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Morty knows he shouldn't be screwing around with multidimensional shit. It's dangerous, it's impractical, it's blah blah blah. But it's a potential key to unlimited energy, how does nobody see that? He's built a dimensional siphon (it kind of looks like a cardboard box with a funnel and a TI-84 taped to it, but it damn well works), keyed in the dimensional coordinates to a random plane, and by God he's going to use it.
He flips the switch and waits for the energy bar to fill up.
It does! It fills up very rapidly. Then it explodes, along with the box. There's rather more smoke than there should be, and once the smoke clears someone is standing there.
"Oh dear," Morty says faintly.
Flicker at Whateley
in-like-a-lion
"Well, there's access to my other favorite things too, this school is a few square miles of hormonal teenage mutants who look like Playperson centerfolds for bullshit magic reasons. And I am the most beautiful toad in all this pond, as you may have noted already." She twirls in midair, not that she wasn't already doing that on a fairly regular basis.
point_b
"Twins do not get that particular advantage except a little on the left of the bellcurve when turning sixteen fixes any health problems we may have and our siblings can patch up any we acquire afterwards."
in-like-a-lion
Ariel turns to look at her in shock. "Are you telling me that you're supposed to be a baseline and you look like that? That's unfair, that is. I'm filing a complaint."
point_b
Bella giggles. "My sister's prettier, so I don't hear that a lot, but thanks. But yeah, there's gemini who look any which way except for 'with chickenpox scars and scoliosis' type values of any which way."
in-like-a-lion
"Never let me gaze upon your sister then, I'd probably combust. I'd hate to go the way of Semele before I even get to thwart any supervillains who aren't my mom."
point_b
"Unless there's some way to purposefully visit between dimensions I doubt you will ever get a look at Alli. And in the interest of evenhandedness, my opinion on our relative prettiness isn't universal when she's not wearing makeup or I've let her put some on me. Semele?"
in-like-a-lion
"Makeup, ech. I don't know how anybody without magic has the patience to deal with that shit. If you're here long enough to learn magic and ignite your Essence I can teach you how to use cosmetic workings, they're way quicker and they work really well. Semele, mother of Dionysus, who ignited upon beholding the divine splendor of Zeus after he'd impregnated her in his usual idiom. Though the murder wasn't technically his fault, that was all on Hera. That fucker."
point_b
"...I can learn magic?" Bella asks. "You don't have to be mutated a specific way to do that?"
in-like-a-lion
"The mutation makes it way, way easier. Much in the same way that Olympic athletes spend their whole lives training to be slightly better at one thing than an Exemplar-2. But you can totally use magic! I was wrong about the 'quicker' thing, actually, spells for baselines take like half an hour of chanting. But it's an option, and magic is super cool." She produces demonstrative sparkles.
point_b
"...How sure are you that fish out of water can use magic? Because unless the requirements are insanely specific, if people where I'm from can normally do spells with chanting for half an hour, I'd have expected someone to stumble on it, and no one has."
in-like-a-lion
"Oh, it's not just the chanting. You have to use some magic to 'ignite your Essence', and that'll leave you as a magicky person forevermore. But you guys don't have spirits and all that, so... not so much Essence lying around to ignite."
in-like-a-lion
"Wrong kind of magic can attract demons, but y'all don't have demons anyway, so I don't see that causing much trouble. And if you fuck it up it can have unfortunate effects, but if you're here long enough to ignite then you'll be here long enough for us to teach you how not to fuck it up. You're smart, you can swing it."
point_b
"And you're sure we don't have demons because they'd make themselves known in ways unrelated to whether anybody around is magic?"
in-like-a-lion
"That and you don't have any other spirits or evidence of magic, yeah. Demons: not subtle."
point_b
"Okay. How much trouble am I going to have picking this up? Are there classes for magic-ified baselines around here that I can enter at this time of year?"
in-like-a-lion
"You're allowed tutoring at whatever pace you want, and we've got a whole department for this shit, so we could totally get you an accelerated track. Maybe we can get Circe to take you on, she's got shit else to do and she's scary good. The amount of trouble you'll have varies, but the classic indicators of magic talent sound like friggin' astrology, so I've never held with that much."
point_b
"Okay. ...Is there a way to non-disastrously dimension-hop or do I need to pick up all my tutoring and, I don't know, spellbooks and talismans, in one trip?"
in-like-a-lion
"I'm pretty sure if we can get you back home within the week we can get you back here without much trouble. You'd have to pay for the lessons, though. And for the transit, unless it turns out I can do it or something."
in-like-a-lion
"...Might want it in silver or something. Actually, silver'd be a really convenient currency for this, Sally can tun it into mithril and sell it at a fucking massive markup. Or just use it for whatever project most recently flitted into her head and sell like three ounces at a fucking massive markup. Or I can get Leo to pay for the whole thing if you'd run some courier missions for his mom or something."
point_b
"Is his mom a supervillain or something too? Because in general I have no objection to courier missions, but you seem to have a surfeit of people whose specific courier missions might be objectionable."
in-like-a-lion
"Oh, yeah, she's totally a supervillain. But not a particularly bad one. She doesn't, like, nuke stuff, just makes ominous deals with demons and accumulates dark power for her own vague purposes. Used to sacrifice people, but she hardly even does that nowadays. Her courier shit would probably be, like, 'get me this black moonsilver athame from Saudi Arabia so I don't have to wait for it to ship' or something. Or 'smuggle this magical recording crystal into the Vatican'. She's good at giving appropriate tasks to folks with objective morality."
point_b
"...And how expensive, in silver, is tutoring, because - Alli, please look up how much silver costs, ballpark, reasons - because I might just want to bounce people around at home for non-villainous purposes and pay for my lessons that way."