So it is! Leo and Xan frolic off to acquire books and do vaguely ominous things in an attached ritual chamber.

"I am from another dimension and not a mutant. I'm a twin - for disambiguation let's say I'm a gemini. We get our powers when we turn sixteen, on the dot, and they come with fewer inconveniences and lower variance. I have some stuff that in local terms you'd call Exemplar traits, and I can talk to my sister at any distance, and sympathetically heal her at touch range, and also, teleport." Bella teleports a foot to the left. "I can do that eight times a second if I concentrate, but I can only hit stationary targets within and relative to my gravity well and they have to be defined in terms that cannot include property boundaries but may include streets."

He scribbles furiously in the direction of a notepad. "Fascinating. Fascinating. What happens if you're born on leap day? Can you teleport objects you're touching- well, you can get your clothes, but could you put an anvil over someone's head? Can deaf geminis talk to their twins? What's the damage range on the healing? Am I asking too many questions too quickly?" He forces himself to stop talking and twiddles the pencil stub he's using excitedly.

"Sixteen is divisible by four. So leap days are not a problem, if you're born on February 29th you also get your powers the same day sixteen years later. I can take things I'm near enough, I don't have to touch them, but I do have a limit - one non-sister passenger, and about fifty pounds. Deaf gemini who have twins to talk to are not so much a thing - we get spontaneously healed of everything when our powers come in, including deafness, and if it's acquired later on, twin healing. I suppose somebody might have gamely put out their eardrums and performed the experiment but that would have to be looked up. Healing will handle anything short of death but it's sympathetic healing, so the one who's doing it hurts like hell for a few seconds while it kicks in. And yes, a bit."

"Sorry, sorry. I just don't get to deal with a lot of, uh, dimensional visitors. I'm just barely refraining from a lot of complicated questions about solar versus calendar versus objective year that you definitely wouldn't know the answer to."

"Not without making Alli look stuff up, no. And her tolerance for that is likely to be fairly limited so I'd rather hold it down to really important stuff."

"Aaaagh. Maybe I'll pass a collection around the labs to fund whatever ritual we'd need to get a techie sent over there to pester all of your scientists."

"What does it take to locate my world? Do I have to be involved in that or can you do it without me somehow?"

He makes a vague gesture with his clipboard. "Maybe? I'm not exactly what you might call 'hep' to the Mystic Arts folks' 'jive'. I assume interdimensional travel is expensive and difficult, because most supervillains don't have massive extradimensional armies, and they generally jump right on that kind of thing."

"I know it's expensive; that has been a topic of much discussion since I'd like to ever see my family again and so on. What I don't know is whether it's prohibitively difficult to get to my world in particular if you don't have me or somebody else therefrom handy."

"Again: not the guy to ask. Closest I've been to learning about magic was the time Ms. Grimes told me that my Essence 'flowed like bubbling pitch' in a particularly nasty budget meeting. My pitchy Essence didn't stop Metaphysics from getting the extra ten K, though." He grins.

"Okay. I'll save it for Circe." Bella writes this down. "Anyway, I think you're supposed to test my powers so I can get an ID card and refer to myself in local terminology more precisely."

"Yep. Conveniently enough, though, you seem to already know what your powers do. So besides the exemplar test, it doesn't seem like there's all that much to get through. Unless you want to check how you hold up against magical or Devised wards, which we can arrange."

"I would actually like to know that, because it seems like it would be nice to get into the mystic arts library by myself. I am warned that trying may cause me a headache. Can you arrange testing sans headache?"

"Since we'll probably be testing you on a spectrum of ward strengths, if it's going to give you a headache it'll come earlier. So it'll be less of one than it would've been that you'd get by just battering at the Inner Sanctum or whatever."

"I'll take it. Thanks."

"But we should probably start you on the exemplar mental test, that's usually how it goes. Unless you've got a strong preference?"

"I see no reason to deviate from the standard. Is this basically just a high-ceiling IQ test?"

"Ish. It was designed by a social sciences devisor, so it's kind of... idiosyncratic, but it works."

"Got it. Hit me."

There follows a fairly lengthy test. There are sections on memorization (increasing strings of numbers, skimming and immediately reciting paragraphs or pages of text), spatial reasoning in up to eight dimensions, and an absolutely brutal strategy game like a cross between Go, 3D chess, and the Game of Mao. There are also straight math and English and science sections, the last of which shades into the bizarre towards the end. (There are entirely too many quantities approaching infinity.)

Bella is fairly bewildered by a lot of it, but gamely plays along. She isn't, after all, mentally enhanced, so a test designed for people who are is of course going to thoroughly stump her on a routine basis.