for the world slows and the stars falter

[jovahs_heiress]

Isabella sings harmonics - including with Micaiah, once he's learned the mass to performance quality; there's a forty-five minute section in the middle that's perfect for extracting and presenting to the wee hours of the morning at the Eyrie.

She flies on intercessions, and generally brings him along, for rain, to halt a blizzard, to calm a storm, and once she finds a plague flag and puts Micaiah down far away from the settlement while she quizzes the healthier community members about their symptoms. Angels rarely catch the plague; she feels safe enough picking Micaiah up again so he can listen to her sing through the verse designated for each complaint (this for fever, that for cough, the other for the rash) and watch the pills fall to earth. The flag comes down and they continue home.

She keeps half an eye on Nathaniel, and quietly informs Baruch of the situation as well so he'll be mindful of the boy's potential sensitivities.

She falls into an assistant role with Delilah - nothing so formal as the situation she had with Linus, because Isabella would be living at the Eyrie either way, but Delilah sends her to greet visitors and has her take notes at meetings and occasionally even asks her opinion on questions about this or that.

And one morning, Isabella opens her door to leave her quarters and sing a pre-dawn duet with Serah - and the hallway is not there.

"Micaiah," she murmurs.

Comments

[truthwright]

Petaal rears up and bumps her nose against Amariah's cheek in a ferrety kiss, then follows Kas and Micaiah into the chosen bedroom.

[jovahs_heiress]

"Now what?" asks Angela helplessly.

[dark_light]

"You hungry? Buy me lunch with your fancy credit bracelets," says Amariah, and she pulls the angel to her feet and leads her back downstairs. They sit at the bar and Amariah explains how it works, and Angela dutifully buys them both meals, although hers - given that it's not even dawn where she came from - is breakfast.

[eversomuchfun]

As they are finishing their food, someone walks in the door.

He pauses.

He looks around him in rapt fascination.

[dark_light]

Amariah notices him and recognizes the face, and narrows it down from a few possibilities based on the observant look. "Hi, Sherlock!" she says, friendly, before she notices that something is wrong, and leans back, narrowing her eyes. "Oh, you're not the one I was thinking of. What is wrong with your soul?"

[eversomuchfun]

"Hello, not-the-Bella-I-was-thinking-of," he says pleasantly. "It was parasitized, if you must know. Gang of vampire assassins. Nasty business all round."

[dark_light]

"That sucks," says Amariah. "I don't actually go by Bella. It's Isabella, which is itself short for Isabella Amariah, and when there's others around my unique nickname of choice is the Amariah part instead. This one's also Isabella and she decided to go by Angela for antiredundancy purposes. Angela, this is an alt of Shell Bell's girlfriend, but not the one I met before. Sherlock, you've got a Bella in your world?"

[jovahs_heiress]

"...Hello, alt of Shell Bell's girlfriend," says Angela.

[eversomuchfun]

"I do, yes. I have been calling her Juliet but she may or may not choose to claim that as her distinguishing nickname."

[dark_light]

"If she lets you call her that I bet she will, unless there's something else obvious," shrugs Amariah. "Oh, I keep forgetting - don't touch the owl, the owl is off limits - people with internal souls do not, I understand, know this implicitly."

[eversomuchfun]

"Noted," says Sherlock. "A pleasure to meet you both."

[dark_light]

"Likewise! I've been here a few times, and me and Shell Bell, who is not here today, are the founding members of the Belltower, which is a place for alts of us and our friends to hang out, but this is Angela's first time and she's from a weird world that I don't fully get yet, so she's reeling a little," Amariah says chattily. "You looked surprised when you walked in - first timer?"

[jovahs_heiress]

"My world is weird? You have an external owl-shaped soul!" says Angela, but she's clearly teasing.

[eversomuchfun]

"I am indeed a first timer," he says. "And enjoying myself so far."

[dark_light]

"You didn't bring your Tony with you. Do you have a Tony?" Amariah inquires. "The other two have them - they're both boys even though Shell Bell's Sherlock is a girl."

[eversomuchfun]

"I—did," he says. "I believe I have already mentioned the gang of vampire assassins."

[dark_light]

"Oh - oh dear," murmurs Amariah. "I'm sorry." Path hoots sympathetically.

[eversomuchfun]

"Thank you."

[dark_light]

"What about Jarvis?" she asks tentatively. "Only one of the others has one of those - but I met him, I went to their world briefly..."

[eversomuchfun]

"Also assassinated. At which point I killed everyone responsible, fucked off to California in search of a compelling reason not to set myself on fire, and found my dear Juliet, who does the trick pretty well. And now you know the story of my life, more or less."

[dark_light]

"What's Juliet's story? I'm a witch and I have an artifact that cryptically dispenses objective truth and I'm working on taking over the world with that and ritual magic. Angela's an angel and she's trying to be a good person so her god will appoint her Archangel. Stella, who's not here today either and I haven't met her but she signed the guest book, colonized Mars and is already calling herself Empress, and Shell Bell is well on her way and she's met Stella and Stella can give out her ultra-powerful sort of magic, so Shell Bell's probably done taking over her world by now too. And Stella has reportedly met a vampire - although not, I think, your kind - of us who is an empress also. It's a trend."

[eversomuchfun]

"Juliet's story is several thousand years old," he says, "but a brief sketch: my world is overrun with all sorts of nasty bitey creatures, of which vampires are perhaps the most numerous but by no means the only. A long time ago, some collection of magic-wielding people with bizarre priorities decided to dump a lovely package of superpowers onto a teenage girl and make her fight off the nasty bitey hordes for them, with the superpowers then passing on to yet another teenage girl when the first was inevitably killed in the line of duty. Juliet is the latest such person; they're called Slayers. I am currently acting as her bodyguard and martial arts instructor in the hope that she will live past twenty-six, which no other Slayer has ever done."

[dark_light]

Amariah blinks.

"...Do you want me to visit your place and sprinkle bayleaves on her and stuff? I can't make her invulnerable, but I can help."

[eversomuchfun]

"Yes," he says immediately. "Please."

[dark_light]

"If this is your first time here," Amariah says, "then you won't know - the place has a time-distortion effect and if everything goes normally you'll leave at the same time you came in. So there's no hurry, but if you haven't been here before you also don't know how routinely you find the door... Jarvis -" She pauses, assessing his reaction to the mention.