Horrors appear!

And they scream!

(They don't look very horrifying, but it's dark.)

They are in a very dark room, lit only by the faint glow from a few buttons and LEDs! The two of them appear to be standing on a flat surface with an extremely faintly glowing (and flickering) circle on it, and partway across the room, standing next to the object that most of the buttons are on, is a fellow distinguished by a lab coat, Kevlar vest, Einstein wig (wig? Probably wig) and a pair of dramatic goggles that cover a great deal more of his face than is really necessary! The extremely shadowy shadows are making him look very dramatic. And is that a gun in his hand? Hard to see, considering just how dark it is!

"WELCOME, emissaries from beyond this dimension! I have called you here to DESTROY this meddling interloper!"

"Hi!"

(The voice is clearly a young woman's, but she's hard to see in the darkness.)

"- Bella can you see," whispers Xander.

"- can now." Where is the gun pointing.

Down, at present! Funny-looking gun, too. His left hand is making dramatic gestures; his right is holding the gun.

(Also, if she can see in the dark, she can see the very large room in very bad shape, the shimmering force-sphere surrounding the gun-wielding lunatic, and the grinning woman in blue-and-white who doesn't really look like a magical girl - no skirt - but looks more like one than like anything else from a non-fictional universe.)

Not all magical girls get with the skirt program.

That gun is going to continue to point down. It will not move.

"Where are we?" Bella asks.

"Chicago, Illinois, the United States of America, Earth, and also some guy's warehouse that he converted into an evil dimensional-travel laboratory!"

"THE HALL OF TRANS-DIMENSIONAL -" (he tries to slightly move his hand, the gun does not want to move) "- WHAT DID YOU JUST DO?"

Seems a question best left unanswered. "Is there perhaps a naming convention for various Earths."

"Actually, if you're Earthlings you're the first Earthlings not from our Earth we've run into? So nobody's worked one out."

"RELEASE MY WEAPON, TREACHEROUS MINIONS, OR YOU WILL FEEL MY WRATH!"

"Dimensional travel doesn't work, y'see, what with there not being any alternate dimensions."

(She's going to take advantage of this to hurl herself up to the rim of the force-bubble, put her hand on it, and then put two equal and opposite forces, one concentrated in the air right on the other side of the force-screen and one in the air behind her, for style's sake. To the outside eye, he gets punched in the chest hard enough to knock him off his feet - and make him let go of the gun - by absolutely nothing, and there is a slight breeze.)

"Yesterday, at least."

"I must confess I have never before considered the possibility that I was created ex nihilo by a mad scientist from an alternate Earth."

"Sorry! It's also possible your alternate universe totally exists! In fact I'm pretty sure there's some ACTUAL scientists who would say that if it's self-consistent, it exists somewhere? But mad scientists creating people is old hat and mad scientists actually finding alternate dimensions that are accessible through science science isn't."

"Does that mean we have no reasonable prospects of going home?"

"You..." *cough* "Have not..." *cough* "seen..." *cough* "the last of me!" The good Doctor (wheezing but still conscious!) attempts to throw a dramatic switch! Does the dramatic switch move?

- Bella doesn't know what happens if she drops the Mad Science Gun! The switch is going to move unless the local girl can do something about it.

Local Girl does not have the range! She can and will hit the good doctor again in the hopes of knocking him out, but since she's trying harder to not break his neck, this does not go great!

The platform the good Doctor is standing on descends into the earth (or, more likely, a basement) The bank of controls and lights descends. The Doctor descends. The shield descends. The gun does *not* descend, and when a shield nigh-impenetrable to physical forces hits a gun that does not want to move, extremely horrible noises happen.

Oh shit. She doesn't really know what to do about that and, uh, panics and drops the gun. - can she stop the whole platform field generator and all -

She can! The platform stops descending, halfway down into the basement!

There's no walls to this concealed elevator, though, so 'Doctor Dimensional''s grand escape attempt is going to turn into very nobly fall off the platform, then limp away as best he can.

"Be right back!" Mirror says, and then she's heading for the emergency stairs.

Does this place have... exits.

Yup! Three - no, four doors in the walls, one labeled EMERGENCY STAIRS and others not labeled.

Do any of them have windows in the walls suggesting that they lead outside.

Well, if there were windows, there would be light, so... no? Probably some of the doors lead outside!

It might be nighttime! But she'll tug Xander along and start trying some doors.

Supply closet, bathroom, there's some light visible through that one!

What else is visible besides light?

More doors, a left turn, and a window right where it turns left with the blinds down.

And past the blinds?

Chicago! They're on the second floor of a red-brick building, it looks like, and not a very interesting building; red brick, mostly, greatly resembling the other buildings next to it. There's a street below, but she doesn't see any cars on the street; in the distance she can hear them, though, now that she's close to a window. Overall it looks... not too different from a not-very-interesting street in her home universe?

"You wanna try the window?" she asks Alex.

"I don't really want to try the window! We could just wait for the other magical girl!"

"I'd catch you," she says, but they don't argue about it; they make their way back to where the other magical girl would be expecting them.

"Hi!" Mirror doesn't take long to make it back. She looks slightly scorched. "Good work finding some light! If a tinker supervillain ever tells you he 'doesn't do robots', by the way, he is a dirty rotten liar."

She gives Mystery Girl a second look. Just what does her costume look like, in the bad light available to them now?

Isabella's costume:

- big red and blue wings, like a crimson rosella but neatened-up markings and color grading
- drapey red and blue outfit, layers of very thin fabric decorated in various subtle ways with designs of rings in many sizes, clustered in places where the fabric gathers and spread out where it does
- magazine-cover-perfect makeup on a magazine-cover-perfect face with perfectly-behaved brown hair gathered into a braid that should have taken six hours for a professional
- heavily circle-themed jewelry, in black and white metals with red jasper and sodalite - necklace, earrings, stacks of bracelets, two rings on each hand, a few things stuck to the corners of her eyes, various ornaments poked into her hair in a manner that indicates they have no structural importance
- nail polish that matches all the red jasper

That is literally the most complicated superhero costume Mirror has ever seen, and also creepily perfect human beauty, huh, if this girl isn't a construct she's probably an Idealist What Fun. "Nice costume! That trick with his gun was you?"

(Mirror's own outfit is a tradeoff between 'what is practical to afford and maintain without Ulysses glowering too often', 'what provides basic armor without being heavy enough to slow me down too much', and 'what looks like the person wearing it is an Ideal Hero instead of a Grim And Gritty Anti-Hero'; it is fairly tight and blue and white and shiny and armored over the torso and a little else where it doesn't disrupt mobility and basically nowhere else because that would make it too heavy, and although a good deal of it is bright blue spandex, Isabella can see a few places where it's been patched or where part of the very light armor has been replaced and part hasn't.)

"Thanks," says Xander, about the costume.

"Yes," says Isabella, now squinting at the imperfections in Mirror's outfit. Some people make pants work, some people make minimalism work, it's not ridiculous someone could be doing both... but visible repairs? Weird.

(She can't see much of Mirror's face under the mask, but neither her face nor her hair looks more than 'moderately pretty', either. If she's being cast in a movie, it's as 'girl next door', not as 'stunning beauty', and she's not likely to be cast in a movie.)

"Thanks! You totally get the credit for beating him; wide-area force-field plus death-ray-that-can-shoot-through-my-power is a combination that I am not great at coping with. I've called the cops, incidentally, so that's taken care of."

"I'm Mirror." Not the best name to go with her power, but it's a family tradition. "Should I ask who you two are?"

"I'm Isabella and this is my brother Xander."

"... Huh. No superhero name?"

Honestly, a brother with no superpowers is a serious dent in the Idealist story, and definitely a blow for the 'actually really plausible their universe is real' theory, given that it's so undramatic to have a superheroine and a mundane appear simultaneously, and Doc Dim was absolutely the kind of supervillain who ran on drama.

She pauses. "... Also, the police will be showing up soon, since this is, you know, where a lot of stolen property ended up. Do you have - vitally important questions to ask me about differences between the worlds or anything - before they come and take custody of the scene?"

"Uh. There's stuff in the category 'can we get a hotel comped' and stuff in the category 'do you need a minute to fix your hair or does that just work differently here'."

"They can almost certainly get you a hotel room for the night, I'm sure there's a Superhero Bullshit fund that applies to you. And, my... hair... is... fine?" She runs her fingers through her hair. (Which is slightly shorter than it appears in the picture, so as not to get in her eyes.) "Is hair important to your world's powers?"

"Among other things. So you are a 'superhero' and not a 'magical girl'? Was the mad scientist also a super- uh, villain, I guess?"

"... I'm sorry, MAGICAL GIRL?"

She coughs. "Yes. Yes, I am a superhero, not a magical girl. The mad scientist was a supervillain. Superheroes attempt to stop supervillains - and, uh, supervillain-type-things - from doing bad stuff."

The smile keeps creeping up to her face. "So, yes, please explain to me this 'magical girl' thing, and how it is totally a real thing in an alternate universe that is not mine, and how it works. Do you have magical transformation artifacts and mascots and called attacks and -"

"Do you have a secret identity and come back from the dead occasionally and represent the complicated attitude of society towards those who are different or exceptional?"

"Yes, almost never but it's been known to happen faking your death is more common, and you'd have to ask whoever's writing my universe, from inside the story we sure look too busy representing ourselves."

"Well. I don't have a mascot but some magical girls can talk to animals. At the very high levels of performance it is sometimes useful to call attacks. Transformation doesn't require an object."

"Valid! I appreciate you answering my ridiculous and probably stereotypical questions!"

She pauses. "I think the most important urgent information to give you is, uh - so are your powers public information back home?"

"Yeah? I mean I'm not personally a public figure but I show up to class like this."

"Secret identities are nice but not mandatory, most heroes lose them eventually and most villains won't go after your family. No, uh, what I meant was more - like, bad guys have internet connections too? If you decide to be a superhero, any information available about your powers that is online is information villains will have. And smart ones can get into the police files. Be as broad as possible, don't include tricks like 'can punch through force fields', and if you have some kind of weird vulnerability, say nothing."

She pauses. "Of course if you have black hats in your own universe than you probably know all this... uh, do you? What do magical girls fight in the world where they're real? Do they fight stuff?"

"There's swarms? Spontaneously generated clusters of shapeshifting black things that if left alone long enough coalesce into larger monsters. But not every magical girl fights them, it's a specific job."

"So's 'superhero', if it helps! Most people with superpowers just live normal lives, or occasionally abnormal in the 'professional healer who makes lots and lots of money going through cancer wards' sense. Were you swarm-hunting back in your own timeline?"

"No, we've been yoinked out of the cafeteria at the University of Washington."

"Ouch," she says sympathetically. That's got to suck.

She glances at Xander. "Do you have any questions, yourself?"

"I mostly have the same questions as her. I'm not shy, I just know which of us is better at handling first contact with a superhero universe."

"Oh. Sorry." 

"No big. I mean, huge big, we have been kidnapped to another universe by a mad scientist, extreme gigantic big, but, y'know."

"... Yeah, I might possibly be underestimating just how horrible it is for you because of being the sort of person who would totally try to use my physics knowledge and ability to fly to become the destined savior of the world? But, um, if you don't have that then this has got to be horrible. And I'm pretty sure we already have like sixteen destined saviors and most of 'em are C-ranked."

There are audible sirens! "Any last questions?"

"- uh, will we no longer be able to talk to you when the cops arrive?"

"You will, we'll just be kinda busy explaining what just happened and doing paperwork and whatnot."

Mirror is currently trying to think of eldritch dangers that innocent travelers from another dimension might not know about!

"... You know about cars, right? Because they hit people sometimes when the people or the drivers aren't paying attention? This is a problem in Magical Girl Universe, too, right?"

"Yes, we know about cars."

"Good, I'm just trying to think of the most dangerous probable things that travelers from other dimensions might not have thought of."

She pauses. "Down that hallway, down the stairs to the left, out front? I've got a flashlight somewhere -" she tracks down a tiny pocket on her belt, pulls it out, flips it on "- and then we can explain exactly what happened to the officers."

And heads off to go do that!

Twins follow her!

The first police car is pulling up as they leave the building, and more are on their way! The first officer stops to listen to Mirror's brief explanation -"so the electronics thief is calling himself Doctor Dimensional and I tracked him here and he summoned some people from an alternate universe and they helped me out -" and by the time she's made it that far, another pair of cops have arrived to take custody of the twins, and hear (and write down) the very brief version of their explanation, as a third car arrives with even more (unnecessary) reinforcements.

(Also, uh, it is cold outside. Especially for people who happen to be from Washington. Not freezing, not quite, but not that far off. Maybe that's why they want the brief version.)

Isabella materializes an oversized fur coat in her colors and puts some of it over Xander.

O-kay, so Mirror had not gotten to the part about how they had magic powers! Brief explanation of what happened, please?

"My brother and I were in the cafeteria in our universe's version of the University of Washington, where we're students. Then we were in there -" she points back at the building, "and there was a showdown between Mirror and the mad scientist. I helped, a little, but not very much because I wasn't particularly oriented to the situation. He scarpered off into the basement at some point, I don't know if she caught up with him."

"Actually, she did all the work and I got jumped by a robot and let him get away! It was mostly her win there!"

Right. How do they feel about coming back to the station to fill out some forms and see about getting them into the system?

Seems reasonable. "Our dad's a police officer," she says conversationally. "In, uh, our universe."

Nods. A slight thawing. (Do they believe her? Probably! Sense Motive is a class skill for police officers.)

- - -

Either way, it's not too bad a drive. Chicago looks rather the way it does in their universe, if with fewer smokestacks and more vaguely eldritch buildings, some of which glow and some of which sound like running water. The police station looks like a police station; indeed, it may be a police station in their universe, too, depending on just when the timelines deserved, and the woman at the desk they are taken to looks half as old as the building.

"Superhero bullshit," says the officer bringing them in, and the woman at the desk sighs. "We need the 312X-D."

The 312X-D is searched for. Coffee/water/tea is offered, and while the 312X-D is located, a more complete version of their story is taken down. Two extremely dusty copies of form 312X-D are, at long last, located. Form 312X-D claims, possibly falsely given its size, to be the expedited form for "persons of unknown origin, alternate-dimensional travelers, time travelers, constructs of unknown origin, extraterrestrials and visitors from other worlds desiring official residence in the United States of America'. The form urges them to submit other, more unknowable forms to the appropriate examples of the Department of Immigration (US), Social Security Administration (US), and/or the Illinois Public Health Administration (State) within 90 days. 

It asks for a lot of boring things like name (if known) and age (if known), blood type (including 'unknown', 'other,' and 'N/A') and gender (options are Male, Female, Prefer Not To Answer, and Write-In), as well as more exciting options like 'do you have powers baseline humans do not possess, and if so, what', 'if not native, do you know of other visitors from your world/time/dimension' and 'Are you plotting the overthrow of the United States Government, y/n', as well as the more practical, 'if you are in need of assistance, temporary residence can be found for you for a period not to exceed the latter of 72 hours or 12 hours after residence card is issued per regulation something-that-makes-your-eyes-glaze-over, do you desire such assistance', requests for the names of earthly contacts if any, and a note saying that if you have powers you can contract the American Association of Superheroes for assistance, here is their phone number thank you.

The twins have names! And ages! And blood types, though Isabella's heard of magical girls accidentally changing blood types so she goes with "unknown" just in case it isn't the same anymore. They have genders, conventional ones even! Xander does not but Isabella DOES have powers baseline humans do not possess; she lists it as "shapeshifting, touch-range temporary conjuration, kinetic halting". They know... each other! They are not plotting to overthrow the government of the United States.

And yeah they would love some temporary residence. And to borrow a phone, apparently?

Temporary residence can be provided. It comes with food, by which it means that the motel has a continental breakfast and that if you show up at any of THESE places in the city and show them your currently-being-printed card, they'll let you in, here's a map. (It does not promise to be good food.) And sure, they can borrow a phone!

In that case Isabella will call the American Association of Superheroes while Xander inspects a map and the takeout menus corresponding to their meal options.

Map looks familiar! Some of the takeout places may even look familiar, honestly, these timelines are weirdly similar.

"Hello, if you have an emergency you should hang up and call 9-1-1, if this is not an emergency, this is the Illinois branch of the American Association of Superheroes and my name is Rachel, how may I help you?"

"Hi, Rachel, I'm Isabella, and my brother and I were summoned here by a mad scientist. I have powers, though he does not."

"Hello, Isabella! Welcome to Earth! Are you in danger right now?" This last is spoken in exactly the same tone as the rest of the phrase.

"No, we're at the police station at this point."

"Good to hear that! Have they gotten you the form -" there's the sound of keys clicking as if someone is typing something "- 312X-D yet, and will you need any help with it, or is there some other reason you're calling?"

"We got it, we haven't had any trouble with it, I was just told that it might be a good idea to call for additional assistance? I suppose it's possible they only meant assistance with the form, I'd been imagining something to kick in for our housing situation after the voucher we're getting here runs out."

"Oh, I'm sorry! No, we're happy to help with what we can, I just wanted to make sure that was taken care of first, you'd be amazed at how many supervillains started out with no particular problems except forgetting to fill out forms and reacting badly to the Department of Immigration checking up on them. If you're interested in becoming a superhero, we can provide you with advice on using your powers, getting a costume, operating as a hero, and help getting state funding and recognition, which is retroactive if you operate before it's achieved; we can also provide you with some basic advice on possible non-combat uses for your powers, as well as putting you on some mailing lists for people interested in part-time or short-term work of the sort that would take heavy equipment or superhuman powers. If you want to hear more about the risks and benefits associated with superheroing, I can explain more?"

"Uh, go ahead and pitch me but I was not operating in a superheroic-analogous capacity at home."

"Oh, if you don't want to, it's fine. No, the main benefit is that you're making the world a better place, but you can also set your own hours as long as you're doing emergency-responder work at least 4 times a year or 12 times each 3-year period, the state pays for insurance, health care, and for pensions in the case of injury but not retirement, and you can set your own schedule. The main risk is that you might get shot, and if you don't have powers that would stop that from happening I would not recommend being a superhero. The pay is also not that great."

"I don't think I have the reaction time to stop bullets. I was going to go to medical school and specialize in things like clots where stopping them in place buys time."

"Then you should not be a superhero," Rachel says firmly, "not unless you have a teammate who can give you very good armor. But that medical school idea is very clever! I'm not sure what your best path for getting there is short-term, though; there might be hospitals that would be willing to take a risk hiring you to use your powers without a degree, but though I can ask around but I wouldn't expect to get anywhere and otherwise you're looking at restarting college." She pauses. "If you want to come in for powers testing, someone might be able to come up for another possible noncombat use for your powers? Or if can get in touch with the Twentieth Century Foundation, and they might be interested in an interview just to know more about your universe? Or I can let you know if anything happens with the tinker who brought you here, if you have his name, and you might be able to sue him for damages if he's caught."

"I could go for some powers testing. And interviewing with Twentieth Century, sure, why not. Doctor Dimensional."

"All right!" She's going to hear some typing. "You're in Chicago?"

"So I'm told. With my brother."

"Right, both of you." She pauses. "I expect Twentieth Century would be interested in talking to both of you, if they're interested in talking to either; I'll call them once I've got your first appointment set up, if you can give me a contact number or when you come in at powers testing? The powers testing appointment should be at -" <type type type> "- tomorrow at 2 PM at -" she gives an address not too far away from the specified motel - "if that works for you. We can get you a pickup if you need one."

"Can you tell me if it's legal to fly around within the city? Or dangerous."

"Wholly legal, and not dangerous at all unless you go above the flashing airplane-alert lights or low enough you might get hit by a car."

"Supervillains don't take random potshots?"

There is a brief pause as Rachel attempts to adjust.

"No. There are not that many supervillains and most of them commit crimes for money. Supervillains in Chicago are usually either in hiding or being arrested by Octavian."

"Okay, cool. We don't have supervillains back home, as a thing, so I didn't know how trigger-happy they are when anybody goes around looking possibly superheroic. I have a fancy outfit, it's," uh, "traditional, for magical girls on my world, comes with the shapeshifting and conjuration thing."

Magical girls. Huh! Rachel does not say. "It's possible, I suppose, but not likely at all."

"Good. Once Xander's squared away I can fly over as long as I can get flying directions - a map'll do."

Flying directions can be provided! Is there anything else?

"Don't think so. Thank you very much."

"Happy to help!"

Okay, after the phone call is concluded it is time to get their temporary housing, settle into it, eat something, and, in Isabella's case, keep her appointment while Xander watches local TV.

Local TV features the end of a riveting news article on, uh... them? It's mostly about how Mirror fought a new supervillain called Doctor Dimensional who escaped to fight again another day, but includes a description of how he opened a portal to another dimension and there are interdimensional travelers in Chicago now! There's speculation about the interdimensional travelers and literally zero information about them that is not speculation! Local TV is basing this ridiculously thin update mostly on "anonymous sources close to the police."

Also included: Medical dramas! Magical girls do not feature! Tinker devices almost never feature! Police dramas, with supervillains being once-a-season things! Weather reports, with nothing superpowered mentioned in the slightest!

Meanwhile, Isabella has an appointment to keep! It looks like a perfectly normal office building except that the walls feature pictures of Mirror, a probably-man with face shrouded in a kerchief and glowing goggles, and a black guy of uncertain age with an I-hate-you expression and no mask.

Also, when she shows up at the desk, they have paperwork for her! Specifically, paperwork clarifying that the IAS testing is being done voluntarily at her request, and that they promise confidentiality about the details of her appointment unless and until there's a court order requesting otherwise. They also want her ID, though either the flimsy temporary card that got printed at the station or her alternate-universe ID will do.

"What kinds of situations cause court orders like that?"

"You rob a bank."

Pause.

"Or shoot someone. Or any other violent felonies."

"Okay but if I don't commit violent felonies it won't come up? - relevantly, one of my powers is shapeshifting, so I could see somebody framing me by claiming I was framing them. I'm not calibrated on what supervillains get up to or how often, my experience of this universe is basically 'it's like my world except there are supervillians and one kidnapped me'."

"If you don't commit felonies, it won't come up. If someone claims you shapeshifted to frame them, the police might question you, but they won't get a warrant for your powers testing logs unless you're resisting arrest."

Pause.

"Supervillains mostly commit thefts. Sometimes they steal money, sometimes they steal valuable things. There are... maybe a thousand supervillains in the United States, if you count minor ones, and usually most of them are in jail? Some of them have mental problems but most of them are just short-sighted and want to be rich and famous. They might kidnap someone rich to hold for ransom or tie up a superhero they defeat until they get away but you're not likely to get elaborately framed unless you really made one hate you."

"Cool, that helps a lot to know." Signatures signatures.

Then it's time for her to go down to the basement for powers testing! The basement is very heavily armored, with concrete and metal and very thick foam padding over most of the walls. It's also equipped with a lot of weird equipment of unknown purpose, very heavy-looking weights, and what sure looks like multiple guns, only some of which are probably loaded with paintballs. The guy managing it has glasses and a curious smile. "Mike Sanchez. You're Isabella?"

"That's me. At home there are plenty of magical girls - although if people are going to make that face at me I might switch to "puella magi", which is the corrupted Latin - and all of them have most of my powers, but presumably here you will want to test more than my unique spell."

"I think you're going to get people making TV references whatever you pick, sorry," he says. "But you've got it. Anything you can do that nobody else can do is something that might save your life or make you rich. Do you mind giving me the full list of your powers, before we get started?"

"Magical girls have shapeshifting and touch-range conjuration. You won't go far wrong if you think of it as a cosmetic power with utility side effects - we're not very good at any shapeshifting or conjuration that produces an effect we can't literally see, though a supporting secondary power of that whole shebang is that we have a mentally accessible mirror at all times. So I can go around with wings, I can wear as much jewelry as I want," she cups her hands and fills them with sapphires and lets them spill to the ground, but they vanish as soon as they leave her palms, "but if I want something to persist after it leaves my person it has to be organic, and I have to grow it out of my body. People do that at home, sell pearls and coral and unicorn-horn-type things, grow weird hybrid fruits out of branches they have sprouting from their heads, but it's kind of uncomfortable and gross so I hope that's not my best option. Shapeshifting works for healing but, again, only in visible domains, so if I break a wing I can stop having it and then put it back, but if I get liver cancer I am in the same boat as anyone else."

He nods and spends a moment thinking. "I can think of a few obvious ideas," he says, pacing back and forth, "that might be worth exploring."

"First power: Shapeshifting. You've already thought of the pearl option. If you have near-human mass and your wings can bear you, that suggests you can manage low-levels of super-strength, by making the muscles in your arms as strong as those in your wings. If you can shapeshift into anything you might be able to make very strong compounds to get light natural armor, and if it's strong enough that might be worth more than pearls, or just save your life if you do decide to hero. Question - do you have fixed or variable mass while shapeshifting? If you don't follow the laws of thermodynamics you might be able to find a way to displace a power plant." 

"Second power: Conjuration. Can you conjure complicated equipment connected to your clothing by a single ultra-durable thread? If so, that's almost as good as complicated equipment that isn't. Can you lift-by-conjuring? Presumably tiny amounts are possible if you displace air, but we can test the limits of it."

"Third power. Is the mirror full 3D sight, or just a mental picture of yourself? And are there any other supporting powers we should get to before we get too far into analyzing your first two abilities?"

"My mass varies, and I can fly. I can shapeshift into anything as long as it's neither too close to nor too far from baseline human - I can't do the first one at all, the latter is very dangerous and I don't have the guidelines from my universe memorized so I'll want to be conservative. Complicatedness of equipment is the sort of thing that I am not good at because I can't see it, but if I studied transparent versions all of whose parts were necessary and sufficient as seen, I might be able to make those? I can lift things by conjuring if I am already supporting the thing, like if I'm holding my ID card -" she takes it out, "I can make a thing under it, but if it's just near my leg or something I can't get a conjuration under it. It's a mental picture of myself but I can change the angle how I like and zoom a fair bit though not microscopically, just like if I were looking very very close up with my actual eyes - at whatever their present acuity - without obscuring the lighting conditions. I have to be doing the mirror thing, which displaces normal vision, in order to do any of my shapeshifting or conjuration things, but not to use my spell, which is stopping objects from moving."

He responds to the first parts and take notes and then stares when she gets to that last part.

"Stopping? In... what frame of reference?"

"I can sort of pick, if I'm in a car or something, but usually relative to the Earth. I haven't gotten it to do anything fancier than "stopped object in car follows car, rather than breaking rear window" so far but maybe you'll think of something."

"That sounds like a very productive avenue for exploration; there's a famous supervillain who started with a not-very-useful object-creation power, then got good at controlling his power's frames of reference and fought the entire Atlantic Six by himself." (He's taking notes again.)

He pauses. "Other questions about it to ask or test - range, legible targets, reaction time? How far away can you use it? Do you need to be able to see the object you're stopping? Can you stop a car crash about to happen?" He has MORE but he can get answers to these first.

"My reaction time is that of a normal human teenager with some practice. Range is a few blocks, I'm not sure what you mean by 'legible' targets. I don't have to be able to see it but I have to know what it is, at least more or less so I could pick it out of a lineup with dissimilar objects - I won't accidentally stop a mockingbird or a for-some-reason-moving television if it sounds like a car and fools me - and the general direction. I can stop a car crash as long as stopping one of the two cars will do that and I can tell which in time, I can't stop two things at once. My range and how many things I can stop at once are both likely to have room for improvement if I get prettier."

His note taking continues, and he's opening his mouth to answer her 'legibility' question when she says "Prettier" and he gives her the Look again for half-a-second before he straightens his face.

"Prettier. By... whose... definition?"

"We don't know! There's a religion defining 'whoever that is' as God but they don't especially have better evidence than any other religion. It's not literally identical to human concepts of beauty, it has other preferences, but that's how we say 'the quality that makes magical girls better at spells' for short."

He pauses. "Wow."

"... So by 'legible' I meant what sorts of things it affects. Can you stop 'all the air a foot from that post', or fire, or a bullet in a magazine, or -" he does not say 'someone's heart,' that isn't something you learn about by testing and it isn't something he wants anyone to think about. "Or just the engine of a car." Because a car suddenly stopping isn't going to be good for whoever's inside it.

"No, no, yes, yes but when I did that I think I may have had an inadequate understanding of car engines because it started smoking."

... Honestly he also has an inadequate understanding of car engines.

"So you can stop parts of objects, but nothing that your power can't conceive of as 'an object'. Do you know what force it takes to move objects that you have stopped, if any?

"I've never seen it done. They can still be compressed, though, if I stop a kernel of popcorn you can step on it and it'll support your weight but it'll flatten."

"Well, one of our gadgets -" he points at one of the machines on the wall - "is for applying a lot of force in a small area." He points. "I've got a penny here -" he pulls one out of his pocket "- if that's a test you want to make?" While I think about the best way to test some of the more complicated powers?

"Sure." She heads over to the machine, checks out what directions and locations it looks best placed to apply force, and leaves a penny in the air in such a location.

The machine's fairly simple; there's an extremely well-braced tray you put things in, and then a sort of a stamp designed to put pressure on them.

It presses down with rather more force than it would take to lift a car, and the penny is now flatter. Has it moved?

Nope! It's just flat now. It continues to hover an inch above the tray.

"... Well, that's the heaviest-duty press I have. I'm not sure the Survivor couldn't move it, but he's not available for testing -" he pauses "- world's strongest man."

Obvious next question - "Do you know how long you can keep an object frozen for if you don't release it?"

"If I don't want to use my spell for anything else and I just leave it there it stays till I fall asleep. Or I guess if something makes me less pretty I'd lose it."

... Okay, the prettiness thing is bizarre, but it's not like it's the only bizarre superpower restriction.

"It can stay frozen even if you leave it alone and stop paying attention to it, with no focus required?" Which would not be unique, but that combined with it ending when she sleeps would be odd...

"Yeah, sometimes I stop a pillow and sit on it. Once our towel rack broke so I hung mine in the air and it'd fallen by the time I came home since I used my spell on other stuff, but not before it had time to dry."

O-kay. "I'm sure there's some sort of industrial job that would love the ability to turn a bedroom sheet into a completely immovable surface and would be willing to pay you to come in once a morning to do that, I just don't know what."

He pauses. "If you want to test reaction times with the power, we have a pitching machine in the corner, but I don't know if you expect that to be relevant to your life." Also guns, because pitching machines have limits, but those are to be used with EXTREME SAFETY so he doesn't bring them up immediately.

"Once a morning wouldn't work out very well - I have terrible balance and tend to catch myself with magic when I slip. I could try to get in the habit of conjuring myself a pillow instead but I'm not currently in that habit. I try to live my life in such a way that knowing my precise reaction time is not very relevant."

He nods. "Perfectly reasonable."

He pauses. "In that case - range tests aren't very practical here," since it's a basement, "but we can see about targeting tests. If I show you a deck of cards and then shuffle it, can you freeze the card that was on top when I showed it to you?"

"Huh, I haven't tried that one. Maybe. A card might be thin enough to cut you when it's stopped, so be careful."

He nods. Shows her the top of the deck, backs of the cards all alike, shuffles, holds the deck between thumb and forefinger of one hand, other hand held below to catch it when he lets go. "Now."

They all drop. "Looks like a no. I don't know for sure but I don't think this is one my power's likely to change its mind on if I get prettier."

He nods. "Do you think it's just a matter of keeping track? If I used two cards, could you do it? Or if you saw the face first?" He's happy to test these!

She will test them, but it turns out she can't do it if the cards are mixed up even if there's only two.

Unfortunate! He's out of targeting tests; he recommends she should check range at some point on her own, maybe with city blocks somewhere they're a regular size, but he doesn't have the space for that.

Next step: Shapeshifting. He'll try the moderate and reasonable and sane tests later, but first he wants to know if she can turn a very tiny patch of skin on her hand into carbon fiber, a substance that could still exist according to the world that ran on the laws of physics, even if the only way to get it in this one is to have someone with the right superpowers make it for you.

"I don't think carbon fiber is an organic substance? I mean, it has carbon in the name, but in the sense of being a thing that could grow on an organism."

"I don't think so, no, but there's a small chance your power might disagree."

And if it doesn't, they can try a very light patch on her clothing.

"I am really really reluctant to try modifications to my body that I don't remember having heard of anyone safely doing because if it turns out they're too far off baseline the thing that happens is I permanently lose my continuity of personality and fuck off into the wilderness to be a dragon or something."

"Understood, I didn't realize it was that unsafe. You're completely right to do that and I apologize."

"Thanks." She can do carbon fiber clothes if she has a picture to look at.

He can provide a picture. And then blink when it works, which he had not been expecting in the slightest.

"You will be one of the richest women in the world if you find a way around your power's restrictions."

"Good luck, my planet's had magical girls for hundreds of years and the rule on removing magically conjured stuff is no grow no go."

She already knows how to use her shapeshifting to make tremendous amounts of money via growing. Other uses for it - he assumes that she's already thought of modeling, since this is a planet where she isn't competing with other magical girls, and, indeed, very few shapeshifters at all?

"Magical girls do do that at home. It doesn't interest me as a main line but if there's some kind of career agency that'll let me know if a billion dollars are up for grabs I'd look at it."

"I think I can get you on some lists. Do you want to try increasing your strength with shapeshifting, or are you worried about that pushing it?"

"I don't think that'd push it too bad and if you ask for something that's definitely not worse than borderline I can take a wing off."

He nods. If she tries to become stronger - and focuses on the fact, which is very true, that her wing muscles are very strong because they're lifting her - can she obtain super-strength?

She can embuffen her arms - she's normally going for a willowier look - and then she is stronger, though they are not more impressive than if she went to the gym a lot for months and maybe indulged in a little T.

But that is just being stronger. She's not being super-strong in her arms, even though she is super-strong in her wings.

... Are her wings actually outputting enough force to move her, or are they somehow making her super-light via magic? There's high enough ceilings, and he has fancy enough testing pads for her to stand on, to see if the force outputted when she takes off is more or less than the amount it would take to move an object of her mass.

She will stand on the pad and flap across the room.

... Okay, no, these readouts are impossible.

"This machine thinks you can't fly." She is not, in fact, outputting enough force to fly. The computer says so. It thinks the fact that she is no longer standing on it is apparently a coincidence!

"It.... is mistaken," she says, landing and folding her wings once she has her balance.

"Apparently it is." She just has the power to fly when she can't fly. But only with wings. "... To clarify, you can't fly without wings?"

"No. I mean, I guess I could conjure a ladder and stop it in place and climb it, but no."

Powers testers are not supposed to say 'weird'. But for the life of him, he can't think of anything better to do. 

... He can test if she can still fly if she's lifting some mid-sized weights?

She can carry about fifty pounds in the air.

... He's not actually sure what that means but it's good to know???

Okay. Other testing, this time moving to the clothing conjuration. Can she control the clothing she's wearing - for instance, if there's any tassels or cords on her clothing, manipulate them via shapeshifting?

Kinda! If she wants to, say, make a bit of her sash wrap around a nearby object she can do that with some trial and error (she can't see the object in starscape and must make all changes in starscape).

Aha. So that's a real limitation. Does starscape also cut off her other senses?

"No, I can still hear and whatnot normally."

"Understood."

Next step, things technically part of her clothing! Can she create objects "as part of her clothing" that are halfway across the room from her and connected to her outfit by very thin threads?

Looks like she runs into a problem when she can't see the threads or when they're far enough away that she can't see them in starscape. (She can create connected things close to her and then move away from them while the thread unspools and they stay, though.)

That is still pretty great. If he takes the objects upstairs, do they disappear after a while?

Looks like they maybe disappear at the point where she wouldn't be able to tell if they were still attached, should she look - maintaining tension on the thread helps a little but not indefinitely.

Hmm. If the thread goes around the corner of a sheet of opaque plastic, does that make the objects disappear?

Not if she's close enough to it! (The sheet of opaque plastic does not join her in starscape, relevantly.)

So it is just a range limit with 'sight' as a metaphor. If the thread is clipped, the objects disappear instantly? Is there a faint 'pop' (suggesting inrushing air to fill the vacuum) or a soundlessness (suggesting the air was transmuted into the object instead of the object being created ex nihilo?)

Yes and there is a faint pop.

All right, moving on for the moment: What level of detail can she create at? How about something with very simple fractal pattern; how far do the tiny patterns repeat? He has a microscope if necessary.

The patterns repeat very small but not so small you need a microscope; a magnifying glass of the kind some gigantic dictionaries have will do.

Can she make them repeat even smaller if she has a magnifying glass?

No, but she can do eagle-eyes and then get them smaller!

"... Fascinating."

Her shapeshifting is SO COOL and he strongly suspects she knows he thinks that, but, well, it is SO COOL

"Thanks."

While they're on object creation... how large an object can she create? They are limited by the size of the room, though it's a fairly large basement, and if they have to they can go out into the street.

This again seems to be a zoom in starscape issue, but she can fill her starscape visual radius with a beanbag or whatever.

... He's going to try something ridiculous and not tell her he's doing it. Specifically, he wants to know if she can make this specific very simple circuit design, it's built into a bracelet and a piece of equipment that disables people's powers? Connected by a thread, please?

"Uh, sure, if I can get a good look at it -" If it's very simple she can probably do it, and it seems likely that it won't work on her powers since hers are different.

It's very simple, so she can do it! And it won't work on her at all, not if she's from another universe.

"Like this?" she asks when she's got it.

That looks exactly correct and does nothing at all, the tiny light doesn't even go on.

"You do not have hidden tinker powers," he says.

"Drat."

"I didn't think it was likely, but -" he shrugs. "Worth testing." 

"Yeah, that's legit if it comes up sometimes."

"We didn't even know that tinkers weren't just 'good engineers' until the seventies, and subtle tinkers can still sometimes be very hard to spot."

He pauses, noticing something he'd missed earlier. "... You called your - shapeshifting alternate view - a starscape? Would you mind expanding on that?"

"Oh, uh, the background I see myself against is of stars, it's like that for all of us. It's consistent stars per person but doesn't match identically between people, but I'm not sure if some people match, or if the starscapes could potentially be, like, summer or winter constellations of the same place, or what - they aren't the stars as seen from Earth."

"Do you see the same stars here as on your own world?"

"Yeah, I can recognize my usual constellations here."

He's running out of shapeshifting and costuming tests. A few more ones worth trying before they move on to frame-of-reference, which is going to be the hardest part:

- If she shapeshifts into other superheroes, can she copy their powers? (Almost certainly not, but there's three mimics and might be four.)

- What does her flying speed look like? Has she tested alternate wing designs for faster flying speed, or was she not optimizing there?

- Can she change her voice via shapeshifting? Is perfect pitch shapeshiftable into having? (He has no idea and is really just curious.)

She wants to take a picture of her current face and outfit first but then she'll try anyone who isn't shaped too close to or far from baseline. Doesn't work.

She can do around fifty miles an hour but competitive fliers are much faster. The prettiness metric punishes plagiarism so copying wing shapes exactly is best left for athletes who aren't going for magic performance.

She can't do that because she can't see her vocal cords.

Fair enough!

All right. So, frame of reference.

"The first thing to recognize," he says, "is - and I expect you know this - that stillness is an illusion. Everything is moving, at all times, even what you freeze. You can do this for a moving car, so you know it is true. The question is if you can convince your power that it should know it, too."

First few tests to run, then, on a rather long treadmill they have!

- If she stands still not on a treadmill, the frozen object (here, have a squeeze-ball) is frozen.

- If she walks not on a treadmill, the ball is frozen and doesn't go with her walking.

- If she walks on a treadmill and attempts to freeze a ball in midair, can she get the ball to move either forwards (because she's walking forwards, and it doesn't make sense for the ball not to move forwards parallel to her) or to backwards (because she's moving forwards so not moving with her is static, now isn't it?)

- If she lets the treadmill carry her, so she isn't moving relative to it, can she have a ball that stays in her hand instead of syncing to the earth?

- Does having her eyes closed, or listening to pleasant music instead of the noises of the treadmill, help with any of this?

She can't board a treadmill that at any point in this process is going to move without falling over in a heap of disgruntled feathers.

Well, shit.

(He doesn't say that.)

"... Sorry about that."

All right, think, what are other available options that he can do with the equipment he actually possesses...

"It happens." She straightens out her feathers in starscape.

... See, the thing is, he doesn't say, his equipment for testing motion kind of assumes you can move. In theory, there exists some kind of fancy VR headset; in practice, he thinks you need to be a tinker to make those. The specific situation of 'person who wants power testing and whose powers testing depends on motion and who has trouble walking straight without falling over' is not one he planned for at any point.

"... I think the next step would be to go outside, get in a car, and see about testing your powers with a car's motion," he says, "if that works for you."

"Do you have, like, a pickup I can sit in back of? The wings don't love being on a chair with a back."

"Honestly I think pickup trucks are outside the list of things we have prepared. I can see if anyone drives one, but my guess would be no?"

"Van with seats that fold down?"

"I think I know someone who has one of those."

Yeah, three minutes of phone calls and ten minutes of driving later, one does indeed appear.

Then she can sit in the back of the van with her wings spread gorgeously out over the folded-down seats.

She can make a ball stop inside, or near, the van, relative to the van instead of the earth; she can also make it stop relative to the earth, though she does warn that if the van continues to move after she does this the ball will make a serious try at escaping out the back door.

Yeah, that's why they're going slowly.

Okay, next step: If she's flying, can she make a ball stop relative to herself instead of relative to the planet? What if she's gliding (uh, assuming she can glide with her wings) without beating them, moving semi-on-automatic instead of taking deliberate action?

She can glide. She doesn't seem to be able to make a ball stop relative to herself while she's doing it.

Not even if she focuses on the fact that she ought to.

Actually, all right, let's go with a very simple test of abusability. Get in van, drive to where a ball won't cause problems if it suddenly goes flying forwards, put a very slightly sticky fluffy ball onto the windshield, accelerate, let her stop it, then slow down.

Does it keep moving, or is it actually synced to the van?

It's actually synced to the van.

Well, that sounds difficult to work around. Also, he's running out of ideas; everything else he can think of consists of testing for obscure powers.

He'll do that, then? He assumes power-nullifying bracelets don't work on her, but she can try if she wants; he can offer to do very mild tests for sensitivity to electricity or cold, he can check just to make sure that she doesn't have the gene and that she won't end up getting double-superpowers...

And, he supposes, he can send off messages to the few people he knows who might be able to talk to someone who might be able to talk to someone in hiring somewhere?

"I would really appreciate the job hunting help, yeah! We kind of don't have our previous support network here."

"I mean, if you need something short-term there's always want ads? If you want to look for something you can go to a library, they've got computers you can borrow and they're happy to let anybody use them. But that won't be great work, so I'll see what I can do."

"Short term I can sell pearls. Assuming people will believe me about them being legit and not plastic, or there's some kind of pearl test that I don't know about because I've never wanted to peel my own arm open to retrieve pearls."

"I have no idea," he says honestly. "I know some people who'd buy spidersilk?" Specifically he knows a tinker who retired who knows tinkers who make lightweight armor, because 'superhero support staff' is a job that lets you meet other people in it. "But I don't know anything about pearls."

"Huh, spidersilk probably wouldn't be too bad actually, especially if I were hooked up to a spool and just had to sit there reading a book."

He shrugs. "I don't know what the - harvesting? - would look like, but apparently it's really useful for armor, and you can't get useful amounts without superpowers. I don't know if it pays the most, but it's an IAS sort of thing, so..."

"IAS?"

"International Association of Superheroes."

"Well, the option won't hurt."

Indeed it won't.

"Is there a number I should call, or do I just give you my hotel phone number, or...?"

Contact information is available on his card (which he hands to her), including email and phone, she can also get in touch with the Illinois IAS via their phone number or website, and if she gives the hotel phone number he can also call that. Probably two days to two weeks depending on a mix of bureaucracies and crises.

"I'm not sure our stay there lasts two weeks but I guess I can call if my contact info changes."

"I'll see what I can do," he says. "And - good luck."

"Thanks."

And she flies back to the hotel.

The hotel remains in existence!

Other shows that Xander has had the opportunity to see:

- Legal drama! The defense is claiming a supervillain made a duplicate of the accused and the duplicate was responsible, the prosecutor thinks this is obvious nonsense but is still trying to get the supervillain (in prison) to make a public statement that he didn't, which provides a great opportunity for intense stares between charismatic actors.

- History talking about WW1! No mention of superheroes whatsoever.

- More local news! The murder and arson rates have been high for the past couple months; one of their experts thinks that Mirror's ultimately responsible because she dramatically arrested a major crime boss and so there's a vacuum; one of their other experts thinks that's nonsense and the real problem is Novapest, everyone thinks the woman in the demon mask is bad news. (They don't bother to explain what Novapest is.)

- Weather report! It's expected to remain cool but clear for the next couple days, but there's a high risk of snow over the weekend.

Wow, WWI is different without magical girls.

He greets his sister when she returns, she tests spidersilk-ing (doable, not too miserable, when Xander checks her against an improvised inventory of magical girl point-accumulation signs the spinnerets are not too expensive provided they are small).

How long are they allowed to stay here again?

Three days minimum, more if it takes them longer than that to get them their green cards. Which it may well.

And they've done all the steps on their end for green card getting?

... Hopefully? Or, uh, if not, insofar as there are more paperwork to fill out or interviews or something someone will hopefully get in touch with them?

Honestly that's good enough for him.

Isabella, meanwhile, is going to go ask the front desk if they can point her to a pawn shop or maybe one of those WE BUY GOLD places.

Yeah, sure, no problem? WE BUY GOLD over thataways, here's a Google Maps printout.

Helpful. She flies to WE BUY GOLD to see if they will also BUY PEARLS.

They do, yes.

... She has wings. A quick calculation is made by the person at the counter. Does she appear to have an implausibly large number of implausibly high-quality pearls, all of them loose instead of already strung into necklaces?

"I haven't made them yet, I want to know if this is even worth it. I don't know what the pearl market is like around here."

He will name a price! It is much, much higher than the price she is used to! She can also tell pretty clearly that he doesn't think of it as high.

"So, on my planet, that would be very generous, because lots of people there can make pearls. On your planet, I suspect it is not generous at all."

"Maybe, but if you keep on making pearls, the market's gonna crash."

"I don't want to make pearls. It's uncomfortable. Making spidersilk will make me more money more pleasantly, but it requires a more specialized buyer and I want to be able to get on the internet sooner than that. This is quite plausibly the only time anybody on the planet will convince me to make customized genuine-nacre pearls in any color and size that strikes their fancy."

... He'll offer a somewhat higher price, and make some specifications on the upper end of what would've been plausible if he hadn't had someone magically wish them into existence.

And now on Isabella's arm is an oyster and she pries it open and pulls out his pearls for him.

Isabella now has more money than she did! And once she's been doing that for a bit, she has significantly more money than she did!

"Bleah," she says, shaking the oyster out of existence when she feels she's got enough of a slush fund. "Thanks, have fun with those."

He absolutely intends to.

... Well, with the money gotten from the resale, at least.

What's Isabella's next step?

Isabella desires INTERNET CAPABLE DEVICES. And also a change of clothes or three for Xander. She collects him and gives him some of the money so he can shop for his outfit, as this is in no way something she is well qualified to do.

Obtaining INTERNET CAPABLE DEVICES is wholly within her power, as this world does indeed contain electronics stores and little booths in malls that are cell-phone stores and stores that sell random objects that occasionally include prepaid phones! There are clothing stores, many of them near electronics stores and/or malls and/or stores that sell random objects that occasionally include pre-paid cellphones! 

Then Isabella and Xander will make mall purchases! Do they have a voucher for the food court or is their food thing more specific than that?

Their food thing's more specific than that. But they do have money, and as it happens mall food courts take that!

"It does seem like a waste not to use the voucher." Xander says this around a mouthful of Panda Express noodles so it's perhaps not very convincing.

"Think of it as subsidizing the other recipients of such vouchers. We're making issuing them cheaper by decreasing the number of -"

"Safeword!"

"Xander for the millionth time you can say 'no more economics' without being weird about it."

"Can I though."

At any rate, they eat their food and then go back to the hotel. With their INTERNET CAPABLE DEVICES. Xander wants to know if they made the news.

Yes! Yes they did. Mirror fought a supervillain and some people showed up from an alternate dimension, and that's definitely a story. Do they have photos of the dimensional travelers? They do not. But they have lots of speculation!

... Also, apparently some people are talking about (and have taken photos of) a winged woman who's new in town, though the connection between that and the 'alternate dimensions' thing is also speculation, if unusually plausible such.

Have they assigned her a SUPERHERO NAME he can tease her about?

Not yet! There's some speculation about whether or not she already has one, though.

"You need a superhero name."

"...Rosella?"

"Acceptable but it locks you in to the color scheme."

"I can change the name later."

Time passes! They get a couple messages (on the hotel phone) asking to arrange interviews; Twentieth Century wants one tomorrow and HE-Tec can do next week.

They have nothing else scheduled! She gives them her new email address.

Great!

They are not murdered or attacked or anything by supervillains during the night, and in the morning they can get free Continental breakfast (or find a breakfast place) and then it's time for Isabella's interview with Twentieth Century!

They eat continental breakfast and Isabella flies to her appointment!

The Twentieth Century Foundation is based in one of the stranger-looking buildings in the city, a gigantic tower that looks - sort of like a cathedral would look like if it was made by the designer of the Starship Enterprise? Shining metal and glass and plastic, sweeping outwards and upwards to lead the eye up to the heavens. Whoever it was didn't just have a good architect, they had a weird architect. The inside fits the same aesthetic, too; like you've traveled sideways fifty years and forwards three hundred. The people at the desk inside are dressed normally, though, and their phones and computers look perfectly ordinary, as they wave her to a sleek (and unnaturally smooth) elevator to ascend to her appointment.

Huh. Sort of like a Thaumatologist temple only huge and sci-fi.

Elevator!

Elevator goes to appointment!

It's a nice office (albeit an office designed by someone who was thinking about spaceship bridges) with a middle-aged woman in it, who's happy to offer Isabella a hand to shake and her name, Mya Carter, and a chair that looks designed to fit people with wings. There's a window on one wall, and a very slowly-shifting picture of elaborate constellations of stars on the other.

"So, tell me about your Earth," she says once they're seated.

"Well, it doesn't have superheroes and supervillains, and instead it has magical girls and swarms."

She nods. "Yes, thank you. Has that been the case forever, or did it suddenly happen at some point?"

"Swarms started appearing in 1420 and magical girls in 1421."

She nods. "And can you tell me more about the state of the earth, in your year? Do you know who was President?"

And she's going to follow that up with a lot more questions, as this one is answered: The last few Presidents. Brands. Prices, for anything Isabella can remember. Inflation rates. Gas prices. Political scandals, political crises. The World Wars, if there were still two of them. Cars, computers, celebrities, people she knew or who she saw on the news, and what, if anything, they could do.

The Presidents mostly don't match in recent years, though most of the historical ones do. Isabella can answer all the other questions pretty well for a person of her age who was not expecting to be kidnapped to an alternate dimension.

"Thank you," says Mya Carter, and her eyes flicker towards the star-scape on the wall.

"Thank you," says the woman on the screen, as it shifts from being a static image to a video of a woman. She's sitting in a spaceship-bridge style chair at a spaceship-bridge style desk and she isn't human, even in the picture; her face is mechanical, molded into a woman's shape; the eyes and the mouth shift slightly, but her skin is blue metal and her hair is silver wire. 

"I'm very pleased to meet you, Isabella Swan from another world. I am Minerva, and I want your help."

"...huh. What with?"

"Thank you, Mz. Carter, that will be all for today," she says, and Mya bows her way out.

And then, after the door is closed, "Minimizing the risk of the destruction of the universe, minimizing the risk of the annihilation of humanity, and trying to discern whether attempting to open portals to your universe would be the greatest humanitarian achievement in history, or the greatest catastrophe in same."

"You can do that?"

"No. But Doctor Dimensional apparently can, at least enough to make one-way travel possible, and a surprising number of supervillains are bribable."

"I'm not going to say he's not bribable but I am going to say that he didn't necessarily have the sanity necessary to carry out a project to spec. - Is something currently trying to annihilate humanity?"

"That's unfortunate. Not necessarily fatal to resuming contact, but important and unfortunate."

She pauses. "And - not effectually, at present. But five years ago a pair of teenage tinkers accidentally unleashed a nanobot swarm with no replication limit, and twelve years ago a particularly delusional supervillain launched a project to create a black hole large enough to permanently tilt Earth off its orbit, and if you go far enough back you get to the Necromancer trying to kill every living thing and barely being stopped and Tovaricho trying to trigger World War Three and Patience Cartwright dropping into a universal-solvent loaded hole and eventually one has to wonder about anthropics. From what you say about your world, we are significantly richer, we are longer-lived, we have colonized Mars, we are starting to make humanity immortal - but every time a new power triggers, we roll the dice."

"...well, we don't have that but we do have kaiju."

The image of Minerva on the screen cocks her head as if to listen. "I don't think you've explained those yet."

"Swarms start out as a few hundred bugs, not more than about a centimeter across. They act more or less together and they can still kill people like that but they're not individually durable, you can step on them. But if nobody kills them they all glom together into a larger monster, and if several of those meet up, they glom together too, and so on. So, in cities, where we notice as soon as one starts existing - by looking or by specialized alarms, though I hear they mostly do false positives - it's swarms of new bugs, but in places where we can't notice for a long time, like the middle of the ocean or in the Rockies or Antarctica or something, it's lots, over weeks or months, and if they get to be about building-sized we start calling 'em 'kaiju'. There's specialist teams of magical girls with heavy artillery to bring to bear on those."

"Interesting. Are Kaiju restricted to close-range attacks? Can they fly? How quickly do they move?"

"They don't really throw things, but they can shapeshift continually so they can suddenly extend in any direction at any time. They can fly if they're shaped for it. They're fast unless they're distracted."

Minerva nods. None of this sounds like it would have posed a serious issue for who she used to be, but who she used to be is not a relevant consideration any more, and she needs U.N. approval to break out the orbital death geoengineering laser.

"My first instinct is to ask you for numbers, but in fact I think there are a sufficient number of things I want to know about your world that it would take several months to finish asking."

"Also I don't have a lot of numbers confidently memorized! I signed up for emergency magic deployment but was never expecting to be called, have a disability that would be a liability in the field, and was instead planning to go to medical school."

"Which is why I want to hire both you and your brother."

She pauses. "To clarify, the job I want to employ you for is to write down everything you know about your world. If you would both be willing to independently record everything you know, answering questions and giving the most precise confidence intervals you can, it could be extremely valuable - to have a complete picture of a path not taken, to determine if we should be attempting to make permanent contact, and to know if there are specific powers in your world that could help save ours - resurrecting the dead, for instance."

"We don't have that one."

Her image on the screen smiles slightly. "Yet."

"Unusual powers do pop up sometimes but that one would really surprise me. I guess maybe if you have a superhero who can make people stunningly beautiful a healer might have a prayer of scaling up."

"That depends on your definition of 'superhumanly beautiful'," she says, "but if perfect shapeshifting isn't enough I only know of two entities that might be capable, and both of them are villains. There could easily be someone obscure in another country, but I don't think we can count on it."

"It's actually mostly a design problem after a certain point."

Minerva does not quite preemptively regret that she is saying this, it is where the conversation has lead her, but -

"There are certainly people who could be superhumanly gifted fashion designers, especially if they thought it would provide them with power, and/or money that they could later use to obtain power."

"At that level, though, I don't know."

(The question of whether you could fashion design hard enough to raise the dead is not one that she had previously considered!)

"Magical girl stylist is a highly paid job in my world. My brother wanted to be one."

Minerva's nods on the screen, and off the screen quietly slots it with all the other information about Magical Girl World.

"There are a number of other powers that could be potentially useful, or potentially dangerous - if there are any magical girl powers that protect against or use mind control, for instance, those would be very important to know about before first contact is made."

"I don't think there are - a defensive one'd just look like not having a power, since magical girls don't tend to throw mind control powers that anyone could defend against. Should I be wearing a very decorative tinfoil hat?"

"Thank you." Mental note.

"The Gorgon Queen is in her sixties and poor health, the Messiah of Mozambique is contained by international treaty, and Hecatonchire has never been known to target anyone superpowered, but if you see a woman with wings, dark clothing, and no other identifying features you can call to mind when not looking directly at her, I would suggest avoiding her; Shoriel may be dead or may be retired or may be a hero, but while she does not have powers of control, she can certainly cloud the minds of unmodified humans."

"Thank you."

Given a pause, Minerva is going to suggest potential hours (reasonable), pay (high) and work conditions (you are currently in a sample office, also, though Minerva isn't bringing this up specifically, it is not in fact incompatible with growing spidersilk) for the job writing down everything Twentieth Century Foundation can get them to remember about an alternate universe that she's offering Bella and Xander. Benefits include an on-site cafeteria and that the building can survive and has survived airstrikes.

"It's a compelling offer. How long do you envision keeping us on in this capacity?"

"Presently, only a few months. There may be other work you can do for us afterwards - having an outside viewpoint could help in a number of fields - but I doubt it would be as highly compensated, and I suspect we will not be your leading option after we've built up a model of your world, though I would still expect to call you in on occasion to check it."

"And with a model of our world you'd do - what?"

"First and foremost, improve our model of what the world would be like without superheroes, which is generally useful for determining whether we approve or disapprove of attempts to increase the superpowered population; secondarily, get a more general pattern of what alternate worlds we could expect if more began to make contact - it's very difficult to know what is unique about us and what is inevitable about all worlds - and tertiarily to know what to expect if other travelers from your world - magical girls, civilians, or swarms - began appearing here. We'd also attempt to determine if it was worth spending the resources to prevent or cause a permanent link, on which I very much would want your and your brother's advice if that seemed a likely possibility."

"How would you increase the superpowered population? Magical girls run in families a little but not that strongly, do superpowers?"

"Yes. First-order powers are ultimately genetic in origin; anyone with two recessive alleles of a certain gene will obtain powers if they are placed under sufficient stress, and while their mindset and the stress they are under can both affect what powers they obtain, no one without the gene can obtain first-order powers. There exist second-order powers as products of first-order power-granter powers, but those are normally both less - user-friendly - and less powerful."

"...less user-friendly?"

"There is a brief period where you are manifesting first-order powers where you can continue manifesting other powers in response to stress. If your muscles grow too strong and would injure you, you will get increased durability to withstand your own strength, for instance, or fire resistance in response to fire creation. This does not apply with second-order powers, and the death and injury rates for attempts to give yourself - or others - powers are both very high, especially for attempts to give second-order powers to those who already have other first- or second- order powers of their own."

"Moreover, first order powers almost always feel instinctively easy to use. This does not normally apply to second-order powers, with the occasional exception of tinkers experimenting on themselves; every person has their own natural interface for how to use powers, and attempts to use others' interfaces are almost always much more clumsy than attempts to use your own."

"Huh. Does this make it a very strong rule of thumb to not go looking for extra superpowers or is it feasible to do safely?"

"Your first guess is correct. Gadgets are fine if you can afford them, armor is fine if you can afford it, purely physical powers if you have no powers or they are purely mental is only normally risky, and anything else is likely to be deadly."

"Gotcha. ...are there very cool consumer-grade gadgets on offer?"

"For rich enough consumers, yes, but tinker equipment is hand-crafted as a rule; there have only been two tinkers that could build factories, I am dead, and Steelstorm's specialties are munitions and military robots."

"Dead, you say."

The woman on the screen nods. "My physical body died almost forty years ago, and with it my first-order powers, leaving only the small army of identical hive-minded robot duplicates of myself running my uploaded brain that I had previously constructed so I could be in multiple places at once."

"So I am dead, but not yet gone."

"Oh. Wow. How's being a hive mind treating you?"

"I enjoy it."

(This is one of the many cases where Minerva is so glad she can just lie now that she has an inhuman amount of processing power to direct to doing it well, not that she thinks she'd enjoy being down to a single body any more.)

"It sounds kinda cool! But, I gather, not very consumer grade.

"Do we get a relocation bonus if we take you up on your offer after discussing it?"

"I provided backups for three other people before my death. I had wanted to do everyone, eventually - so far none of the immortality methods have been anything close to mass-produced - but it had not made it to the top of the agenda when I died.

"And yes, absolutely under the circumstances." She will name numbers.

"I'll go talk it over with my brother when we're done here. Anything else to cover sooner than later?"

Minerva considers giving Isabella warnings about ridiculously unlikely supervillain attacks and then decides it would take too long for the amount of ridiculously unlikely it is.

"In the event that reporters call you up and ask to interview you, I'd appreciate it if you'd keep details of this conversation confidential. Also, you may be asked for autographs."

"Should I refuse to give autographs?"

"Completely up to you. It's just that if you go down the street with wings and a costume, people will tend to assume you're a superhero and superheroes do get asked for autographs. And interviews. And to get cats out of trees; I've never learned why so many cats get into trees, but it does seem to happen."

"I could get a cat out of a tree."

"I do not doubt that you could."

"But I usually fly to get places so I'm fairly hard to stop for an autograph." Shrug. "Anything else?"

"Not unless you want an elaborate description of various supervillains and/or similar threats alien to your world who are highly unlikely to appear in Chicago, but might. Which I doubt you do, given that they have Wikipedia pages."

"I'm glad to find Wikipedia is something we have in common."

"It is thus far the most improbable coincidence that the mutually-real-alternate-timelines hypothesis has to account for," she says, "but Wikipedia is exceptionally useful."

"I don't know if it's the most improbable. We have a lot of matching presidents too, why not a matching Jimmy Wales."

"Because of the odds that he would pick Wikipedia as the thing to call it in both worlds. No presidents born after 1924 were the same - which is not surprising, as that was the decade in which superpowers first entered American life. The number of basic internet services that are the same is staggeringly unlikely, to say nothing of the smaller implausibility that internet translates."

"You didn't have superpowers around until 1924? What happened?"

"Our world cured a rare genetic childhood disease. Then people who'd survived the disease started to be in high-stress situations. A tiny number of children had survived it before, there are tinker-made-artifacts and a tiny number of immortals, but very few of them - we have some suspicions about Jesus and Joan of Arc - had significant impacts on history."

"...we had Jesus and Joan of Arc. Joan of Arc wasn't even a magical girl."

"... I see. Thank you."

(Minerva is downgrading the odds of 'Bella's world is alternate history' and upgrading 'Bella's world is a construct' in which case funding her is worth less. Really, she'll see what the economists have to say, most of the bulk of the evidence will be in whether the price structure hangs together insofar as it is different from her home timeline's...)

"You're welcome. Should I go talk to Xander now?"

She nods. "Yes. And thank you for what you've already said; even if you decide not to help, what you've already given me will be very useful."

"I'm all for saving the world."

"And I'm very pleased to hear it."

Isabella flies home and talks to Xander and then they look up Minerva on their INTERNET CAPABLE DEVICES.

Yeah, she has a Wikipedia page, too. Longer than that of the average President. 

"... Minerva (b. unknown, d. 1977) is an American superhero[1] and futurist[2] who serves as a founding member of the Atlantic Six[3], a philanthropist[4], and an independent hero[5]. A construct and former tinker[6], she is most famous for her Atlantic Six service, her leadership of the Twentieth Century Foundation[7], and her role in the synthetic rights movement[8], as well as her leadership of the Qattara Depression Project[9]..."

"... Minerva's early life is unknown, as she has refused to disclose her secret identity[13], the only member of the Atlantic Six to consistently oppose doing so..."

"... Her early claims to be a traveler from a utopian future were not borne out[18], and she has since admitted them to have been fictions created to protect her secret identity[19]..."

“... As a founding member of the Atlantic Six, Minerva played a major role in the Atlantis crisis[26], Voidwrath’s first, second, fifth and sixth invasions[27], the Necromancer’s reigns of terror[29], and the Legacy Forge crisis[20], among others…”

"... Her death in 1977[30] triggered a Supreme Court case over continuity rights[31] which was decided six to three in favor of the plaintiff..."

Minerva’s nemeses:

Its own page, and a long one.

Minerva’s engineering projects:

And you thought the page of her enemies was long. Includes a, quote, ‘orbital geoengineering laser’ and a satellite system to aim it, as well as power plants, robot factories, and an advanced AI (later stolen).

Political views:

"Prior to the 1968 amendments[43] to the Atlantic Six charter, Minerva regularly made political statements on a variety of topics consistent with a social democratic[44] or democratic socialist[45] position, regularly condemning American foreign[46], civil[47], and industrial[48] policy as inhumane. Since the charter’s amendment she has refrained from making any public political statements[49], though she has said that she does not agree with all of her former beliefs[50]. She has signed joint public statements by the Atlantic Six condemning the Ethiopian genocide[51], the Chinese government’s policy in Tibet [52], and the neo-Sovietist movement[53], among others… Her party affiliation is presently registered as Independent[54]...”

Controversy:

“... Although Minerva regularly comes first[74] or second[75] in polls as both the 'most famous'[76] or ‘greatest’[77] superhero in the world, she is not without her critics, primarily on behalf of her political statements[78][79][80], and her history of foreign interventions[81][82][83], some of which she later admitted were ill-conceived[84]...”

Who else is a contender for most famous or greatest? Who are the Atlantic Six? What has become of the stolen AI? What's the page on the Twentieth Century Foundation have to say?

The two questions correlate a lot! The Survivor of the Thirteenth is the other hero who usually ends up first or second on those lists, as well as someone French called Superieur and another American called the Smith. The Survivor is an immortal veteran of the Second World War whose strength and toughness increase permanently whenever someone dies near him; he has a fancy suit built for him by Minerva so he can pick things up without breaking them and is the world's strongest man. Superieur is a power-mimic who's generally accepted as the strongest member of a major European superhero team whose name changes every several years; it's currently the All-European Crisis Team, who is apparently actually very quiet and friendly when off-duty and on-duty usually has thirty or forty powers active at a time. The Smith was another American tinker, an engineer and family man who could make any mechanical device he'd ever seen function, letting him copy and improve on other tinkers' work, but he died of a heart attack about twenty years ago and he's been dropping on the lists since.

The Atlantic Six is a superhero team; it originally referred to the only six American superheroes to survive WW2, but that team was disbanded after half of it died in 1953 and a new team was formed in 1963 consisting of the Survivor, the Smith, Minerva, Veritas, Professor Porphyry and Meteor to fight Legate Livia. Its membership has changed over time, with Minerva and the Survivor being the only permanent members; the current leadup also features the second Smith (the first's son, also a tinker), Paladin (maintains a super-strong and indestructible shell around herself, formerly the supervillain Vendetta), Tidebringer (controls all water in about a mile's radius, including blood, which he uses to incapacitate people safely, also has a tinker-made gauntlet that can create magic water), and Evenhand (former Marine and power-nullifier).

The stolen AI was stolen by Mechanos, one of Minerva's rogues, a Singaporean-born archvillain also known as "The Scavenger Tinker" and "The Self-Made Man," who used elements of it to run his evil robots. It is currently working with him as his assistant/master-computer, under the name H3R4.

The page on the Twentieth Century Foundation says that it is a centrist philanthropist organization devoted to helping with the peaceful and sustainable development of human flourishing. They fund research into preventing disease in the third-world and understanding why wars happen so they can make them not do so and doing research on what makes people be supervillains and how to stop global warming, and generally give money to good causes in the broad spheres of 'third-world poverty', 'existential risk' and 'democracy good'.

Isabella and Xander will email Minerva accepting her job offer and start looking for convenient real estate.

Minerva is happy to have them.

Convenient real estate is surprisingly expensive, but there are potential options within their price range. Do they want to rent or buy?

Rent, it's a short term gig.

Fair enough! Then they can rent an apartment with no particular problems.

They spend some of their relocation bonus on stocking the kitchen and buying furniture for the apartment and getting a few more articles of clothing for Xander, especially since he might want to surrender his original ones as evidence about their world.

They can do this! A couple of times during their shopping, people show up and ask Isabella for autographs and what her superhero name is (since she does seem to be going around in a superhero costume, and, also, wings) but so far nobody has needed her to get any cats out of any trees.

The Twentieth Century Foundation would kind of like to buy their alternate-universe possessions, yes; they can't think of very many specific ways they could be useful, but tinkers can be pretty weird sometimes and more alien artifacts can't hurt.

Isabella didn't have many objects - just her ID card and some pens, besides a notebook and phone that contains personal information she doesn't want to hand over, but she could tear that out/delete them and present the rest of the items if desired. Xander had his clothes and his phone (which he doesn't keep personal notes on) and his keys and the carabiner he kept them on and the somewhat battered syllabus for his Intro Psych class.