A few moments later, a woman comes in after him. Her eyes flick over the bar area before settling on him.

"Hullo." Slight nod. "Do you know this place or is it exposition time?"

"Hello. I've been coming here since I was seventeen, actually, it's you I'm curious about if anything."

"Oh, how am I shiny this time?"

"Your mental shielding. I'm assuming it's that and not that there's something wrong with you, anyway, do let me know if I'm wrong."

"No, I designed it myself. Telepath, then?"

"Mhm."

"Nice to meet you, I'm Terence, and the thing people in this bar most often find strange about me is that I work in magic tech support."

"Likewise. I'm Edie, and I teach languages at a school for the gifted. And by 'gifted' I mean 'mutants.'"

"Interesting, I take it not the traditional-to-me 'random probably bad genetic change' kind of mutant? You might be tired of explaining, feel free to decline to." He resumes walking toward the bar, and orders and receives mint tea.

"I don't mind explaining. I rather enjoy it, actually. Mutants, are, essentially, what my world has instead of magic--I have my telepathy because I'm a mutant."

"...Now I want to see if my instruments can detect it. Would you mind?"

"I don't object, but I've been tested for magic before and it's always come up negative."

"Then I'll be able to feel incredibly smug if I can detect it." His briefcase opens up to reveal a series of objects that look mostly technological. Mostly. The standout non-technological influinces are knobs and dials set into colorful sets of crystals, or an elaborate set of re-arrangable circles and runes engraved on the silvery back of a phone-like object. He commences scanning.

Well, there's certainly something there. It's not magic, though.

Well, he hmms over a line of magic things before choosing one in particular and manipulating little glass beads attached to it. The thing gets pointed at Edie. He takes notes.

"So... I can tell you're a telepath, you're definitely not magic, you're not necessarily running down any resources or power source, it's more intuitive than the kind of mostly artifact-based telepathy I can use, you're completely human apart from the telepathy, you're very general about it and not read-only, and my shields would probably be able to keep you out if you were trying to break them. Definitely, at least long enough for my emergency evac teleport to trigger."

"Almost completely...? I am human. I have a single pair of very nifty recessive alleles to distinguish me from any other specimen of humanity."

"My divinations disagree, but they can be wrong, especially with new things. If I was being properly thorough about it I'd have tried a half-dozen other things."

"Well, I won't claim to know anything about your divinations."

"So for some reason, mutations occasionally cause humans in your world to develop strange and not-magic powers?"

"Nnnnot exactly. We thought that was what it was for a bit, and the name stuck, but 'mutants' aren't actually people who indipendantly mutated telepathy or magnetism or shapeshifting, we're people with a recessive gene--the X-Gene--that, when active, causes the rest of our DNA to behave differently."

"That sounds... Well, I'm not a geneticist, nevermind."

"Oh, I know it's terribly improbable, otherwise more universes would have it."

"I suppose anything's possible. The sheer variety of worlds I've had to work on puts proof to that."

"Work on?"