"Hi," says Aegis around a mouthful of cheese and crackers. "Who're you?"

"My name's Edie. It's not often I meet another mutant in Milliways, apparently most worlds don't have them."

"Aegis. I noticed that. How do you tell who's a mutant?"

"Oh, I'm a telepath. Mutants' minds feel different, and other telepaths even more so."

"I'm not a telepath."

"...Are you sure? Your mind feels a lot more like a telepath's kind of shielding than a non-telepaths."

"I'm kind of surprised you're even getting that much. I'm an anti-telepath. Pure defense."

"It feels like really really good shielding, even for a telepath. I don't think even the Professor could do as well."

"I don't know who that is," Aegis points out.

"Professor X. Charles Xavier. The most powerful known telepath."

"In your world, I assume. If we even have one in mine he's probably been dropped from my curriculum in favor of xenobio or military econ or something."

"Yeah, in my world. Why, where are you studying? Some kind of military academy?"

"Yup. Space military academy for space military academics in preparation for space military practicalities."

"Space military! That's a bit after my time, I'm guessing. I'm from 1984, how about you?"

"2169."

"That is pretty far in the future. I don't know, maybe you didn't have one, I'd sort of expect him to still be remembered all things considered but maybe not as much in space military academy."

"We cover history but it's all military stuff, branching out only as much as necessary to cover things like 'your chain of command may be disrupted if you've been having personal conflicts with people in your off-hours, here are examples'. So if he wasn't a combat telepath, and a big-deal one at that, I probably wouldn't've heard of him."

"Well, he does lead the X-Men...I wouldn't describe combat telepathy as his primary thing but he definitely does it. And, like I said, most powerful known telepath."

"Well, maybe we don't have one. Or he hasn't been born yet or wasn't a telepath, that could happen."

"I guess. He's pretty instrumentals to the mutants' rights movement, though. I'm not sure if it's a good thing if you didn't have one."

"I mean, we have mutant rights, far as that goes. Maybe I would've learned all about it in the fourth grade or something if I hadn't gone to Battle School. For Battle School purposes what matters is that I have the exemptions necessary for my exoskeleton," (that must be the copper lace all down her arms and hands) "and rules about powers during games which don't apply to me since mine doesn't do anything but did get my best friend in trouble once when they thought he might've done something. Matters even less in Tactical now we're not having battles."

"Oh, I was wondering what that was. What kinds of exemptions do you need to have it?"

"The stuff's a nice fancy alloy that won't let any random person with a teekay mutation stab me in the spine with it or rip it off me, but the reason not everybody wears one is because it makes it many times easier for a telepath to hijack physical control. The exo partially bypasses a lot of brain architecture about how bodies are supposed to move to give conscious control and conscious precision. Same way it's easier for most telepaths to tell what somebody's thinking right then than to tell whether they're distributing their weight evenly between feet, it's easier for a telepath to turn someone with an exo into a puppet than to do the same to anyone else. And the exo makes for a ridiculously fast and graceful puppet. There was a nasty incident where someone did exactly that and people died, so the exos were pulled from production and I only got one for my balance problems because I handle the telepath problem separately."

"Eek. Yeah, that would be bad."

"Yeah. But it worked out pretty great for me." She sets her snack tray down and does a neat casual flip over the back of her arm chair. "Anytime I'm not in the shower I can do anything I have the muscle tone for, and in zero-g everybody else floats and I fly."

"That is pretty cool. Of course some people don't need zero-g to fly but zero-g sounds pretty damn cool anyway."

"Yes, well, if I were the kinda mutant with wings I couldn't go to Battle School in the first place, they have to trade off between polite disability accommodations and being in space."

"Oh, I was thinking more of telekinetics who can lift themselves and so on. My sister does magnetism and one of my other best friends does teekay and they can both fly."

"They don't love teekay or magnets in space either. I think they've made exceptions but they're not otherwise selecting for psychological health above a certain baseline and if a temper tantrum loses station pressure..."

"Ew. Okay, that makes a certain amount of sense. Not that either of my friends is likely to do anything like that, but yeah, lives on the line, I can appreciate that logic."

"I mean, they take Battle Schoolers who are kindergarten age, they have great psych tests but still."

"But still, yeah. ...So if you've been in space for the past whatever, you probably don't get trees and grass and stuff. Have you been outside?"

"There's an outside? I mean, besides the stars exploding outside, which, I didn't bring spacewalk gear."

"Yeah, Bar has a backyard with a lake and a forest and a mountain off in the distance."

"Neat. Can people swim in the lake?"

"Yeah. I've done it a couple of times."

"Anybody gonna care if I don't want to soak my uniform pants in so doing?"

"I don't, and Bar doesn't care what you are or are not wearing as long as it's not in the main area."

"Neat. Which way?" Aegis sways slightly with anticipation.

Edie opens the relevant door.

Aegis runs, rather gazelle-like, to the shore, hops out of her pants, and dives in. She is not an expert swimmer, but she stays afloat. "Brr!" she says delightedly.

"Don't get a lot of chance to go swimming in space?"

"Nope. Zero-g's better but this is new. For exercise it's all treadmills and weights and such."

"Yeah, novelty's cool. And swimming's fun, even if the water is pretty cold."

Aegis figures out how to float on her back. "So you know what I do all day, what about you?"

"Oh, I'm at college getting my teaching degree. Nothing near as interesting as space."

"What're you gonna teach?"

"Languages. I'm already something of a polygot, so it seemed like a good choice."

"Neat. Does your telepathy do languages? That's a nice polite application for it."

"It does! And yes, it is. Getting a language out of someone's head still involves getting something out of their head, so I make sure to ask permission first, but it's sufficiently non-invasive a lot of people will say yes."

"Yeah. I'd maybe want some languages but I don't think I can make a gap for you."

"Even if you could, it might be wise to wait until you were ready to go back inside. Milliways has security that is apparently sufficient to keep patrons from doing nasty things to each other, but I don't think it extends out here, and you've known me less than an hour."

"Good to know. But I can't. I can make a gap for my best friend, but his power's pretty harmless and noninvasive even when he's trying to use it in a fight and I can still only do it when I'm in a decent mood and not if I'm mad at him or anything."

"Oh well. It might be a little hard to explain why you could suddenly speak, say, German as it was spoken almost two hundred years ago anyway."

"It'd be a decent foundation to update to modern German, and besides, suddenly learning a bunch of languages for fun isn't too out of the ordinary for my school. We're genuises, and in humans intelligence generalizes most of the time."

"Fair enough. I got a decent chunk of my languages from someone whose primary job is inventing interesting mechanical things."

"Yeah? What's new and happening in mechanical things in the nineteen eighties?"

"Well, there's a jet, and a telepathic amplifier, and holograms."

"Nice. ...If your world is just an earlier version of mine, you might get attacked by nasty bug alien hive minds. Not too far out."

"Good to know. I will definitely let people know to keep an eye out for that."

"They don't have mutants but they have better tech than humans of the time by a long shot and the hive minds foul up conventional combat telepathy something fierce. The hives are oriented around queens, if the queen dies all the other buggers fall over empty. They hit China first."

"Aha. 'Foul up combat telepathy,' definitely good to know. Is it safe to assume sufficiently amplified telepathy could still function as an early warning system, if we know to look?"

"Yeah. If you see a big-as-fuck mind with a million times more moving parts than it ought to have and it is in space: it's buggers. But they're not chatty, either."

"Got it. Not that we wouldn't have figured out something was wrong if we found something like that, but it probably wouldn't be findable before it became obvious through other channels that something was wrong, if we didn't know to look."

"They don't want to be your friends. If they're buggers, if they're like ours. I think someone noticed them before they came in, first time, and was trying to say hi, and if they managed to make 'hi' understood at all it didn't save China."

"Ah. And at that point the confounding factor is whether we can convince governments of things."

"Yeah."

"Might well work. 'You should be scared of this thing and attack it' is something governments are often unfortunately willing to listen to."

"Yeah, well, if it gets them to shoot the buggers out of the sky so much the better."

"Yeah. I'm not arguing with that."

"They got fought off, they came back and Mazer Rackham figured out the queen thing and nipped her ship to cripple their whole fleet, and my world we're getting ready for round three now."

"And that's why you're in space military academy."

"Yup."

"Sucks. Well, hopefully we can nip that in the bud if we have to deal with it."

"I'd offer to buy you fancy shit on my alt's tab, but it'd all be weapons and ships you wouldn't know how to use or maintain and most of it would probably be a little big for Bar to handle."

"...What about blueprints? We do have a mechanical genius who's already reverse-engineered some stuff my sister and I have brought home from Milliways."

"Ehn. Yeah, I was a little afraid of that. Oh well."

"Sorry. And she can't do weapons either, or won't, so."

"I already knew that, yeah. Actually...Bar, is there any way you could tell whether my world has these Bugger things in it?"

Not with confidence. As found in Aegis's world, they do not publish recorded works nor have any artifacts that count as 'available for sale' in a way I can access. I can make tentative guesses based on the presence of similar alien flora which I could access as inedible garnish, but this is hardly conclusive.

"Hm. Oh well, it was worth a shot."

"Yeah. Pity."

"Pity indeed. So what's your best friend's power? You said it was harmless, but it's also the kind of thing a telepathic shield is relevant to..."

"He links people up. It's near-purely voluntary, and ups everybody's multitasking handling to compensate. Sue picks and chooses what to relay. More useful for allies than enemies, but if someone's hurting him he's been known to show them what they were doing, kind of a discount empathy deal, but it barely works, like that."

"Sweet. I don't think I've ever heard of that happening, but the thing about mutants is we're all so different. I think telepathy and teekay are a few of the only things that show up consistently similarly in unrelated people."

"There's been more repeats by my era, or things that looked like they weren't that turned out to be stylistic differences."

"Well, you've had longer to do it in."

"Yeah."

"Hey, Bar, can I see some books on mutant history from her world?"

How technical would you like them?

"A basic overview to start with, please."

A book entitled Mutation: Its First Century and a sequel called Mutation: Its Second Century by the same author appear.

Edie picks up the first one and flips to the index. Any mention of her parents or any of the other X-Men?

Yup! Those were a thing. There are pictures, even. ...Her parents did not get along. Well enough to have children, or do more than occasionally play chess while Erik was in prison.

"Are... you okay?"

"Professor X existed in your universe. So did my dad. They were, apparently, archenemies instead of best friends." She slides the page over. "Lehnsherr. My name is Edie Lehnsherr."

Aegis looks at it. "I'm... sorry."

She's just going to keep crying a little longer.

"It's okay, I guess it was kind of a shock."

"Yeah. I knew they had a pretty big fight, once...they made up a few months later. I guess the making up isn't guaranteed."

"Yeah."

"It's so sad though. He's been through so much...he's fine, now. He's happy. But I don't think the one of him in your universe ever got to be. And maybe that's his own fault but it's still sad."

"Book doesn't seem to speculate a ton about his psychological health..."

"He wouldn't have been, I don't think. Maybe he wasn't always miserable but if he was living like that, in and out of prison, doing things like that...I know my dad. He wouldn't have been happy."

"So... why didn't he just do something else?"

"Based on what I'm seeing here? Because he thought his happiness was less important than what he thought he was accomplishing. Because terrible things had happened to him, truly terrible things, and even my version of him didn't really believe happiness was an option until he had it."

"...Your dad is a little screwed up."

"He survived the Holocaust. Screwed up happens."

"Mmhm."

"What?"

"...The Tactical School physical combat instructor is that old?" asks Aegis, squinting at the page. "Gonna have to ask him about that."

"He's your physical combat instructor? Wow. Maybe don't tell him you found a universe where Magneto isn't a supervillain, they don't even get along that well when they're on the same side. Or you could, if seeing him react sounds like your idea of fun."

"It sounds hilarious, actually, but I don't think I'm going to tell a soul about this place. Howlett's a cool guy but somebody'd notice if I went chatting about it to get reactions."

"Fair enough. Everyone back home--and by everyone I mean my close personal acquaintances, not the general public--knows about Milliways because my sister and I bring tech home for genius guy to reverse engineer."

"Yeah, I'm super, super tempted to do something like that with my alt's tab but the International Fleet is sort of spotty on the... not being evil idiots...? thing? Like, I'm by and large fine, but I wouldn't trust them to handle 'Tactical School student who is coincidentally resistant to telepaths conjures a lot of tech from goddamn nowhere' better-than-uselessly, and that's where I am, so I can't just take home a heap of things and run away with it..."

"That sounds frustrating."

"Yeah. I don't know if I'd actually wake up with my power drugged away and my exo taken for security reasons but it occurred to me. Even though anti-mutie drugs are super illegal."

"They had better be! Wow, when you said you didn't trust them to be better than useless I was imagining bureaucratic dithering and an ocean of red tape, not human rights violations."

"I'm pretty sure they're better with people who didn't already sign their lives over to them? I'm in a military contract that doesn't end until I'm a few years older, minimum. The IF probably wouldn't get involved, or at least it'd be all carrots no sticks, if some random person dirtside showed up with stuff. They might try to get me to explain, too, the trouble is there's no way they'd believe me without a way to get into my head and check. Monitor won't even work, my power blocks those too."

"Bleah. Better than doing it to random civilians, I'll grant, but still."

"They originally didn't even consider me for Battle School because the monitor didn't work. They have alternative tests that they use for other regions of the world and I took those, eventually, somebody really wanted me up there, but the IF is very big on knowing what we're thinking. There was this game back in Battle School that they were using for psych data, but the game started doing weird stuff for me and Sue, and they couldn't figure out what it meant anymore, and they had me writing up self-reports."

"That sounds...creepy and invasive, but I don't have a whole lot of experience with militaries to tell how bad it actually is."

"I don't have experience with any but the one. The game goes away after one graduates out, anyway, so I've stopped reporting. And I hacked all their records to see what they have on me. They've had some remarkable arguments about me and Sue."

"Ooh, what kind of arguments?"

"...If I tell you the juicy ones you need to promise not to put me in the awkward position of having to defend the International Fleet from an overreaction. Like, they suck, but they do some other unrelated things much less suckily, they are actually trying to solve a global extinction threat, and they are a bunch of different people who agree on stuff."

"...If I don't say anything but make faces will you feel the need to defend them, I can keep my mouth shut but I don't know that I can promise not to make faces."

"Oh, no, arbitrarily upset faces are totally par for the course, go nuts. Okay, so, back when Sue was in Tactical with me, there was this guy, I don't even know if he was regular gay or just space-gay - gender balance is fiercely male-dominated in Battle School et al, fill in the blanks - there was this guy who creeped on Sue. Beat on him and raped him and Sue is only a little older than me and we were both promoted fast, mind, so the guy's older. The authorities suck, so nobody says anything, and by the time I get Sue to tell me what the fuck is wrong with him so we can plan to feed the guy his own knees together, guy busts into our room. Sue freezes, I'm just about ready to commit murder, guy gets in a lucky shot and I spend the rest of the fight knocked out. Sue commits murder. And later I look at our records and we find out that the teachers knew what was going on and wanted to see how their promising future savior of the human race reacted to the stressor. They didn't sic the creep on him, but they did let him see how to override the palm locks. There were a couple very valiant psychologists typing NOOOOOO at the top of their metaphorical lungs, but nobody fucking listened to them."

Intensely upset faces!

"I know, right? Sue didn't get in trouble for icing the asshole. It was like nothing happened. Some people were awfully pleased with how he reacted to his stressor. Some of 'em think he's not good enough because he was too paralyzed to jump in as quick as I did."

"I should hope he didn't get in trouble for that. Well, that's some new material to add to the folder of 'things to think about if I need to be pissed off.'"

"D'you need that much?"

"Not really. It's just there's enough stuff that pisses me off that it's easier to put it all in one place. And putting it aside for if and when I need it is easier than trying to repress it or dwelling on it all the time."

"I don't get it."

"It's like...I can't tell myself that it doesn't matter, that I shouldn't be angry about it. But I can tell myself that I can be angry about it later instead of right now."

"And then later... never comes?"

"And then later ends up coming when I have access to a gym and can beat the shit out of a punching bag for a few hours."

"Fair enough. Not everybody can beat the shit out of Howlett instead."

"Well, I can do that, too, but not while I'm away at college."

"Fair enough."

"I wonder how Logan will react when I tell him I know his birth name. ...I wonder what made him start going by it again, I think the name legally on his paperwork right now is Logan L. Logan. Guess what the L stands for."

"Logan? Shot in the dark."

"You guessed it. I don't think anyone actually believes that's his original name, but so far all efforts to get it out of him have failed. ...I'm so tempted to tell anyone other than my sister, but I probably shouldn't. It's not really fair to breach his privacy by going behind his back to another universe."

"My one isn't especially talkative about his history, so I couldn't tell you why he switched back."

"Well, this book suggests he did use it for a while in your history." Flip flip flip. "...My sister and I never existed in your universe, it looks like. Not really surprising, all things considered."

"Yeah, it sounds like a lot of things were different. Maybe you don't have buggers, either."

"Here's hoping. Although I suspect that the aliens in the metal spaceships would be more easily defeatable if the world's prime magnetist isn't swanning around being a supervillain."

"I think the First Invasion postdated him by a little..." Aegis rechecks the year. "Yeah, he was dead. And anyway they mostly hit from orbit. Little out of most people's range."

"Ooh. Luck on that."

"It's bad enough I never got to meet my grandmother. I really, really don't want to lose my dad."

Nod.

"If I do manage to acquire longevity for my loved ones, I'll keep an eye out for you in a couple centuries."

"You can leave things with Bar for specific people, or templates. I got a key to a room that some of my alts paid for and permission to use the richest one's tab."

"Oh, that's convenient. I've never met an alternate version of myself here or I might have done something similar."

"Apparently a bunch of mine have magic, but unless I run into one in person I can't have any, they don't dare leave it lying around."

"Lucky. That makes sense, though, if it's at all worth having."

"Yeah. They don't want to trust obscurity and an ordinary door lock with it and Bar can't distribute magic items."

"That is an entirely sensible attitude to artifacts of significant power."

"Frustrating as hell for me, though. Magic I could deploy right under the IF's collective nose without them being able to do squat."

"Deploying things under the noses of obstructive persons without them being able to squat is one of life's little joys, yes."

Giggle.

"One of the benefits of being at the genesis of mutantkind is that the people in charge haven't figured out how to catch most of us at deploying things yet."

"Yeah? Fun stories?"

"Well, we can catch us at deploying things much more reliably, and I grew up at a boarding school for young mutants, so I don't have all that many fun stories from my childhood--of the deploying things variety anyway--but I think the college still hasn't cottoned on to the fact that the fire alarm mysteriously gets pulled at the other end of the building when Professor MacGregor starts inserting homophobia into his lectures."

Snort. "Who's doing that one?"

"Well, I can't promise that the fire alarm's getting pulled on any lectures I or someone who's interested in collaborating with me haven't attended, but it's my sister who pulls the actual metal bar. I let her know when to do it, she does the doing."

"Cool. Mutant rights aren't what they could be but things're mostly better for gay people," Aegis mentions. "In my world. Based on my heavily filtered information from a planet I haven't seen since I was six."

"Hopefully things will get better faster with the two most prominent mutants rights activists working together instead of at each other's throats and one of 'em's a supervillain."

"Luck with that."

"Thanks. Good luck with your information on gay people not being horribly misleading."

She shrugs. "I'm not actually even sure if I'm gay yet. Sue seems to be. He used to flirt with me before he cottoned on I didn't like it but he didn't mean it."

"Is Sue a boy's name in the future? I think historically the trend has been for boys' names to become girls' names more than the opposite."

"Pff. No, it's a girl's name, that's how I conned the Tactical School people into letting me room with him. He hates his paperwork name like it stabbed him in the face. Like it stabbed me in the face, more like, Sue'd care more if it were that way around. Wouldn't tell me what it was back when we met, and then I watched him play that psych data game I mentioned and he kept going to a part that killed his avatar in interesting ways, over and over and over, and I nicknamed him Suicide Watch. Got shortened."

"Aww, that's cute. In a sort of superficially disturbing way."

"Disturbing and cute is very Sue."

"And this was before the incident which I am not supposed to comment on extensively."

"I mean, you can comment, but if you start calling for the dissolution of the IF or something I have to fall back on 'but the buggers would destroy the entire Earth and that is strictly worse'."

"Oh, no, I'm far more rational than that. If I can put up with encouraging the American government's trigger-happy tendencies I can put up with not futilely trying to overthrow an organization that massively fucked up."

"Mkay."

"I mean, if there was some convenient alternative that would predictably do at least as good a job, that would be one thing, but that would be massively implausible even aside from the part where I expect you would have mentioned it."

"It would've come up."

"I had guessed. I really hope the Buggers aren't a thing in my universe."

"Me too."

"I expect China agrees with us."

"Oh yeah. There's still a China, but they took an enormous loss."

"Oh, I hadn't thought to ask. That's good, I think China represents the oldest continuous civilization in human history. It would be a terrible shame to lose that, even on top of the loss of human life."

"It sort of depends on how you count 'continuous civilization', I think."

"It's got some pretty damn important culture regardless, but I suppose so."

"Some culture was lost. A lot of landmarks are unrecognizable. Some of the more regionally concentrated ethnic groups were all but wiped out."

"Yep. I mean, I know some things that aren't military history. It's not that expensive to maintain a decent library for other things. I read fiction sometimes, or stuff about economics or philosophy or whatever strikes my fancy. Especially since Tactical School has basically no games around, while Battle School was brimful."

"Reading's nice. I probably wouldn't have done very well at your games, I have problems caring positively about things that look like they should have minds behind them but don't."

"Well, then you wouldn't have liked the fantasy game, but some of the ones in the room you could play against the other kids if you didn't like the automatic."

"Fair enough. Of course it's moot, since there's literally no chance my dad would have been okay with sending me away to space military academy in the first place."

"Mine weren't thrilled. I had to talk them into it. Regular school was boring."

"Dad...has issues with legal authority. Which considering what the legal authority in Germany decided to do when he was a kid isn't all that surprising. He's also...he loves my sister and I desperately. We're all the family he has. If he really honestly truly knew that sending us into space was the best thing for us, knew it beyond a shadow of a doubt, he'd do it. And it would break his heart."

"We... correspond. We don't have a lot to say to each other at this point though."

"I can imagine." She shivers. "I'm going to chalk that up as a fantastically minor but still extant reason to deal with this whole bug problem as quickly and efficiently as possible. And...keep the Institute open, let's see, how long did it last in your world..." flip flip

Did not long survive the death of its founder. Inspired some similar organizations, most of them not very stable, especially as integration efforts proceeded.

"Well, chalk that up as a fantastically minor but still extant reason to keep the Professor alive. And keep an eye out for baby you and offer her a scholarship."

"September 13, 2155. Forks, Washington. Isabella Marie Swan, daughter of police officer Charlie Swan and future kindergarten teacher Renée Higgenbotham Swan. However, a plurality of my alts were born in 1987, one a few years later, so if you get one closer to the mean rather than one who's just like me the date might be earlier. September 13 is consistent where applicable though, and the name is too except for the one who was born in a postapocaylptic dystopia and the non-Earthling... one was born on Earth but in California instead."

"Conveniently, we actually have deploying-things levels of access to public records. Well, half deploying things and half our genius used to work for the CIA. So don't wait a couple of hundred years to look for baby you to give a scholarship to, understood."

"And she's nearly guaranteed to have a dupe of my power if she's a mutant at all. The alts call it 'mental opacity' and those of us with ways to have powers in the first place get that one."

"Oh, that's interesting. I'd be...surprised if I had an alt who wasn't some kind of telepath, but that's a bit more relevant in day-to-day life."

"My power's indirectly relevant to me every day. ...Buy little me an exoskeleton from Milliways if you can swing it. We're also all really clumsy until something happens to fix that, like magic or turning into a vampire."

"True! Bar, if we have a little Aegis, can I buy her an exoskeleton?"

Yes. While it is military hardware, it is not a weapon per se.

"Awesome."

"And don't call her Aegis. We all pick distinguishing nicknames and she'll be annoyed if she gets here and hers is taken. So far it's Aegis for me and there's Golden, Stella, Juliet, Amariah, Shell Bell, and Angela."

"Oh, right. Honestly I just remembered your nickname more than your birth name. A little Isabella then."

"Bella. Probably. The angel and the witch use the full name, the rest of us shorten."

"A Baby Bella then."

"Aaaand if she has my power but it doesn't kick in until puberty like some people's, or if she doesn't get one or that one at all, still stay the fuck away from her head unless she wants to play Welcome To My Brain, there is a damn good reason we wind up with this power and it's not because we find it strengthens our moral character to be prevented from something as fun and harmless as telepathy. Pure-communication shit like talking only silent is fine, livesaving shit is fine, everything else keep it to yourself."

"Oh, sure. I definitely don't read people's minds without their permission anyway."

"Right, just making sure. This applies even if she is two and you can't figure out why she's crying, it applies even if you are mad at her, etcetera, it applies unless you would also be willing to stab her in the face. ...Sues also happen more than once. He will be harder to find because I'm not sure if they all have the same birth name, they hate it enough that it didn't make it into our book in our room."

"...Noted. That is a higher threshold than most people have and I will be sure to respect it. Are there any other identifying features of Sue that I could use to find him?"

"They look the same. I can show you the pictures in the book in our room. They'll come up wacky as all hell on any psych testing but you probably don't have particularly population-comprehensive psych testing... I think they all have rich parents and evil dads who should not be allowed to dad."

"I'd be happy to see the pictures. We're already keeping an eye out for kids with evil parents who should not be allowed to parent but the rich part complicates things, because fuck society."

"Fuck society!" agrees Aegis. "You should probably come with me to look at the pictures in case Milliways does time shit." She dances up the stairs.

Edie follows Aegis up the stairs, less gracefully.

And Aegis fetches the book and shows Edie pictures of Sues.

Edie pays much more attention to the pictures than she normally would to faces with no minds behind them!

"Alts don't always look precisely alike. Shell Bell's shorter than the others. I might end up taller, zero-g. Angela has wings. Golden is a vampire and this makes her pale and gives her gold eyes. But that is what Sues look like."

"I think I can remember this. Nice hair they've got."

"They're soft and fluffy sorts."

"If you keep talking like that I'm going to have to lean more towards cute than disturbing."

"And the distributable form of magic the others of me won't leave lying around runs on pain and Sues are where they get it."

"...Voluntarily. Right?"

"Yeah, Sues are very chill with this."

"Okay. Well, I'm not unfamiliar with the concept of a high pain tolerance--Logan's claws don't have sheaths, for example."

"I haven't actually seen him do claws, just regen, but yeah, Sue usedta go all out on him and break shit. Me too, sometimes, but I'm less intrinsically fascinated by crunching noises and I know I don't need to worry about overgentle habits if I pull my punches in lessons."

"I, on the other hand, have enough of a temper and a high enough chance of meeting civilians who will piss me off that practicing breaking people on someone who can take it probably isn't going to teach me habits that I actually want."

"If I were you I'd rather have a nosebreaking habit than some other possible habits."

"I don't exactly spectate and catalogue injuries but he broke his elbow one time. Why?"

"Aren't his bones made of super-strong metal now? Is there anything about that in this book, hang on." Flip flip

"Okay, that makes sense."

"I broke his nose once but that was just cartilage."

"Yeah. I'm honestly a little surprised his nose hasn't healed crooked at any point."

"Decent regen template, I guess."

He appears, but not that early or personally.

"Never asked. Although to hear him tell it they don't actually like him that much. He doesn't tell people he's a mutant, thinks his job would be the first thing to give. Better doesn't mean perfect, especially when your job involves swatting kids around."

"He's not a very likable person. Or he very deliberately doesn't go out of his way to be, at any rate."

"Sue likes him a lot, but Sue's Sue. I like him fine but only to a point."

"I get along with him better than Dad does, but that's not saying much. Emily...has a sort of weird fascination with his skeleton. She doesn't obsess over it or anything but apparently she finds the kind of metal magnetically aesthetic."

"Buy her a marble of it to play with."

It depends on the variety. If carbonadium will do, I can get you a small sphere for $360.

"You know what, sure. This is probably not the most responsible life choice I have ever made but I don't really care."

Small carbonadium marble.

"That's cute."

"Jewelry's a convenient way to carry around small quantities of metal she's particularly attached to. She has a bracelet made of a few rolls of steel pennies she used to play with when we were little."

"I don't think I've ever seen a penny of any composition in my life."

"They're mostly made of copper, but this one year they made steel ones. I guess they've probably been phased out by the time spacefuture rolls around."

"Yeah. Physical cash is not so much a thing anymore at all. Although admittedly even if it were I wouldn't have seen any since I was six, it doesn't come up in space, everything's military issue."

"Huh. Well, I'd be a little surprised if there weren't still some in museums and private collections and whatever, but kudos. Even if it takes the concept of fiat currency to mildly amusing levels."

"I remember going to museums when I was little but if there were pennies in them they didn't make an impression. At that age I liked the shiny rocks and the dinosaurs."

"Shiny rocks and dinosaurs are fun!"

"Mm-hm. Especially flying dinosaurs."

"I think the flying ones aren't technically dinosaurs, but that doesn't make them less fun."

"Eh, I was like four, technical distinctions were a little lost on me for things I cared about on the level of 'neat, I want to ride it'."

"Alas, they do not let you ride the skeletons at museums."

"And the skeletons are shit at flying, too."

"Alas, it turns out that cutting costs by only including the bare bones of one's flying machine is an unwise investment."

Hee hee hee.

"My dinosaur-riding childhood fantasies mostly revolved around T-Rexes. Flying I could get by pestering someone."

"Eh, I feel like it's not really flying if somebody has to do it for you. Different if it's a critter."

"I think it helped that my sister lets me read her mind whenever, so I got her perspective of it too."

"That'd be different, I guess."

"Yeah. And my brief high school boyfriend had wings. Making out in midair is fun."

"I'll take your word on that at least for now."

"Probably for the best."

"Yep. But if I like boys I'll have just about my pick of vicious space genius. Gender ratio!"

"Gender ratio! Gender ratio was pretty balanced for me growing up, which was fine by me. I think my closest social circle was 2:1 girls to boys, this despite the fact that I'm straight."

"I think I'm the only girl in Tactical right now unless there's one in the latest shipful I haven't seen. Another one graduated a while ago."

"I wonder why the gender ratio is so imbalanced."

"They filter for aggression! I'm borderline too nice!"

"Oh, lovely. That...suggests several different problems with their way of thinking."

"I mean, I get your point, but I get their point too on that one. They're training kids, not adults, because they want the perfect army because the shit that's going to go down has to go down right, against a perfectly coordinated technologically superior foe. You could train a nice calm reasonable adult to be good at strategy, but if you want an army full of people who breathe it, you need to dunk 'em in it from a nice early age and then you have to motivate your tiny launchies to learn the shit, which means motivating them to play the games like they matter. And the best way to do that on any kind of scale is to pick the launchies who want to smash the other little fucker's face in, and channel that. They find very smart five- and six-year-olds, but still."

"I also meant that in my experience girls are naturally just as aggressive as boys are."

"E, sometimes, sure, witness me, but not as usably. They could have maybe come up with a program designed more for girl style but they didn't. Because 'they' are themselves military and male-dominated."

"So what kind of name is Mazer Rackham anyway?"

"I think he was Maori."

"...I know nothing about the Maori so I'm just going to shut up and try not to be too much of an ethnocentric white girl, then."

Snort. "I don't know if it's a traditional Maori name, maybe his parents named him after some brand of car that was popular in New Zealand, how should I know, but yeah."

"At least you have the space military excuse."

"It's handy! I'm in trouble if I reveal that I'm not very good at lightspeed physics, though!"

"That shouldn't be too hard around me, I know zip about lightspeed physics."

"Good, that should keep you from pop quizzing me on ship acceleration and temporal shit."

"Despite my prospective career as a teacher."

"Languages, right? Huh, you're probably pre-Stark standardization."

"...Stark like Howard Stark?"

"Huh? No, it's a language. Also called IF Common or just Common, Stark is Star Common or something like that and fewer syllables so it sticks. It's like a cross between English and Esperanto with all the life sucked out of it. Easy to learn, very regular, pretty easy to understand even through an accent, international standard."

"Ah. Yep, definitely before that."

"Ostensibly we all speak Stark in space but there's a lot of space-specific slang from every which where more or less mangled, and they also don't bother to translate all our reading assignments when they start out in English. Lucky me I was born in America."

"Lucky you."

"Then again, means I'm not proper bilingual, I just have snips of this and that. Point of Stark is so we don't have to also learn Russian and whatnot."

"Russian actually is one of the languages I know, but I definitely wouldn't have wanted to learn it the hard way."

"I can have a real simple conversation in Russian, Dutch, Chinese, and Arabic, but I mean real simple, listening to my launch group talk to people they shared languages with and picking up words simple."

"Sure. I could swear in Russian before I downloaded the whole thing."

"Oh, I can swear in everything. Battle School kids swear a lot."

"I had an uncle who delighted in teaching me swear words behind Dad's back."

Hee hee.

"I wonder if he's in here..." flip flip. Any mention of Azazel?

He's in the index with a further reading suggestion but doesn't have an actual paragraph.

She's not sure she really wants to know, anyway, considering which side he would have been on. She does not request the book.

"Do you even know anyone who isn't a mutant?"

"Most of the people I go to college with aren't. Growing up...not so much. Well, there was Ms. MacTaggert."

"Mm?"

"Oh, she's a friend of the Professor's. Moira MacTaggert. Used to work at the CIA with Dr. McCoy, that's the resident genius, left not long after the fight I mentioned."

"Ah. Must be interesting having so many mutants around in one place. I don't think I'd met any besides the telepaths I shrugged off when I was yea high," she gestures, "till I went to space."

"Well, I grew up in a boarding school for them. For us. It seems strange not to but I'm well aware I'm biased."

"Renée - my mom - wouldn't hear of putting me anywhere but in her own kindergarten class. I think there are still mutant schools, but I wouldn't have fit in especially well in one anyway, I don't do anything."

"True. Not everyone does something that has an active effect at the Xavier Institute, though. And--sometimes when I mention I went to boarding school people are surprised that someone like I tend to describe my dad would send me away and I have to explain, no, he teaches there."

"Who else have you got with passive powers?"

"Well, there's Professor Munoz, although I suppose it's inaccurate to describe his power as passive, defensive though it is. He can basically adapt to survive anything, including disintegration. There's a kid with an immune system that can fight off pretty much everything--we haven't exposed him to anything beyond the normal, but apparently some of his T-cells in a petri dish have won some pretty impressive grudge matches."

"All right, maybe it'd've worked better than I thought. And I can pretend I have a power that does something with the exo, anyway."

"Well, you have a power that lets you use the exo."

"I have a power that makes it legal. Anyone could use it."

"I meant more that you couldn't have gotten your hands on it if it wasn't legal. If you could have then the power that lets you use the exo would presumably be called 'being rich.'"

"True. Is that a power that qualifies for admission into the school?"

"No, not on its own."

"Didn't think so."

"I wonder if it would be safe for me to use one, I'm on the high end of telepaths and could probably swat anyone who tried to hijack it."

"Nobody on your world will stop you if you want to try it, anyway. It's only a real issue if someone notices how it works and decides to attack you and you can't beat them."

"Yeah. It might be a little hard to pull off if I can't get it reverse-engineered, tho'. ...And I wonder if it blocks magnetists sensing as well as pulling it, because my sister emphatically does not need that kind of feedback about the topography of my body."

"It doesn't go everywhere. But I don't know, I've never asked one."

"If it goes over the breasts it's apparently TMI. I've discussed this with her."

"I mean, I barely have any, but when they show up I do have to reconfigure the exo around 'em because they'll get in the way of the muscles, which are what the exo is supposed to go on top of."

"...Not that it actually matters, because reverse-engineered Milliways technology is the best, but would it do anything for someone who was paraplegic?"

"Depends on why."

"Bullet to the spine."

"Yeah, probably, the exo could jump the nerve damage. I'm not a doctor but that's my understanding."

"Good to know. Again, not massively relevant, but still good to know."

"It's the best gadget."

"I bet. Bar, I haven't decided yet, but if I did want an exoskeleton like hers what would it cost me?"

$87,350.

"...Seems a bit excessive considering I already have a near-perfectly functioning body that does what I want it to. I think I'll pass, at least for now."

"My parents didn't pay for it out of pocket but I forget if it was insurance, the IF pulling strings, or the company giving it to me for free as a PR thing. I just opened it up on Christmas."

"The Institute has enough money that I suspect a Baby Bella in our world would get one anyway, but I really don't need it."

"Suit yourself." She flips over and balances with perfect stillness on one hand.

"That is fantastically impressive, but not worth more than eighty-seven thousand dollars to me."

"Nah, I get it." Pause. "So how good are you at punching shit, d'you wanna go in the yard and spar?"

"I am reasonably good at punching shit! Even better at kicking shit, actually. I'd love to spar, as long as you can promise that you hold back well enough not to break any bones if I don't dodge something."

"Oh yeah, I won't break you. Perfect control, I don't even have to leave bruises if you're timid, I can stop just short and tap you."

"Bruises I don't care about."

"All right. No broken bones no sprains no abrasions?"

Bar provides: sweatpants and a T-shirt and a sports bra.

"Iiiif you really want me to, sure."

"I don't really care, to be honest, but most people would have been weird about it. And Bar has a rule against nudity in the main area."

"I don't give a shit, nobody in space gives a shit."

Outside! Aegis does stretches. She's very limber.

Edie changes and also stretches. She is not as limber, but has some impressively-developed leg muscles.

Aegis cracks her knuckles. "Say when."

Aegis just got off the treadmill and she is, for all her skill, a skinny young kid. That said, she is promptly upside down and then off the ground entirely and flicking Edie in the forehead and then bouncing away with a light kick to the shoulder, and she doesn't slow down from there.

The teacher's not gonna ask, when Aegis goes to class, where the marks are from. Aegis rolls (flips, sways, limbos, pirouettes) with the punches &c and lightly swats her opponent, only resorting to bruising force when it's part of pushing off for movement.

Edie's nowhere near as graceful as Aegis, but she's good enough not to look like a chump. If Aegis is the wind, she can be the mountain.

"Yeah! Nice to get some variety. You're not bad."