"You two seem like you'll get along fine," Dresden says. "I'll leave you to get situated, if you don't have any questions for me?"

"If that's the end of the tour I think I don't have any, thank you very much!"

"You're welcome! Yeah, it's not much of a tour. Feel free to come down to my office and talk anytime!"

Dresden makes his exit. Alex lets Kaede in to the room, sits down in a chair with wheeled feet, and spins around a couple of times. The room contains two lofted beds, under which are desks, and one sink with a mirror over it. There's also an ottoman under the window. "So, this is my dorm room, and now also your dorm room! As you can see the bed is lofted, you can have Harry unloft it if you want but that means your desk won't fit under it and you'll have less room on your side. I think I've reclaimed all the miscellaneous junk I was storing in your desk when it was my second desk, but if I missed anything just throw it at me. I'd rather you didn't eat in the room, ants are no one's friend and I have problems with chewing noises; if you have any requirements of me as your roomie, you can hit me with them now."

"I've never roomed with anyone else so no idea if I have any, but I'd guess not, I'm pretty chill," she says, looking around with interest. "Where do I put my stuff?"

"There's closets by the doorway, mine's the one on the left." Alex points them out. "Being chill is good! I try to also be chill, and mostly manage except when I'm having an episode. Uh, speaking of which: I'm bipolar, and a Class-3 Rager. That means I sometimes have periods of emotional instability where I'm really manic excited or really depressed and irritable, and when I get really mad, my powers get more, uh, powerful. Ordinarily I'm a low-level chaos mage with a little bit of precog and paragon ESP and probability-warping, but when I'm raging they all go into overdrive and I get very difficult to stop. I don't go rager often, otherwise I'd be in Hawthorne, but it's still my responsibility to warn you about it."

"Give me the three-sentence explanation of each of those things? I'm from another world, see."

"Oh, for sure. You'll get all this in Intro to Powers too, but I'll give you the basics. Chaos magic means that I can do magic purely instinctually, without preparation or theoretical knowledge of what I'm doing. Unfortunately, that also means I have less control over what happens when than other mages do." Their hand is abruptly surrounded by flames, and then, equally abruptly, it isn't. "Precog is short for precognition; I can look a few seconds into the future, and I sometimes get prophecies of things that will happen further than that. Paragon means I can focus on a task and just know the best way to do it. Probability warping is what it sounds like - I have supernaturally good luck sometimes, and supernaturally bad luck sometimes. I can mostly control which happens when, but if I stretch the good luck too much then it snaps and I have really awful luck for a while, with no control over it. It also connects with my bipolar, so when I'm up it's really easy for me to stretch my luck and when I'm down it's almost impossible."

She nods, looking enraptured. "So many forms of magic.—oh, my form of magic is metamagic, by the way, naively I'd think there's a chance I could help with any aspect of yours that's misbehaving."

"Ooh, metamagic. I don't know if I'd want to mess with my luck through magic, though, that seems like a good way to get backlash. And I'm usually fine with how the chaos magic behaves, it's in line with my subconscious - it's only really a problem when I'm trying to do something I don't actually want to do, or not do something I do want."

"That's fair, too. I don't want to rely on it with local magic too much, anyway, since it's very surprising to me that I can interact with it at all, what with how my magic system is completely separate. So, like, I can see your magic hanging around you and stuff but I'd want a lot more than just that to even begin thinking about messing with any of it in any way and definitely not if you don't want it."

"Oh, cool. How much can you see? Can you guess my big secret?"

Now that they mention it, Alex's magic is unusual for what Kaede's seen of other mutants. Their power is partly coming from them, but there's a trailing thread connected to something else, winding off and vanishing into a direction that doesn't track with the normal Euclidean dimensions.

"I'll say it has something to do with how there's a bit of your magic that's not coming from within you but I don't know enough local magic to know where it's coming from instead."

Alex nods. "It isn't actually a secret, it's more a fact that nobody believes. Me and some of my friends are reincarnated gods, and we've still got a connection to the old wells of power from when we were worshipped. There's not much power coming from them anymore, because nobody still worships us, but the connection is still there."

"Huh. How does that work, being a reincarnated god?"

"Well, there's a little bit of backstory there. We're not the first gods to try this gambit; we had a whole pantheon, and we weren't the big ones. The big gods did it first, the ones that everybody used to worship. But they were power-hungry, and they didn't work together, and they got themselves killed. So we got together, six of us who thought we could work together, and we fused ourselves to some humans who were about to be born in the same general area."

"And what... are gods. Like what do you all do, my world has stories about gods but I'm pretty sure they're all fake and if they're not I guess I'm meant to be evil."

"Oh, gods are- so, in our world, baseline humans have a certain amount of mystic Essence that they generally don't use unless they're trained in magic. When they worship a being, their spare Essence goes towards that being. If that being actually exists, then they get a little packet of Essence added to their supply. If they don't exist, Essence accumulates in the sort of general location where they would be until there's enough to gain consciousness, and a god begins to exist. Gods generally do more or less whatever they want. Some answer the prayers of their followers, if they're feeling nice or if they want to reinforce god-approved behavior. They're no more a moral authority than any other being is, they're just... bigger."

"And if people stop worshipping you, what happens, if you were originally made from that Essence? There's still some coming from there, right, will it run dry sometime, and is being reincarnated relevant in some way, do you have memories from before or powers, and what about the people you fused with—sorry, that's a lot of questions, it's just so exciting—"

"Essence is to some extent self-renewing; a god with no worshipers can continue to exist as long as they don't do much that requires Essence, but it's kind of depressing being a god and not being able to do any of the stuff you used to do. Being reincarnated is frankly a much better deal; mutants can do what they want with their powers, they just have to eat to recharge. We have all our memories from before, and while our godly powers influenced the mutant powers we got, we don't have access to the powers we had as gods anymore. Not yet, at least; if we can scrounge up some worshippers we'd be back in business. The people we fused with were newborns, so when our personalities merged, they - grew up around us, like a beanpole, if that makes sense? If the essence of Tyche was removed from me, Alex would still be there, but he'd be different from the Alex who you're talking to. That's what happened with Steven, at least." They wince. "Shit, I have to explain Steven now. Um, one of our number was Herakles, the God of Strength, and... we think he got a bad baby. Because when we all met back up at Whateley, he was... we were all different, that's how the fusion worked, but Herakles - Steven - was just awful. Then he picked up a boyfriend, Jack, who's an Avatar of a powerful spirit, and... stuff went down, it was complicated, Jack's spirit ended up sort of eating the Herakles out of Steven and leaving just the awful human bits. So we ditched him and took Jack into our team instead."

She blinks a few times. "And Steven is... still around?" is what she settles on in the end.

Alex makes a face. "Yes, unfortunately. No, I don't mean that, people dying is bad, but he really is awful."

"What's Steven like? I'd been thinking of it as you guys like replacing or mixing with the baby but if there's enough person there to be a person when half is gone..."

"He's like... he feels entitled to things, and he resents anybody who doesn't give them to him. He takes what he wants, if he thinks he can get away with it. And he thinks we betrayed him by dropping him when he lost Herakles. Herakles tempered him a little, he was kind of - protective, and brave, and ultimately well-meaning. If Isolate Steven has any positive qualities he hides them very well."

"Is Herakles around, in Jack, or all gone?"

"He's gone. Jack's spirit digested his essence. I don't mean to make him sound like he was perfect, he was a bit of an ass even before the fusion, but."