holy place

[she_sells_seashells]

My alternates tend to take over the world. Advice available. Rates negotiable.

Shell Bell puts up her sign and nibbles her most recent charity meal. Not potatoes! It is not potatoes. Or fish or clams. It is rice and curry and a fruity yogurt drink. That nice person told Bar she could use his tab for four meals, and this is meal number two.

Comments

[seewhathappens]

"Yes."

[she_sells_seashells]

"This is a good problem to have," she giggles. "I've only been here a week and it usually takes months and months to get a new door and I've got things I want to read, I think I'll stay a while longer, but time's not passing at home in the meantime."

[seewhathappens]

"The non-passage of time sounds like a convenience of being mortal," Kirovalin remarks. "If it's possible at all for time to pass differently between different parts of myself, the bar at least doesn't cause it."

[she_sells_seashells]

"Huh, maybe being distributed helps, sort of like I never see something moving too fast or too slow. You have some of you here and some of you back on your continent and that's like having the door open, I guess."

[seewhathappens]

"That's what I think is happening, yes."

[she_sells_seashells]

"Makes sense." She pockets the extra disks. "Do you want some books on how Panem is organized now? Are you going to - promote from within, or do you want to hold the door for each other next time I'm in here so you can march some people you already know from your continent in to run the place?"

[seewhathappens]

"I'd appreciate the books. I hope to be able to find capable governors who already live there, but if I have to send people over from home and translate for them while they learn your language, I'll do that."

[she_sells_seashells]

Shell Bell nips over to Bar for some books and comes back. "These are all blatantly censored and/or propaganda, unfortunately, but they're different kinds of it. This is the standard textbook for District students, this is a Capitol-written history, this is historical fiction, this is an autobiography by one of the first Hunger Games winners."

[seewhathappens]

"Thank you." He collects the books and makes them disappear.

[she_sells_seashells]

"...If you're going to keep them you should pay Bar for them, I usually only borrow books."

[seewhathappens]

"I want to read them as soon as possible, so I'm distributing them among my manifestations. I can bring them back just as easily when I'm done. If I want to keep them, I will pay Bar when I decide to."

[she_sells_seashells]

"Oh, that makes sense. You can only move stuff that way, not people?"

[seewhathappens]

"Only plants and inanimate objects, not animals or people, and only things that belong to me in some sense. Even if I am only borrowing them, as in this case."

[she_sells_seashells]

"Huh. Still, that means there could be trade. I'm now positive that we have more technology - even if it's really badly distributed - so this will probably be useful to your people back home once we're stable enough to produce exports. Wrecking the Capitol will interfere some with our tech production capacity but as long as District Three's okay we'll probably be able to recover most of it."

[seewhathappens]

"I am definitely looking forward to those opportunities."

[she_sells_seashells]

"It'll be great. ...Creepy question: I assume you can do food, like, meat, in principle can you do corpses? Because we have medical technology too, and sometimes if somebody is only recently, not too messily dead, they can be brought back."

[seewhathappens]

"...That's... possible. But transporting the recently dead doesn't work. So it may depend on whether or not there is a gap between the respective definitions of 'recently'."

[she_sells_seashells]

"Yeah. It'll just take a while to train people on the far end to use the medical equipment even if we can spit out enough of it to meet demand. I think it helps if the dead person has been kept cold, especially underwater? One time when I was four the Hunger Games wound up with the last two kids fighting on a frozen lake and they both fell in. They had to fish them both out, wake them up, and put them back."

[seewhathappens]

"I see..."

[she_sells_seashells]

"Yeah."

[seewhathappens]

"I am looking forward to being able to put a stop to that."

[she_sells_seashells]

"Me too. Do you want a map of the place - anything else I can get you so you'll be prepared to make as clean a sweep as possible?"

[seewhathappens]

"Maps, definitely. And whatever other information you think of. Especially if you can find more precise descriptions of their weapons and how they work, although I'm sure that will be difficult to come by."

[she_sells_seashells]

"Not with Bar's help. They're controlled in Panem, but Bar doesn't care about censorship laws." Shell Bell goes and comes back with more textbooks and an atlas.

[seewhathappens]

"Very good." He disappears the textbooks, but keeps the atlas with him.