The bar was...unusually reticent, in the lower layers of her mind (and she hadn't pried further; she wasn't sure if she'd be noticed; she wasn't sure if offending would get her kicked out, and regardless of whether it was actually safe it was safer than anywhere else she'd been for the past...three years?) so she couldn't be sure this place wasn't really a trap of some kind, but the higher layers gave a plausible explanation that didn't involve being a trap, and whatever else it was warm and dry and had food. Her guard was probably a full 25% down. Positively trusting, these days.
"The ones I can perceive are all ones I can read pretty well anyways, so there's that. If there's much of anything in a text I'd find really tricky the whole thing get's translated, is what it looks like to me."
"What counts as a single text, I wonder, if you got a book of poems and some were ones you knew...?"
"I don't so much know discrete poems. I know chunks from Proverbs and the Song of Songs and stuff like that."
"Alas. On the other hand, I don't exactly take French class seriously but I do care about my grades enough to pretty much learn the material, and there's been some songs on the curriculum. Caaan I see a, um, songbook that has Lark, At the Point of Avignon, and, um, the one that goes At the clear spring, as I strolled by, I found the water so beautiful, that I bathed myself."
"I assume you're getting the whole thing in English but I do see those three songs in French, and not the rest."
Her alt is over in a corner booth, being as unobtrusive as possible and reading something borrowed from Bar.
"For, uh, purposes of studying differences between alternate universes, I should probably mention I'm straight," the other Edie says, eyes still firmly on her book.
"...I mean, in the absence of any other alts to learn things from, it is potentially useful information on how we vary," Cerebella admits.
"...I think I had better not," the other one says after a moment of looking incredibly conflicted. "Differences and...stuff. Um. I'll just...do the magic thing and then flee like a coward, probably."
"...I think probably not, but it's...a good thought. Anyway." She gives her alt a look. Cerebella rolls her eyes a little, and opens the door. The other one darts through it.
Her world. It can only be hers, of the three, because it's dotted with minds of a familiar kind--mutants. Too few, far too few, and more winking out all the time as the Sentinels reap their bloody work.
The image dissolves, and reforms--one of the deadly metal creatures, looming over a screaming woman. A barrier springs up between them. Protection, murmurs a voice from nowhere.
Another Sentinel, shifting rubble out of the way to reach the young boy it was shielding, raising an arm to--crush him, or spear him through the chest, or something. It halts, shuddering--and collapses in on itself. Vengeance, the voice whispers. (She hates herself, a little, because she has gotten to the point where that sounds more appealing.)
She sees herself, older, wiping out a horde of them with a single magical blast. She sees others. She sees her sister, in an outfit not much less ridiculous than the one her alt had been wearing. She sees a girl with purple skin being offered a similar choice.
I will follow you, the voice murmurs. Your people need not be powerless. You can be the vanguard of a new era. A leader, as those before you were, and would have continued to be. You are not broken beyond repair.
She sees herself, laughing, face lined with past grief but not so overburdened by it that she cannot walk forwards.