??

"Warm drinks? Only kind of warm drinks we have here are temperature, like hot cocoa or tea or coffee."

She opens the fridge. "I've got a nice tangerine-mango juice blend that's really yummy, how about a glass of that?"

"That'll work." 

And then Audrey blinks. "Oh, right, you said you didn't have ellecol - a drink is warm when it has ellecol in it. Usually it's put in coffee or juice."

"Huh! Yeah, the name sounds a little like alcohol, but we wouldn't usually describe the effects as warm."

She pours two glasses and brings them over, handing one to Audrey and sitting across from her at the table. "What's ellecol do?"

"It helps you focus, at first at least. Then it starts to make your senses finer and makes you aroused. One or two drinks is a good time, three or four will make everyone your girlfriend, five or six and you'll be having muscle spasms and puking on the floor. I usually stick to one drink; that's the limit at the il'ka I go to." 

Audrey seems completely frank in her account, as if she's completely forgotten what she looks like right now. Which may well be the case. 

She sips her juice lightly and rests it on the table, and has a handful of nuts. 

"We have alcohol where I come from, but it's a sanitizer and not a drink. I can't imagine anyone would find it pleasant in comparison to ellecol."

That. Sure is a twelve-year-old talking about arousal, girlfriends, and implied sex.

"Wow! That sure sounds like an improvement over alcohol. Maybe we just don't have the right plants to discover it or something."

She takes a sip of her juice. "Oh! Another question I wanted to ask, before I forgot: you were using 'we' and 'us' and 'collectively' earlier, and I was wondering what you meant by that. That's not very common here, so I'm curious if it's just a language thing or if something else is going on there."

"You're all singlets?" 

Audrey looks as if something fundamental has just been turned on its head. 

"Okay let me explain."

"On Terra, it's normal for people to facet around the age of ten, developing one or more alternate selves that go on to become their own identities in that body. Most people have between three to six selves, but some may be as crowded as thirty. Generally these internal facets will share memories, but present significantly differently in style of dress, speech, personal likes and preferences, preferred aesthetics or mythological roles, and similar. The facet that's most forward - that speaks the most to other people - is known as the "host" or sometimes the "heart" of the system - a system is a group of people in one body - and being the one speaking to others outside the system is called 'fronting.' I'm the host of the Songbird System - Audrey is my personal-name, and Songbird is my system-name. There are two other people in here with me - my shield, Lily, and my spark, Foxbox. Shields protect, sparks play and have fun." 

Why does she feel some kind of way about that?

...Not now.

"That sounds fascinating. It sounds like a nice way to never really be alone. We definitely don't have much of that here. I've maybe heard of something a bit like it, but it's probably badly misunderstood, like most ways people can be different."

"I'm getting the impression this world is kind of just... worse than the one I come from. Between drinking alcohol, not letting tweens vote, and you saying people would be shunned for having more than one self..."

She blinks, long and slow.

"Am I going to have to deal with your Exception Handling branches being incompetent too? There's places where they don't work well on Terra too, but they're small places like Derim of the Rising Flame, not - the kind of place you'd expect to hit by random." 

She frowns. "Exception Handling... sure sounds like the kind of government agency I really wish existed here. If they do what it says on the tin, then that job is handled — poorly — by a hodge-podge of different departments, from the police to social workers to the military."

"Oh. Oh dear."

Audrey frowns. 

"... what rights do I have then? I was assuming things would be fine even though I look like this, but if tweens can't vote..."

"Not a good look for my world, but you basically don't. Parents and guardians can be arrested and the kids taken away for physical or sexual abuse, but that's basically it. Kids without parents or guardians get housed with foster parents and sometimes eventually adopted, but the process tends to be an awful mess. I actually just six months ago got certified as a foster parent just so there would be more good ones."

She tilts her head. "How old are you, anyway? You look twelve, but one of your IDs has a picture of you older and says twenty, and you talk like you have more experience than I'd expect from a twelve-year-old."

"I... I'm not sure. I remember having taken the voting exam, that's the last thing I recall. So I'm probably at least twelve. But there's so much evidence of my being older, on the other IDs... something isn't right. It feels right for me to be this young but I don't know if that's a - physical identity thing or a mental identity one, if you get what I'm saying. Looking at the pictures on the licenses I do feel that they're also me, and not relations of mine, but my memory is really spotty..." 

She tilts her head. "The juices I have on me have ellecol in them, and it'd have been illegal for me to have them on my person in Asterion if I hadn't passed the age of consent bar, but I don't remember taking the exam for that at all. My mind seems... light? Graceful? Not noticeably inhibited? But I don't know for sure. I certainly was quick to grab a stranger when you showed up. Tentatively, I think what might have happened is that I've lost years off my life. There was more of it at some point, but I'm younger now, at least in some ways."

"Normally I wouldn't be so quick to suggest magic, but, well... We're already talking about alternate universes here." 

"Odd. Very odd. That... suggests some things about how we handle this. It's possible to find foster or adoptive parents who won't just treat you like a slightly precocious Earth twelve-year-old and exclude you from any decision where your input is inconvenient, but rare, and we're going to need to finesse things a bit, depending on what you want to do from here."

She is not sure she trusts normal foster parents to raise this kid.

Possibly she shouldn't believe the alternate world story so quickly, but all that ID is pretty convincing.

The cops are going to be trouble. They're the best way to get social workers for placement quickly and to get Audrey and her... other selves? The other girls in her head? Facets, she called them? To get them into the system and get a social security number, but unless they get lucky with which cop they get, the otherworldly stuff is going to turn this into a circus.

And the cops and social workers just straight-up can't be told about the facets, not until Sable learns more about it all herself. It sounds like it's normal on their world, and that means that there are proper ways to handle it that America's mental health system will fuck up badly if given the opportunity.

Well, good thing she's got this week off.

"Well. That's... complicated, for sure." 

Audrey lets out a breath.

"I still like you and all, but I'm going to let Lily forward for the moment because this is - too much to process all at once. Sorry. Um. I hope you like her." 

And she sits up straighter in her chair, and meets Sable's eyes with a gaze that would almost be intimidating if it wasn't on a twelve year old girl. 

"Okay. I think I can trust you to sort this out, and I don't exactly have better options from what you've said. On our world the thing to do now would be for me to shut up - since I'm not even considered a party to the negotiations - and let you handle it. I'm a bad liar but I can genuinely like you honestly, I think, you've been sweet so far despite everything." 

She crosses her arms over her chest. "What do you expect the police to object to about my situation?"

"Good to meet you, Lily. I'm glad Audrey and Foxbox have you to look out for them," she greets her with a smile.

"As for the police, we probably can't mention facets at all, unless we want badly broken mental health institutions involved. The thing I'm stuck on is whether we go open on the alternate world and put up with the resulting circus, try just naming your parents from your world and using non-full-disclosure to get you out of telling any actual lies, or try to swing amnesia. The police are basically going to be useless for figuring out anything about how you got to this world, and they have absolutely no processes for this. We'd see a lot of disbelief, confusion, and frustration, at least until someone actually sat down and studied your documents. Either or both of us would probably be assumed to be crazy."

"Which set of parents? Our aunt Sable mostly raised me, but Eva and Topaz were both there too to different degrees, and all of them had lots more girlfriends who helped out, like Method and Sisters and Sunflower and Duskwing and Gardenia and Imp and Dragoness. My biological parents are Eva and Sunflower, but Sunflower isn't even in the clan, she just happened to be willing to bear for Eva." 

She shakes her head. "I think the second thing is best, if we can get our story straight. I'm relatively good at selectively leaving out information; lies of omission are my best kind. And being the focus of media attention is bad enough when it's not on a planet where people drink alcohol for fun. There must be schizophrenics on this planet as well, yes? Large fame attracts them like moths to flame. Better to stay quiet."