"Oh." He laughs. "I wonder if you got stuck in my head, if I could push you to Aegis."

"Even if that's something you could do, I don't think I want to be there either. I would be happy to help her in whatever her projects are but I do have an empire to run at home."

"I didn't say I wanted to try it," he snorts.

[Awwwwwww,] says Alice.

[He's very curious about what, exactly, you and Micaiah are busy with. We have told him that he should ask you guys and now he's impatient. Can I get an ETA?]

[Well, right now we're snuggling,] he says cheerfully. [Give us a minute to throw some clothes on and make out a little.]

"I thought you said the rest of me weren't muties," says Sue. "How'd you talk to him?"

"Magic!" says Stella. "Some worlds have it. Mine's one of them. Mutie - is that short for something?"

"Mutant," he says. "I could talk to the other me too, if I'd met him before or knew where he was."

"Interesting. Is Aegis one too?"

"I bet we can guess what she does, if she is," says Angela.

"Yeah," he says. "...Wait, neither of you guys is wearing an exo. Do you not need 'em?"

"...An exo? What's that?"

"We call the power mental opacity and of six four of us so far have had it one way or another... I second the question on the exo? Is that also short for something?"

"Exoskeleton," Sue explains. "Aegis wears it so her body does what she wants. She says when it's not on it's like she's made of bricks."

"...Is that because she's too used to having it, or did she get dealt a worse helping of clumsy than the rest of us?" Stella wonders. "Until I got magic I couldn't walk across a flat surface without finding something to trip on, but there was no technological solution proposed."

"I'm not sure if I was born less clumsy than the usual Bell or if the wings just help me keep my balance. I've always been able to fly straight, but I'm certainly wobblier than the next angel walking... Amariah's the same way, she's always been better in the air."

"Aegis flies, too," laughs Sue. "In zero-g. She's great. She's the best soldier in Battle School."

"Zero-g," says Angela blankly.

"Remind me to conjure you some physics textbooks," Stella tells her. "So your world's high-tech enough to give accident-prone kids nifty exoskeletons? That's neat, mine's not there yet."

"Not everybody," he says. "Just her. 'Cause telepaths can't touch her. Anybody else, if a nasty telepath got hold of 'em they could override the exo and take over their body. But not Aegis. So she gets to have it."

"So she does have mental opacity like the rest of us - but the rest of us who have it all have magic. Your world doesn't? Except insofar as 'mutant' powers count? Which it sounds like perhaps they should, but sometimes the line blurs a little."

"We don't have magic, no. Just muties." He grins. "That's a bad word, by the way, in case you couldn't tell."