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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
"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."
whatamithinking
"It's entirely plausible. Is there anyone you could tell about Milliways and expect to be believed, Bar could probably sell you something to help with the ash problem."
point_b
"I mean, if I bring home enough weird little robots maybe someone would believe that something happened. Milliways in particular is pretty unbelievable."
whatamithinking
"...I know you're phobic but being able to just show someone that you're not lying or joking is so useful."
point_b
"Phobia is an irrational fear. If I were irrationally afraid of telepaths, I would, say, not be able to comfortably believe your claims to have ever met an ethic or to have your power under decent control. I am rational amounts of afraid of something that happens to be something most people do not consider particularly important, in much the same way someone who is immunocompromised would have to be warier of sneezing people than I am because they want to be more careful about managing the genuine threat represented and I can just make Alli heal me if I get a cold."
whatamithinking
"I apologize for misusing the word. I didn't mean that it was irrational, but apparently I misremembered what phobia meant."
thinkering
"Good. I'd be phobic if I weren't immune, Ziz'll do that to people. ...Ziz is an alternate name for the Simurgh."
alli_oop
"Anyway, if one of us could just telepathically convince the Junebugs or whoever that we really went here, we'd probably have to do it a bunch of times. There are a lot of Junebugs, long chain of command."
whatamithinking
"I...really do not work well in a chain of command. I work well on teams with one or maybe a few leaders whom I personally trust. The people I consider myself answerable to at home consist of my parents. And I was less referring to the fact that I was a telepath and more to the fact that Papa was."
point_b
"We're not answerable to the Junebugs unless we're participating in their operations. We're minors and went for partial membership. They handled the evac well though."
thinkering
"My chain of command is kind of shit," acknowledges Lorica. "I'm probably going independent when I age out of the Wards. It's badly organized, I think - parahumans as a group are psychologically damaged high-powered people, the Protectorate basically has to accept any would-be members who register on the powers scale and haven't recently eaten more than four babies, and you have all these sharp edges rubbing directly against each other until something breaks and someone destroys a city block. If I were running it every cape would get a nonpowered personal assistant with a compatible personality to run interference for them. I'm trying to compensate as best I can with robots, myself, I have a smart little software 'bot that I trained to handle most of my correspondence and scheduling and I'm trying to get people to talk to it instead of me if there is the least hint that we aren't going to be best friends."