"You're not wrong. For all I know we were genetically engineered by hyper advanced aliens or something, but we haven't seen any evidence of that in particular."

"Although I am a human, designed entirely by humans, I suspect I am hyper-advanced relative to your society - but still could not pull off plasma eye beams, not with a laboratory that was the stuff of dreams, not with anything short of 'copying it from somewhere'. Bar makes copying a more viable means of advancement than previously supposed, but still."

"This is all further complicated by the fact that when two mutants have children, the resulting offspring may have one of their parents' powers verbatim, or something similar to one or both, or something completely different."

"Given the existence of these powers - are they always only powers, never anything deleterious? - and the leading hypothesis involving junk DNA, that's not overwhelmingly surprising."

"Well, eye beam guy can't turn them off without technological assistance..."

"There are also miscellaneous physical alterations--our aunt has blue skin, for example."

"But no one who, oh, has their bones fused together or has no skin or anything like that?"

"Ew!"

"None that have come to our attention, but they usually don't come to our attention until they're old enough that having no skin probably would have killed them already."

"Oh, I didn't realize you weren't keeping comprehensive statistics. I suppose it's possible that truly deleterious mutations of this magnitude will be almost invariably fatal by the time you notice them if you're waiting for them to reach some age past five or so."

"We would like to but we're a private institution, not the government, and...there is no way that asking the government to try to keep comprehensive statistics on mutants is going to go well. If it's happened it hasn't happened often, anyway, we would have found out if it happened often."

"Which is itself surprising. Most changes are not improvements. But if you can get wings or telepathy in one step, maybe all the changes are so dramatic that anything unsafe causes spontaneous abortion? If not outright killing the carrier - how did the plasma eye beam one develop to term in a living person?"

"The living person has a mutation that lets them adapt to otherwise-fatal situations. They literally reconstituted themself after being disintegrated by similar plasma beams generated in a far less perilous fashion."

"Oh. I suppose that would help. So, all right, bizarrely coherent but perhaps high-variance anomalous traits, some of which cause miscarriage before anyone would notice them and some of which produce useful - powers. This sounds like an interesting world."

"Pretty interesting, yeah."

"I do bizarrely-controllable magnetism," Emily volunteers.

"Really? That sounds very versatile if you're creative enough and keep ferrous metal on hand."

Emily raises her arms; snakes of liquid metal pour out of her sleeves.

"That's amazing."

"I know! And I can fly by pushing myself off the Earth's magnetic field, it's great."

"Oh, that sounds like tremendous fun."

"It so incredibly is. I can't do it in Milliways, though, Milliways isn't on a planet and doesn't have the requisite magnetic fields."

"Alas."

"Totally worth it, though, Milliways has the previously mentioned reverse-engineerable technology and also beverages made of fruits that don't exist back home. Speaking of which, Bar? What would you recommend today?"