the place to be

[point_b]

Bella finds it.

"Alli!" she twines. "C'mere."

"You c'mere. Easier for you."

"No, you need to come look at this, seriously."

"Okay, fine, where are you?"

"Garage."

So Alli comes out to the garage. Their parents aren't home; Charlie's working, Renée is volunteering with some of the refugee kids at a shelter, trying to find which have parents who just wound up somewhere else, which need adopting, which are going to wind up coming of age adrift in the bursting-at-the-seams system. It's just them, not attending school, recovering.

"Whoa," says Alli. "So when you said you were at the garage, you meant that you were at the freakish restaurant that someone put in our garage."

"This isn't somebody's idea of remodeling," Bella says. "It's too big to be the garage."

"Do you think it's safe?"

"I think one of you should go in first, for sure."

"We don't actually know if I work that way," say two Alli voices, but Bella pushes one of them towards the door anyway.

Nothing happens.

The Allis converge, inside the bar. Bella follows.

Comments

[point_b]

"So, you remember everything quite straightforwardly and had a change of heart through some reasonably conventional mechanism of having to go through kindergarten again, or whatever?"

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"...Okay, so the basic overview is that Helen and I--that's her real name, Helen--were dating, and we were going to form a superhero team, and we had a massive blowup that was only mostly our faults and I stormed off to become a supervillain because I had the emotional maturity of a grape. Our lives for the next thirteen years proceeded to suck heavily for unrelated reasons, which led among other things to both of us looking back on our relationship with great fondness because it was the last time either of us had really been happy. Then one day when we were duking it out in a nice, non-civilian-inhabited area, we accidentally caused a cave in and she bled to death in my arms while we had a tearful deathbed reconciliation. I quit the supervillain business then and there and spent the next eighteen years growing the fuck up before her second incarnation showed up on my doorstep."

[point_b]

"Does everyone reincarnate where you're from?"

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"...No," apparently-Helen says. "We don't know that no one is, but if everyone did it would probably have gotten out. And we haven't found any solid evidence that anyone else is."
"We're worried the guy who got her last time might be," Ava says quietly. "He used to be on Peerless's hero team. If it has any connection to our time as capes--and that seems to be our best guess--it might apply to him, too."

[point_b]

"Damn, people with superpowers don't do that in our world."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"How would you know?"

[point_b]

"Well, I suppose we might not know if they do it only very rarely, but we're not reincarnated and exact power duplicates are almost unheard of and where they're heard of they don't usually come with the same twin powers. And it would be, I don't know, off-theme? If we didn't reincarnate in our twinsets."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"...Twinsets?"

[point_b]

"My world, the people with superpowers are twins. Or triplets, etcetera. They're twins too," she points at the mutants, "but that's unrelated to their powers."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"We have something called S-Factor that can get activated in a wide variety of ways."

[whatamithinking]

"Ours is genetic."

[point_b]

"What a lot of ways there are to come over all super."

[thinkering]

The door opens. A girl Flicker's shape and height, wearing similar jeans and similar T-shirt and the coolest-looking steel-blue motorcycle helmet of all time, walks in, muttering to herself, and then cuts off as there is a high beeping sound coming from her helmet.

She looks at Flicker, and at everybody else, and then at Flicker again.

"I'd love to hear all about how this grade of Shaker got into the Wards building and what said Shaker's team wants."

[iamnotpolaris]

"Milliways irony at its finest!"

[thinkering]

"Excuse me?"

[iamnotpolaris]

"Hi, welcome to Milliways, an inter-universal bar that hijacks random doors in random realities. We're all different pairs of superheroes from different universes! You're the first singleton, unless there's someone right outside you'd like to call in."

[thinkering]

"I didn't think other universes had superheroes to speak of."

[iamnotpolaris]

"Having been to Milliways before, and met people from plenty, I will admit that we are something of a rarity."

[thinkering]

"So you're saying that the Wards building wasn't specifically targeted," says the newcomer skeptically, "this is some kind of Haywire-style superhero-finding bullshit and it just... found me?"

[iamnotpolaris]

"I don't know who Haywire is, but I would assume so."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Who're the Wards?" Helen asks. "I'd ask if they were like the Young Guardians but you probably have as little idea of who those are as I have of who the Wards are."

[thinkering]

"...Wards are junior Protectorate. Protectorate being United States hero organization. Young Guardians sounds like it'd be some other country's version of same. So what worlds are you from, does it mean anything if I say I'm from Earth Bet?"

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Well, I live in Ohio. Sounds like the Young Guardians and the Wards are a rose by any other name, etcetera. We don't have a name for our world; we didn't even know for sure other ones existed until less than an hour ago."

[whatamithinking]

"We're familiar with some world names but Earth Bet isn't one of them."

[thinkering]

"There's some tinkertech that will go between Earths. Mine's Bet, there's Aleph, one can pay through the nose to get their version of various movies and so on. Sounds like you're from worlds we haven't contacted, which makes sense, there's certainly more of those. That leaves the door thing to explain. Is it just running on its own with its tinker or shaker not paying attention...?"