give it all you got, go

[alicornucopia]

At a booth in Milliways sits a woman in her thirties, stirring a cup of tea, watching the stars explode. There is a fat boring-looking lawbook under her elbow, and a barcode across the back of her right hand.

Mark (with kappa)

Ruth (with Maggie)

Comments

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"I, um. I should have known better. My parents and brother...having a tattoo with a number like that is, um, not a good sign."

[alicornucopia]

"No? Not a fashion statement in your world?"

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Definitely not."

[alicornucopia]

"I get people asking if they should go into tattoo parlors," she says, stretching out her hand, looking at the ink. "And get their own."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"...Is this a common thing? Are there not, like, laws against cloning yourself just for organ transplants."

[alicornucopia]

"No. Quite legal."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

The book briefly becomes heavier, before returning to its normal weight. Green-and-yellow girl's hand is forming a white-knuckled fist, and her jaw is clenched.

[alicornucopia]

Lawbook lady drops her lawbook, startling enough to jostle her tea with her other hand. Splish. She saves the book but has to dab some tea off her hand.

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Sorry, sorry, fuck, I haven't lost control like that in years."

[alicornucopia]

"What did you do?"

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Gravity. I do gravity. It's a thing in my world, people having powers, my brother and one of his daughters do magnetism."

[alicornucopia]

"You do gravity?"

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"I...alter the universal gravitational constant of two objects with respect to one another."

[alicornucopia]

Lawbook lady shakes her head. "The people who show up here," she mutters. "Is that all you do?"

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"...Do you mean is that the extent of my powers or do I do anything with my life besides powers, because the answer to both of those questions as I have phrased them is yes. As far as I know, anyway."

[alicornucopia]

Snort. "I meant the first."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Yeah. It amounts to something that looks a lot like a very idiosyncratic telekinesis. Or so I've been told, anyway."

[alicornucopia]

"Wasn't aware that was a thing with idiosyncrasy to it. My world doesn't have any magic."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"It is...technically not magic, actually."

[alicornucopia]

"Well, my world doesn't have science fiction in real life, either."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Fair enough. Although what counts as science fiction depends heavily on things like when you are and where you stand relative to baseline early-twenty-first-century Earth, but since the X-Gene showed up while it was still the twentieth century it qualifies more comprehensively than many things."

[alicornucopia]

"I'm in 2015."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"I'm pretty sure that's earlier than normal for cloning technology to be developed, so kudos, you do have science fiction in real life. I'm from 2123."

[alicornucopia]

"Cloning's been around for longer than that. I'm thirty-two."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Congratulations! You are from a sci-fi world. Probably not as sci-fi as mine, though, it's true, my older brother's a hundred and ninety-seven."