"Yeah, why wouldn't it be?" Rewind's voice replies. "Wait, aren't you in HQ?"

"Uh, never mind."

"A'ight," she says, boredly. "Sure wish there was something going on..."

They don't respond to that. Instead, they slowly float in, looking around at the scattered patrons—none of them looking bothered or anything, a couple sparing them a glance but then returning to their food and drinks—and approach the bar. And a napkin appears there. They read what's written on it.

An hour later, they're still too engrossed in conversation with the magic sentient bar, enough that they haven't yet noticed they're alone in there.

Meanwhile, Mary Rivers has opened the door to her hotel room. She finds a remarkably similar bar -- empty excepting one person.

"Hello?" She calls, so her voice will carry. 

The loud voice against the silent backdrop finally lets Glam notice they and Bar are alone.

Well, were alone. "Hello!" they say brightly. "Be right back," they tell Bar then float over to the girl.

She stares. 

"You're floating. How are you doing that."

"You're probably not from my world, then," he says, making the suit disappear. "Hi, welcome to Milliways, the bar at the end of the universe, although which universe is up for debate, since there are several of them even beyond the myriad I already knew about. In mine some people have superpowers."

Mary has several questions competing for her attention, and she hasn't even properly stepped past the threshold. 

Well.

Her initial go-to -- is it dangerous, and if so, how -- doesn't appear to be an issue. Yet. Nothing about the bar looks dangerous. 

This is almost certainly a bad idea, she muses to Heidi. 

Yes, she hears in reply. But you're curious, so you're still going to do it. 

True enough.

"Multiple universes," she says. "some with -- with superpowers. Okay." She steps through the doorway and hears an audible click as the door shuts behind her. "So -- how do these superpowers work on your world?" 

He gestures for her to follow and—now no longer floating—takes a seat by the bar. "Before anything, this is Bar, she's a sentient bar, she can talk to you via napkins, first drink's free, she can sell lots of things for locally appropriate prices, also there's a translation effect going on here, also time's paused where you're from while you're here so you won't miss anything, it's amazing. Anyway, um, superpowers where I'm from, they're kinda terrible, um, how do I start explaining..."

She follows. She also sees many such napkins already resting on the bar -- excuse her, Bar's -- surface. She examines one.

He doesn't seem to have had time to write that much beforehand. Although, given that the bar appeared in her hotel hallway --

"The time-pausing sounds useful. Did you verify that when you came in?"

"...I didn't! That's a good idea!" He makes the part below the neck of his suit appear and quickly floats over to the door, holding it open, closes it, opens it again, then returns. "Yep, paused."

Yep, that's basically what Mary would have done. 

"So. Terrible superpowers. Do you mean that they're dangerous? Or hard to use? Or, er, poorly distributed?"

He mulls over this and settles on "All of the above? More or less. People started getting them in the seventies, they do it by going through traumatic events, and can range from the very useless to the ridiculously overpowered. Mine is closer to the latter."

"Closer to the latter, eh? What can you do?"

"I can conjure pretty much anything. It doesn't even need to exist." And to prove it, he makes a floating ping-pong ball appear, floating between them. Then another. They start zipping around, and they collide and explode into a lot of rainbow glitter.

"Conjuring. Sounds familiar."

She punctuates that last word by conjuring a multicolored ping-pong ball of her own. She holds it in her hand for a moment, then moves to fling it at Sadde's face. 

It'll disappear before it actually hits him, of course. But with an opening like that ...

He has pretty good reflexes, though—rather than merely flinching, he ducks pretty fast. Then looks around, and at her, and grins.

She grins back. 

"Yeah, conjuring things is pretty powerful. Depends on what, and how. But it's versatile." 

"I wonder if our respective -- er, you said superpowers, let's go with that -- work similarly, if you look at them closely. Mine has lots of drawbacks."

"Like what?"

She starts ticking off fingers.

"I can't dismiss conjured objects. If the objects get more than -- oh, usually it's around ten centimeters -- away from my body, they disappear. The only way to make them not disappear is to keep them close to my skin for a while. 

Oh, and. It's really, really bad to breathe conjured air or eat conjured food. If you leave the field, the stuff goes poof, and if you ate the stuff, so do you."

"...you disappear?!"

"Yep. If you leave a field for too long. It's okay, I won't conjure any food or air. Or, explosives, or nasty chemicals ..."

He probably gets the idea.

"Actually, I'm working on rescuing some people back home. I'm not sure how to get them out of the field. Yet. But I have time -- they're not leaving it, and it's stable and will probably be around for another half century, at minimum."

"...I'm simultaneously fascinated and horrified, wanna trade more complete explanations of our respective kinds of powers?"

"Sure. I haven't heard much about yours yet."

"Okay, storytime! So, sometime in the seventies this cruise ship found a naked golden man floating above the water in the middle of nowhere."

Mary listens.

"So, they approached the golden man, who lowered to see them, and he was expressionless but people said they felt like he was really sad. Uh, sec, lemme see if I have the video here..." He grabs his phone and looks for the video, doesn't find it, so opens the door again to download it and show it to her.

He explains about the man who got cured of cancer after touching Scion, and about superpowers, and trigger events, and Scion getting a name and going around fighting bad guys and rescuing kittens from trees, and Endbringers, and villains, and the Protectorate.

"And my power is making whatever I want exist, for a while."

Mary thinks that trigger events sound awful, that the Endbringers are somehow even worse, and that the powers are extremely poorly distributed.

She'd be almost tempted to give her companion her magic, except he seems to have a better version of it already.

"Right, making stuff. Do you have to concentrate to use your power? My magic takes concentration, to project the space further than default and to conjure things at all. Plus we have to know what we're making."

"Not exactly concentration, but I do have to occupy a certain specific mental state to do it. It was really unintuitive and nonobvious at first, but I got the hang of it now. I can even make, say, copies of people," and after he sets up the expectation he generates a copy of himself standing there, "who are not sentient but behave the way I want them to." The copy grins and waves.

Mary. Do you think he could make me a body? 

Possibly?

If he can transfer my mind to a different brain, he can transfer it back. So I'm safe either way.

It's worth a shot. 

"Hey, I have an experiment we should run. But it requires some background information. Anyway. I have a tulpa, which is a fancy word for having another mind, that you created, living inside your brain. And body. Her name is Heidi, she was really curious about whether she could inhabit a body you created -- I don't know enough about human biology to make one for her myself because I have to know how an object works if I'm going to conjure it. Plus I suppose I don't have room ...

"It might require more knowledge of how your power functions, maybe about the state of mind you need in order to conjure things. But we could try, and it might work."

He blinks. "Another mind? That's—" Incredible? Horrifying? Confusing? "—pretty cool. Except, um, I can't really make minds, or transfer them or what-have-you, the bodies I create," he says, gesturing at his copy, who takes over explaining, "respond to his will. I'm not sentient, I'm merely a very elaborate construct."

Sure, creating a new mind inside your own has some pretty extreme implications, but it's not like that's completely inconceivable with powers from his world.

"How do you know you can't? I mean -- I understand being leery about experimenting with creating minds, but we shouldn't have issues if we test whether you can transfer them."

"Well, 'cause I expect if I could I would've. I've—tested my power pretty extensively over the past ten years, and pretty intensively over the past year, it seems to be limited to making stuff under my control. I mean, other people can use objects I create, as long as they don't look too hard at it, but."

"If you could have, you would have? Without any conscious effort? Accidentally? I'm not sure I understand."

"No, not accidentally, when I made the copy I was actively trying to make a person and I failed. And the one time I tried to have a copy of mine to send me telepathic messages, it disappeared, probably because of squinting."

"You actively tried, knowing that the person would disappear afterwards?"

"That's why I tried to create another me, because I knew I'd be okay with that."

"Oh."

"Well. I still think it would be cool to run some tests. You make a body, Heidi tries to get in, that sort of thing."

Mary's expression falls away as Heidi finishes collecting her thoughts. Their expression becomes blank, then intent.

"I'm Heidi. I suggested the idea, so perhaps I should tell you why I think it's plausible."

"I think I could try to meditate inside your conjured body or try to move it. I very much doubt I'll end up with another instance of myself, because I don't want to, and Mary doesn't want there to be one either.

"... I suppose that needs context. Tulpae are created when their host imagines another person vividly enough. We develop independent reactions and then independent goals and preferences. We can have bodies if a host practices visualization often enough, and likewise voices, and these grow to be our own over time as we become more independent. But these bodies and voices are still only perceived subjectively by our host. 

She goes silent for a second, raising her hands to her brow, her eyes closed.

"The more relevant point is that tulpae are not created instantly. Leaving aside the fact that we require interaction and direction in order to exist at all, our growth is guided by our hosts and our sentience is determined by whether our host wants it. I suspect something similar might be happening with your power. There might be a mental block stemming from revulsion at the idea of creating a person."

He blinks at that. "Hi, Heidi, nice to meet you," he hazards. "I don't think that was what was going on—I'm unusually good at dealing with my own brain, though not as good as my girlfriend—actually I should show her this place somehow—but I'm not against testing, testing's fun, I'm just saying it probably won't work." His copy disappears. "Do you have a way of showing me your preferred form?"

"Sure."

Heidi conjures a figure of a tall, bald black woman with a strong jaw, wearing a black dress and hoop earrings.

"How tall do you want to be?"

"As tall as Mary, please. I'm used to her height and center of gravity."

Mary is around 180 centimeters tall. 

And there she is.

That's exactly what you look like! Mary chimes. 

Meanwhile, Heidi is concentrating on inhabiting the body. Is she getting any sensory information back? Proprioception, the wind on her skin, the feel of the clothing? How does it compare to fronting their body?

She has absolutely no sensory feedback from the new body.

Can she send information, like movement and expression changes, even if she's not receiving? 

Nnnope.

Hmm. Heidi will try to think of other tests.

"Why do you think it probably wouldn't work?"

"Well, why would it? It's not like you can transfer your consciousness to a regular brain, is it?"

"Well, I'm not magic and I don't run on superpowers."

She frowns. 

"Maybe if Mary visualizes at the same time?"

"Wait, not magic? Then... how do you expect it to work? And how are you not magic?"

I'm going to take over for this one?

Sure. 

"Maybe we didn't explain properly. Creating a tulpa -- creating another mind that also inhabits you body -- is something that anyone can do. It doesn't require magic. All it requires is the ability to act and believe as if the other person exists, and interact with them for long enough that their responses become automatic. Seeing Heidi and hearing her voice, which I can do, is - it's like a consensual hallucination, or -- I think the term is operant conditioning.  I imagine seeing it, I want to see it, I see it, it stops requiring conscious effort after a while, at which point Heidi can take control. Does that make se--"

She stops speaking suddenly, then smiles apologetically. "I don't think I introduced myself. My name is Mary Rivers."

"Sadde Woods," he returns in kind, looking somewhat bewildered. "So... Um. I'm actually not sure how to react to that, I mean, I think it'd be offensive for me to doubt its possibility."

"Lots of people react with doubt, we can take it. Although I would prefer if you act as if Heidi exists around me, even if you don't believe it yourself."

"I mean, uh... I'd like to believe things that are true, and this is an interdimensional bar so I'm pretty open-minded about what things could be true, it isn't that hard to believe there's someone else in your head. I just really don't know if I could do it."

"And if you don't think you can do it, then you won't. On the other hand, if you do think it's possible, it is."

"...um. There is presumably a fact of the matter as to whether a brain of a human from my world can house more than one person simultaneously, or create a new one, like that, that is independent of my belief, I'd think."

"Why do you think it's independent of your belief?"

"Because a brain is a machine that's running an actual software and has an actual capacity. I, uh, maybe in your universe there are gods? Other than Scion if that I'm pretty sure mine is godless and soulless so there's a finite capacity to a person's brain and whether it fits two people in it and can run them should be a deterministic question with a deterministic answer that depends on its physical characteristics and nothing else."

"In our world we have a mental illness called dissociative identity disorder, which looks similar to having a tulpa except that it's involuntary. And if another personality fronts, the host blacks out -- that doesn't happen with tulpae. Do you have that in your world?"

"Yeah, we do have that, though I think the evidence on whether it really exists is mixed. But I know that people can be full people after a hemispherectomy so it sounds plausible that two people could inhabit a brain, it's just that creating a whole new person sounds... well, difficult, at best."

"Well. It depends on how difficult you find modelling other minds -- it took a while for us but it wasn't that hard.

I suppose I'm a bit biased, having done it."

He grins. "I suppose so, too. But, knowing that it's a perfectly natural and nonmagical process, why would you expect it to work on an," he gestures, "empty construct?"

"I suppose I don't know that it would work -- my belief in Heidi's existence doesn't necessarily interact with your power."

Well...

"Did you expect it to?"

"I didn't know how your power worked! You said it was unlikely, but I thought it would be worth a shot, and you said you hadn't tried it before."

"Yeah, fair enough, I suppose." He looks around at the otherwise empty bar then says, "So I have a secret and it'd be very dangerous to me if it escaped to my world but you're not from there anyway, and also I'm pretty sure now it's the reason the door picked us."

"Oh?"

"The, uh, mental state I mentioned, is... belief. Kinda. Expectation, really. I have to expect a thing to happen, and it will. But the trick to it is that other people's beliefs also count. If I tell you I can conjure a thing, and you actually expect me to be able to, it's much easier for me to do it."

Oh. 

... Oh. 

Mary immediately expects a rainbow ping-pong ball to appear outside her space as hard as she can. 

Nothing happens.

Hmm.

"I'm going to conjure a ping-pong ball right over there." She points to a spot outside her range.

Then she forces the ping-pong ball. 

There it is!

"That wasn't me conjuring right then -- that was you. The ping pong ball was outside my range.

I really think conjuring Heidi a body would work."

"Then let's try it again."

They do!

This time Mary forces Heidi instead of relying on Sadde to do it himself. 

There she is.

Can Heidi move her arm? 

Yep!

"Cool!"

Heidi grins. 

Can she touch her nose?

With absolutely no sensory feedback, but yes she can.

"I just tested proprioception by touching my nose and couldn't feel my nose." And realized that she may be supplementing her proprioception with Mary's secondhand sight. 

"Mary?" She asks. "Could you turn around?"

Heidi, that's not how it works, if you make a falsifiable test and then expect the test to fail it's going to fail, he just told us his power works like forcing. 

 I was going to suggest that you try forcing me through a non-visual sense. This is a physical, corporeal body. I will not disappear when you are not looking, so you won't have to visualize me. 

I'm just scared that if I try to hard to not perceive you you'll disappear, or --

No. No. You're real, this is what we're proving, right now, that you're real even when I'm not looking.

Yes.

... Mary turns around so that her back is to Heidi. She focuses on the air, on the feeling of someone reading over her shoulder, of the tension of waiting for someone to sneak up behind her. She tries something she's rarely ever done, forcing smell, and Heidi smells of lavender and cinnamon toothpaste. 

"Sorry about that," Mary says for Sadde's benefit. "We were arguing about tests."

Can Heidi lift her arm?

Sadde watches in curiosity and shrugs. "It's alright."

And yes, Heidi can in fact lift her arm. She can still not, however, get any sensory feedback other than anything Mary believes she can.

Heidi starts to dance! The movements are slow and jerky and become progressively less so as she does more of it. 

"So, how do you conduct tests for your power? I wouldn't think you could do science to it properly if it's so dependent on expectations."

He giggles.

"It's quantitatively dependent on expectations, and stuff like passive, active, or vague ones from various people contribute differently to it. There's also a few limits related to how much attention I can pay and how many things I can keep track of—even subconsciously. Also one of my girlfriend's powers is being categorically immune to mind powers so her expectations completely fail to affect what I can or can't do."

"That sounds inconvenient."

"Oh, no, it's very convenient, she can work as my spotter and help me design experiments and effective controls on what's my expectation and what's other people's and what's my expectation of their expectation and so on."

"I guess it does make her an effective control, but it also means you can't do tests working with other peoples' expectations. Especially if you keep it secret."

"Oh we did test that, too, and it's actually much easier if they don't know: I merely tell them a thing will happen and try to make that thing happen, or something different, or whatever, and see how much influence they have on it. Power testing is standard Protectorate procedure for new capes."

"And no one you've tested with has guessed how your power really works?"

"Nope. It's not really that easy to guess, making stuff appear out of thin air isn't that unreasonable as far as powers go and inviting other people for the ostensive purpose of seeing how different powers interact is par for the course for this kind of test. Besides, I already have a public weakness and fictional description that account for it, so most people don't tend to look farther than that."

"What's the public weakness?"

"The squinting thing. My power doesn't like it when people look too hard at it, or pay too much attention to what I conjured. This one isn't strictly mental so Lorica can do it, too. Also I describe it as 'being able to conjure increasingly complex things the more practice I get' which is to account for why I can't create Endbringer-killing lasers now but presumably will be able to, in the future. Once enough people believe in me," he says, smirking.

"That's a very tidy cover."

"Yep! Also not unheard of, there's this other hero in my team who can imbue certain objects with power so they can become 'more themselves.' He has an electrical lance and a shield that makes forcefields and a sword that's super sharp and easier to wield and superspeed boots and a good vision helmet and he hasn't reached an upper limit to how much he can improve his items."

"I guess it's good for you that in your world some powers are just strictly better than others; otherwise you'd have to come up with a more limiting weakness."

"Oh, yeah, definitely. Like, Scion just breaks the game, but even without taking him into account, you got people like Eidolon, who can have any powers, and can have up to three of them at the same time. Or, on the villains side, you got people like Gray Boy who is terrifying and the Siberian who is just as much." He shudders.

"You could be even more powerful than Eidolon if you had a reputation that supported it."

"Yep," he says smugly.

"Any reason why you don't, I don't know, disguise yourself as a Scion-like figure and kill all the Endbringers immediately?"

"There's always someone tracking Scion's current location, and if people knew it was just a copy they wouldn't believe it was as powerful as the real thing."

"True."

"... although now you know that other people can use your power to do anything you can do. That might help somehow."

"Well, more or less, I can still easily dismiss anything I conjure regardless of anything else."

Mary considers asking him whether he's ever made food and thinks better of it.

"Right. Conjuring stuff and not being able to dismiss it easily is definitely a logistical quandary."

"Yeah, it is, and for that matter, your turn for the exposition."

"Well, what do you want to know?"

"Everything! Or, well, I dunno, an intro like the one I did for my world would be cool."

"Well, magic is only a few years old -- I don't actually know when it started. But the person who first had it is named Devon Ross. He went to collect the Randi Fund, and probably something else, too, because he immediately decided to buy an island. He was advertising it as a post-scarcity society; he said all these things about the end of energy and material shortages. 

My sister and I were some of the first people there. Long story short -- I figured out how to duplicate his magic. I also found out that everyone who's ever eaten his food is in danger. I guess he was so excited by his vision of utopia that he never thought to test his magic properly."

"In danger bec—oh. Because they can disappear. Yeah, that's bad. How does your magic work, exactly?"

"I'm not sure. Not on a deep level, anyway. Heidi has better theories than I do."

(Heidi is still dancing. She's not used to having her own body and is thoroughly enjoying it.)

"I found out how to duplicate his field when I was visiting his island. I got him to tell me what happened when his field appeared -- he was meditating, apparently, and he fell asleep, and he lucid-dreamed, and when he woke up he noticed himself falling out of his dream into reality. I guess some of his ability to -- to affect his surroundings. To change his world. Came with him.

Man, that sounds so stupid. It's much better when Heidi does it." 

Heidi stopped abruptly in the middle of a pose. 

"Do you want me to?"

"Nope."

"If you're sure." Whee, more dancing. 

"Anyway, I managed to generate my own field and tried to give it to some people, he took exception to that, and now I'm ... sort of ... on the run from his sympathizers. They're not trying to kill me or anything, but they also don't want me to give a field to anyone else."

"Why shouldn't Heidi do it?"

"Why shouldn't Heidi do what?"

"I dunno, you said it sounds better when Heidi does it and she asked if you wanted her to and you said no."

"Oh, she spends a lot of time coming up with theories for how our magic works. But she's distracted now."

"Oh. And what exactly is your magic? I mean, you mentioned meditation and conjuring things that have to stay close to your body, but, uh... I mean, I don't really understand it yet."

"Well, I can conjure any object I can properly visualize -- so, objects where I know how the discrete parts work, on the inside -- and if it stays in my field it can exist there indefinitely. But if it leaves the field, it disappears. 

"I've done experiments with power generation, and it turns out that the energy doesn't disappear. Which is extremely useful, of course. But I can't make energy by itself -- no pure heat or electricity. Oh, and if I make anything that gives off energy, I have to be careful to shield myself from it."

She reaches up to grab a burn on her left arm, faintly embarrassed. 

"Oh, cool. How big is this field? Yours looks barely larger than yourself but you said that guy from your world gave people food?"

"Yeah, I still haven't figured out how he manages to make his bigger so effortlessly. Mine usually extends about 8 centimeters from my skin. I've tried making it bigger -- if both Heidi and I are focusing as hard as we can it gets up to four times that -- but then it resets."

"So you have to actively concentrate to make it grow? You mentioned he found it by meditation, does that help?"

"Yeah, but when I stop concentrating it just -- snaps back. I meditate to maintain the space, too. Heidi or I need to do it every day or else it disappears."

"Hmm... What's the world like? Society? Is it, like, democracies, countries, a single kingdom? How big is the planet? It is a planet, right?"

Mary describes the relative technology level of Earth, circa 2010ish. She mentions things like Wikipedia and cell phones and lists off some countries. 

"Oh, so your world is also an Earth? That's weird. Mine is like that, the year is two thousand and three, what year is it where you're from?"

"2015. Wait, wait, an Earth?"

"Well, I live on a planet that sounds a lot like yours but it's 2003 instead."

"True. I guess -- wait, you were telling me about Earth Aleph, that's why you're not --- weirded out by there being lots of different Earths. Right?"

"We're in a multidimensional bar," he points out, "but yes, being previously acquainted with the concept of many different Earths does help."

"I would think that calling a -- a planet Earth -- wouldn't be exactly common. So if it is multidimensional then it's not grabbing dimensions too far from one another."

"Maybe. Bar did say the door seems to like putting interesting people together, so maybe if people are too different they aren't mutually interesting?"

"That makes sense."

"I wonder if there's any power on your world that would be able to help ours. You mentioned someone with healing powers?"

"I don't think I did? Well, there's Scion, but he's too busy rescuing kitten from trees, usually."

"I wonder what would happen if he found this place."

"He'd probably do the same things, no one gets him."

"I keep wondering whether there's something we could do for each other. I could help you or your world somehow, or your world could help mine."

"My world could probably help yours, we have so many powers and you don't have the stupid Endbringers to deal with, but the problem is that Milliways might just disappear forever."

"And I don't want to ask you to abandon your girlfriend or your world when you do have Endbringers to deal with. And we don't have access to anyone else who would want to help and could be trusted to help and wouldn't mind leaving. And any survey to find a person like that might end up getting one of those awful villains or a mind-controlled plant or something."

"Yeah. I mean, if we both stayed here we could make Milliways be effectively a portal between the worlds, I'm actually tempted..."

"Would it be worth the opportunity cost of you using your power on your home world? Killing the Endbringers is probably more important than helping a few thousand people."

"Time's stopped in my home world," he reminds her.

"But it wouldn't be if you kept the door open, which you'd need to do to allow communication. Or for the person to come to the door if they live far away. If there's anyone who can help at all, although there are other problems with my world other than, well, magic."

"Yeah but that'd be only for a while, to coordinate, for the duration of the actual fixing of things time'd be stopped."

"Does bureaucracy work more quickly on your world? I was assuming it would take a while for your world to find someone to send. Plus the person would have to be okay with staying indefinitely -- we can't assume that we'd find another door, and you'd get bored of holding it."

"Well, it's not an insurmountable problem, but it's an annoying one, yeah. Still think it might be worth it, though."

"Want to try it?"