"What's bizarre about it?"

"If I were going to talk about youth rights I'd talk about the unholy amount of things parents get to decide for their kids and making running away legal and fixing literally everything about how we handle child abuse and the foster care system and, I don't know, probably something about mutant rights but that's because it's my pet issue for reasons, and maybe something about public schools? I definitely would not talk about lowering the age of consent, although I might talk about Romeo and Juliet laws in states that don't have those." 

"I'd probably be horrified by those things too! They just haven't come up yet. What has come up is the fact that two people both really really liked each other and wanted to date and didn't because of the imaginary harm caused by being in love with someone who has had a couple more birthdays than you."

"I mean, most adults who want to date a fifteen year old are in fact a bad idea to date, it's just that Asher didn't know I was fifteen and we'd gotten to know each other in a context where age didn't matter? And that ever happens but it is really not common, most adults who want to date teenagers are creepy about it." 

"It is kind of horrifying if fifteen-year-olds and twenty-two-year-olds usually never get to interact in a context where age doesn't matter! --Also, I know how you mean it, but 'most adults who want to date teenagers are creepy' sounds to me like 'most gays are child molesters' or something, like, that's how bigoted it is in my home society."

"Fifteen year olds are in... school. And if they're doing extracurriculars it's usually a club that goes through their school, or something for teenagers, something where you wouldn't be interacting with the adults around on an equal level? There exist people who volunteer at the library or something but usually it's, like, the school math club or the swim team. So an adult who wants to date a fifteen year old almost never just met a cool person and interacted with them and wanted to date them, they're specifically going for someone younger and inexperienced and who they have power over." 

"I realize, like, Canada and most of Europe are like that but it's weird. It's super weird. Like, I get that no one ever goes off to college at sixteen in most of the world, but-- surely some teenagers stay friends with their friends when they go off to college, and some teenagers have jobs, and some teenagers participate in community theater or sports instead of special segregated Teenager-Only Sports where they aren't tarnished by talking to someone over the age of 18, and some of the people in the first three groups invite their friends to parties, and then sometimes people hook up at parties."

"It is almost stereotypically true that you lose touch with your high school friends when you go off to college, and seniors aren't really friends with freshman anyway so the age gap there is only like one or two years, and adult sports pretty reliably don't let teenagers in and community theaters usually have youth theater and adult theater separate, and you would not generally invite your adult friend to the sort of party people hook up at. I think, anyway, I don't actually go to parties." 

"Your entire society is weird and horrible."

"Maybe it is, but the age of consent being where it is does reflect a real thing that actually exists." 

"So I assume that's a 'no' if I hit on you."

"It's a 'let's interact with each other for a while first,' if hypothetically you were to be hitting on me, which of course you would not." 

"I will respect the strange and unusual ways of the culture I find myself in!"

"Cute," Sasha says, and snuggles him. 

Sasha wakes up and puts the clothes he wore last night back on and comes out. (His feet still hurt from walking around the city barefoot.) 

"Hi, Chris brought me — what the everloving fuck." 

"--are there normally two of you? Hi, Other Lily."

"There are not normally two of me, what the fuck." 

"That's what I thought too. And my name is Sasha, not Lily." 

"Hi! I'm Lev! I'm from an alternate universe. This is Sasha, who is from this universe. Apparently someone summoned us for some reason."

"We know a mad scientist did it and was aiming for something to do with this universe's Lev but we're not super sure what she was trying to do. Sit down?" 

He sits down. "I don't think I have a Lev but that sounds not.... great." 

"Asher says if someone managed to get us here he will definitely be able to get us home, so I'm not too worried."

"Good. — I hope it's soon, my boyfriends are going to be worried about me." 

Lev considers this statement and then decides that it would probably not be helpful to point out that there's no reason to believe time runs at the same rate in different universes so for Sasha's boyfriends it might be five seconds or ten years and either way the amount of time it takes Asher to reverse-engineer it won't be the deciding factor.

"My world has a fertility crisis and a ton of fundamentalist Christians, and no mutants or superheroes."

"My world doesn't have a fertility crisis or mutants or superheroes. — everyone here smells weird and I can't tell what that's about."