"Anyway, I used those eighteen years productively," Marie says. "On a personal level, anyway. I certainly would have wanted a letter at the time but to be honest, if I hadn't had those years of personal growth when I found out she was alive I suspect we would have fallen into our old bad habits."

"Bad habits?"

"We didn't communicate as well as we should have," Helen says. "We had a tendency to be passive-aggressive about things instead of talking about them like adults. We...were the first happiness each other had had in a long time, and assumed that meant we were supposed to just work and didn't put in the effort we should have."

"So the fact that I didn't manage to get in touch before I showed up at eighteen worked out in the end, mostly. I'm still going to break that bastard Gregory's mind if I can," Helen concludes.

"...Break his mind?"

"He was trying to avenge me, but he killed me instead. I intend to tell him so at some point. I'm hoping this is enough to at the very least convince him to leave me the hell alone, but I won't deny I'd feel a certain satisfaction if it broke him."

"Is 'mind breaking' a weird feature your world has or are you just referring to him being very thrown and upset in some ordinary way?"

"I'm referring to he's already demonstrably unstable and hopefully being significantly more thrown and upset than is ordinary. But no, mind breaking isn't a weird feature, just a weird idiom," Helen explains.

"Okay."

"I'm not even sure what would qualify as weird at this point, relatively speaking. Our worlds are pretty different," Marie says.

"Yeah. Bar has only had a chance to tell me a few things and didn't get around to mentioning that in some worlds humans breed like animals, so I assume there's a lot more I don't know."

"Sometimes people have scientifically improbable powers," Marie offers.

"Powers?"

"Selective telekinises or temporary object generation or superhuman physical abilities, to name a few categories," Marie adds.

"Oh wow. We don't have anything like that - unless you count puppeting as telekinesis, but anyone can do it if they learn. Who gets those powers?"

"If you have a quality called S-Factor--no one knows what exactly it is--and it gets activated, then you get powers. Unfortunately, while the ways to activate S-Factor are varied, they're near-universally harmful if you don't have it, and no one's figured out how to test for dormant S-Factor yet," Marie explains.

"How inconvenient."

"No kidding. If anyone ever figured out how to test for S-Factor they'd win at least one--they'd win at least one Nobel Prize, which is a very prestigious award given for achievements in things like sciences and making the world a better place," Marie says.

"Better yet would be figuring out how to induce it."

"Well, whether or not it's induceable depends on what it is. For all we know you're born with it or you're not," Marie shrugs. "But you'd win at least two Nobel Prizes if it could and you figured out how."

"Yeah. How many people get powers?"

"I don't have statistics on hand, but I know the number's been slowly growing since it started happening. This hasn't been going on forever--our first lives were amongst the first people to be empowered," Marie says.

"Okay, but - more like one in ten thousand or one in ten million?"

"Oh. More like one in ten thousand," Marie says.