"Okay." Pause. "When I first realized there was someone there and I couldn't even tell your mind existed I thought you were--one of the people who was trying to kill me because--back home there's only one thing that can do that. It's an alloy. The only amount of it anyone knows to exist comes from a helmet my dad had before they killed him. So. I--I don't know, I don't even know why I'm telling you this..." her hands are trembling.

"This is an interdimensional bar. There might be any number of reasons you wouldn't be able to read someone in here."

"It lasted for like half a second before I turned around and saw your bare head. I didn't really have time to think it through."

"I mean, I think there are some people who can't help it," she offers, "...which even I think is bad but goes more in the 'innocently radioactive' category than the 'arguable supervillain' category."

"Sure, if they can't help it. But they'd better live in a cabin in the woods. With signs."

"Or around other telepaths who can do their filtering for them. We had a couple of little kids who hadn't learned to stop, back when there was a school." She sighs.

"I guess that could work too."

Bella sits down at Bar and asks for a recommendation and puts the resulting bottle of beverage into her shield.

And eventually Cerebella comes out of the mirror. "I think it should be fine," she reports.

"I'm not going to second-guess you but I'm curious about what makes you confident of that."

"...Part of it is that she's not likely to resort to unethical things when she has better options, part of it is...she thinks she can work up to a resurrection spell at some point, at which point she gets to answer to her version of Dad for any nonconsensual mindreading she did and Dad isn't fond of it either. Like, a lot of her terrible decision making is predicated on 'nothing can ever be okay again' and now she has evidence that it is theoretically possible for anything to be okay ever again, and damn is the inside of her brain a depressing place."

"Gotcha."

"She's me gone horribly wrong, but she's still me. Which makes her unusually easy to figure out, if nothing else."

"I stayed here a long time, last time, but didn't run into any alts."

"That's a shame."

"Yeah. I finally left when I noticed a drop in muscle memory for some of my basic witch-fighting routines."

"How long did you end up staying?"

"Two and a half months."

"And then another loop is a month...and it's been four months for me."

"It's nice to see you again."

"Yeah, same."

"What've you been up to?"

"Schoolwork. Magical Girling, both of the rescuing-people-thwarting-villains variety and the networking-for-future-plans variety."