"Do you come in singlet the way I apparently do?"

"Not as far as we've met. And most of our alts had the same powers as us, too."

"Well, gemini doesn't do the 'tinkering' thing, so I couldn't have had hers. Apparently she could have had mine."

"I should have, actually. When powers run in families - and they often do - subsequent triggers are often in the same vein as previous examples in the family. I'm not even a transport-focused tinker; I do what I'm currently badly summarizing as 'contingent robotics'. And my thinker power is even less obviously relevant."

"Your what? ...Triggers?"

"Oh, I'm also flat immune to mind-affecting powers all the way up to the Simurgh. It's nice, but it has nothing to do with teleporting and that's all Dad does. Triggers are traumatic events that lead to getting powers."

"Getting your S-Factor activated can be traumatic but it's not an inherent feature," Marie comments.

"Emily and I have had ours since before we were born."

"Got ours as expected on our sixteenth birthday."

"In theory second-gen capes trigger easier than ones who come out of nowhere, but that didn't do me any good because the first remotely traumatic thing to happen to me was still a fucking Endbringer attack."

"Do I want to know what an Endbringer is?"

"Stupidly powerful monsters that descend on a city every few months and wreck everything until either a massive army of capes or Scion or Eidolon in particular hits them hard enough to send them back into hibernation. Leviathan does water. Behemoth is a dynakinetic with a kill aura. The Simurgh looks like a fucked-up angel, she's telekinetic and she fucking sings, she personally kills fewer than either of the other two but her first act was to fucking destroy Switzerland by manipulating everybody who listened to her. Anybody who's in range too long has to be quarantined forever because any effect they have on anything is contaminated by her bullshit precognition directing them to destruction. I was in San Diego when she hit it. But I wasn't there past the limit and the song doesn't touch me anymore."

"...You should stay in Milliways for a while. Sometimes fuck-off powerful people show up and while I normally consider myself one of them this sounds like the kind of problem I am not optimized to solve."

"We've got some fuck-off powerful people back home, too. Eidolon can hold any small handful of different powers of his choice and use them all at once, Scion's even more ridiculous, who do you think's going to come in here who can actually get Endbringers dead?"

"Sometimes people from different systems can tackle things each others' systems find impossible. I've met people with magic systems who assured me resurrection was totally impossible and people who referred to it as being in casual use. In this case it's less a matter of 'has more power to bear' and more 'comes at it from a different angle'."

"Well, I suppose that's promising. How long can one stay here, then?"

"Milliways rents out rooms and sells food, so the answer is sometimes 'until you run out of money.' Considering how terrible the problem you're trying to solve is I will happily contribute to a tab for you to stay as long as possible."

"I don't have any cash on me. I have a tinker budget but if it disappeared and I hadn't built anything there would be very awkward questions and I don't see how I'd draw it down from here. If you get me a seed fund I could build things and sell them to passersby, maybe? I'm not as compulsive as your average tinker but I still don't like the idea of camping out in a hotel for a month without making anything."

"That sounds plausible. Fair warning, Bar doesn't sell weapons or things she knows you're going to make into weapons."

"Then I won't make weapons. I'm not primarily a weapons tinker."

"What works?" Lorica approaches to look at the napkin. "Oh, yeah, sure, cute little custom robots. The only problem is they'll be tinkertech and will be cussedly hard to reverse-engineer to fix when they break."

"Some worlds have magic that can just revert things to previous states. And other ways of fixing things."

"Good for them."

"I'm starting to think we won the world lottery. No horrible monsters and I'm not dead three times over."