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]

"You don't like your powers that much?"

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"My powers are fine. I have issues with some of their cultural connotations."

[point_b]

"Yeah, fair enough. I like my power, though. It's really convenient! It just hasn't come up since I've been in a single room since coming here."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Sounds it. I can think of times when a teleportation power would have been more useful than my lightscreens."

[point_b]

"What do your lightscreens do, anyway?"

[maggie_of_the_owls]

A shimmering, glowing barrier appears in the air. "I can make planar barriers that give off light. They can be any shape I want, so long as it's two dimensional, and I can make plenty at once, so I could make almost any polyhedron, but nothing with curves." The barrier vanishes, and one shaped like a star and a glowing dodecahedron appear. "They're not quite invulnerable, but close. They're useful for platforms to stand on in midair, and shields, but also putting out fires and obstructing movement."

[point_b]

"Requires a little creativity, but not bad."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"It wasn't a happy time in my life, but for thirteen years I was one of America's most prominent superheroes."
"It helped that you had a particularly dramatic nemesis," Marie says.

[point_b]

"Can you make them go through things?"

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Yyyes but it's harder, and sort of--fuses, and provides really unpleasant sensory feedback."

[point_b]

"Fuses?"

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Like, it's not as strong, and--If I were to, say, take an apple, and put a thin barrier to bisect it, the top and bottom halves wouldn't come off, the barrier and the apple would be sort of coexisting. And then when I dismissed the barrier the structural integrity of the apple where it had been would be severely compromised, but it wouldn't be cut."

[point_b]

"But you could still seriously injure somebody that way?"

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Theoretically, but I never have. I can think of one instance in my whole life so far when I would have chosen to, and I didn't have them at the time."

[point_b]

"Why didn't you have them?"

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"When you reincarnate, your S-Factor has to be reactivated. I never actually knew for sure as Beatrice that I still had S-Factor, and almost all of the ways guaranteed to activate it will seriously hurt or kill you if you don't."

[point_b]

"Like Lorica's world's trigger events?"

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Not exactly. If you wander close to an otherwise-lethal source of radiation you may not even know it until you get mad and suddenly your asshole ex's eyebrows are on fire."

[point_b]

"...True story?"

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Hypothetical example, alas."

[point_b]

"So what does it besides lethal radiation?"

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Well, this time around it happened because we were trying to get a gun away from a villain who was less concerned about civilian casualties than usual and its exotic energy source exploded," Marie says.
"The logic being that if anyone was going to get killed it should be the people who would be fine twenty years later," Helen contributed. "I know there's some viruses that do it."

[thinkering]

"Just say no to exploding exotic energy," murmurs Lorica absently, punching a random-looking array of holes in a bit of sheet metal.

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"The shrapnel from the gun's casing did some damage," she tugs the collar of her shirt down to show a thin white scar tracing up her collarbone, "but since we had dormant S-Factor to activate the energy didn't hurt us at all."

[point_b]

"Well, that looks sort of superficial, I hope it doesn't predict the weather or anything? We can be kind of careless about injuries because we can heal each other - and we strongly suspect that if only one of Alli dies she just reintegrates into the other one, although fortunately that hasn't been tested."