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]

"There's an entire condemned city where Nilbog was quarantined... I'm curious to know if you could, but terrified to suggest, that you could try some telepathy on the Simurgh quarantine zones. You won't convince anyone to unquarantine them and I don't know if she leaves telepathically visible marks, but if you could find out what exactly happened to the people inside... There's a Simurgh victim on the S9, too, you wouldn't necessarily have to detour to the quarantines."

[whatamithinking]

"Which one?"

[thinkering]

"Goes by Mannequin. Tinker. Used to be working on self-contained environments with a view to space colonization. Simurgh killed his family and drove him insane."

[whatamithinking]

"...Ick. Um, yeah, noted."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"I am simultaneously impressed and appalled by how much higher stakes your world's superscene is compared to ours," Marie says.

[thinkering]

"I do have days where I just sit in my workshop for hours, programming robots to do my homework and working on my dad's suit, but yeah, sounds like you've got various flavors of idyll."

[whatamithinking]

"Multiversal evidence actually suggests that my world narrowly dodged a highly martial civil rights movement that might or might not have ended in genocide robots. I mean, we still sort of ended up with the movement, but it was significantly less necessary, and we're pretty sure the robots have been comprehensively averted."

[thinkering]

"My world no longer has most of Japan. Not to turn it into a contest."

[whatamithinking]

"Sorry, I was agreeing with you."

[iamnotpolaris]

"She intended to emphasize 'averted' more than she ended up doing. Apparently most of the worlds of our type at least see the robots coming into existence, even if they never reach the genocide stage."

[thinkering]

"We don't have any of those in particular that I've heard of, but there's a lot to keep track of even for people who follow cape events really closely. Tinkers all have specialties, and robots aren't that common when you could also get, say, guns, or plants, or software, or musical instruments, or weird vaguely alchemical products of common kitchen ingredients."

[iamnotpolaris]

"The robots are apparently perfectly mundane technology, actually."

[thinkering]

"Huh."

[point_b]

"Is tinkertech not?"

[thinkering]

"I mean, sort of, we need parts - usually, anyway, some biotinkers can do stuff with their bare hands and own bodies - and there's usually a mechanism behind whatever it's doing, but no one else understands what we're doing except for other tinkers with similar specialties, no one else can reproduce the tech - whether they just literally can't or no one has ever been exact enough in following the assembly steps, I don't know - and no one else can maintain the tech. If I make you an ash-cleaning robot it will suck electricity out of your wall or live on the ashes it eats up or something, and when anything goes wrong with it, it won't work, and you won't be able to fix it, but if I did invent one maybe Bar could make it even though it's almost magic?"

[alicornucopia]

I can only sell things that are in some meaningful sense 'available for sale' somewhere. I might be able to find an object with similar effects, and if you made and sold at least three of the same design and did not construe them as being limited edition when so doing I could perhaps sell copies. It doesn't count as magic but almost always does count as too unique.

[iamnotpolaris]

"What I actually meant was that their invention wasn't accomplished using any kind of inventing things super power."

[thinkering]

"Huh. Non-tinker robotics is mostly confined to industry, not warfare, back home."

[iamnotpolaris]

"Thankfully we don't actually have Sentinels, those being the killer robots, back home."

[whatamithinking]

"I don't think we have any kind of military robots back home. I could be wrong. I'll have to check."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Is 'inventing things' usually a viable power option? Because it isn't in my world," Helen says.

[thinkering]

"It is for my kind of cape. One day I got a taste of my worst nightmare, the next day I started building little doodads to fix my clumsiness and designing my own computer from scratch."

[point_b]

"Oh, you had that too? Mine went away when we turned sixteen and our basics came in; gemini are peak-human physical condition and coordination from that age on. But we don't have tinkers."

[whatamithinking]

"Our world has the occasional engineering genius, and sometimes there's strong evidence that the genius is a power, but the stuff they make still works like normal stuff, you can teach people to fix it and make it and stuff."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Yeah, we have nothing like that."