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

[alli_oop]

"It could be total strangers on the internet."

[whatamithinking]

"If it's total strangers on the internet, I can't feel their minds, and then we're back to square one."

[point_b]

"What is your range? And parameters for finding people within it?"

[whatamithinking]

"My range is...pretty wide. Several miles at least. I'm one of the three most powerful known telepaths back home. If I know what someone's mind feels like, and I check to see if they're there, I can find them if they're within my range. It's also possible to check for other things--if I were alright with reading peoples' minds I could look for 'the person who knows this thing' or 'dudes named Gilbert' or something like that, and one thing I have searched for in the past is 'intention to cause harm.'"

[point_b]

"What kind of information will a search like that turn up for you about people who aren't named Gilbert or don't know the thing or don't intend to cause harm?"

[whatamithinking]

"Very little. It's a case of...it's less that I'm checking each mind to see if it has the information and more that I'm checking the mindscape for instances of the information? Gilbert's the sloppiest one, for that I'd have to check for prominent emotional attachment to the name, and then I'm getting false positives from people whose loved ones have the name and I have to check for context."

[point_b]

"Gotcha. How do intentions register? If somebody's deluded about it, say, or prone to impulse harm but not actually planning on it?"

[whatamithinking]

"If someone thinks they can harm me and intends to try, it counts. If someone might do harm but isn't planning to when I check it doesn't count."

[point_b]

"Can you do 'don't object to mind reading' and only get anything meaningful from people with that characteristic?"

[whatamithinking]

"...Eenh, that one's a little less...either you know something or you don't, but how you feel about something is a sliding scale. I can establish a threshold and say that someone has to be at least this okay with the idea, but at that point I have to give the individual mind a poke to check where on the scale it falls. I can still get, say nothing other than one's opinion on being mind read from a given mind, but it's not the same kind of thing."

[point_b]

"Yeah, not really, kind of fails at relevant purpose out of the gate."

[whatamithinking]

"It's better than nothing if for some reason I have to read someone more deeply than that but I can pick from a handful and for some reason can't consult them but as I'm sure you can imagine that doesn't happen very often."

[point_b]

"Yeah."

[whatamithinking]

"I mean, I can imagine scenarios like that, they're just not very likely."

[point_b]

"What kind of scenarios do you tend to handle when it's not silly putty monsters? My universe is pretty low on professional superheroes and supervillains."

[whatamithinking]

"Some thefts, some plots to take over the world, although those are usually flimsy enough to blow over in a sharp wind. Some unusually militant protesters with super powers. Those I try to deal with before they can actually say what they're protesting for. It never helps a cause to have a supervillain on their side."

Several universes to the left a man in a cape and a silly helmet sneezed.

[point_b]

"Your powers are a little more... broad spectrum than gemini bonuses tend to be. Some gemini try superheroism or supervillainy - I have been told that I'd make a really good thief - but eventually somebody shoots you, and if your power isn't immunity to bullets, this is bad."

[iamnotpolaris]

"I can actually deflect bullets."

[point_b]

"Which is but one of many applications of your power! But gemini can't usually do that and also do anything that's particularly handy for superwhatevering unless they're, like, lucky quintuplets working together - then you maybe have one who can handle projectiles and one who can see through walls and one who can teleport to the locations of the other four for as-necessary healing and so on. But there aren't very many of those and they'd have a hard time going unidentified like that and if the wrong one decides they're out of the game that's the synergy broken."

[whatamithinking]

"Mutant powers as a general principle tend to be pretty broad. And they're not, technically, limited one a customer--one of the telepaths I know can also shapeshift into diamond."

[point_b]

"What? Wow, okay. That doesn't even make sense as a pair of powers for one to a twin, what does that even have to do with anything?"

[whatamithinking]

"I have no idea! But I also have a friend who does heat vision and invulnerability, which is less inexplicable because one of his parents creates these plasma rings and the other one I'm not convinced isn't literally immortal. So maybe her parents had similar powers, or maybe she's a chimera who has the powers each of a set of sororal mutant twins would have had, or maybe the explanation is something completely different that I don't even have a guess at."

[point_b]

"Weird. I don't think gemini powers run in families where applicable at all. If one of us has kids and they're twins they're just as likely to get, say, 'sorting small objects by size' and 'disintegrating stuff', as anything recognizably like mine or Alli's."

[whatamithinking]

"I do think twins run in families, though, so there's that. I wonder what on earth happened in the fifties that people spontaneously started getting powers?"

[point_b]

"Nobody knows. It's very irritating."