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

[whatamithinking]

"I'm not sure how it is that most people think my telepathy even works, but you're not the first person to be surprised that I perceive that minds exist even when I'm not doing anything with them. It's very strange to me--like someone being surprised that you still see things even when you're not reading a book."

[point_b]

"Gemini don't throw telepaths who work outside their own twinset. And what I've read about ones who have it for within a set don't work like you describe."

[alli_oop]

"She was scared I'd be a telepath," sighs an Alli.

The second Alli, who is now braiding the first one's hair, adds, "It would've sucked so hard!"

[iamnotpolaris]

"I can't imagine Edie not being a telepath. Honestly, I've always thought the idea of being alone inside your own head forever sounded depressing."

[point_b]

"Well, then you and I are both very lucky indeed to have the twins we have instead of having by some improbable mechanism swapped."

[iamnotpolaris]

"Definitely. Quite possibly especially definitely depending on which swapped set got which set of parents."

[alli_oop]

"Why?"

[iamnotpolaris]

"Because we also have a telepathic parent, and they didn't really trouble themself not to read our fetal minds."

[point_b]

Bella shivers.

[whatamithinking]

"It's not like there was any other way of communicating, at the time."

[point_b]

"What could you possibly urgently need to communicate to a fetus? Like, I know my reaction is an outlier and I probably couldn't have articulated it until I had at least learned the word 'privacy', but most people manage without communicating to their unborn children except via putting Mozart through headphones on the midsection."

[whatamithinking]

"Part of the problem was that I had no boundaries, for most practical purposes. I was sort of--projecting everywhere I could, which ended up amounting to Emily and our parents, and between me and the relevant parent and Emily not having any form of negative reaction, everything got a little--tangled."

[point_b]

"Tangled."

[whatamithinking]

"I don't really have a good way of explaining it. I was sort of--reading everything off of Emily and sharing everything with her likewise and reaching out to every mind I could and--nng. This is really not going to be explainable without explaining my family. You said the twins thing started in the fifties, what year is it for you?"

[point_b]

"Two thousand four? And if you're about to tell us somebody's gay, so am I. Hi."

[whatamithinking]

"Hi. So people with genetic superpowers are called mutants, and sometimes we have physical mutations as well as powers, and both of my parents are externally-male male-identifying medical hermaphrodites, essentially."

[point_b]

"Huh. Gemini can happen the opposite way, I've heard - some people who are biologically speaking fraternal twins fused in the womb happen, they're called chimeras, and they get basics, which include one-time total healing and resolve them into a set of anatomy that matches their mental body map."

[whatamithinking]

"That sounds convenient. So Emily and I were apparently conceived at the same time, and we were born on the same day, but we never actually shared a uterus."

[point_b]

"Huh. I don't know if that would have made you gemini in our world or not. Some people have tried all kinds of wacky things to get superpowered kids ranging from irresponsible fertility drugs to human cloning, but that exact thing hasn't come up."

[whatamithinking]

"Luckily our kind of powers don't rely on that. Unfortunately, each of us was being carried by the parent with the opposite power. Which just made things a little more surreal for Papa, what with various washers and coins sticking to his stomach, but if he hadn't intervened I would literally have killed Dad by projecting tiny baby love at his brain too hard."

[alli_oop]

"That's... sort of... cute?"

[point_b]

"It's horrifying and may or may not cast noticeable doubts on my stance on abortion."

[whatamithinking]

"I was four months old when it started, if it's relevant. I'm vaguely curious what your stance on abortion was and in what direction I may or may not have influenced it."

[point_b]

"My stance before was 'fetuses are definitely not people'. I may have to revise that to 'first trimester fetuses are probably not people and even if they were they wouldn't be entitled to camp out in people who didn't want them'."

[whatamithinking]

"So, yeah, I was a very high-risk pregnancy, but it all worked out in the end, which granted it probably wouldn't have if anyone involved had been phobic of having their minds read, but to be fair if you're phobic of having your mind read you're probably not going to be in a position to get impregnated by a telepath."