"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."

"Helen had to spend six hours trying to do the most basic thing before we were sure she couldn't."

"That's not so long... but I guess some people would rather just have other people do it for them anyway."

"And any society still needs people who make clothes and food and stuff like that."

"Yeah, that's true."

And here is the door to Milliways! They can go inside to have lunch.

Which Bar provides deliciously. Om nom nom.

Om nom nom indeed.

Since Helen did not substitute meteorological shenanigans for breakfast her lunch will be somewhat smaller.

Stormy contemplates running up a tab, eventually decides against, is rejected from a Security job on the grounds that she doesn't have reliable nonlethal fine control while indoors yet, and leaves. She hugs Marie goodbye and goes out.