"A combo of cryo and aerokinesis, plus flight as I demonstrated earlier."

He demonstrates again.

"… Neat, I guess?" he says. "Any idea how it interacts with the previously-established laws of physics?"

"By kicking the previous laws in the balls and taking their lunch money."

"Huh," says Martin. "Right. How nice of them."

"Well, he means that powers apparently defy previous tenets. In practice everyone is so clueless about how they work that it is hard to say what they disproof or not. They are consistent per individual but no one knows their inner workings."

"When you say it's an agent and not, like, a virus, what actual distinction are you drawing, and what actually is it? Like, 'agent' doesn't give me anything except, like, 'it is a thing that does a thing'."

"Which describes everyone's understanding of it quite well. It is a microscope structure with some crystalline properties and it can alter DNA."

"No idea how it came about?"

"Oh, that is the best part. Alien artifact thingie that some private company found and started experimented with, until the thing popped out a vial of the Ternion Agent and then they experimented on it with humans, because they clearly have not seen that movie and then boom! it is spreading around the world."

"Alien artifact thingie. That had a thing that caused people to spontaneously get powers, or die, or neither, in approximately equal quantities. And these powers seem to break the laws of physics." Pause. "I feel like if this were real I'd want to glare at your world real hard."

The triplets look at each other and laugh.

"That is entirely fair, there are quite a few scientists that sort of... lost it, not in a dramatic way, or not all of them, but quite a few really got disillusioned with magic."

"I mean, it's not just the fact they break what used to be established as the laws of physics, but– it's from a weird alien artifact thingy that goes and infects people and kills a third of them. That sounds like a movie or something."

"Oh, well. Do you want us to open the door to our bedroom and glare at it?"

"I mean, I can try but I doubt it'd do much."

"Maybe it would carthatic," Felix shrugs.

"At least you don't have to live in it? But apparently the multiverse full of even worse cliches - earlier we saw a fairy godmother."

"An actual fairy godmother, as in someone who has someone they look after, grants magical wishes to, possibly Cinderella, that sort of thing?"

"The precise experience was that we saw a lady with dragonfly wings and in her nightgown sleeping over there. And there was this sign saying: This Fairy Godmother is Out of Wishes. Someone took her wand and started playing with it until security took the perp and the wand away."

"Personally, I think she was more like the one from Pinocchio than the one from Cinderella."

"Right," he says, raising an eyebrow.

Felix shrugs. "I mean, insofar it is accurate to ascribe these things, but the multiverse is so big that I wouldn't be all that surprised."

And then the door opens again! And in walks a male wearing just boxers.

He has blue hair. It's a dark blue, but it's definitely noticeably blue.

Martin turns around to look.

So do the triplets. "Welcome to Milliways! If you haven't been here before, this is an inter-dimensional hub that occasionally takes over random doors and receives patrons from all over the multiverse."

"Huh," he says. "And what language are we all speaking, might I ask?"