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

[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.

[eversomuchfun]

He doesn't react visibly, just waits for her to continue.

[dark_light]

"...Could open a door with perfect reliability, but everyone else is stuck with some amount of chance. My boyfriend finds this place every couple of months; I've never found it on my own yet. Shell Bell used to wait a year or more sometimes, between door-finding; her Sherlock gets better results and her Tony can sometimes get it on purpose but the other Tony couldn't and I don't remember about the other other Sherlock. We don't have stats on Angela or her boyfriend - he's an alt of mine - yet. And Stella didn't leave notes about her and her friends - Stella's boyfriend is also an alt of mine - but she did mention that she told Bar to give a Belltower key to the vampire us's daughter because she's here a lot and her mom isn't. My point is, I could wind up stuck in your world for a while, will I have a place to crash or should I see if Angela will buy me a hammock with her credit bracelets and hang it from my cloud-pine somewhere up in the sky?"

[eversomuchfun]

"I am currently sleeping in a refitted crypt. There are probably more available. If you would prefer a hammock, by all means acquire one."

[dark_light]

"A crypt. Ah-huh. Am I liable to be shot down or something if I hammock in midair? I imagine your world doesn't have my sort of witches, or at least not exactly."

[jovahs_heiress]

"At the risk of further mockery about my world and my educational background and so on," says Angela, "why would anyone live in a crypt, and what is a vampire?"

[eversomuchfun]

"A vampire is a former human with no heartbeat who drinks blood," says Sherlock. "In my world they look like this."

He shifts to vampire face: nose and brow ridged in an artificial snarl, teeth long and sharp and dangerous, eyes a wolfish yellow.

"Except, of course," he reverts to his human face again, "when they don't. I live in a crypt because I catch fire when exposed to sunlight, so participating in normal human society is generally hazardous to my health, and the town of Sunnydale is oversupplied with graveyards so there are plenty of crypts to go around."

[jovahs_heiress]

Angela startles when his face changes, although she recovers faster than she did when Petaal shifted shape. "That's..." She doesn't seem to know whether it would be rude to say whatever she had in mind. "I am learning a lot today," she says vaguely instead.

[dark_light]

"If there is some danger of my being observed and subsequently harassed there are spells for that, I just need to know if I should cast them," Amariah prompts.

[eversomuchfun]

"Yes, sorry," he says. "You might not have trouble in some places, but I would take the precautions if I were you. In Sunnydale there is always the chance someone will decide you'd make a nice midnight snack, floating in the sky or no."

[dark_light]

"Notice-me-nots, check. Remind me to get some tea tree oil from Bar before we leave," says Amariah.

[eversomuchfun]

"Will do," he says.

[jovahs_heiress]

"Are your worlds similar, or are you both just better at dealing with inter-world chaos than I am?" asks Angela weakly.

[dark_light]

"I'm from Earth, summer of 2013, and I live in the United States, Maine for the time being," Amariah volunteers to Sherlock. "We've got witches and humans and panserbjorne, in the sentient-critters department."

[eversomuchfun]

"Earth; winter of 2005; Sunnydale, California; and we have literally uncounted sentient species, in that no one has ever been able to accurately count them, but humans and vampires are probably the two largest populations. The existence of anything other than humans is not widely known."

[dark_light]

"Why's everyone else hiding?" asks Amariah, reaching up to scratch under her chin, then noticing this is ineffective and scratching under Path's beak instead. "And how old's Juliet?"

[eversomuchfun]

"It's easier to eat people who don't know you exist. She's about seventeen, I think; I haven't looked it up."

[dark_light]

"Huh. I'm almost nineteen, so older but not by much; I was born in ninety-four. In a few decades I'll have a lovely patina of ageless witchiness though. Before you ask, I haven't figured out to make non-witches as immortal as we are," she adds regretfully. "I'm working on it, but the absolute truth device is limited to communicating through an array of thirty-six symbols with layers of meaning, and I can barely read it myself anyway, my boyfriend has to do most of it. It helps but I have legwork to do."

[jovahs_heiress]

"I'm eighteen and I was born in. Well. Six hundred fifty-six," says Angela. "But that's counted from the founding of Samaria. Generations ago the years were counted from some other time that doesn't seem to be written down anywhere."

[eversomuchfun]

"Best of luck," he says to Amariah. "Do let us know when you've worked it out. If Juliet does not manage to make herself immortal somehow or other, I am going to be very upset when she dies."