"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.
"Mutants absolutely run in families. And yeah, that sounds like it would do it. Although all things considered I'd be surprised if there wasn't anyone who didn't come up with an excuse to hate you."
"There are such people, but not very many, at least near us. Might or might not have helped particularly that for high school we had to go to a gemini school where everyone was a twin."
"Ours is not a boarding school. There exist boarding Gemini schools but ours was just like a regular public school, only with uniforms and arrangements to keep twinsets in the same classes and no gym class until after one turned sixteen."
"...Now, like, after Yellowstone exploded? School everywhere for everyone is canceled for - a while. It'll start up again eventually."
"It didn't get my dad's house, so me and Alli and our mom moved there. Our parents get along better than a lot of divorcés, or it'd be awkward."
"I think they might get back together," opines Alli. "Sometimes I go down for a midnight snack and there's nobody sleeping on the couch."
"The couch is very uncomfortable and if they're managing to share a queen size bed that doesn't mean very much by itself. I don't think we'd better read into it."
"What color do you want your ashbot, and do you have a use for small unfaceted diamonds?" asks Lorica.
"...Blue, and, uh, not... really...? I think the De Beers cartel makes it pretty impossible to trade in them usefully? But that might change, or I might be wrong, and I don't know what the alternative is."
"I could make it facet them but I'd need more parts than I originally budgeted. Eh, I'll just have the ash annihilated and then you won't have to plug it in." Lorica hops to her feet and collects some more objects from Bar.
"Blue's a good color. I'm pretty sure you can pawn diamonds even if you can't set up a jewelry shop with them."
"Well, they're still diamonds. I'm pretty sure some kinds of gemstone get put into jewelry without facets."
"Mmm, if you run it all the time in an ashy area - oh, and it'll get dust and any dirt inside your house too, easier that way, but restrict itself to ash outside - maybe forty kilowatt-hours a day?"