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Bella finds it.
"Alli!" she twines. "C'mere."
"You c'mere. Easier for you."
"No, you need to come look at this, seriously."
"Okay, fine, where are you?"
"Garage."
So Alli comes out to the garage. Their parents aren't home; Charlie's working, Renée is volunteering with some of the refugee kids at a shelter, trying to find which have parents who just wound up somewhere else, which need adopting, which are going to wind up coming of age adrift in the bursting-at-the-seams system. It's just them, not attending school, recovering.
"Whoa," says Alli. "So when you said you were at the garage, you meant that you were at the freakish restaurant that someone put in our garage."
"This isn't somebody's idea of remodeling," Bella says. "It's too big to be the garage."
"Do you think it's safe?"
"I think one of you should go in first, for sure."
"We don't actually know if I work that way," say two Alli voices, but Bella pushes one of them towards the door anyway.
Nothing happens.
The Allis converge, inside the bar. Bella follows.
point_b
iamnotpolaris
A moment later, the door opens again, and a pair of women crash through it. One's wearing a gold-and-pink dress, the other one a differently-styled blue-and-purple one. Both are wearing masks in the same colors as their clothing.
whatamithinking
"Shut the door shut the door shut the door--" says blue-and-purple. The door slams shut without either of them touching it.
iamnotpolaris
The both of them lie on the floor for a minute, breathing heavily. Pink-and-yellow pushes herself to her feet after a minute, a little shakily. "Thank God. Milliways. Hi, persons, sorry for startling you."
whatamithinking
"We're fine," says blue-and-purple, also climbing to her feet. "A little bruised. Not looking forward to going out that door again. But mostly fine."
alli_oop
"Diiiid you come in through our house or is that more about this being a weird place?"
iamnotpolaris
"Weird place. The place we came in through could not reasonably be described as anyone's house. Bar, does your weapons rule apply if the thing could not be used to harm a living thing without the kind of finagling you could do to use just about anything as a weapon?"
point_b
No hard-and-fast rule. If you want something for disintegrating golems or performing hostile takeovers of robots I am afraid I cannot help you, but perhaps you have something else in mind.
"What the heck?" Bella says as the napkin appears.
"What the heck?" Bella says as the napkin appears.
iamnotpolaris
"Welcome to Milliways, the Bar at the End of the Universe. Which universe no one knows. Arbitrary doors lead here at arbitrary times, the bar is sentient and female and does brilliant drink recommendations, and the first drink's free."
"I need a sonic wand thing. It'll emit a soundwave that's supposed to deactivate the things that are after us. That are completely nonsentient and also made of flubber or silly putty or something, because someone did their research."
"I need a sonic wand thing. It'll emit a soundwave that's supposed to deactivate the things that are after us. That are completely nonsentient and also made of flubber or silly putty or something, because someone did their research."
I can give you a sonic wand.
whatamithinking
"Some kind of animated semi-gelatinous humanoid thing. I didn't catch whether the idiot who created them was being appropriative enough to call them golems or not."
point_b
"And you have idiots creating animated semi-gelatinous humanoids to send after you because why?"
alli_oop
(Alli, meanwhile, sits at the bar, says, "Drink me!", and gets something orange.)
whatamithinking
"Because the world we are currently staying in contains superheroes, including my sister and I, and sometimes mad scientist kinds of supervillain happen."
point_b
"That explains the independent-vigilante costumery, I guess, but my world has those and doesn't have mad scientists."
whatamithinking
"Oh, we're actually working with an organized team right now, those love me, everyone just dresses up like this there. Some worlds don't, I have no idea what the difference is."
point_b
"Like, if twins came in 'mad scientist' you can bet I would have had a really strong opinion on what kind of bonus I wanted. I like what I got though."
whatamithinking
"...Twins? I mean, my sister and I are twins, but that's entirely distinct from the superhero thing."
point_b
"...Okay, so where do your powers come from if you didn't have a gemini event?"
point_b
"I guess that sort of makes more sense insofar as superpowers make any sense. In my world back in the fifties twins - all of 'em, plus people who used to have twins, or were genetic chimera, or whatever - turned up with superpowers. Happens on our sixteenth birthdays."
whatamithinking
"Huh. In my world, people with genetic superpowers have been covertly around for a while, but came to light rather abruptly in the sixties when a group of us prevented another group of us from lighting the Cuban Missile Crisis on fire."
"Superpowers sometimes develop during puberty, but some of them just naturally show up sooner, and if your mother has them too they might even start in the womb."
"Superpowers sometimes develop during puberty, but some of them just naturally show up sooner, and if your mother has them too they might even start in the womb."
point_b
"What-all kinds do you get? On top of our basics I'm a teleporter and Alli self-duplicates."