Isabella takes awhile catching up with her parents, and the queen.

She is back at the house late that night, not tired but a little ragged. Path alights on her shoulder when she reappears.

She inspects her house.

"I'm going to keep this place, since people sometimes use it as a landing pad to get daemons, and sometimes I want to be able to receive visitors from within the world," she decides, "and a castle in the afterlife won't do that, but I'm going to go build a castle in the afterlife, who wants to see it?"

Author: dark_light	Isabella takes awhile catching up with her parents, and the queen. She is back at the house late that night, not tired but a little ragged. Path alights on her shoulder when she reappears. She inspects her house. "I'm going to keep this place, since people sometimes use it as a landing pad to get daemons, and sometimes I want to be able to receive visitors from within the world," she decides, "and a castle in the afterlife won't do that, but I'm going to go build a castle in the afterlife, who wants to see it?"
Author: telesonorous	"I do!" says Helen.
Author: dark_light	"All right then." Pop. They're in midair for a split second, but then Isabella summons the ground up into a hill, and then they are standing on it, overlooking the gates that go into the worlds from the land of the dead. "Have you seen this place at all before?"
Author: telesonorous	She shakes her head.
Author: dark_light	"Huh. Well, this is it. I was going to add more geographical variety, but I hadn't gotten around to it, before..." She shakes her head. "Whatever, I can do it now. Starting with a castle. Any suggestions?"
Author: telesonorous	"Well, what kind of castle do you want?" she says consideringly. "I hear enchanted ones are convenient. If the walls and floors and so on keep themselves clean, then you can make them out of much more interesting things than if they don't. And there should be a stand of cloud-pine, because who wouldn't want their own stand of cloud-pine?"
Author: dark_light	"I can make it behave in all kinds of ways, here, without specifically enchanting it, albeit not with quite the same degree of autonomy as a proper enchantment," muses Isabella. "Interesting flooring like - what are you thinking, here?"
Author: telesonorous	"Oh... marble," she suggests. "Or bare wood."
Author: dark_light	"Wood's nice, marble's more palatial... maybe I'll make it mostly out of live wood and tile the bottom floor with marble."
Author: telesonorous	"Good idea," says Helen, grinning. "What kind of shape will it be? More round, or more rectangular? Round is more interesting, but harder to fit a bunch of rooms on the same floor. You could still do it, though..."
Author: dark_light	"Maybe an ellipse. Rectangles in the middle, half-circle rooms on each end with nice curvy windows."
Author: telesonorous	"Hmm," says Helen. "I'm imagining that and it just looks like a big pill from the outside. How about something more like this?" She conjures an illusion: an octagonal courtyard enclosed by a thick wall, with circular towers at the corners and a much larger circular tower in the middle. Four of the outer towers have outward-facing doors, and all eight have doors facing into the courtyard; the main tower has one big door facing north, in line with the north outer door. Everything is made of wood; the octagonal wall linking the outer towers also has spiky glittering ice running along the top.
Author: dark_light	"Fortressy," comments Isabella. "Meshes oddly with the wood structure; I expect things shaped like that to be made of blocks. Might go with marble like your first suggestion."
Author: telesonorous	Helen changes the entire outer structure in the illusion to black-and-white marble, but keeps the icy spikes and lets the inner tower stay wood. "Better?"
Author: dark_light	"Are you attached to wood for a particular reason?"
Author: telesonorous	"I like the way it looks," she shrugs. "Like the tower is a giant tree." Whimsically, she replaces the tower with an actual giant tree of roughly the same size, a nonspecific conifer, spreading enormous branches over the top of the outer wall and between the outer towers. It looks surprisingly good all together, although the door at the bottom is now a little incongruous.
Author: dark_light	"Sarion's kind of elf has these..." Amariah tweaks the illusion to ensubtle the door. "Very sneaky houses. They're cool." And she tweaks the tree into a specific conifer; it's a giant cloudpine now.
Author: telesonorous	"Very nice," admires Helen. "Do you know what you want the inside to look like?"
Author: dark_light	Amariah adds windows - glass in the marble parts, cutouts leaving webs of wood in the outer trunk of the tree and dappling the inside with light - and reveals furniture and interior decoration. "I've had a while to think about eventually having a castle."
Author: telesonorous	"I guess so," says Helen. "That's pretty."
Author: dark_light	"Thanks." Amariah makes a few adjustments - she didn't, after all, have the layout picked out before now. She fills in the illusion courtyard with plants and bejeweled-mosaic paths. She nudges the arrangement of the cloudpine branches, and hmms, and then she taps into her custom plane and there they are, on the ground floor of the tree-tower.
Author: telesonorous	Helen proceeds to the middle of the tower, stands in the open central column, and looks up at the spiral stair winding around and around and around all the way to the top. "Awesome," she says.
Author: dark_light	"Thank you," says Amariah, taking a little bow.
Author: telesonorous	Helen grins at her.
Author: dark_light	There's a Janepoint here, and Amariah has sped up the castle environs to match outside time in contrast to the rest of her afterlife plane. She makes an ansible; Jane takes half and the other half plugs in. "And now arbitrary people can visit me without having to spend stars to ward off their potential daemons."
Author: telesonorous	"That'll be handy," says Helen.
Author: dark_light	"Quite. Especially since the star only lasts about a week, did you hear that story?"
Author: telesonorous	"I didn't!" she says. "What happened?"
Author: dark_light	"Minus - Juliet's Sherlock, from Sunshine - came over for a visit, and while he was here Jane went down for the first time. After he'd been here about a week he woke up in the middle of the night with a genet. She went by Subtrahend, till I told him what the canonical Sherlock Holmes's daemon was called - didn't like Stephirashal entire but she took Steph. They weren't thrilled, though, either one."
Author: telesonorous	"Why not?"
Author: dark_light	"Well, she wasn't on purpose, and Sherlocks have some mixed feelings about existing, so existing more was an unpleasant surprise."
Author: telesonorous	"Oh. Poor Minus. Are they okay now?"
Author: dark_light	"I don't have up-to-date information," confesses Isabella. "All kinds of things could've changed since I last saw him, I don't even know how long it was in Sunshine."
Author: telesonorous	"Well - I met Soph, and she said somebody from her world got rid of their daemon and then got her back later. But I didn't ask her any questions about it. I'm pretty sure it was the same person, though."
Author: dark_light	"That would be him, yes, nobody else from Sunshine ever had one in the first place." Isabella shudders slightly.
Author: telesonorous	"Yeah. People with no daemons are only slightly unsettling, but - " She shakes her head.
Author: dark_light	"It took me some getting used to. The first time I walked into Milliways I called everyone a zombie, for a while."
Author: telesonorous	"I hardly notice most of the time, and then something reminds me and it's weird all over again. But I'm getting used to it."
Author: dark_light	"Steph didn't like it that it made me more comfortable around Sherlock when she existed."
Author: telesonorous	"...I don't get it," says Helen. "Why?"
Author: dark_light	"It was a reason to continue existing, with which she had issues."
Author: telesonorous	Helen thinks about this. "Steph is confusing," she concludes.
Author: dark_light	"Very confusing, yes. If she's stopped and then started again that's promising."
Author: telesonorous	"I guess. But she still - stoppped." Helen shivers.
Author: dark_light	Isabella nods. "I suppose it must have seemed like a reasonable option to them at the time."
Author: telesonorous	"I can't see how."
Author: dark_light	"No, me either, but we're the odd ones out, no one else has daemons as a fact of life."
Author: telesonorous	"Yeah," she sighs. "It's so - peculiar."
Author: dark_light	"Yep. Very much so. Some of my alts and some of your dad's have acquired daemons but I don't think they think of them in quite the same way as Alethia natives with them do."
Author: telesonorous	"What other way is there?"
Author: dark_light	"It's hard to characterize. Most of what makes me think this is that they're a lot more cavalier about tucking them away. I don't remember Kas ever doing it with Petaal at all, and I only do it when it's crowded or something. Also, Cam's daemon is also his magical notebook, so there's that."
Author: telesonorous	"The magical notebook thing is definitely peculiar," says Helen. "And I'd kind of have to be cavalier about tucking Kal away if we weren't separated, especially if I lived somewhere that people mostly didn't know about daemons, but I guess I'm a special case."
Author: dark_light	"Yeah. I'd expect the same thing if Juliet got a daemon; a lot of big-cat daemons here are kind of shrunk to travel size but hers was anything but when she got an illusion. But Shell Bell has a smew, and yet." She shrugs.
Author: telesonorous	"What's a smew?"
Author: dark_light	"It's a kinda duck." Isabella produces an illusion of Neptune.
Author: telesonorous	"Ooh, he's pretty," says Helen. "Soph said that Juliet picked a name for her tiger and that means she might maybe hypothetically get one, but she doesn't know why she hasn't yet or what might get her to."
Author: dark_light	"I have a guess," says Isabella after a moment.
Author: telesonorous	"What is it? Unless it's private. Then forget I asked."
Author: dark_light	"If I'm right you probably shouldn't tell Juliet's Sherlock, but I don't think she'd care if you knew."
Author: telesonorous	"Okay, I won't tell," she says.
Author: dark_light	"She doesn't have one, so acquiring one would be about what she could do with him that she couldn't otherwise; he looks terrifying but she doesn't live in a place where that gives her any advantage in, say, a fight - which is particularly relevant to Juliet - because there aren't any other daemons for him to engage with and anyone else she meets at home won't know that they mustn't touch him, or if they found out they'd have an entirely incorrect reaction to the information. She has no strong incentive to separate, so she doesn't expect to be able to send him on errands without inconvenience and unpleasantness she could more easily skip. The only thing she could do with a daemon that she can't without is send him to snuggle up to her Sherlock. I think she's waiting to see if Steph will touch her."
Author: telesonorous	"Oh," says Helen. "That does make sense."
Author: dark_light	"After a fashion, yes, but I suspect Sherlock would feel pressured if he figured it out. If he hasn't already."
Author: telesonorous	"Well, maybe he doesn't know about the name. Or maybe he's trying not to," she says hopefully. "Because aren't they supposed to be really good at figuring things out?"
Author: dark_light	"Sherlocks are extremely good at figuring things out, yes."
Author: telesonorous	"Goes with the name," says Helen. "Which is also peculiar."
Author: dark_light	"Yeah, they're a weird case. Some of them actively model themselves after the book character - well, the version found in their worlds' literature, without a Stephirashal attached - but some of them just sort of happen."
Author: telesonorous	"Other worlds are funny that way. - Wow, and of course their books wouldn't have daemons in them either, I hadn't even thought of that."
Author: dark_light	"I imagine it must make casting actors for television shows and so on a lot easier."
Author: telesonorous	"No kidding," she laughs.
Author: dark_light	"But I haven't watched any offworld TV, so I don't know how much it matches or fails to match. I'm more than half a century behind on media from this world."
Author: telesonorous	"I don't watch a lot of movies, so I can't recommend anything," says Helen. "Are you going to start going after the people who make bad movies about you?"
Author: dark_light	"For what value of 'going after'? I'm not going to hurt them or anything. They might get made fun of at a press conference or something."
Author: telesonorous	"I was thinking getting them to stop. You don't seem to like it very much."
Author: dark_light	"I have no idea what the current legal state of public figures not wanting movies made about them may be. And I have no power to change that. So there's not a good way to stop a determined person, but I can make it clear that I don't approve and hope that torpedoes ticket sales."
Author: telesonorous	"Here's hoping," says Helen.
Author: dark_light	"Yep. And I will probably accumulate legal power over time, anyway. And maybe I can find a decent filmmaker who wants to make a not-terrible movie about me and help them out and hope that crowds the market."
Author: telesonorous	"People will probably want a movie about you with you actually in it more than they'll want ones without," she muses.
Author: dark_light	"I don't know if I'd go so far as acting in the thing. But I would endorse a decent movie."
Author: telesonorous	"What would a decent movie about you be like?"
Author: dark_light	"Mmm... depends on how much interdimensional stuff I want to disclose, I guess, which I won't know until I'm up to speed on what's been going on in my absence."
Author: telesonorous	"Well... what do you want to know about what's been going on?" she wonders.
Author: dark_light	"What do people think happened? How is the new afterlife affecting things? What's politics like at this point, culture - is there any intersubworld exchange going on to speak of - what's happened with tech?"
Author: telesonorous	"There are some people talking to shades from other worlds," says Helen. "I don't hear that much about them, but they're there. I think maybe mortals are more affected by the afterlife than witches, or maybe it's just that the mortals I've met are usually younger than it is, and the witches sometimes aren't - I've known witches who forget once in a while about revenants and shade-dreams and things, and mortals don't do that so much."
Author: dark_light	"Interesting. I don't suppose you've personally dreamed your way here before?" Isabella gestures at her homemade subworld.
Author: telesonorous	She shakes her head. "I don't know any shades."
Author: dark_light	"Makes sense."
Author: telesonorous	"Yeah. Well, I guess you could count the people who kidnapped me - I met them, and they're dead now - but they haven't tried dreaming at me so far."
Author: dark_light	"I would hope not. They can stay where they are."
Author: telesonorous	"They were unpleasant. Well, that's not technically true, they were very nice to me if you ignore the part where they kept trying to kill Kas and probably had some kind of secret horrible plan."
Author: dark_light	"Do you care what the plan was? Have you been bothered since?"
Author: telesonorous	"I don't care especially. I'm sort of curious, but not enough to bother trying to find out. And nobody else has tried to kidnap me or cast horrible curses on Kas since then. As far as I know. If he's caught any more horrible curses, he hasn't told me about them."
Author: dark_light	Isabella declines to mention the cluster headache curse. "Probably an isolated incident, then. I may look into it but it's not a priority."
Author: telesonorous	"Okay," says Helen.