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]

"Well, I suppose that's promising. How long can one stay here, then?"

[whatamithinking]

"Milliways rents out rooms and sells food, so the answer is sometimes 'until you run out of money.' Considering how terrible the problem you're trying to solve is I will happily contribute to a tab for you to stay as long as possible."

[thinkering]

"I don't have any cash on me. I have a tinker budget but if it disappeared and I hadn't built anything there would be very awkward questions and I don't see how I'd draw it down from here. If you get me a seed fund I could build things and sell them to passersby, maybe? I'm not as compulsive as your average tinker but I still don't like the idea of camping out in a hotel for a month without making anything."

[whatamithinking]

"That sounds plausible. Fair warning, Bar doesn't sell weapons or things she knows you're going to make into weapons."

[thinkering]

"Then I won't make weapons. I'm not primarily a weapons tinker."

[point_b]

"I mean, this sounds like a good idea if it'll work for you, but can't Bar just sell whatever you'd be making...? Maybe you can undercut her but will that leave you margin...?"

Lorica could offer customization options that I cannot.

"Oh, that works."

[thinkering]

"What works?" Lorica approaches to look at the napkin. "Oh, yeah, sure, cute little custom robots. The only problem is they'll be tinkertech and will be cussedly hard to reverse-engineer to fix when they break."

[iamnotpolaris]

"Some worlds have magic that can just revert things to previous states. And other ways of fixing things."

[thinkering]

"Good for them."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"I'm starting to think we won the world lottery. No horrible monsters and I'm not dead three times over."

[thinkering]

"Yes, well, lucky you."

[point_b]

"Our world is mostly okay, except it doesn't have reincarnation and Yellowstone exploded recently."

[thinkering]

"Um, yikes. Are you in an ash zone, do you want a cute little ash scrubber robot...?"

[point_b]

"I still live on the same continent, so some ash, yes. I couldn't possibly explain where I got the cute little robot so if you could make it disguise itself as a Roomba or something..."

[thinkering]

"I dunno what a Roomba is but draw me a picture and I can make it pretend to be one whenever somebody besides you is around."

[iamnotpolaris]

"You had a supervolcano go off on your continent. Eek."

[point_b]

"We had a little warning. I helped with evac."

[alli_oop]

"She saved one point five million people," says Alli.

[thinkering]

"Damn," murmurs Lorica.

[iamnotpolaris]

"Holy shit. That's impressive."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"When are you guys all from, anyway? You mostly dress like aughts and tens as best I can remember..." Marie says. "So if it's just that my world could have but didn't have Yellowstone go off that's one thing, but I think we should all check to make sure that's not in our futures."

[point_b]

"It blew up late 2003."

[thinkering]

"I'm a little earlier than that, but I feel almost positive that if it's going to go in my world, it'll be because Behemoth or possibly the Simurgh or possibly a geokinetic supervillain did it and the fact that it hasn't already happened suggests it's not that easy to do."

[whatamithinking]

"Nineteen ninety-three for us. We'll definitely get some people to check."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Okay, it's 2086, if this were going to happen it would probably have happened by now."