"If you're hallucinating from painkillers, I suppose I must be hallucinating from exhaustion," she muses. "I remember painkillers. Vaguely." She rubs at her calf.

"I have some lovely ones back in my cabin, they're probably fine if your metabolism's within spitting distance of normal, but I'm unfortunately not at all sure what they'd do for hallucinatory women," he says, smiling.

"My biology's mostly the same as baseline, and my few tweaks don't really interfere with that sort of thing, but I don't actually currently have any injuries that require them. Hello and welcome to Milliways, the bar at the end of the universe. Apparently no one has a damn clue which universe is ending but it's apparently been doing so for a damn long time." She jerks a thumb at the window of exploding stars. "This place hijacks doors at random from a wide variety of universes. What's yours like?"

"Well, I can tell you that I'm from anno domini nineteen eighty-three and that I object to having to use that phrasing because he's not my lord and that I'm from Earth and that seven years ago the United States of America was overrun by genocidal murderbots," she says, "for instance."

"...Twenty-nine ninety-seven Earth Common Era," he says. "I think that's the same calendar, but while I don't know much about pre-Jump Earth history, I can pretty definitively assert that none of its countries were ever overrun by genocidal murderbots. That seems like the sort of thing that would make it into most summaries alongside Shakespeare and the pyramids."

"Well, we have Shakespeare and the pyramids. And genocidal murderbots. And mutants, apparently those don't come standard."

"Ah... can you unpack 'mutants' for me? I've known the term to mean different things to different people even without extra universes in the way."

"...In my universe, there's a recessive gene called the X-Gene that, when manifested, can cause changes dramatic enough and apparently out-of-nowhere enough, since it's recessive, to the child's phenotype, that the class of persons who have two copies are called 'mutants.' Effects of the X-Gene range from white hair to blue skin to fully-functional wings to generation of and control over a personal magnetic field to telepathy."

"My sister and I are mutants, and the genocidal murderbots were specifically designed to kill us. We want out. Ideally we would like to come back some day with the resources to turn them into scrap metal, but at this point we'll be happy to settle for being able to survive without having to set guards every night and scrounge for the increasingly small number of places that the Sentinels aren't watching. The Sentinels are the murderbots," she adds.

"I... can definitely offer you somewhere to go," he says. "Several somewheres. I'm actually on my way to my version of Earth right now, and from what I hear it's pretty robust at handling refugees, although your situation might be unusually difficult to explain. The resources to turn the Sentinels into scrap metal... might also be available, but I'm already running a pretty high cost overrun on my last mission; planetary and subplanetary conquests will have to wait until I'm assured of my ability to feed, pay, and equip my people."

"I understand. Back when any of the rest of our family was alive we would have prioritized them over random strangers too." She considers. "If it matters, we can earn our keep; my sister has the magnetism I mentioned, and what it largely comes down to is very good metallokinesis." She points to a cuff on her sister's wrist; it looks to be made of stainless steel. How it got on her wrist is a mystery, since it's flush against the skin and there appears to be no latch. "That used to be coins."

"And if you don't mind my asking, what's your special feature?"

"I'm a telepath. I'm not reading your mind, but I could, or speak to you in your head, or put something there, and with remarkable precision. I've copied languages from people and shared them without touching anything else in there. I can also knock people unconscious or affect their movements without actually touching anything in their minds."

"That's... certainly a special feature," he says cautiously. "Please excuse me if I sound suspicious; I've spent the last six months near-continuously fleeing assassins and the part of me that asks 'what's the most devastating way this could go wrong?' is on permanent high alert these days. I expect you can relate."

"Oh fuck yes I can. I don't suppose it soothes your nerves any that if I had been out to get you I could have simply pretended to be a living telephone?"

"My nerves are not near so easily soothed. But thank you for the thought."

"Understandable. Thank you for not responding to having frazzled nerves by trying to kill me."

"...Is that a common problem?"

"The Sentinels were created because their makers were afraid of us."

"Well, that's... not quite the most atrocious thing I've ever heard, but it clears the top five, I'm pretty sure."

"Really? I mean, we do have abilities that could do some serious damage, some of us. Granted that they went overboard in execution but in terms of motive I'd say they had a better one than most people who commit atrocities."

"It's just such a... wretched failure of imagination," he says. "People have spent vast stretches of history hating and fearing one another for this or that reason, and the answer is never indiscriminate murder, and there's always some fucking fool who thinks it is, and then smarter, more compassionate people have to clean up their damn mess."