A two legged metal thing the size of a horse, with a twelve years old clinging to its back, holding tools.

Who is yelling confusedly in German.

"Okay." says a boys whose colouration matches the tye dye he's wearing. "You didn't say it would be a kid." 

Erwin starts stammering. 

She slams a panel closed, chambers over the top to sit in a too-large seat, and flips a switch that starts a loud engine while settling into a sort of harnass.

"Are you going to try and kill us all?" asks one of the glowing, platinum blond children. 

"Because it's our eleventh birthday, and that would be rude," says his apparent twin. 

"I varely know Englis and I am scared." The hydraulics hiss to life, the machine starts following her movements. She backs away.

"It's okay, we won't hurt you."

She glances at the multicolored boy.

If she was thinking instead of reacting maybe she would believe them. As is, she turns and pushes the walker into a surprisingly quick run. Towards the most open area available.

She almost runs over a few party goers, including a grey skinned boy with claws and webbing between his fingers.

Gah, that just confirms it.

This thing is no window-climber but she makes it act nimble enough to avoid actually stepping on anyone or running into anything. Is there a door available or is she heading for a window?

They're outside, on a beach. 

Now she's clear of those people, she pushes the machine into a proper sprint across the sand. And starts looking around some more to figure out what the heck!

What appears to be the glowing twins' siblings flies beside her. "We're on an island."

"I can see that! Why!"

"It's where me and my family live."

"Why am I here! How are you flying!"

"I think our friend accidentally brought you here. And I'm a Miracle."

"No you're a-" Something in german. She growls inaudibly over the engine's roar and kicks it into a higher gear. Squeezes maybe another five miles an hour out of it.

"I think the German word is Wunderkind."

"You're not making any sense! Darwin- AAAH!"

She got too distracted rebutting him and the machine tripped. It's now tumbling along the beach at forty miles an hour.

The girl scoops her out and gently sets her down on the sand.

"I- you- what-" She watches the tumbling walker grind to a halt with a spray of wet sand. "Okay. I'm dreaming, that's the explanation."

"I don't think so," says Moira in perfect German.

She switches to German, then. "What's Wunderkind, some kind of Darwinist procedure? I thought they were forbidden from doing that to humans."

"It means people who can do things most humans can't do and will live forever unless they're killed."

"Some kind of Darwinist creature then. Please don't kill me."

"Why would I do that?"

"I dunno, 'cos of the war?"

"Wait, you don't know what Miracles are, but you do know about the war?"

"The war between the Central Axis Powers and the disgusting Darwinist Allied Powers. You're trying to confuse me, you are."

"Um, Central Axis Powers sounds like a Great War thing."

"Yeah, that's what they're callin' it."

"That was over a hundred years ago!"

"...Okay what."

"What year do you think it is?"

"Nineteen seventeen."

"Twenty-twenty."

"Okay so why did you- or whoever that was, time-kidnap me?"

"I think he just wanted to pull in a coin or something."

The grey boy runs over to the two girls. It quickly becomes clear that not only is he not wearing anything, the dress code around here seems rather lax in general. The blonde girl in particular is literally dressed like a peacock. 

"Are you a villain?" says the grey boy, in peculiarly accented English.

"I am a mechanic."

"You tried to run me over!"

"You were in between me and the fastest way to run away. And I didn't actually hit you."

"Why are you here?"

"That's what I want to know!" She throws her hands up.

"I bet she's a spy!"

"If I was gonna spy on Darwinist creatures you think I'd be stupid enough to bring a Walker with me?"

"Whaaat?"

"...I'm not a spy. I'd have been a lot more sneaky if I was a spy, the fact that I'm not sneaky means I'm probably not a spy. And ask him, I didn't even mean to be here!"

The other party goers crowd around Walta.

"Are you okay?"

"I'm not hurt. Still really confused though."

"It's okay, my auntie will take care of things when she gets home."

"Talking to an adult is probably a good idea." She glances around at everyone. "I'm gonna go try to stand Bert back up."

"Want help?"

"Do you have a crane?"

"We have like five kids with super strength."

"That would probably help, sure."

She starts walking over to where it came to rest.

Martin rights the machine with his bare hands.

-And nearly rips a hydraulic lead right off as it flops back onto the ground. "Hey, be more careful! I need to get it to standing rest again, and I could have told you where to lift..."

"Sorry!"

She sits back into the cockpit-area and flips a few switches. "Okay, on the big metal bar that's not making noise, slowly."

He does so.

And it settles into a stable standing pose with a series of clicks, and she shuts the engine off. "Thanks! Time to see how much damage that fall did..."

"Hey, do you wanna get something to eat?"

"Not really! I want to clean Bert and then finish what I was trying to fix on it. 'Cause that's the thing I actually know how to do. This looks like a party, go have fun if you want."

"I think the party's kind of moved over here."

"Well if you tell me what the food is and don't trick me into eating something gross, then sure."

"Party food."

"No I mean like, this is bread. This cake is made with chicken eggs, right, not something crazy like ostrich or quail?"

"Yeah. Though there's some dead fish for Michael over there."

"Okay, I'll be happy to have some party food in like two minutes. Ugh, popped seal..." She peers at a cylinder leaking some kind of blue ooze for a moment before setting on it with tools.

They watch.

It takes like two minutes to reseat the seal. "It's cracked now and I need a new one sooner or later but it should be okay for a day or so..."

The kids decide to introduce themselves.

"Probably already forgot all your names. I'm not good at names."

Fair enough, there's like twenty kids at the party. Of course, none of them have much experience forgettings things in general.

Walta is just going to kind of quietly work on the thing, maybe explain what precisely she is fixing if they keep asking.

She doesn't know how to fix some of the damage. She tries anyway.

"Maybe we could help?"

"Have you ever even seen things like this before though?"

"Um, sorta?"

"I watched walkers getting fixed for three years. And then I was a mechanic apprentice for one and a half. I know how they work. You gotta follow my instructions okay?"

"Oookay."

"Okay thanks. So first we need to..." And she descends into a rambly eleven year old's monologie about fixing her broken gigantic toy.

Stan's built more complicated machines than this.

Oh really? The control systems are strange and finicky. Some combination of electrical, hydraulic, and clockwork.

The other kids starts pitching in to varying degrees. They all seem weirdly clever for their age.

She's not sure whether or not to be pleased.

Eventually they run into the problem of lack of material. Walta declares, "Good enough."

"Are you a Miracle?" asks the grey boy.

"Pretty sure I am not whatever you all are "

"Do you have powers?"

"...Nope."

"Are you sure?" She looks at the Walker.

"Didn't build that, Krupp Autoworks did. I just fix 'em. For now."

"What is that thing anyway?"

"It's called a walker. Like a tractor kinda, but it walks."

"So it's a farming thing?"

"Not really? Tractors are cheap. They get used for construction and mining, heavy dangerous stuff."

"Not much of that here I'm afraid."

"Which is why I want whoever got me here to send me home."

"Maybe we could get Erwin to try sending you back?"

"Yes please. Well."

Come to think of it, does she want to go back? When the war makes for more rationing every day?

"It's just I don't think he's ever sent anything back."

"Well, I want to go home. So he has to try."

"Maybe later, though, he's still kinda shaky."

"Oh, did I scare him by being summoned?" Yeah, she's kind of bitter right now.

"Yeah, actually. He's never summoned a person before."

"And I've never been summoned before. Guess he'll be more careful now huh?"

"I don't think he was trying to summon a girl."

"You guys get all these crazy powers apparently and just- I guess there was no way to tell. I'm still annoyed though. If I can't get home to mum she'll be so scared you know. And this walker belongs to Hans."

"Who's Hans?"

"The guy who lets me in his repair shop to watch and learn."

"Does he have any more of these?" He sounds a little concerned.

"Um, yeah? They're pretty common, they're used for lots of stuff. I don't get to touch the Army ones."

"This thing is used for war?"

"Not this one, but there's storm walkers and landship and stuff..."

"Nobody really uses tanks and stuff anymore. Mostly it's just Miracles and people in Knight suits."

"...I kinda want to hear about those. Is there a war here right now?"

"Sorta, mostly it's just my mum's people trying to keep arseholes from being arseholes."

She blinks at the swearing.

"Um. Alright, no war is good."

"It's kinda worse than war."

"Uh, how? I've read the newspapers about the front... They call it no man's land."

"Most of the world is ruled by nasty people with really dangerous powers."

"Like yours? How do they happen anyway."

"How does what happen?"

"The powers."

"Well there's this virus that, like, one out of three people have in their bodies, and really bad stress makes it turn on, and if it doesn't kill you, you're a Miracle."

"A virus! Oh man, I can't touch anyone or eat anything, what else did the bioweapon preparedness thing say!"

"It's not that contagious. And you should cat it anyway, being a Miracle is awesome."

"There is way to much weird new stuff for me to decide that yet "

"Also, I don't think you catch it from food."

"Yeah, well, the bioweapon warnings say that excess caution is better than insufficient caution."

"Well, you don't want to starve."

She bristles. "I have!"

"...One old biscuit. Well that's that. Gimmie some food."

He takes her over to the party food tables. "Maybe you should mingle for a bit."

"I don't know anybody. Also I'm bad at making friends. Mom always said so. What's your name I'm Walta?"

"Stanislav. Everyone calls me Stan."

"Makes sense."

Oh look food. Is there a line or anything? If not she'll grab something out of the way-ish.

There's a lot of cake and soft drink, also eggs for some reason.

Ooh, they have Pemberton Cola! Delicious.

...Are the eggs cooked?

To the nearest person, "Are the eggs cooked?"

"...Yeah," says the girl with the horns.

"Okay. Just seemed odd to have eggs at a birthday party, 's why I asked."

That guy who brought her here, where'd he go?

"I think he's hiding inside."

"...Um." Did you guess that or did you read my mind or something?

"The latter."

Would it do any good to ask you to stop.

Because she's flipped between interested, excited, and utterly terrified four or five times in the last few minutes and it's getting kind of tiring.

"Sorry." The horned mind reader wanders off.

They are not Darwinists. Not. Darwinists. It's something different and equally terrifying, but it means being cautious and afraid in anti-Darwinist ways won't help.

She has some cake, quietly.

the little grey boy wanders over and sits down beside her.

"Still think I'm a spy?"

"What?"

"What kind of spy plans on getting randomly summoned? It's impossible to do it deliberately, probably, and there are way easier and less flashy ways to get here, probably. Why are you grey?"

"Wait. English. Right. I'm not good at it."

"What was that first part?"

"Talking about how I'm not a spy."

"All of it?"

"I also asked... Color? Is that the word?"

"Are you talking about my skin?"

"Yes. Sorry, I know like two hundred words in English. I'm trying not to use German ones in place."

"It's okay. What about my skin?"

"It is a color I only see on sick people, but I do not think you are sick, why?"

He grins. "My mother's a mermaid!"

"...Meerfrau? People who look a little like humans but live in the ocean?"

(Not! Darwinists!)

"Yeah. I have legs because my dad is a human."

"Okay, that's actually pretty cool... If I ignore how it makes me think of scary stories from home."

He scowls. "What do they say about mer?"

"The stories aren't about mer really... They're about humans making lots of scary creatures, and something kind of like mer called kappas are one of the things they made."

"What are kappas?'

"They look a little like really short humans with green skin, but they're strong and have claws and I don't really want to keep talking about this sorry."

"So, you don't have mer where you're from?"

"No, just some things that are kinda-not-really like mer. Like, um, monkeys are to humans."

"Wow. That sucks."

"Mm." Cakenibble.

"No proper mermaids at all?"

"Nope."

"So who lives in the sea?"

"...Fish? Shark?"

"People?"

"No."

"That's just depressing."

She shrugs. "Everything's crazy here to me."

"How so?"

"Mer, miracles, the year two thousand, heck I've never actually been on a beach before."

He looks aghast. "So you've never been swimming?"

"I swam in a, a- lake a few times?"

He sniffs. "Freshwater."

"The only kind we humans can drink without dying, it is."

"The most boring kind of water."

Shrug. She grabs some more Cola. "I like sugar-water. Delicious stuff."

"Do they have lakes of it where you come from?

"No, they make it for food, that was joke."

"What does your world have?"

"Walkers? Hideous Darwinist beasties? I dunno."

"Anything like them." He points towards some of the party guests-fifty feet above them.

"Nope. Definitely not. Maybe the Darwinists can make people like that but modifying humans is super super illegal."

"Why?"

"Because the idea is so scary to most people I guess?"

"Seems pretty cool to me."

"I also heard most Darwinist experiments die or come out horribly deformed, maybe that's it.'

"Kind of the opposite here."

"...Hm?"

"Well, being a Miracle just seems better. Not as good as being mer, but still."

"Darwinist creatures aren't the Miracles though."

"What are they like?"

"Mostly like animals that already existed, with one little thing changed, and then another little thing changed, until you have a giant squid that eats sharks and ships for breakfast, or a flying whale, or a war bear." She shudders.

"War bears sound cute!"

"No they don't they're terrifying."

"Wait, real bears are big, aren't they?"

"Bigger than the walker. And war bears are twice as tall as that with teeth and claws as long as your arm."

"Sounds scary. Like orcas."

"Yeah, Darwinist monsters are scary. They have flying whales, you know, and what they call kraken - giant squid that can even eat whales."

"You ever seen an orca?"

"Maybe a picture of one, in a museum? I'm not sure if it was some other kind of whale."

"Orcas are the scariest things ever."

"Do mer people get attacked by them?"

"Sometimes. My mum knew some people who got eaten."

"Should figure out what Orcas are scared of and have that. Do guns work underwater? ... Probably not. Bet I could make one that does."

"I asked that once, apparently bullets don't work properly."

"If the water's like a bullet hitting a wall constantly, yeah. Tesla coil? No, you'd just shock yourself. If bullets don't work maybe bombs. I don't know that much about weapons though."

A woman drops down from the sky behind Walta. 

...Who is still pondering the benefits and drawbacks of various weapons. You can get used to anything; Just Another Person With Powers. 

"I don't believe I remember you from the school."

"-Right! I'm supposed to be mad because appearing-guy randomly appeared me out of the middle of a workshop!"

"Pardon?"

"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."

She continues being vaguely comforting.

"...There have been about ten impossible things in the last hour. I think I'm giving up on reacting, now. What kind of things to reduce the chance?"

"Well, we can trigger Manifestation without the risk of death."

"Meaning, do the powers thing without maybe dying? Much better."

"Yes. So far we haven't anyone die on us that way."

"I am really, really in favor of not dying."

"I doubt you've been infected."

"How do you tell?"

"You've only been here for what? And hour?"

"Yes."

"It's not quite that contagious."

She mutters something resentful and wordless, and then, "Viruses. What about later though? You said you maybe can't send me back."

"We'll see. I wish I could give you more definite answers."

"Well I guess of all the places I could have been disappeared to this probably isn't the worst."

"I'm sure neither of us hail from the best of all possible worlds."

"Yeah well a virus that kills you or gives random maybe-not-good people big power has got to be a really destructive thing. Whoever made it is stupid or evil - was it made?"

"We think it was created. Hardly something that would evolve naturally."

"And nobody was smart enough to have good quarantine protocols. Or they got ignored because someone wants superpowers and accepts the risk. Typical Darwinists."

"Or it could've been released deliberately."

"Oh that's even more reckless. Making diseases and doing things to humans or other smart critters is illegal for good reasons where I'm from."

"I'm not saying it was a good idea."

"Did the virus make mermaids?"