"...It might make an awful noise. But you can teleport, and better than my dad can even, so just drop it in the sea or something, it won't even poison the fish."

"Are you sure I shouldn't take it apart and try to find a secondary market for that exciting ceramic?"

"Yyyyeah, don't do that."

"You don't call him Charlie."

"Pardon?"

"When he's not around I often call our dad Charlie and our mom Renée."

"Oh. Did that, kicked the habit when I found out he was a cape. We're publicly father/daughter so I can say 'dad' helmet on or off."

"Makes sense."

"I've never really gotten the impulse to call your parents by their first names, but then I understand Emily and I are somewhat atypical in that we're as likely to refer to each other as 'my sister' as our first names."

"Sometimes I say 'my twin' but mostly because everybody knows that means stuff."

"Makes sense."

"I'm trying to figure out some kind of equivalent for mutants but it doesn't work, we just don't have interdependent powers that way."

"I don't think I've ever even listed the gemini package completely - so, twins who actually both exist when they turn sixteen, as opposed to being chimeras or one of them dead or something, get bonuses that work well together. How much varies, Alli and I have powers that work pretty well independently and the only obvious synergy is that she doesn't count against my passenger limit. The bonuses vary in quality and aren't necessarily fair within a set; like, you could have someone whose bonus is turning things yellow who had a twin with the power to make yellow things blindingly bright. But you won't get someone who can turn things green and a twin whose power is to make yellow things blindingly bright. And in addition to the bonuses are basics: Olympic-level ability - but not form - no maintenance required in general physical can-do, and we can talk to each other at any distance but have to talk aloud to do it, and we can sympathetically-heal anything short of death."

"Healing sounds useful. Magnetism and telepathy aren't really linked but teleportation and duplication don't seem linked until you get to the passenger limit thing, I wonder what a pair of us who were from your world or an equivalent would be like."

"I have no idea. But you don't look familiar, so if you exist you haven't been making waves."

"Oh, I think we probably don't exist in your world. I was speaking purely hypothetically."

"None of us look familiar to you, right?" Flicker asks Mistral and Lumiere.

"Pity. I like having an alt. She makes me presents."

"I am arguably also getting you a present, seeing as I'm paying for the materials."

"Yes, I appreciate that very much, but I couldn't count on duplicating the effect by finding more of you."

"True enough. Of course, another alt of yours might not have the skill or resources to make you more presents."

"That's true, I'm not really pulling my weight for Lorica."

"You'd do the same for me if our positions were reversed, I'm sure," says Lorica, serenely applying a blowtorch to something.

"If the door had been less uncooperative you could have teleported my sister and I somewhere nearish the people we were supposed to be dealing with."