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

[iamnotpolaris]

"Also if you get up to the kind of behavior the Conquistadores were so fond of she has a security team guaranteed to be a match for whoever's in the bar at the moment."

[point_b]

"...How do they finagle that?"

[iamnotpolaris]

"Fortuitous yet reliable coincidence, apparently."

[point_b]

"Weird." Bella sits at the bar. "I will try my own drink recommendation, thank you."

Her drink recommendation is hot chocolate. With whipped cream.

"So, we don't do secret identities, but we do code names. I'm Flicker and she's Verge."

[whatamithinking]

"I'm Psyche, and she's Magnetrix."

[point_b]

"Descriptive, that."

[whatamithinking]

"Well, our dad calls himself Magneto."

[point_b]

"Were all the less on-the-nose names taken?"

[whatamithinking]

"To be fair, we've used a lot of different names over the years, and it was our aunt who named Dad. ...Aunt on the other side of the family, Dad's an only child."

[point_b]

"Fair enough. My name was a Junebug selection, I think they probably have someone on staff whose mission in life is naming teenage gemini."

[whatamithinking]

"I mean, she labeled our other parent Professor X, they're a telepath like me, it wasn't only power based."

[point_b]

"Our names are usually connected to our bonuses in some way. Powers tend not to be exact duplicates, which helps, but there are other teleporters and I'm lucky there was something as mellifluous as 'Flicker' free when we had our birthday."

[whatamithinking]

"Oh, we have teleporters too, my aunt had a kid with one and the cousin's a teleporter too."

[point_b]

"How do they work? I can only teleport to locations stationary relative to whatever gravity well I'm in, which is usually the Earth, and I need latitude and longitude, line of sight, an intersection, or to just know where I'm aiming. But no absolute range limit - at least not one smaller than the globe; they had someone tote me up to the moon for a power test but haven't brought me anywhere bigger. And I can do four times a second if I'm trying."

[whatamithinking]

"...Um. I don't know of a specific ruleset they have...I'm pretty sure they don't have the stationary limitation...if they have a reasonable idea of where they're going and nothing's keeping them out they can get there, mostly."

[point_b]

"Well, that sounds convenient."

[whatamithinking]

"It is. I know short-range teleporting is...easier than long-range, is the best way of putting it."

[point_b]

"I don't really have an 'easiness' feature. I can get there or I can't."

[whatamithinking]

"That's definitely different than their thing then. It's...not literally a muscle, but it seems to be more an organic thing than yours. Which makes sense."

[alli_oop]

"And I do this," says Alli, both of her that there suddenly are. "But we're stuck in sync until something happens." Bella shoves one in the shoulder. "Like that," says the one who got shoved.

[whatamithinking]

"Oh, that's very odd. For me, I mean, on a telepathic level."

[point_b]

"You said you weren't reading our minds."

[whatamithinking]

"I'm not. But I can tell they exist, and that they're different minds from each other, and that is definitely still one mind, not two." She sighs. "Imagine you're walking through a library, and all the books are bound in slightly different, unique colors, and you can't really tell anything about them except the color and the size and whether it's a hardcover or a paperback unless you pick it up and read it. That is like seeing the exact same book in two places and it's obviously an optical illusion except it's not."

[point_b]

"...Okay."

[alli_oop]

The Alli who didn't get shoved pats Bella on the head. The one who did sneaks the last sip of the orange beverage. "Hey!" says the other one.