if i were yours

[floofcoaster]

Behold the wolf in his unnatural habitat, eating the foods of his people in traditional quantities, his typical companion away in the distant land of The Bathroom.

That is to say, Zeus is in Milliways with one and a half heavily topped pizzas, waiting for Harley and Andrea to come back.

Comments

[apprivoise_moi]

"Seriously though: magic," says Ophelia.

"All right, all right," laughs Harley, "one sec, I'm gonna check you're actually one of me."

He leaves Andrea with Zeus and freecasts to the Enchanted Forest.

[Hey, Glass! There's a new Joker in Milliways, can you come look at her and make sure she actually is a Joker before I mint her? I'm pretty damn sure, but she's a new face.]

[thaumobabble]

[Coming.]

Jane drops Glass in the Belltower and Glass lets herself into the main bar.

"That's a Joker all right," she confirms. "Felicity and Corona's cluster, first phase. What do we call you?" she asks.

[apprivoise_moi]

"Ophelia," says Ophelia.

"Pretty," says Harley. "How'd you pick it?"

"Shakespeare," she shrugs.

"Anyway, poof, you're a mint. Did nobody tell you how minting works, do I get to tell you how minting works?"

"I guess you get to tell me how minting works!"

"So the deal is, you make wishcoins out of pain," says Harley, grinning.

"Awesome," says Ophelia.

[thaumobabble]

"You can also acquire an enchanter's aura if you visit my world and donate some magic to the forest. I bet Harley will help. And we can give you a Janegem."

[apprivoise_moi]

"What's a Janegem?"

[thaumobabble]

"Jane is a computer-person." Glass taps her own gem. "She uses these to have eyes and ears various places, with which she can pick us up and put us down, even between universes. She also syncs time. She doesn't have a hundred percent uptime history, but she's very, very handy."

[Hi,] says Jane. [You're an alt of my dad!]

[apprivoise_moi]

[Oh, weird. Hi!] says Ophelia. "Siiiince the very next thing I'm about to do is go have a ton of sex, I think I'll pass on that for now."

Harley giggles.

[thaumobabble]

"You can," says Glass, "turn off the camera and microphone without wrecking her connection."

[apprivoise_moi]

"Yeah but I'm really keen on the ton of sex I'm about to go have."

"Should I see who's free?" giggles Harley.

"You should!"

Harley vanishes for approximately a second.

"Poof, now you can teleport," he says when he reappears, "I'll teach you to freecast later, right now you and me have a date with a huge pile of our alts. Follow me. Bye Glass! Bye Zeus, love you!" And he disappears again.

Ophelia teleports after him.

[floofcoaster]

[Love you too.]

[aeskhyne]

Milliways time dilation makes it hard to determine exactly how long Ophelia spends in a pile of Jokers. She does quite a lot of shapeshifting, including mimicking the other Jokers and playing a game of who-can-be-the-fluffiest-thing with Petaal and Ivy. (There is not really a clear winner, but there wasn't meant to be.)

But she never takes her original form. No one cares - it's moderately obvious that the shape she met them in wasn't the one she was born with, but she doesn't show anyone what she used to look like and they are all fine with that.

She amasses a large store of coins. She learns how to freecast. She doesn't bother enchanting herself an aura just yet. She conjures cake. Everyone freecasts to the Joker's asteroid in Origin and she redecorates it extravagantly.

It's pretty obvious to all the Jokers that Ophelia wants wishcoins for something, and has some reason to be deeply paranoid about telling anybody what it is. None of them raise a fuss about it. She's early-phase, but she's still a Joker; she can solve her own problems if she wants to. So.

Ophelia freecasts home, with a dormant Sue-link as her line back to the rest of them. (By admission, Janegems are basically spying devices. She doesn't feel like taking chances with being spied on. She trusts her own alts, after they all linked up and shared their various histories with her and nobody said a thing about how much she was leaving out of what she shared in return. She has no idea how she would even begin to verify that a strange Bella was actually a Bella, and has no point of reference at all for Jane herself.)

And Trouble perches on a roof as a pigeon, and brainphones Bella.

[Hey. I found a thing.]

[instar]

There is a long pause, and:



[A thing?]

[aeskhyne]

[A thing. A kind of really hard to explain thing? Where are you right now? Uh, a decent short version might be 'I scored what sure looks like totally arbitrary magic fueled by pain off of what sure looked like about twenty alternate-universe versions of me, without telling any of them anything about where I was from or why I wanted it'.]

[instar]

[I'm home.]

[aeskhyne]

[Nobody around who'd be surprised by me teleporting right in front of you? I mean, and shouldn't be?]

[instar]

[In this room it's just me right now.]

[aeskhyne]

Now it is her and a pigeon.

Now it is her and human-formed Trouble, fully clothed.

"Poof, you can teleport," he says. "Poof, you can arbitrarily shapeshift."

[instar]

Bella blinks at him. "How do I work these new powers?" she wonders.

[aeskhyne]

"I dunno, it was obvious to me," he shrugs. "Anyway, those are kind of trivial, the big one is minting and you'd get way less use out of that than me. You can have it anyway if you want, it's just a hex, hexes are cheap." He fans out a progression of coins in his hand, from triangle up to seven-pointed star, all made of what looks like clear glass veined with thick twisting streaks of colour. The streaks move, slowly but visibly. "Arbitrary magic fueled by pain. You touch a coin and make a wish and if it's a big enough coin and it's not a specifically impossible wish, wish comes true. Anybody can wish on 'em but only mints can make 'em. These are all mine."

[instar]

Bella looks at these coins.



"Can they by any chance pause time everywhere but here so you can explain this to me and I can think without large quantities of awful things happening elsewhwere while we do that?"

[aeskhyne]

"Don't see why not."

He disappears the coins.

"There. Took a hex."

[instar]

Bella looks out the window.

Bella sits down.

"What happened?"

[aeskhyne]

"I was in one of my human morphs - this one," he flickers briefly into the appropriate shape to demonstrate, "and I walked into the library and instead of the library there was this bar. Cute guy sitting at the bar with a ton of pizzas told me it was interdimensional, we got to talking, I said my name was Ophelia, he's Zeus apparently, and also apparently his boyfriend is a - what was it he said, something like 'pansexual masochistic snuggle-fiend with a shitty home life', anyway there's like twenty of me and we're collectively called Jokers. I'm also pretty damn sure there's a bunch of you, but I only met the one, and I don't have a way to verify those. The Jokers all telepathically dumped their life histories on me, I gave back something heavy on the childhood trauma and light on the identifying details, I'm pretty convinced about them, but I don't think the same solution exactly applies when it's you."

[instar]

"I want to meet the bunch of me."

[aeskhyne]

"Okay. I'll - hm. Do you still care about secrecy, should we meet 'em somewhere that's not your house?"