"...Right, those were that one toy."

"Yeah. Sorry."

"S'okay. Better that you didn't do most of your growing up in an apocalyptic wasteland."

"Seems counterproductive, too, apocalyptic wastelands must trigger tons of capes."

"...Huh?"

"You might call it something else, the thing where your powers start after something bad or stressful happens to you?"

"...No...we were born with them, most people develop them around puberty, lots of people get theirs somewhere in-between?"

"That's weird. I know Earth Aleph capes work like ours."

"...When I yelled, the Sentinels didn't just divide their attention, they ignored you completely. You...might not be a mutant at all."

"I'm a cape. I triggered almost two years ago and I Tinker stuff. My dad's also a cape so I'm second-gen, but I didn't have powers when I was born, and if nothing bad had happened to me till I was twenty-seven I would have triggered then instead."

"Yeah it sounds like your thing is just completely different."

"Huh. I wonder why Aleph and Bet are more alike."

"No idea."

"Found one. Heading to the surface."

"Thanks."

"I was going to need to surface soon anyway, there's no oxygen recycler in this thing."

"I can probably rig one up with enough parts."

"That'd be good. I can make a lot of stuff but, like, it's stuff that I was able to practice when Hank was still around and could draw up plans."

"If your - metallokinesis? - is good enough we'd synergize pretty well."

"It's very good. I did this," she says, holding up a bracelet that has extremely intricate decorative engravings, "and I've done plenty of circuitboards."

"Cool. I'll figure out a screen somehow and then my AI can show you stuff I need, if I'm not good enough at describing it. You can talk to the AI while I'm working, if you want, it can talk through my suit and I'm kind of out of it while I'm building stuff."

"Huh, okay. AI. Is it a person?"

"I can't feel it, but then I can't feel you either--telepath," she adds.

"You can't feel me because I have a secondary power that renders me immune to mind-affecting and -detecting abilities, you can't feel Rete because it's not a person, assuming you work on AIs that are people. Do you?"

"No idea, never met one."