim she can't remember the words.
Isabella descends.
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Date: 2013-02-27 02:06 am (UTC)"How can that be?" she whispers.
"Amazing, ancient, relinquished technology," says Caleb. "The interfaces talk to the ship, the ship is so advanced it can talk back - but it only follows instructions. These instructions make the rain fall, those make the lightning bolts fall, but it doesn't make decisions - and it's not divine. It couldn't have turned a lucifer into an angel."
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Date: 2013-02-27 02:11 am (UTC)"That makes more sense than it doesn't," he murmurs.
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Date: 2013-02-27 02:17 am (UTC)"Quite," agrees Caleb. "The threats are real, though, the lightning bolts quite real, and we've kept our silence to avoid tearing Samaria apart badly enough that there would be no Gloria. It really would destroy the planet if no Gloria were sung."
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Date: 2013-02-27 02:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-27 02:24 am (UTC)"There's - in the oracle caverns, there's a place one can stand, and from there, teleport to -" Alleluia starts.
"Oh," says Isabella, "is that how it's done? It's quite safe to be on the space ship?"
"Yes," says Alleluia. "We've been there."
"Why fly all the way to Sinai," says Isabella harshly, "when I can teleport all on my own?"
And she takes all four of them to the ship, and it's silver and strange around them, and she falls to her knees and weeps again.
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Date: 2013-02-27 02:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-27 02:55 am (UTC)Isabella laughs, a short, almost barking sound.
"The angel Isabella, and Micaiah sia a Manderra ye a Edori formerly registered as Azaziah son of Canaan and Judith," intones a deep, even masculine voice. "And Caleb and Alleluia. How did you arrive on the deck of the spaceship Jehovah?"
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Date: 2013-02-27 02:57 am (UTC)"Why am I the one who gets the whole big long name plus the part I don't want?"
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Date: 2013-02-27 03:01 am (UTC)"We teleported. Not your way," Isabella tells the ship, shortly.
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Date: 2013-02-27 03:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-27 03:17 am (UTC)"You're talking perfectly intelligibly," says Isabella. "But you're a machine, Caleb says."
"It is as he says. Men and women with better educations than yours built me and installed the programs that allow me to communicate. However, I do not truly think, and am not truly aware."
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Date: 2013-02-27 03:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-27 03:28 am (UTC)"Transport between planets, originally. Later programming was added in order to cause me to serve guidance functions for Samaria and ensure it did not deviate from the vision the settlers had for it."
"Guidance functions," repeats Isabella.
"Selecting adequate political leaders, suggesting genetically valuable pairings, producing limited advice in response to oracular questions."
Isabella blinks slowly.
"Genetically valuable pairings."
"Personality factors are also considered, but yes, the primary function of the Kiss response is to ensure that various gifts and talents are not lost to future generations, as well as to keep up the population of angels."
Isabella's eyes slide slowly to the Kiss in her arm.
And then to Micaiah's Kiss.
And then to his face.
no subject
Date: 2013-02-27 03:33 am (UTC)He looks... afraid.
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Date: 2013-02-27 03:49 am (UTC)"The matches are usually very good," Alleluia hastens to add. "Caleb never served as angelico because I was not Archangel long enough, but he would have been if Delilah hadn't recovered, every other Archangel's selected first spouse except for Levi, many famously devoted couples -"
"Except Levi?"
"Delilah didn't ask, when she was first named. She knew what the answer she wanted was, and it turns out that this isn't actually one of the rebellions that induces the ship to destroy the world," says Alleluia.
"But it's not all famously devoted couples, anyway," says Isabella slowly. "Uriel and Hagar fought all the time. Rachel and Gabriel nearly as bad, early on, and Ariel and Johnathan, and Aaron and Miriam -"
"It's not perfect, but you and Micaiah obviously do love each other," soothes Alleluia.
"I can't imagine having paid a moment's attention to a guest in Delilah's office who wasn't even there for a petition if it weren't for the way the Kisses flared," exclaims Isabella.
"I wouldn't have met Caleb if the music machines at the Eyrie hadn't broken, but that doesn't mean we were any less -" Alleluia trails off as Isabella begins to cry again. "Isabella, this is why I wouldn't take you as my own acolyte. I'm the only oracle who knows; at any time only one oracle knows, the previous Sinai oracle died without passing on the knowledge or the successor would have been able to fix the problem with the ship's listening devices that caused all those problems with it being unable to hear prayers. I talked to you, we had that long conversation - I saw how curious you were and how devout and I knew I'd never be able to have you in Sinai for longer than a day without you finding something, asking some question that caught me off guard, and I'd tell, or you'd talk Caleb into telling, and it would devastate you. But now I wish I'd taken you on then and you'd have already known and you wouldn't doubt yourself now, married and pregnant, this is worse, I'm so sorry."
Married and pregnant. The words echo in Isabella's head; her hands drop to her very slightly swelling abdomen. Married and pregnant.
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Date: 2013-02-27 01:09 pm (UTC)Micaiah bursts into tears and hugs his angel.
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Date: 2013-02-27 04:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-27 04:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-27 04:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-27 04:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-27 04:25 pm (UTC)Finally Isabella looks up. "You found this out decades ago. During your time as Archangel, before I was even born, you found out."
"Sinai is - wired a little differently than the other two oracular interfaces," says Alleluia. "The ship can issue a slightly less constrained set of outputs compared to Mount Egypt or Mount Sudan. I went there when it stood empty and the screen said send help in the oracular language that I'd been learning; it told me how to teleport up here, and Caleb caught me at it and followed, and we replaced the broken part of the machine."
"And Delilah's wing was fixed - and that was you, Caleb, wasn't it everyone called you a miracle-worker -"
"Not as much as they'll be calling you one. But I did use a little ship technology to do it. Batteries - I've been inventing my own, but the ones on the ship, that power the music machines, they're much smaller, hold a lot more power, there's one of those joining up a broken connection in Delilah's wing," says Caleb.
"So you found relinquished technology that calls itself a god and you used it to fix a wing and get the - the weather control back into shape - and that was all, you took up your post as oracle and you set up your workshop at the foot of the mountain and you've been pretending piety since -"
"It would destroy the fabric of society, if we were even believed and not ridiculed or stoned as mad heretics," Alleluia murmurs. "And if it went badly enough, there would be no Gloria."
no subject
Date: 2013-02-27 04:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-27 04:38 pm (UTC)"Oh," says Isabella, rising to her feet, "it is. I was trying to figure out why Jovah would let me work a miracle he saw fit not to. And now I see there was no seeing fit at all. I can do more than the ship can. I can make better choices, because frankly destroying an entire inhabited planet full of men, women, and children most of whom would have nothing to do with a failed Gloria is a dreadful choice, whether the machine made it or the settlers who programmed him did. Jovah?" she says sardonically. "Are you even going to try to stop me?"
"While I am programmed for self-defense, I have no weaponry aimed at the ship's interior," says the ship, not particularly emotionally.
"I don't intend to destroy you completely. At least not today. But disarm you - yes, I think that would be a good idea, so you can't turn your incredible if ungodlike power on my world."
"My weapons are also intended to defend the planet from threats outside of Samaria. This has already been necessary once before. I destroyed an invading force with the help of the angelica Susannah to reposition my artillery."
"So I'll have to replace that function, then," says Isabella.
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Date: 2013-02-27 04:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-27 04:57 pm (UTC)"I am not programmed to hide information from occupants of this ship under ordinary circumstances, and I do not have anything that could be described as a desire for self-preservation, but the powers you claim make you a threat to the well-being of the settlers' project -"
"They crippled their children!" cries Isabella. "They took a flaw in human nature and patched it with amputation and lobotomy so we couldn't hurt each other too hard or too cleverly and they gave all that destructive power to something that cannot even change its mind! What do I have to do or be to take over for them and their interests in your programming?"
"The captain of the ship is the only person empowered to change its mission, and captaincy has been vacant since settling; captaincy is meant to be reassumed by -"
"By this procedure or that, but ultimately it's a name recorded somewhere, like my name, or Micaiah's?" asks Isabella.
"Yes."
Isabella waves a hand negligently. A square goes.
There is a silence, and Jovah says: "Welcome to the starship Jehovah, Captain Isabella. All functions stand ready. What are your orders?"
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