She pokes her head into the building and looks around. "Ah, Miss Martin. May I have a moment?"

"Sure!" A girl soars out at high speeds and comes to a halt by Bella. "New kid?"

"Not quite. Mortimer Halliman accidentally summoned her, and she's going to be staying here until we can put her back in her home universe. I'd like you to show her around."

She shakes her head. "Ah, Christ, Morty. Yeah, sure, I can show you the wonders of Dickinson. What's your name?"

"Bella. Yours?"

"I'm Ariel, codename Stormhammer. Current holder of the Blizzard Force, not that you know what that means considering you're from another universe. Basically, I'm a big-league powerhouse. Feel free to bask in my glory if you so choose. If you so don't choose, I can show you around."

(Mrs. Carson sparkles off back to her office for glorious, glorious paperwork.)

"My codename's Flicker, if those are customary to introduce oneself with. What is the Blizzard Force?"

"Carson gave you the whole Powers Theory spiel, right? It's this thing where a really powerful Avatar takes a whole bunch of spirits and mashes 'em all up into one big thing with more power, and they can keep doing that for their whole career. It's frowned on these days because, y'know, kinda inhumane to the spirits, but my mom was a supervillain and she wasn't real big on the whole morality thing, so she did it anyway. When she died I got the Force. It gives me a TK-7 supergirl thing, EN-6 ice blasts, and Wiz-3 magic. Plus I've got Ex-5 and Warp-3 gravity powers naturally. Basically, I break shit really hard."

"What is the deal with spirits? They are not a thing back home."

"Spirits are, like... there's a lot of different kinds. There's ghosts, there's, like, tree spirits, dryads and stuff, water nymphs... They don't usually interact with humans, but Avatars can talk to 'em and convince them to do stuff like join their powers with us. Or just grab them and stuff 'em into a Force, but, again, not very nice. You probably won't have to worry about the kind we're talking about. There's also, like, demons and shit, who would like to eat you, but they're not very common and if you keep me around I can beat them up and eat them myself, so that's a win/win."

"And you can't just let out the non-demon spirits you have despite considering it inhumane that they were collected to begin with?"

She sighs. "Nope. They're, like... it'd be like trying to hatch an omelette. Those spirits are gone. I mentioned that Mom was not a nice lady, right?"

"You mentioned. Anyway, in local terms I'm an exemplar/warper with an oddball esper extra but I don't have numbers on any of those."

"Niiice. Warper pride, hey? I wonder if the testing devise they've got would work on you. Probably not, but you never know. What do you do with the warper thing? Or the esper thing either, those are always kinda cool. I know a guy who sees ghosts."

"I teleport, with the warper thing. To nonmoving targets relative to whatever gravity well I'm in. Mrs. Carson classified twining as an esper power - where I'm from it's not mutants, it's twins, and one of the things we can do is talk to our twins at any distance. We have to speak aloud to do it, but she said being able to hear that makes it count as an esper thing."

"Twins? Huh. That is a super weird system. But cool! Can you talk to your twin from here? Jeez, I hope you can, it'd- can you do that from here?"

"Yeah, I can, I checked. She can hear me just fine and vice-versa and when I have settled in I'm going to be relaying a summary of the whole business through her to our parents."

"That's good! So, d'you want that tour now? Dickinson's really nice, I used to live in Hawthorne but it's way better here."

"Yes please."

Bella follows, pedestrian-fashion. "What did they do to be jerks instead of cool?"

"Jerks is a general term for any large group of people. Most of them are pretty cool. A couple of them are kind of assholes, but they don't do all that much, they're just Regina George impersonators." She floats up the stairs. "First floor is freshmen, second sophomores, etcetera etcetera. I'm a soph, so I'm on floor 2; you probably get your pick." Her voice drops to a conspiratorial whisper. "We've got the cool kids, though. Join us."

"I'm in tenth grade, back home, although school isn't back in session yet because -" Pause. "Uh, what year is it here?"

Ariel checks her bare wrist. "It is currently the Year of Our Lord two thousand and fifteen. January sixth. We just got back from break."

"Okay. It's 2004 back home and Yellowstone recently exploded. Did Yellowstone explode here?"

"...Fuck. No, it didn't- I mean, there's been a ton of supervillains who plotted to blow it up or something, but they've all been thwarted. Shit, that sucks."

"It did it all by itself, as far as anybody knows, no supervillains were involved. There was a little warning; I did evac work with the Junebugs. Anyway, school's going to be out for a while longer and I will be going to a different one because Phoenix is buried under ash."