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?"

"I work in tech support for a multiversal company. They send me to all sorts of places to figure out how the local metaphysics has FUBARed an entire portal array or whatever." 

"Wow."

"To me, it's a job. An interesting and exciting one, yes, but still a job. That I'm very good at."

"To be completely honest, I was more marveling at humanity's endless talent for screwing things up."

"Never underestimate that. It can always be messed up worse."

"Never. But when it's not your personal problem, it's so much easier to take a step back and wonder at the sheer accidental artistry of the flaming train wreck."

"I can maybe see it. Some of the schemes the suits come up with are just..." He shakes his head.

"Bureaucracy, yes. If I had gone to public school I probably wouldn't have decided I wanted to be a teacher."

"I'm good enough at my job and enough things would be on fire without me that the bureaucrats don't push me around too much anymore, thankfully."

"Convenient." Pause. "I feel like I should clarify that I'm aware that there are a lot of things that really need bureaucracy to get done, it's just sometimes annoying."

"I know the feeling. I could give you examples of the best and the worst of it. Universal magical healthcare on the more developed worlds! ...Enchanting mills barely paying a living wage in low-tech low-magic worlds because MTU didn't like the developed places' labor laws."

"...I see."

"Yeah, it sucks. Luckily it's also an abolute PR nightmare when someone finds out so things like that aren't the standard. Your world doesn't have 'globalization'? Most Earths seem to do similar things, in places."

"We do have this problem, but it seemed, hm, more difficult to solve when it was a multidimensional high-magic corporation that demonstrably could shield people well enough to keep me out than when it's a random American corporation taking refuge in China."

"MTU cares about their bottom line. If they start to lose lucrative contracts with people who have morals, or needing to spend too much on information suppression it's the better option to just cut it out. I do my best to steer things in the right way, when I get a chance, but I'm not cut out to become one of the suits. Not only would I hate it, I'd get outmaneuvered in the office politics in five minutes flat."

"Yes. I'm...okay at the political side of things, but I could never take trying to convince people not to do terrible things as my primary job. Although it would be easier, certainly, if they were all shielded like you."

"Mine are unusually good, though everyone more than a few levels from the bottom will have a general set of wards. Less temptation to do something to them?" Left unsaid: This is a good sign.

"Exactly. Not that I would, but the temptaton gets distracting sometimes."

"Makes sense. Every once in a while, when I have to deal with a particularly stubborn, abrasive, or abusive customer, I consider flagging their account for audit or something. But that way lies being a collossal jerk."

"There's something to be said for the worst-case scenario being 'being a massive jerk'."

"...Point."

She waves a hand. "Sorry to get you down. Plenty of perfectly ordinary people make it through their lives without physically assaulting the people around them; this is a bit higher in scale but I have plenty of self-control."

"No, it's just, I'm having an attack of conscience. As in, why am I not giving all my money to charaties that improve magical education in Tura-sed. So! I can be sort of crudely telepathic, if I'm using a certain item, I'm just going to get that out in case something I have trouble getting accross in words comes up."

"How does that even...work, with the shield?"

"Fake, read-and-communicate only mind that mirrors my real one, basically. I could go into more detail, but it will involve jargon."

"That...sounds...extremely strange. Um. How...sure are you that you're not creating a new person every time you use this and killing them every time you stop?"

"Quite sure. The fake mind is part of my shield, it doesn't do anything except pretend to be my mind. It's a brand of glamour, and glamour is always fake. And it's really only open on one or two dozen, mm, surfaces. I've used it with other full telepaths before and they always say it's definitely not proper telepathy. Nevermind, then."

"I mean, even it it's not proper telepathy, if it's a less lossy information compression method than language I'm all for it. And now you've got me curious."

"Alright, then." The current set of devices get swapped out. He pulls out and dons a silver circlet. "It looks a little tacky, but it's by far the most efficient method."

He taps the center, and then there is... Something, there. It's sort of like a mind in the way a van gogh painting is sort of like a real image. [Impression of success[eager, interested, gloating]].

"I...think I begin to see the appeal of television."

The mental response is: Confusion, then comprehension, then a defensive 'this is the best I've got'.

Then he turns it off, shaking his head. "There's better models available, I'm just too paranoid to tolerate the holes in my wards they'd require."

"...I was joking. It's fine. Sorry."

"It's alright. Call it nerd pride, I'm just a bit sad you weren't super impressed with my shiny toy." His tone is almost artfully casually self-deprecating.

"I may have higher standards for shiny toys than most people you meet."

"That's the beauty of an interdimensional bar, never know what you'll find. Not that there's not plenty of strange stuff in the corner of the multiverse I can visit without Milliways."

"Like what?"

"Planet-sized AIs. Sentient plant-like things that exchange memories by sharing seeds. Literally thousands of varieties of many standard-to-me fantasy tropes like dragons, magical girls, witches, unicorns. Off the top of my head."

"Sounds amazing."

"A bit less when your job is mostly to make sure all these different physics and magics don't interfere with Multiversal Thaumics Unlimited's premium interdimensional phone service, but yes."

"Familiarity breeds contempt."

"You can get around that with the right mode of thought and showing off to someone once in a while."

"True."

He hmms loudly. "Yeah, I've had a long day untangling DTLs and calibrating rune arrays. I'm going to go grab a drink. That's what a bar's for you know."

"True. I don't drink alcohol because it interacts badly with my telepathy but she does these amazing chocolate coffee things."

"I am sensible enough to have a wire in my tools that hooks to my wards - if I'm not 'fully myself' I can't use the more finicky and dangerous ones, and it steps up the backup policy three times too." He sets down a triangular coin. "Bar, a Sunset Rose, extra sweet?"

"Sensible of you. I wouldn't enjoy being intoxicated at all, though, if it shut down one of my primary senses altogether, so I still wouldn't drink." She orders a chocolate coffee thing.

"No way to make it, say, 'look, don't touch' for a while? Or that still wouldn't be safe enough, because privacy? Stop me if I intrude, but, nerd."

"Privacy and the fact that I'm reluctant to mess around with the delicate working parts of a major feature of my brain."

"I've worked on filters for telepaths before - none very similar to you. It would sort of be like flipping a switch and everyone's like what I felt like when I wore the circlet. I expect you to decline me offering to try something similar, which will be easily and definitely reversible if you don't like it because it doesn't actually touch your brain."

"...I suppose I could try it."

"...I offered in haste, it'll take some fiddling, I'll still try it if you want. It's interesting working with new things, is why I asked, but I'm pushing a bit aren't I?"

"Just a bit."

"Like I said, long day, and rambling helps. What kinds of things do mutants do other than telepathy?"

"Lots of things. My dad and twin sister do magnetism, I have an aunt who's a blue shapeshifter, a cousin who is also blue and teleports, a friend who's also a telepath with added teekay, a friend who's basically invulnerable and shoots rays of plasma from his eyes, a friend slash ex boyfriend who has wings..."

"None of these things are too far out there to me, but all from the same system, and without magic... Huh."

"Unusual?"

"We don't see that kind of thing often. Most worlds that have people suddenly start developing special powers that aren't magic, apocalypses tend to follow... And now I'm worried for your world."

"Why would that be a thing?"

"Multiverse theory, the study of things like worlds with angels tend to also have demons, any gender-linked magic tends to be... The term is 'softer' but it has a different meaning, maybe I should turn my circlet back on. Anyway, nobody knows why these grand sweeping generalizations across tens of thousands of worlds hold so often, but statistics says lots of things and makes reasonable predictions a lot of the time, especially if you feed it to a good divination program. Why are there so many Earths? If you find one nonhuman species, be on the lookout for more. Suddenly develop superheroes? Watch out for apocalypses. And so on."

"We developed superheroes decades ago and haven't--well, we haven't had to deal with any apocalypses since we went public."

"And I'm not a statistician so take everything I say on the subject with a rather large grain of salt."

"Does an ex-Nazi trying to cause a nuclear holocaust count as an apocalypse, because that happened in 1963."

"...Yes, that's the sort of thing that tends to happen to worlds that suddenly develop superheroes. Do you want a Defense Division catalog? Fission suppressors run for only a couple thousand MTU."

"I mean it was a one-off and the guy is very, very dead now--I don't think we have any particular reason to think that if something else apocalyptic came up it would be similarly nuclear."

"Joining the multiversal economy can be a bit of a rocky road, too. Earth, nuclear era... Think cheap Chinese labor and colonialism on a planetwide scale?"