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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
point_b
"I mean, this sounds like a good idea if it'll work for you, but can't Bar just sell whatever you'd be making...? Maybe you can undercut her but will that leave you margin...?"
Lorica could offer customization options that I cannot.
"Oh, that works."
Lorica could offer customization options that I cannot.
"Oh, that works."
thinkering
"What works?" Lorica approaches to look at the napkin. "Oh, yeah, sure, cute little custom robots. The only problem is they'll be tinkertech and will be cussedly hard to reverse-engineer to fix when they break."
iamnotpolaris
"Some worlds have magic that can just revert things to previous states. And other ways of fixing things."
"I'm starting to think we won the world lottery. No horrible monsters and I'm not dead three times over."
point_b
"Our world is mostly okay, except it doesn't have reincarnation and Yellowstone exploded recently."
point_b
"I still live on the same continent, so some ash, yes. I couldn't possibly explain where I got the cute little robot so if you could make it disguise itself as a Roomba or something..."
thinkering
"I dunno what a Roomba is but draw me a picture and I can make it pretend to be one whenever somebody besides you is around."
"When are you guys all from, anyway? You mostly dress like aughts and tens as best I can remember..." Marie says. "So if it's just that my world could have but didn't have Yellowstone go off that's one thing, but I think we should all check to make sure that's not in our futures."
thinkering
"I'm a little earlier than that, but I feel almost positive that if it's going to go in my world, it'll be because Behemoth or possibly the Simurgh or possibly a geokinetic supervillain did it and the fact that it hasn't already happened suggests it's not that easy to do."
thinkering
"Well, I can look into it, but I'm not a precog and they know that. I guess I could claim it manifests weirdly in some way I wouldn't have noticed..."
whatamithinking
"Not being able to plausibly tell people about Milliways must suck. That having been said, I've never heard anyone else mention Yellowstone exploding, and I've met lots of people from Earths later than 2003."