"I'm gay but have not historically felt the need to seek much support from my surrounding environment for the condition; are matters particularly adverse here?"

"No more so than any other boarding school full of teenagers. Which is to say, unfortunately yes. As I mentioned, you have my personal protection, and absolutely no one will trouble you if they know what's good for them; if you would rather take that out of the equation entirely, you might prefer Poe."

"Which is apparently misconceived to be for crazy people, and your mad scientist here has already attempted to diagnose me with schizophrenia for twining my sister."

"Yes. You may notice that I have not placed you in a box and summarily deposited you there. This is because there are material downsides to any given option."

"I don't anticipate trying to date while temporarily stuck in an alternate universe, so let's go ahead and put me in Dickinson and I will be as stealth as the situation demands."

"Stealth is as necessary as you make it. Benefits of stealth include likely making some of your dorm-mates slightly more comfortable with you; benefits of not stealth include being able to glare conspicuously at casual homophobia and make the perpetrators feel guilty and slightly threatened. It's your choice. Anyway, shall we? Dickinson is half a mile east of here, if you'd like to teleport."

"I can take one passenger at a time when none of the passengers are my sister, do you want me to bring you?"

"Sure."

Bella takes her and Mrs. Carson half a mile east, a quarter-mile up so she can scope out the place, then puts them on the ground in front of the building under them.

"I should probably return to the parts of my job that don't involve disaster management, I can have a resident show you around the cottage. Are you going to want to attend classes while you're here? We are a very highly rated private school, and you are apparently at the appropriate age."

"I'm sixteen. I'd be happy to audit some classes if you get me a catalog or I find somebody I want to shadow. I might also just want to spend lots of time in your library reading up on your advanced medical tech and deciding what I want in my gift basket, though. Can I get the location of your office in case somebody needs to be dropped off there for apocalyptic disciplinary action?"

"Sounds like a plan. You can also get individual tutoring if you have any concerns about falling behind in your classes back home." She rattles off the latitude and longitude of her office. "If that's all, shall I get a guide for you and return to work?"

"Sounds like a plan."

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."