"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.
"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."
"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."
"Key suffix being 'ish', these people sound scary. But yeah. If the door comes back before I leave I still can."
"It would still cut down significantly on travel time. Anyway, resource sharing is an important function of alts! When applicable, anyway."
"Pretty alike, most of us. There was one who had a living grandmother and one whose parents were women and two who were princesses and one who was a dragon, that was the farthest-out one, but most of us were mostly the same."
"You'd like her, I bet. Especially since her form of telepathy was purely communicative, no mind reading at all."
"Also, she was shapeshifted into an elf. Voluntarily, apparently the kind of dragon that she is does shapeshifting. So even if one is only programmed to find humanoid small children adorable she still qualifies."
"I am pretty sure I would also have found a small dragon adorable, but shapeshifting is neat."