Thataway is... a man in a tweed suit. He looks about forty, he's sitting in a nicely upholstered armchair in the middle of the forest, and he's got a book in his hand entitled WE COME IN PEACE.

What he doesn't have is a mind - not one of his own, at least. He's the extension, the projection of a mind. A big one.

"Nice night for a hike," the projection says, glancing up from his obviously fake reading.

"...Well, you know, haven't been killed by Sentinels yet, that's the most important facet of any night." 

He raises an eyebrow. "I'm happy to hear it. What in God's green Hell is a Sentinel?"

"The...murder robots that have been making the United States uninhabitable for the past ten years? ...Do they call them something else here? Are we in--Canada, Europe, somewhere safe?"

"You're in Massachusetts. A Massachusetts notably devoid of murder robots." He considers. "Usually, at least, you do get the occasional Devisor with bright ideas - but I'm getting off-topic. You're saying that your Earth's America had some kind of robot apocalypse, and everyone else just sort of - let it? Do they not have superheroes?"

"The robots were--I don't know how but they were made to adapt to any mutant ability used on them. They took down our strongest four years ago." 

He inhales sharply. "That's... not good. Ah, I think I've established to my satisfaction that you're not here for the express purpose of destroying my place of employment - would you like to continue this discussion somewhere with walls?"

"Okay. Where?"

The man holds up a map, which was not in his hands a second ago. "You're south of campus, currently. Just continue in the direction you were going - head for the first building you see, then go down the stairs to the basement and we can meet in person."

"Okay." 

Emily picks Edie up and zooms in that direction. 

The first building they see has a sign out front reading HAWTHORNE COTTAGE. As they approach, the door is opened by a blonde woman in a pantsuit, whose mind is unreadable due to an impenetrable aura of bright blue light.

"Good evening," she says. "I'm Headmistress Elizabeth Carson. I'll take you to Louis's room, we can talk there."

"...Thanks." 

She leads them downstairs to... what looks like an indoor swimming pool. In an armchair by the pool sits the man they met before in the forest, reading another book called FIRST IMPRESSIONS; in the pool is a horrible, horrible monster. It has many tentacles, but also an enormous quantity of other features that make much less sense. Horns, wings, hooves, teeth- lots of teeth. Generally, it looks like something that shouldn't exist.

The monster is clearly the "source" of the man in the chair, to Edie's mental senses. Its mind is enormous, and, oddly, almost completely unshielded - there's something towards the bottom that's locked away tight, but other than that it's an open book.

The man in the chair, and the monster, look up as they enter. "Hello," the man says. "Glad you found your way over."

"Hi. What are hooves useful for underwater?"

"You know, it's an interesting question. I believe the entity which originally held this form could shapeshift, so it had hooves when it was on land and wings in the air and tentacles underwater. I can't volitionally shapeshift, though, I'm just an Exemplar - so when my body decided to emulate that entity, it decided to go for the best of those three worlds at once, without considering whether it made sense to do so."

"Oh. What's an Exemplar?"

"One of the fundamental categories of mutant, in our world. Exemplars take on a form they perceive as 'ideal', and they gain enhanced physical and mental capabilities with it. I started out as a fairly typical example of the category - tall, handsome, et cetera - but I unwisely made telepathic contact with an entity from outside our reality, and my body image template was warped to match its own." The man in the chair gestures to the monster. "I've come to terms with it, over the years."

"Oh. That's weird. I don't think I've ever encountered a mutant like that before. We have people who have physical changes, but they're pretty much uncorrelated with what someone would look like if they got to pick, and we have voluntary shapeshifters who can look however they want, but nothing like that." 

"Oh? Perhaps we're working from a different mutation, then... or perhaps your world simply doesn't have a way of connecting to the extradimensional body image template..."

Mrs. Carson clears her throat. "Priorities, Louis."

"I think it's something of a priority to find out if we're even the same kind of mutant," Louis (apparently) says mildly.

"...Up close, you feel kind of different. More like my kind of mutant than like a baseline, but..."

"Hmm. I don't seem to have the same kind of synaesthetic senses that you do with my telepathy; mutants and humans feel roughly the same, though I can tell an Exemplar from a baseline easily. If you say we feel different, then that's some evidence in that direction. Does your type of mutant have mutations along the meta-gene complex? Or, well, you might call it something different, but - approximately eighteen distinct locations in the genome which are different between mutants and baselines?"

"...No, we have one recessive gene which when expressed activates a set of otherwise-junk DNA that has the same variance curves between mutants and baselines. How can you have eighteen distinct places where a binary set differs, what happens when they intermarry?"

"Fascinating. As I understand it, the meta-gene complex is rather stubbornly binary - you either have it or you don't. The children of mixed marriages either have it or don't. It also crops up randomly in populations without any members who have it. I'm not a biologist, but it really doesn't seem to add up, does it?"

"It really doesn't. I could buy the first part if they were all adjacent on the same chromosome, although I'd be skeptical that there was literally zero crossover, but...I mean, we have mutants born to baseline parents but that's because it's recessive."