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

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"Back to Milliways." She yanks the last few wires off herself and stands up and picks up the machine.

[point_b]

Bella teleports them and the object to the door, where an Alli is sitting with a Gameboy. In they go.

[thinkering]

"There you are," says Lorica. "I'm not sure if we have the same fingerprints and I want to lock this to you so it'll behave for you and not obey random passersby, give me your hand." With Flicker's hand, she puts palm to a flat part of the roomba-like object, now otherwise finished. It bleeps.

[whatamithinking]

"I didn't check with any of my alts whether we have the same fingerprints or not but I doubt it, even identical twins don't have the same fingerprints."

[thinkering]

"Easy way to check." Lorica pats the object. It bleeps. "Same fingerprints as far as the ash-eater can tell."

[whatamithinking]

"Okay, I'm surprised. Ah well, dimensional bullshit, what can you do."

[thinkering]

"Also the entire thing came in under budget, Bar had some good alternative materials suggestions in several cases!"

[whatamithinking]

"Well, that's good. Bar's good at that kind of thing."

[thinkering]

"Yup." Lorica returns all her borrowed tools. She hands Flicker the robot and then asks for a piece of paper to write up a user manual on. Bar provides; Lorica scribbles.

[maggie_of_the_owls]

Marie also returns the borrowed amplifier.

[iamnotpolaris]

"Your robot feels interesting and strange."

[thinkering]

"Oh?"

[iamnotpolaris]

"Oh, I get sensory feedback from my magnetism. I've never even seen some of those metals before."

[thinkering]

"Oh yeah, I can't do a thing with exotic materials myself but some Tinkers are all about it and they come up with wacky metals and plastics and whatnot! And I can use them even if I wouldn't have the first idea how to force them to exist in the first place."

[iamnotpolaris]

"Nifty. Hey, Bar, what kinds of exotic metals are there from her universe?"

[alicornucopia]

Bar produces an extensive list, indexed by originating tinker or other metal-generation power.

[iamnotpolaris]

"Ooooh, nifty." She begins browsing the list.

[whatamithinking]

"Emily's quite fond of new kinds of metal. Apparently there are few enough kinds of normal magnetism-responsive metal that novel sensations along that axis are hard to come by in the normal scheme of things."

[thinkering]

"I heard about a tinker in Kansas who made a teammate something to magnetize nearby non-ferrous metals."

[iamnotpolaris]

"...Bar?"

[alicornucopia]

Only one was made. I can't reproduce it, in the same way I could not reproduce specific art projects you made in grade school.

[thinkering]

"I could make one! I'd have to tweak the design and it'll be more expensive than the ashbot but I could totally do it!"

[iamnotpolaris]

"Hmm. I don't actually have any fixing-things magic myself, so I'm not sure it would be wise..."

[thinkering]

"It ought to last for years, I didn't mean to imply that tinkertech falls apart at the drop of a hat. If your fine control is really good and you have a memory to match, I can just make it almost entirely out of metal and you can hold it in place if it tries to snap?"

[iamnotpolaris]

"Oh, that's a good point. My fine control is excellent, but I'm not sure on what scale you're talking...I did this bracelet," she shows it to her. The detailing is really intricate and some of the details are small enough to be difficult to make out. "But I can't, say, pull the iron out of a piece of liver. Yet."