"Well, it's been more relevant to me for longer!"

"What, really? I've been looping for a few years, when did you get your magic?"

"Well, I only got it a few years ago, but I always suspected I would. You didn't know magical girls existed until not too long before you became one!"

"Okay, that's true. Is Sailor Moon basically required reading in your world?"

"Not usually, I don't think, but I was always a very extracurricular sort of kid. My parents would probably have homeschooled my sister and I if I didn't insist on sticking around to, well, try and fix the system from inside. And Emily insisted on sticking with me."

"Did you get anywhere on fixing the system from the inside? I'd think that's the sort of thing you'd need a non-student vantage point to accomplish."

"Yeah, but five year old me didn't get that. I didn't get any institutional problems fixed, but I did put the fear of me into a lot of bullies, so I at least made the experience less unpleasant for some other kids."

"I would have taken my parents up on it if they'd suggested homeschooling, probably. At any point. I might have been able to push Renée into it but it never seemed urgent given she wasn't into the idea."

"I don't really regret it; I won't deny that in general homeschooling is probably better, but at least I had a little leverage to make the world a better place, and none of my classes stomped on my desire to learn anything I had been attached to."

"Yeah. I mourn the lost efficiency at school's ostensible purpose, sometimes, but yeah."

"It helped that my parents had zero qualms taking me out of school for a day or two when there was something they thought would be better. I've been to so many museums."

"Museums are great. What's your favorite?"

"Oh, um...good question. Off the top of my head, I think I'd have to say either the Ithaca Sciencenter or the Corning Museum of Glass, since those are nearby and we visit them more frequently than any of the others."

"I'll have to see if we've got copies in my world."

"Yeah, I don't know that they were particularly influenced by the existence of magic, and you guys do apparently have Sailor Moon, but who knows."

"I think we have Sailor Moon, I could be mixing it up with something else."

"Hey, Bar, does her world have Sailor Moon?"

Yes. With a slightly different history of subsequent adaptation.

"Well, that makes sense."

"Different year, different background magic system. I'm a little surprised we have any matching media, you'd think the magic would butterfly-effect the heck out of everything."

"You'd think. ...The, uh, other one, I got a couple of impressions of her world before everything went to hell, and she didn't have any magic at all until mine got imported, and it still looked pretty recognizable."

"I wonder why worlds run in parallel like that at all."

"I have no idea. Bar, do you have any idea?"

Speculation merely. It is fairly common, and people from 'parallel' worlds seem more likely to meet, but it's by no means universal; some worlds seem to 'diverge' more sharply or earlier than others even if they seem to contain some parallelism in their histories.

"...I mean, in an infinite multiverse I guess it would make sense that some worlds would happen to turn out basically the same way despite fantastic odds against, and given the premise of Milliways in the first place being attracted to superficially similar worlds makes sense."