"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.
"Okay, I can put you in the yard. ...My sense of place does not think I can teleport past the threshold there, it must not count as being in the same gravity well, we will have to walk."
And when she's stepped past the threshold, she, passenger, and device are in the backyard in the very ashy Pacific Northwest.
"I can get you a face mask but maybe you don't need one."
She carefully attaches the leads to various points on her body--her temples, a few pulse points--and feels it take effect.
She is the wind.
She has a flesh body, of course, but she pays it no more attention than you would give your little toe. She is the wind, and the wind is heavy with ash.
This needs to stop.
Carefully, as her consciousness settles into the ten feet or so above where the ashpiles have already settled, she stills it, noting the way the air was moving before so she can put it back later. Winds gather the particles into clumps, letting them fall from the sky like black snow. The still zone rises as the ashlevel gets higher, always leaving a safe zone. The ash over areas not devastated already is carefully herded over to the destruction before being shaken from the sky.
When she is done, she takes a moment to remember where her body was, and fumbles for a moment before turning the machine off.
"Ngh," she winces. Coming down like that--becoming merely human again--was always the not fun part. She checks her watch. It's several hours later.
Bella is sitting nearby, with a book. "Hey. I forgot to ask how long that would take but fortunately your girlfriend had a guess. How'd it go?"
"Awesome. I hope Lorica doesn't feel redundant; there's still a lot of ash on the ground and I can bring her little robot to places that might need that to not be the case, but this is a bigger deal. Back to Milliways?"
Bella teleports them and the object to the door, where an Alli is sitting with a Gameboy. In they go.
"There you are," says Lorica. "I'm not sure if we have the same fingerprints and I want to lock this to you so it'll behave for you and not obey random passersby, give me your hand." With Flicker's hand, she puts palm to a flat part of the roomba-like object, now otherwise finished. It bleeps.
"I didn't check with any of my alts whether we have the same fingerprints or not but I doubt it, even identical twins don't have the same fingerprints."
"Easy way to check." Lorica pats the object. It bleeps. "Same fingerprints as far as the ash-eater can tell."
"Also the entire thing came in under budget, Bar had some good alternative materials suggestions in several cases!"
"Yup." Lorica returns all her borrowed tools. She hands Flicker the robot and then asks for a piece of paper to write up a user manual on. Bar provides; Lorica scribbles.
"Oh, I get sensory feedback from my magnetism. I've never even seen some of those metals before."
"Oh yeah, I can't do a thing with exotic materials myself but some Tinkers are all about it and they come up with wacky metals and plastics and whatnot! And I can use them even if I wouldn't have the first idea how to force them to exist in the first place."