Relatively few origin worlds have had people with what Azzy would call superpowers, and among those, there's not really much information about how they might have learned to control their powers. Plenty of worlds had some kind of magical powers that could be trained to improve one's control of them. Among those cases where the library actually has detailed information about how this process worked, mostly it's either completely different for each magic system, and when they do overlap it seems to be fairly generic meditation stuff. And he can't find any record of anything quite like his powers.

Darn. Oh well, nothing much to be done about it. He'll keep the meditation commonality in mind, he figure Ton'guni will mention it when he talks to him but he doesn't it'd be good to bring it up just in case.

Time passes and he fills up more pages of his notebook, and also maybe does some people-watching as other refugees filter through the library over the next few hours. Then, once it seems like it's dinnertime (going from his phone's clock, if there isn't any other clear signal) he'll start making his way to the great hall.

There's a grandfather clock in the library, but he probably won't miss the librarians and visitors packing up and heading out around eighteen o'clock.

The great hall is much fuller now than it was at lunchtime. It looks like about two hundred people are present.

Huh. He doesn't think he's ever seen a 24-hours grandfather clock before. He normally associates that format with digital clocks. Neat.

And...this is a lot of people to all have in the same room at once. He starts to hang back around the edges without even really thinking about it, and quickly slinks over to the kitchen to think about what he wants for dinner, if anything. Maybe some of the people who like cooking will be making something he can tolerate, and he can just have some of that rather than needing to decide for himself.

Tonight's selection: fresh bread, slices of roast meat (not from an animal that exists on Earth, but it smells good), and roast vegetables—also not a species that exists on Earth, but they look somewhat like squash or pumpkins, with a hard shell surrounding a cavity of soft flesh. If Azzy tries some, he'll find it to have a mild, slightly sweet flavor. Whoever put this together clearly saw the nine separate sauce options as the primary flavor agent for the meal.

He'll give the slices of meat a close look. He's been betrayed by his nose before, and if this doesn't like either white meat or like it's been cured, he'll give it a pass. The roast vegetable seems potentially interesting, and if he can figure out a way to render it totally smooth or extract any tiny little fibers that might be present and leave just the softness with the tools on hand in the kitchen, he'd be happy to spread it on some bread. Otherwise, it'll have to just be bread, perhaps dipped in one of the sauces if any of them seem palatable.

Now equipped with...more of a snack really than a meal, he'll mentally prepare himself for the throng of the great hall, and see if he can a group that looks welcoming. Who was it that James said might be waiting for him? Lebron? If nothing else, maybe he can ask around for him.

The meat has more myoglobin than what's considered white meat on Earth, but less than most red meat. He can find a fine sieve to push the vegetable through if he wants to remove the (valuable dietary) fibers. The sauces come in a great variety of flavors, but all of them are fairly strong, and none are like, completely familiar to Azzy's palate.

If he asks around for 'Lebron', he will be asked if maybe he's looking for Levron, who is over there.

He hopes he's getting enough fiber. He thinks that the pizzas have a decent amount, but he should double check the nutrition facts the next time he makes one. Assuming the boxes have accurate facts, which he doesn't really know for certain. Maybe he should just add it to the list of things to mention to Ton'guni whenever he manages to get that appointment.

Ah! Yeah, Levron, not Lebron. He'll thank whoever corrected him, then head for Levron and see if there's a reasonable place for him to sit nearby for a conversation.

Levron is the same old man he saw playing cards the night he arrived. One of the cats is there too, and an old woman, stocky, with two curved horns, and clearly not human. There are several open chairs at their table, and when Azzy approaches, Levron waves him over.

Ooh, horns. Very nice. He waves back and quickly heads over and takes a seat. "I heard from James earlier today that you were looking for me?"

"Indeed! I do not usually have to wait so long to meet our new arrivals, and I am quite curious. My name is Levron Garabedian."

"I'm Ora," says the cat, a calico. She makes perfectly normal cat vocalizations, which Azzy effortlessly recognizes as language. Also, cat language apparently has a built-in convention for mapping cat vocalizations into human vocalizations, which is why she has a human-pronounceable name instead of, like 'meomrrmrmr'*.

"Lydiar Kovrino," says the woman. She has a smooth, low voice.

* (Not really a faithful rendition of cat language, which encodes a lot of information via prosody.)

Azzy chuckles and flushes a bit in embarrassment. "Yeah, sorry about that! My angel-- err. So, I come from a nonmundane Earth, where people have been developing superpowers for the last 24-ish years, and I have one, sort of. I call it my angel, and it just kind of does stuff on its own, moving things around and the like. It's...been acting strangely ever since I entered the refuge, and it managed to get into enough trouble that the Hearthkeeper offered to dilate the time in my room until she'd figured out a way to keep it from getting into even more trouble, which I was very gracious to accept. She let me know that the work was done earlier today, which is when I met James and Tasha. Anyway! It's good to meet you, Levron, Ora, Lydiar."

He pauses for a moment and almost starts eating before remembering to actually introduce himself. "And you can call me Azzy."

"Welcome to the refuge, Azzy. How are you finding it so far?"

"Uh. Well, from my perspective it's still only my first day, so I'm kind of still settling in. Trying to sort out my feelings about the angel situation from everything else...I guess it's going pretty well? It's nice to not have to worry about the bull-- I was between a rock and a hard place, sort of. And now I'm not!"

"I would be interested to know what your life was like before, and what your world was like in general. Although, ah, if you don't want to say anything, we won't mention it again. Some refugees have very good reason not to want to speak of the events that brought them here, as I'm sure you can imagine."

"I don't think I mind? I don't know if my life was all that interesting, and I wasn't exactly like, a scholar or anything..."

And he'll go ahead and and give a basic description of his world. History prior the year 2000 seems to be Typical, to those familiar with it, while divergence therefrom has been mostly limited to an explosion of organized crime in the form of small super-gangs which in the last few years have begun to coalesce into larger alliances that are challenging the ability of many governments across the world to enforce the law, with an accompanying precipitous drop in government approval ratings more or less globally. He'll also give an overview of the super-gangs in Chicago, their politics, the superpowers of their headliners, that sort of thing. As questions come up, he'll do his best to answer, though he's cagey about the particulars of his life.

"So these people with superpowers have mostly been using their powers for crime?"

He raises a hand and tilts it side to side. "Sort of? Some of them are definitely mostly doing, like, crime-crime, especially the ones that formed up around old pre-incident gangs. But a lot of them are just people trying to use their powers to keep themselves and their family and friends safe, to take control of their lives, that sort of thing, at least in my experience." He shrugs. "I never hung around with one for too long, since even the nicest still expect a lot from supers who join up with them since they're all desperate for manpower, though, so my information about what life's like for people live on the inside of it all is limited."

"Ah, I thought perhaps the state had attracted some of them to assist it in upholding the law. Or even that some might have loftier ambitions than protecting kith and kin or enriching themselves... though it may be for the best if they don't."

Azzy shrugs. "Maybe some? But at least as far as I saw, people who joined up with the cops or the army ended up disappearing for one reason or another. Maybe they got recruited to be secret agents, or abducted and used for human experiments if you put stock in the conspiracy theories. And some people definitely had big ambitions, but if they and their buddies had the powers to match then they usually ended up going bigger scale than even the big names in the city. Going out to the middle of nowhere and being their own little government kind of stuff. I don't really know the details, I never went out and looked for myself and the news wasn't exactly unbiased on that front."

"Censorship?" asks Lydiar.

"Maybe? Or just perverse incentives. The news makes their money by selling their audience's attention, and nobody's paying them to have people look at stuff that doesn't make money."