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

[thinkering]

"...Why do you have two civilian names apiece?" She starts fiddling with some of the hardware affixing the helmet around her neck.

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Reincarnation. This is my third life, actually, I suppose you could call me Beatrice if you really wanted to."

[thinkering]

"Cape names are fine. I'm Lorica." She pulls her helmet off. "Seems like it'd be confusing if I went by my civilian one."

[alli_oop]

"Extra Bella!"

[point_b]

"Weird!"

[iamnotpolaris]

"Ooh, alts, those happen sometimes."

[point_b]

"This is a known thing? What does it mean?"

[thinkering]

"Well, I don't have a sister, so it's not particularly comprehensive. And you don't strike me as a tinker. Not enough gadgets on you."

[alli_oop]

"My Bella's a teleporter. You don't have a me? That must be so sad for you."

[thinkering]

"No offense, but it never occurred to me that I needed one. My dad's a teleporter, I wonder if that's a coincidence."

[iamnotpolaris]

"Alts are when one person happens in more than one universe. Edie and I have some, one time Milliways decided to have an Edie And Emily Convention the way it's currently holding a Superhero Convention."

[point_b]

"Do you come in singlet the way I apparently do?"

[whatamithinking]

"Not as far as we've met. And most of our alts had the same powers as us, too."

[point_b]

"Well, gemini doesn't do the 'tinkering' thing, so I couldn't have had hers. Apparently she could have had mine."

[thinkering]

"I should have, actually. When powers run in families - and they often do - subsequent triggers are often in the same vein as previous examples in the family. I'm not even a transport-focused tinker; I do what I'm currently badly summarizing as 'contingent robotics'. And my thinker power is even less obviously relevant."

[point_b]

"Your what? ...Triggers?"

[thinkering]

"Oh, I'm also flat immune to mind-affecting powers all the way up to the Simurgh. It's nice, but it has nothing to do with teleporting and that's all Dad does. Triggers are traumatic events that lead to getting powers."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Getting your S-Factor activated can be traumatic but it's not an inherent feature," Marie comments.

[whatamithinking]

"Emily and I have had ours since before we were born."

[point_b]

"Got ours as expected on our sixteenth birthday."

[thinkering]

"In theory second-gen capes trigger easier than ones who come out of nowhere, but that didn't do me any good because the first remotely traumatic thing to happen to me was still a fucking Endbringer attack."

[whatamithinking]

"Do I want to know what an Endbringer is?"

[thinkering]

"Stupidly powerful monsters that descend on a city every few months and wreck everything until either a massive army of capes or Scion or Eidolon in particular hits them hard enough to send them back into hibernation. Leviathan does water. Behemoth is a dynakinetic with a kill aura. The Simurgh looks like a fucked-up angel, she's telekinetic and she fucking sings, she personally kills fewer than either of the other two but her first act was to fucking destroy Switzerland by manipulating everybody who listened to her. Anybody who's in range too long has to be quarantined forever because any effect they have on anything is contaminated by her bullshit precognition directing them to destruction. I was in San Diego when she hit it. But I wasn't there past the limit and the song doesn't touch me anymore."

[whatamithinking]

"...You should stay in Milliways for a while. Sometimes fuck-off powerful people show up and while I normally consider myself one of them this sounds like the kind of problem I am not optimized to solve."

[thinkering]

"We've got some fuck-off powerful people back home, too. Eidolon can hold any small handful of different powers of his choice and use them all at once, Scion's even more ridiculous, who do you think's going to come in here who can actually get Endbringers dead?"