"Bar has food. I'm hungry too, we've been out here for hours and hours. ...And I still have no money so I guess I have to run up a tab anyway..."

"Well, lunch probably isn't too expensive. If you're really worried about running up a tab I could cover you."

"If you don't mind. It sounded like you were worried about expenses."

"I'm worried about expenses on a scale of nifty technology to bring home, not on a scale of lunch."

"Oh. Then I will totally take lunch. It wasn't anywhere near meal time when I found my door."

"I mean, worst come to worst I could probably get my parents to reimburse me for lunch. I'm probably going to have to tell them about Milliways anyway."

"How come?"

"The person with the convenient light powers that went so well with Helen's gave her a bunch of the light things she can make. We're storing them in my room. There are a lot of them."

"Oh. And you live with your parents."

"I'm only seventeen. Technically."

"I'm ten, but I live at the Winding Circle temple because that's where the people who know how to teach ambient mages are."

"We have boarding schools where I'm from but I don't go to one."

"...Helen and I reincarnate. This is my second life and her third. This body is seventeen years old but I am a little more than a hundred. The reincarnation is a secret, though, so I have to act like I'm seventeen."

"That sounds really annoying. Being a kid is bad enough when you are actually a kid."

"I remember my first childhood with great fondness, mostly because a number of terrible things happened to me at about the same time as I reached adulthood. Being an infant with a grown-up's mind is on both of our top ten lists of unpleasant things, though."

"Ew, that's even worse."

"Mm-hm. Better than staying dead, though."

"Oh, yeah, by a lot."

"It might have something to do with the powers. We only know of one other person who comes back and he has powers too."

"My kind of powers don't work that way... not usefully, anyway." Stormy gets up, stretches, runs her fingers through her tangled hair as best she can, and heads for the inside. Lunchtime.

"Lu--the woman with the light abilities--didn't either. She actually did reincarnate, but differently from us, and everyone from her world could do the light thing."

"That sounds useful, everyone having powers. Although it'd make it less useful to be able to do it, probably, you'd have to learn to do other things too."

"Well, it was a very skill-heavy kind of power. It was less the kind of thing anyone could do and more the kind of thing anyone could learn to do."

"Oh." Stormy sits at the bar again. "That works then."