A moment later, the door opens again, and a pair of women crash through it. One's wearing a gold-and-pink dress, the other one a differently-styled blue-and-purple one. Both are wearing masks in the same colors as their clothing.

"Shut the door shut the door shut the door--" says blue-and-purple. The door slams shut without either of them touching it.

The both of them lie on the floor for a minute, breathing heavily. Pink-and-yellow pushes herself to her feet after a minute, a little shakily. "Thank God. Milliways. Hi, persons, sorry for startling you."

"We're fine," says blue-and-purple, also climbing to her feet. "A little bruised. Not looking forward to going out that door again. But mostly fine."

"Diiiid you come in through our house or is that more about this being a weird place?"

"Weird place. The place we came in through could not reasonably be described as anyone's house. Bar, does your weapons rule apply if the thing could not be used to harm a living thing without the kind of finagling you could do to use just about anything as a weapon?"

I can give you a sonic wand.

"Free drinks, score."

"Alli, that is not the most imp- you've got what after you?"

"Some kind of animated semi-gelatinous humanoid thing. I didn't catch whether the idiot who created them was being appropriative enough to call them golems or not."

"And you have idiots creating animated semi-gelatinous humanoids to send after you because why?"

(Alli, meanwhile, sits at the bar, says, "Drink me!", and gets something orange.)

"Because the world we are currently staying in contains superheroes, including my sister and I, and sometimes mad scientist kinds of supervillain happen."

"That explains the independent-vigilante costumery, I guess, but my world has those and doesn't have mad scientists."

"Oh, we're actually working with an organized team right now, those love me, everyone just dresses up like this there. Some worlds don't, I have no idea what the difference is."

"Like, if twins came in 'mad scientist' you can bet I would have had a really strong opinion on what kind of bonus I wanted. I like what I got though."

"...Twins? I mean, my sister and I are twins, but that's entirely distinct from the superhero thing."

"...Okay, so where do your powers come from if you didn't have a gemini event?"

"Genetics."

"I guess that sort of makes more sense insofar as superpowers make any sense. In my world back in the fifties twins - all of 'em, plus people who used to have twins, or were genetic chimera, or whatever - turned up with superpowers. Happens on our sixteenth birthdays."

"What-all kinds do you get? On top of our basics I'm a teleporter and Alli self-duplicates."

"I do telepathy--and no, I'm not reading your mind--and my sister does magnetism." She pulls off her mask. "No real point to these here. Hi, I'm Edie, and my sister's name is Emily."

Emily does a little wave while also pulling off her mask with the other hand.

"We don't bother with secret identities almost ever. We'd have to conceal our ages or sisterhood to avoid being known as twins, and our powers are so useful for everyday that hiding those so as to be unrecognizable in masks would be a tragedy. I am glad you are not reading my mind. Continue to never, ever do that."

"Wasn't planning on it. We don't have secret identities in our home world, for various reasons, including but not limited to having to be in the closet being tragic, but it's useful where we're staying now. Mostly because for cultural reasons unmasking is a big enough deal that if someone can threaten us with that they're less likely to try to threaten us with something else."

"Funnily enough, due to shenanigans I'd rather not get into, we did have to conceal our sisterhood for a while."

"You're not staying in your original world?"

"Milliways pauses time in your homeworld while you're here, so when we go back we won't have missed anything. And we owed this guy a favor, so he asked us to fill in on his team for a while while he got someone else who would fill a similar role. And I get doors pretty often, so it's not too massive a risk."

"Oh. I guess that sort of makes sense, insofar as this place makes any sense."

"I don't know about sense, but it makes delicious whatever this is."

"I know, right? I get fruity beverages made of fruits that don't exist in my homeworld, it's fantastic."

"What an interesting use for an interdimensional portal."

"Aw, c'mon, Bella, have a sip."

Bella goes over and has a sip. "Okay, this is good."

"We're not totally frivolous! We bring home fantastic medical technology to have reverse engineered."

"That is a very sensible use of an interdimensional portal."

"Unfortunately Bar can only produce technology and not magic, but we get by."

"She also won't give you weapons--as I referenced when we first came in--living things, or anything bigger than her."

"Also if you get up to the kind of behavior the Conquistadores were so fond of she has a security team guaranteed to be a match for whoever's in the bar at the moment."

"...How do they finagle that?"

"Fortuitous yet reliable coincidence, apparently."

"I'm Psyche, and she's Magnetrix."

"Descriptive, that."

"Well, our dad calls himself Magneto."

"Were all the less on-the-nose names taken?"

"To be fair, we've used a lot of different names over the years, and it was our aunt who named Dad. ...Aunt on the other side of the family, Dad's an only child."

"Fair enough. My name was a Junebug selection, I think they probably have someone on staff whose mission in life is naming teenage gemini."

"I mean, she labeled our other parent Professor X, they're a telepath like me, it wasn't only power based."

"Our names are usually connected to our bonuses in some way. Powers tend not to be exact duplicates, which helps, but there are other teleporters and I'm lucky there was something as mellifluous as 'Flicker' free when we had our birthday."

"Oh, we have teleporters too, my aunt had a kid with one and the cousin's a teleporter too."

"How do they work? I can only teleport to locations stationary relative to whatever gravity well I'm in, which is usually the Earth, and I need latitude and longitude, line of sight, an intersection, or to just know where I'm aiming. But no absolute range limit - at least not one smaller than the globe; they had someone tote me up to the moon for a power test but haven't brought me anywhere bigger. And I can do four times a second if I'm trying."

"...Um. I don't know of a specific ruleset they have...I'm pretty sure they don't have the stationary limitation...if they have a reasonable idea of where they're going and nothing's keeping them out they can get there, mostly."

"Well, that sounds convenient."

"It is. I know short-range teleporting is...easier than long-range, is the best way of putting it."

"I don't really have an 'easiness' feature. I can get there or I can't."

"That's definitely different than their thing then. It's...not literally a muscle, but it seems to be more an organic thing than yours. Which makes sense."

"And I do this," says Alli, both of her that there suddenly are. "But we're stuck in sync until something happens." Bella shoves one in the shoulder. "Like that," says the one who got shoved.

"Oh, that's very odd. For me, I mean, on a telepathic level."

"You said you weren't reading our minds."

"I'm not. But I can tell they exist, and that they're different minds from each other, and that is definitely still one mind, not two." She sighs. "Imagine you're walking through a library, and all the books are bound in slightly different, unique colors, and you can't really tell anything about them except the color and the size and whether it's a hardcover or a paperback unless you pick it up and read it. That is like seeing the exact same book in two places and it's obviously an optical illusion except it's not."

"...Okay."

The Alli who didn't get shoved pats Bella on the head. The one who did sneaks the last sip of the orange beverage. "Hey!" says the other one.

"I'm not sure how it is that most people think my telepathy even works, but you're not the first person to be surprised that I perceive that minds exist even when I'm not doing anything with them. It's very strange to me--like someone being surprised that you still see things even when you're not reading a book."

"Gemini don't throw telepaths who work outside their own twinset. And what I've read about ones who have it for within a set don't work like you describe."

"I can't imagine Edie not being a telepath. Honestly, I've always thought the idea of being alone inside your own head forever sounded depressing."

"Well, then you and I are both very lucky indeed to have the twins we have instead of having by some improbable mechanism swapped."

"Definitely. Quite possibly especially definitely depending on which swapped set got which set of parents."

"Why?"

"Because we also have a telepathic parent, and they didn't really trouble themself not to read our fetal minds."

Bella shivers.

"It's not like there was any other way of communicating, at the time."

"What could you possibly urgently need to communicate to a fetus? Like, I know my reaction is an outlier and I probably couldn't have articulated it until I had at least learned the word 'privacy', but most people manage without communicating to their unborn children except via putting Mozart through headphones on the midsection."

"Part of the problem was that I had no boundaries, for most practical purposes. I was sort of--projecting everywhere I could, which ended up amounting to Emily and our parents, and between me and the relevant parent and Emily not having any form of negative reaction, everything got a little--tangled."

"Tangled."

"I don't really have a good way of explaining it. I was sort of--reading everything off of Emily and sharing everything with her likewise and reaching out to every mind I could and--nng. This is really not going to be explainable without explaining my family. You said the twins thing started in the fifties, what year is it for you?"

"Two thousand four? And if you're about to tell us somebody's gay, so am I. Hi."

"Hi. So people with genetic superpowers are called mutants, and sometimes we have physical mutations as well as powers, and both of my parents are externally-male male-identifying medical hermaphrodites, essentially."

"Huh. Gemini can happen the opposite way, I've heard - some people who are biologically speaking fraternal twins fused in the womb happen, they're called chimeras, and they get basics, which include one-time total healing and resolve them into a set of anatomy that matches their mental body map."

"That sounds convenient. So Emily and I were apparently conceived at the same time, and we were born on the same day, but we never actually shared a uterus."

"Huh. I don't know if that would have made you gemini in our world or not. Some people have tried all kinds of wacky things to get superpowered kids ranging from irresponsible fertility drugs to human cloning, but that exact thing hasn't come up."

"Luckily our kind of powers don't rely on that. Unfortunately, each of us was being carried by the parent with the opposite power. Which just made things a little more surreal for Papa, what with various washers and coins sticking to his stomach, but if he hadn't intervened I would literally have killed Dad by projecting tiny baby love at his brain too hard."

"That's... sort of... cute?"

"It's horrifying and may or may not cast noticeable doubts on my stance on abortion."

"I was four months old when it started, if it's relevant. I'm vaguely curious what your stance on abortion was and in what direction I may or may not have influenced it."

"My stance before was 'fetuses are definitely not people'. I may have to revise that to 'first trimester fetuses are probably not people and even if they were they wouldn't be entitled to camp out in people who didn't want them'."

"So, yeah, I was a very high-risk pregnancy, but it all worked out in the end, which granted it probably wouldn't have if anyone involved had been phobic of having their minds read, but to be fair if you're phobic of having your mind read you're probably not going to be in a position to get impregnated by a telepath."

"I in my lesbianitude will avoid being impregnated by any telepaths."

"...I mean, probably don't sleep with anyone from my world, the hermaphroditism mutation goes both ways."

"Oooookay. And especially no telepaths."

"Not to get creepy on you but they wouldn't necessarily have to mention it."

"I'm not even planning to go to your world, what with not knowing my door-getting propensity, and I don't think I'm the one-night stand type, and I am literally sixteen and would not go on being pregnant if I found that I had got that way, but yes, thank you for reminding me that telepathy would be really easy to hide, on multiple levels."

"Sorry."

"Nope! Are you more supertwins?"

"...We are extremely not twins. I'm Annabelle Ryerson, and this is my girlfriend, Ava Carmichael."

"Oh, gotcha," says the Alli who spoke. "I, I mean we, I mean, uh." They converge. "I am her twin," she points at Bella, "and they are twins, and we all have superpowers."

"And you're all out of costume? Are you an indie team, and if so, can you convince my parents to let me join you guys instead, I don't actually want to join the Young Defenders."

"Not only are we not a team we are not all from the same universe. This is Milliways, it hijacks random doors in random worlds."

"I see." She gives them a considering look. "Well...we haven't started actually doing heroics yet, but I'm going to be Lumiere, and this is...Gale Force." The other girl gives her a surprised look.

"Our org doesn't do costumes exactly, it does uniforms, and we're not like in it in it, anyway, but if we're doing code names I'm Verge and she's Flicker."

"Wow. Either you're really from a different universe or you do a really good straight face."

"Well, we're from a different universe than them. I suppose you could be from our world and planning to join some sort of org overseas that we've never heard of - especially likely if this place does translation, which considering I bet it must - and you both have twin siblings who aren't here. But I doubt it."

"That's not it," says Ava. "Gale Force is the name of a notorious supervillain from the 'tens who happens to have had the same powers as me. If I was planning to call myself that and you were from our world you would immediately have known that I was either planning to go evil or kind of an idiot."

"Oh. Yeah, never heard of them, sorry."

"So what are your powers? I duplicate myself and my sister teleports."

"Ironically, I do lightscreens. ...It's ironic because that was what Peerless did too. Ava's an aerokinetic."

"I do magnetism, which usually translates to ferrokinesis, and my sister is a telepath," Emily volunteers.

"A telepath who has ever met an ethic, if that worries you as much as it did me."

Ava takes a second to process what she means and then bursts out laughing. "Oh, what anyone would make of the inside of my head! No, I did not particularly think the woman who was standing there not reacting at all was reading my mind."

"To be fair, I do a marvelous deadpan when I want to."

"What's so ultra-reaction-worthy?"

"Theoretically, yes, practically I have no wish to find out what security Milliways stocks that could take me down."

"I just have basics and teleporting..."

"I meant more on the scale of telling people back home."

"No one can get to your universe unless you hold the door for them."

The two look at each other a little longer. "You know what, sure," Ava says finally. "It's not like anyone but the two of us have ever known us, not really, not for a long time. I am Gale Force," she says, in a tone less of a confession and more daring someone to do something about it. "And she is Peerless, and we have no flipping clue why we're reincarnating but I fully acknowledge that my previous actions were idiotic and morally indefensible."

"Reincarnating? What brand of reincarnation are we talking about here?"

"You die--whether that's bleeding to death because the cave-in crushed your leg or in bed of old age or in a home invasion" Annabelle raises a hand to her scarf "and then you wake up and I won't describe what happens next because it's gross but eventually you grow reasonably up and everything isn't terrible anymore. Or if it's terrible it's not because you're an adult in a baby's body."

"So, you remember everything quite straightforwardly and had a change of heart through some reasonably conventional mechanism of having to go through kindergarten again, or whatever?"

"...Okay, so the basic overview is that Helen and I--that's her real name, Helen--were dating, and we were going to form a superhero team, and we had a massive blowup that was only mostly our faults and I stormed off to become a supervillain because I had the emotional maturity of a grape. Our lives for the next thirteen years proceeded to suck heavily for unrelated reasons, which led among other things to both of us looking back on our relationship with great fondness because it was the last time either of us had really been happy. Then one day when we were duking it out in a nice, non-civilian-inhabited area, we accidentally caused a cave in and she bled to death in my arms while we had a tearful deathbed reconciliation. I quit the supervillain business then and there and spent the next eighteen years growing the fuck up before her second incarnation showed up on my doorstep."

"Does everyone reincarnate where you're from?"

"Damn, people with superpowers don't do that in our world."

"How would you know?"

"Well, I suppose we might not know if they do it only very rarely, but we're not reincarnated and exact power duplicates are almost unheard of and where they're heard of they don't usually come with the same twin powers. And it would be, I don't know, off-theme? If we didn't reincarnate in our twinsets."

"...Twinsets?"

"My world, the people with superpowers are twins. Or triplets, etcetera. They're twins too," she points at the mutants, "but that's unrelated to their powers."

"We have something called S-Factor that can get activated in a wide variety of ways."

"Ours is genetic."

"What a lot of ways there are to come over all super."

"Milliways irony at its finest!"

"Excuse me?"

"Hi, welcome to Milliways, an inter-universal bar that hijacks random doors in random realities. We're all different pairs of superheroes from different universes! You're the first singleton, unless there's someone right outside you'd like to call in."

"I didn't think other universes had superheroes to speak of."

"Having been to Milliways before, and met people from plenty, I will admit that we are something of a rarity."

"So you're saying that the Wards building wasn't specifically targeted," says the newcomer skeptically, "this is some kind of Haywire-style superhero-finding bullshit and it just... found me?"

"I don't know who Haywire is, but I would assume so."

"Who're the Wards?" Helen asks. "I'd ask if they were like the Young Guardians but you probably have as little idea of who those are as I have of who the Wards are."

"...Wards are junior Protectorate. Protectorate being United States hero organization. Young Guardians sounds like it'd be some other country's version of same. So what worlds are you from, does it mean anything if I say I'm from Earth Bet?"

"Well, I live in Ohio. Sounds like the Young Guardians and the Wards are a rose by any other name, etcetera. We don't have a name for our world; we didn't even know for sure other ones existed until less than an hour ago."

"We're familiar with some world names but Earth Bet isn't one of them."

"There's some tinkertech that will go between Earths. Mine's Bet, there's Aleph, one can pay through the nose to get their version of various movies and so on. Sounds like you're from worlds we haven't contacted, which makes sense, there's certainly more of those. That leaves the door thing to explain. Is it just running on its own with its tinker or shaker not paying attention...?"

"I'm guessing tinker means mad scientist? Because we're pretty sure Milliways is magic, not technology."

"I'm not mad. Other than that, yes, you have the idea. Some capes ascribe their powers to magic but that's not conventionally accepted."

"So what kinda nonmad science do you do? Is your helmet made of nonmad science?"

"Mostly it's made of not revealing my identity to random people, but yeah, it also has my HUD and most of my kit's sensors in it."

"We've got masks," she gestures with the hand still holding hers, "but we took 'em off when we came into Milliways."

"We have costumes with masks but we were caught in civilian garb," Ava-who-still-hasn't-mentioned-her-original-name says.

"We have Junebug accessories but they don't even come with masks. I've gone on international television only slightly more dressed up than this."

"Not literally every cape at home does the secret identity, but almost all do. And it's sort of an etiquette thing that you don't even unmask capes you've just beaten in a fight." She looks at Flicker again. "So if you don't do secret identities what are your names?"

"We do the code name thing. I'm Alli, or Verge, and my sister's Bella, or Flicker."

"I'm Emily, or Magnetrix, and my sister's Edie, or Psyche."

"I'm Annabelle, or Helen, or Lumiere. My girlfriend is Ava, or Marie, or Mistral."

"...Why do you have two civilian names apiece?" She starts fiddling with some of the hardware affixing the helmet around her neck.

"Reincarnation. This is my third life, actually, I suppose you could call me Beatrice if you really wanted to."

"Cape names are fine. I'm Lorica." She pulls her helmet off. "Seems like it'd be confusing if I went by my civilian one."

"Extra Bella!"

"Weird!"

"Ooh, alts, those happen sometimes."

"This is a known thing? What does it mean?"

"Well, I don't have a sister, so it's not particularly comprehensive. And you don't strike me as a tinker. Not enough gadgets on you."

"My Bella's a teleporter. You don't have a me? That must be so sad for you."

"No offense, but it never occurred to me that I needed one. My dad's a teleporter, I wonder if that's a coincidence."

"Alts are when one person happens in more than one universe. Edie and I have some, one time Milliways decided to have an Edie And Emily Convention the way it's currently holding a Superhero Convention."

"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."

"Yes, well, lucky you."

"Our world is mostly okay, except it doesn't have reincarnation and Yellowstone exploded recently."

"Um, yikes. Are you in an ash zone, do you want a cute little ash scrubber robot...?"

"I still live on the same continent, so some ash, yes. I couldn't possibly explain where I got the cute little robot so if you could make it disguise itself as a Roomba or something..."

"I dunno what a Roomba is but draw me a picture and I can make it pretend to be one whenever somebody besides you is around."

"You had a supervolcano go off on your continent. Eek."

"We had a little warning. I helped with evac."

"She saved one point five million people," says Alli.

"Damn," murmurs Lorica.

"Holy shit. That's impressive."

"When are you guys all from, anyway? You mostly dress like aughts and tens as best I can remember..." Marie says. "So if it's just that my world could have but didn't have Yellowstone go off that's one thing, but I think we should all check to make sure that's not in our futures."

"It blew up late 2003."

"I'm a little earlier than that, but I feel almost positive that if it's going to go in my world, it'll be because Behemoth or possibly the Simurgh or possibly a geokinetic supervillain did it and the fact that it hasn't already happened suggests it's not that easy to do."

"Nineteen ninety-three for us. We'll definitely get some people to check."

"Okay, it's 2086, if this were going to happen it would probably have happened by now."

"Which at least indicates it's not a universal in Earth timelines."

"It's also possible that it would have happened but someone prevented it."

"Well, I can look into it, but I'm not a precog and they know that. I guess I could claim it manifests weirdly in some way I wouldn't have noticed..."

"Not being able to plausibly tell people about Milliways must suck. That having been said, I've never heard anyone else mention Yellowstone exploding, and I've met lots of people from Earths later than 2003."

"So it could easily be just us."

"It's entirely plausible. Is there anyone you could tell about Milliways and expect to be believed, Bar could probably sell you something to help with the ash problem."

"I mean, if I bring home enough weird little robots maybe someone would believe that something happened. Milliways in particular is pretty unbelievable."

"...I know you're phobic but being able to just show someone that you're not lying or joking is so useful."

"Phobia is an irrational fear. If I were irrationally afraid of telepaths, I would, say, not be able to comfortably believe your claims to have ever met an ethic or to have your power under decent control. I am rational amounts of afraid of something that happens to be something most people do not consider particularly important, in much the same way someone who is immunocompromised would have to be warier of sneezing people than I am because they want to be more careful about managing the genuine threat represented and I can just make Alli heal me if I get a cold."

"I apologize for misusing the word. I didn't mean that it was irrational, but apparently I misremembered what phobia meant."

"I block you, right?"

"Yeah. I couldn't even tell you were there if I had my eyes closed."

"Good. I'd be phobic if I weren't immune, Ziz'll do that to people. ...Ziz is an alternate name for the Simurgh."

"Anyway, if one of us could just telepathically convince the Junebugs or whoever that we really went here, we'd probably have to do it a bunch of times. There are a lot of Junebugs, long chain of command."

"I...really do not work well in a chain of command. I work well on teams with one or maybe a few leaders whom I personally trust. The people I consider myself answerable to at home consist of my parents. And I was less referring to the fact that I was a telepath and more to the fact that Papa was."

"We're not answerable to the Junebugs unless we're participating in their operations. We're minors and went for partial membership. They handled the evac well though."

"My chain of command is kind of shit," acknowledges Lorica. "I'm probably going independent when I age out of the Wards. It's badly organized, I think - parahumans as a group are psychologically damaged high-powered people, the Protectorate basically has to accept any would-be members who register on the powers scale and haven't recently eaten more than four babies, and you have all these sharp edges rubbing directly against each other until something breaks and someone destroys a city block. If I were running it every cape would get a nonpowered personal assistant with a compatible personality to run interference for them. I'm trying to compensate as best I can with robots, myself, I have a smart little software 'bot that I trained to handle most of my correspondence and scheduling and I'm trying to get people to talk to it instead of me if there is the least hint that we aren't going to be best friends."

"That is actually better than my reason. Not that my reason isn't perfectly good, but wow, that's pretty terrible."

"How much of an exaggeration is 'recently eaten more than four babies'...?"

"It almost certainly depends on how well-publicized the baby-eating was and whether they think they can sell the public on a new cape identity. I mean, if the Protectorate thinks they can control the cape. I don't think they'd recruit Nilbog, he'd go in the Birdcage. I have my suspicions about anybody lower down on the threat level who promises to be good. Which, you know, would be sort of admirable if they were doing it because they wanted to be reasonably merciful."

"It's worlds like yours that make me almost wish I was a less ethical person so I could make everyone behave better. ...I never would, but everyone has massively inappropriate fantasies sometimes."

"Join the club. I actually wouldn't stop you if you wanted to, say, go after the Slaughterhouse Nine from a nice safe distance. Some things justify that."

"What is the Slaughterhouse Nine? And if they're evil enough to justify brainwashing, do you have any idea where they are, my sister can fly pretty damn fast."

"They're a rotating-membership group of nine appallingly destructive capes. I don't know where they are but I could find out where they were last causing mayhem. They've all got a kill order on them and as a group they're classed in the same tier as Endbringers. But if I block you whatever they've got to keep native Masters and Strangers and such from doing the same thing might give you a problem too."

"Unless we know for sure that it would I think it's worth a shot."

"If I can call you in for contract hits on supervillains I could get you a list. Although most of them don't rate a kill order. I don't think any of the villains currently active in my city do, you have to do something more than be conspicuously a neo-Nazi."

"...I would also like to do something less drastic than that about them if you also have Nazi supervillains. Dad's a Holocaust survivor."

"I understand the impulse. But as organized supervillainy goes E88 is sort of on the more civilized side. They run illegal businesses, hold odious opinions, and get into fights with superheroes, but they hold it down to background radiation and check the other local parahuman gang activity to an extent. Plus, villains often show up to Endbringer fights, under truce, and help. The S9 are one thing, smalltimers who might be able to get Leviathan to leave even two minutes sooner are another thing."

"Ugh. Fine, since you're the one holding the door I won't make the time you'd have to do it in longer by going after them, but if they happen to get in my way I don't promise to hold back any more than 'no brainwashing.'"

"Don't you think I should be making promises or not, given that I'm the no brainwashing option? But yeah, no going after the Nazis, no matter how tempting it is."

"It's just Nazis are a little more personal for me. And I did say I wouldn't go out of my way to attack them."

"Oh for fuck's sake."

"Sometimes Milliways decides to deprive people of doors for arbitrary lengths of time, no more than two days apparently, but within that period pretty arbitrary."

"I mean, I was planning to camp out anyway, but if it keeps me that long there goes the fantasy of you making all the S9 members march themselves to the Birdcage unless you want to wait too."

"Gimme a specific example of an evil thing they've done."

"The Slaughterhouse Nine? Well, nobody's figured out how to save Gray Boy's victims, yet, they're in time-looped eternal torture. Another supervillain eventually killed him."

"Yeah, I think we can camp out a couple of days."

nod

"Good."

"My magnetism is...really, really strong, actually, and my sister is a fuckoff powerful telepath, so yeah, we can probably clean up more than just this one group if you do have a list."

"There's an entire condemned city where Nilbog was quarantined... I'm curious to know if you could, but terrified to suggest, that you could try some telepathy on the Simurgh quarantine zones. You won't convince anyone to unquarantine them and I don't know if she leaves telepathically visible marks, but if you could find out what exactly happened to the people inside... There's a Simurgh victim on the S9, too, you wouldn't necessarily have to detour to the quarantines."

"Which one?"

"Goes by Mannequin. Tinker. Used to be working on self-contained environments with a view to space colonization. Simurgh killed his family and drove him insane."

"...Ick. Um, yeah, noted."

"I am simultaneously impressed and appalled by how much higher stakes your world's superscene is compared to ours," Marie says.

"I do have days where I just sit in my workshop for hours, programming robots to do my homework and working on my dad's suit, but yeah, sounds like you've got various flavors of idyll."

"Multiversal evidence actually suggests that my world narrowly dodged a highly martial civil rights movement that might or might not have ended in genocide robots. I mean, we still sort of ended up with the movement, but it was significantly less necessary, and we're pretty sure the robots have been comprehensively averted."

"My world no longer has most of Japan. Not to turn it into a contest."

"Sorry, I was agreeing with you."

"She intended to emphasize 'averted' more than she ended up doing. Apparently most of the worlds of our type at least see the robots coming into existence, even if they never reach the genocide stage."

"We don't have any of those in particular that I've heard of, but there's a lot to keep track of even for people who follow cape events really closely. Tinkers all have specialties, and robots aren't that common when you could also get, say, guns, or plants, or software, or musical instruments, or weird vaguely alchemical products of common kitchen ingredients."

"The robots are apparently perfectly mundane technology, actually."

"Huh."

"Is tinkertech not?"

"I mean, sort of, we need parts - usually, anyway, some biotinkers can do stuff with their bare hands and own bodies - and there's usually a mechanism behind whatever it's doing, but no one else understands what we're doing except for other tinkers with similar specialties, no one else can reproduce the tech - whether they just literally can't or no one has ever been exact enough in following the assembly steps, I don't know - and no one else can maintain the tech. If I make you an ash-cleaning robot it will suck electricity out of your wall or live on the ashes it eats up or something, and when anything goes wrong with it, it won't work, and you won't be able to fix it, but if I did invent one maybe Bar could make it even though it's almost magic?"

I can only sell things that are in some meaningful sense 'available for sale' somewhere. I might be able to find an object with similar effects, and if you made and sold at least three of the same design and did not construe them as being limited edition when so doing I could perhaps sell copies. It doesn't count as magic but almost always does count as too unique.

"What I actually meant was that their invention wasn't accomplished using any kind of inventing things super power."

"Huh. Non-tinker robotics is mostly confined to industry, not warfare, back home."

"Thankfully we don't actually have Sentinels, those being the killer robots, back home."

"I don't think we have any kind of military robots back home. I could be wrong. I'll have to check."

"Is 'inventing things' usually a viable power option? Because it isn't in my world," Helen says.

"It is for my kind of cape. One day I got a taste of my worst nightmare, the next day I started building little doodads to fix my clumsiness and designing my own computer from scratch."

"Oh, you had that too? Mine went away when we turned sixteen and our basics came in; gemini are peak-human physical condition and coordination from that age on. But we don't have tinkers."

"Our world has the occasional engineering genius, and sometimes there's strong evidence that the genius is a power, but the stuff they make still works like normal stuff, you can teach people to fix it and make it and stuff."

"Yeah, we have nothing like that."

"Not even, like, Edison and Tesla, or nobody who you think it might be a power?"

Snort. "Nobody who we think it might be a power. We had Edison and Tesla."

"If I think about it too much tinkering is actually very bizarre. It's sort of like a really, really supercharged version of... noticing how much linguistic information you know just by being a native speaker, or being able to sing a song in a different key even if you couldn't figure out the transposition on an instrument. But that's too - passive, in addition to being too trivial. That's something that happens without you noticing. I definitely notice when I'm tinkering and I'm actively directing myself, but simultaneously it's sort of like a trance state, people call it 'tinker fugue'..."

"That sounds very strange."

"It's so weird. But it's amazing for getting a lot done in a short time. When I let a fugue get going I don't have the slightest impulse to slow down until I'm done. My software bot reminds me to eat and sleep, but I don't waste time playing video games or anything."

"Sounds like really good flow state. On meth."

"Yeah, that's a good way to put it. You can watch me do it if you want to fund Flicker's little ash robot. I think I can keep the whole thing under two thou if I can borrow tools without buying them, even less if Bar has good alternative materials suggestions."

"Sounds enlightening. Sure. Bar, whatever she needs to build the ash robot is on me."

"I suspect it's remarkably lucky that while Bar doesn't allow arbitrage there's no such restriction on various worlds one can visit through her."

"What do you mean?"

"Bar offers 'reasonable currency-dependent prices' for things. For example, you can buy an apple from her from about what you could get it for at a local supermarket. You can not, however, sell it back to her at the price you could get for it three counties over where their apple blossoms got killed by late frost this past spring."

"No, I know what arbitrage is, I mean, is there not a restriction on where you can go through here? It seems like it's limited to worlds belonging to people who show up at the same time. If Lorica waits here for a month and nobody who can kill Endbringers or has a world with people who can shows up she's out of luck."

"Oh, no, there is, but Emily actually has a device that somehow gives her the attribute of counting as a native of the universe we're staying in as well as our actual homeworld, so we can get doors to either, and there's a non-negligible opportunity for arbitrage between the two."

"Oh, neat. Is that how you're funding my expensive ash Roomba?"

"Among a few other things, such as the fact that my family had money to begin with, yes."

"That's handy. In our world it's sufficiently potentially dangerous to raise twins in iffy circumstances that if you try to do it while poor the government will either outright pay you child support or take your kids. We're not that far down the socioeconomic ladder but it was occasionally tight. I'm very marketable, though, global teleportation isn't common enough to drive down the price, so I expect to be rich after I've had a while doing that."

"Convenient. I hope they don't exercise the 'take your kids' option too often."

"Think of it as 'social work if they cared enough to put people and attention and thought into it'. They took us once for a few days - they thought our mom might be hitting me, because I was always injured, because before my basics I was really clumsy. We got them to give us back, though."

"Okay, that much is fair."

"I'd be inclined to summarize the governmental reaction to gemini suddenly popping up as 'surprisingly non-dystopic'."

Snort.

"Our government was mildly dystopic about the sudden public existence of mutants, but luckily money and some really good preemptive PR."

"I've got the impression mutants run in families?" says Flicker. "There is a limited extent to which that's true of twins, but it's only particularly visible on the population level. Anybody can have a set of twins. Like, there were some historical complications, twins who'd been separated by this or that sad historical event suddenly being able to twine and not speaking each other's language, etcetera, there are public figures associated with Getting The Twins Thing Right, but I think mostly it's that anyone could have one and there is no way to construe having a twin as being a behavior someone could control, like homosexuality. So everyone sort of liked us in a general sense and everyone acknowledged that it needed getting right."

"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."

"We also went to a school for only people with powers! Boarding school, even."

"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."

"Uh, yeah, that's pretty much what I meant. And--yeah, that makes sense."

"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 can imagine."

"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."

"Well that's an. Interesting way to find out."

"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."

"Yeah, but still!"

"I mean, it's better than random bedspring creaks, I'd imagine."

"Thank you for that mental soundtrack."

"Sorry."

"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."

"Unfaceted ones?" says Flicker. "You think?"

"Well, they're still diamonds. I'm pretty sure some kinds of gemstone get put into jewelry without facets."

"...Lorica, if I do have to plug it in how much electricity will it need?"

"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?"

"Prrrrobably a little more than powers everything else presently in your house. Do you want a diamonds mode and a power-saving annihilation mode?"

"That sounds great."

"I feel like this is the kind of conversation a normal person would find surreal."

"I'm not a normal person and I find this surreal," Helen volunteers.

"I find it surreal too. Lorica, when it breaks down is it going to have antimatter and shit in it? Is it going to be hard to dispose of after its lifespan is over?"

"No antimatter! I don't have time to build an antimatter generator and it's outside my specialty anyway and Bar probably doesn't sell it. It'll just stop working and you probably shouldn't open it up but it won't explode."

"Technology that doesn't explode is my favorite."

"...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."

"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."

"How many of yours have you run into?"