"I was working on a thing, and boom I'm suddenly here, don't know the name of who did it but he ran off somewhere."

She looks at her. "Where do you think you are?"

"I dunno, beach? Someone said it's actually a century later now? I don't really have 'panic' in me anymore after the first couple minutes of it. Wouldn't help anyway."

"Hmm. Where are you from?"

"Berlin 1917."

"Does the term Huxley's virus mean anything to you?"

"Unless it refers to a disease spread through flying jellyfish monsters, no."

She sighs. "Would you prefer some privacy?"

"All this won't be better or worse with privacy unless there's another mind reader around."

"Okay, how much do you know?"

"Superpowers apparently?"

"Yes. Anything else?"

"It's supposedly 2020. Merfolk are an actual honest to god thing. Nobody seems to have heard of Darwinist beasties? Something about stress and the virus."

"I will admit, this is something of a new situation for me. Do you have any particular questions?"

"Can you send me home, preferably with shiny tech, if not can you put me in a making-things school 'cause that's what I'm mostly good at, I'm already mechanic."

"...I'm not sure I can answer either of those questions right now."

"How does ze get-power-or-die thing work exactly?"

"If you experience extreme stress while carrying a certain virus, it attempts to reconfigure your biology. In about four out of ten cases, it works."

She... Looks pretty deeply disturbed by this.

It's like Darwinists messing with humans, but nobody's even driving.

"Oh."

"Hmm?"

"And nobody's controlling the change- Darwinist experiments are scary already and they're on purpose and always ready to kill anything that doesn't work right."

She puts a comforting hand on her shoulder. "Shhsh, it's not as bad as all that."

"Sixty percent chance of dying is not not bad!"

"We've managed to figure out how to improve the odds. And you almost certainly aren't carrying the virus."

"I- This- Gaaah."