"My best friend's dad is a Holocaust survivor. One of the evil Nazi doctors took an interest in him."

"That does sound like approximately a Galen level of terrible."

"To be completely honest, most of the things that have cause to be laid at Dr. Schmidt's feet were done while Edie's dad was hunting him down for revenge, after the war, not while he was a captive. So it's not quite the same thing."

"Yeah. I... would not have been able to hunt Galen. I'm lucky I got the opportunity I did. Well, I say 'lucky', in large part I have Miles to thank for it."

"He was fourteen when it started and got out a handful of years later. It's not the same thing. It wasn't even the time he spent suffering himself that he was trying to get revenge for, it was that Schmidt had killed his mother to try to motivate him to do better. Edie's named after her, it was the only thing he had left of her."

"Not the same thing, no," he agrees.

"So it's a very good thing he's dead without anyone having to spend almost two decades tracking him down."

"Yeah."

"I mean, it wasn't all bad! That's how he met my father, is that the nazi was trying to do evil things again and my father was trying to thwart him."

"Oh, good for your father."

"Yeah. And then of course the whole mutants thing went public..."

"Oh?"

"Ah--when I say mutants, I don't just mean blue eyes or lactose tolerance or the shit that apparently goes down on Barrayar. 'Mutants' in my world are people with something called the X-Gene that activates a bunch of what would otherwise be junk DNA. Results range from blue skin to fully-functional wings to less explicable superpowers, often in the same person. I do magnetism." She flutters her fingers, and her steel bracelet divides into three pieces and floats off her wrist. "Evil Nazi Doctor was also a mutant, he did some really nasty stuff with energy. He took an interest in Edie's dad because he manifested his mutant powers trying to avoid being separated from his mother. He...had no way of knowing how badly that was going to backfire. Anyway, thwarting Schmidt--who was using the name Sebastian Shaw at that point, we still don't know which if either was his real name--ended up being very public. Do you know about the Cuban Missile Crisis, Ivan didn't but he was neither raised on Earth nor did he display any particular historical interest that I observed."

"It rings a distant bell. Cold War...?"

"Yeah. In my universe, Shaw-slash-Schmidt engineered the Cuban Missile Crisis to try to turn the Cold War hot, because he for some idiot reason believed that massive amounts of radiation would benefit mutants while it was killing off everyone else, creating a new world where he was on the top and only people with what he saw as good genes would survive."

"Your variety of mutants is clearly something very out of the ordinary as far as my world's science is concerned, so is that as absurd a plan as it sounds...?"

"Yes. My kind of mutants is caused by one gene that affects other genes. Random genetic damage is still random. And radiation poisoning will still get you before you could reproduce in the first place unless your mutation would specifically protect against that, which some of them would."

"Oh, what fun. And how did your father and his friend deal with this fool...?"

"My father's a telepath, and Erik--that's his name, Erik Lehnsherr--does magnetism too, so Papa held him still while Erik drove a coin through his forehead. This being the same coin he had failed to lift when Shaw was pointing a gun at his mother," she clarifies.

"How very poetic."

"That's one word for it. At that point in his life he was kind of a tangle of rage and drama."

"Yeah."

"But he got better, thank God."

"That's good."

"Evidence mostly in the form of 'people from similar but very, very different universes' suggests that if Edie hadn't happened he would've graduated to supervillain after the fight he had with my father when it was over. So yes, it definitely is."