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]

"That sounds great."

[whatamithinking]

"I feel like this is the kind of conversation a normal person would find surreal."

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"I'm not a normal person and I find this surreal," Helen volunteers.

[point_b]

"I find it surreal too. Lorica, when it breaks down is it going to have antimatter and shit in it? Is it going to be hard to dispose of after its lifespan is over?"

[thinkering]

"No antimatter! I don't have time to build an antimatter generator and it's outside my specialty anyway and Bar probably doesn't sell it. It'll just stop working and you probably shouldn't open it up but it won't explode."

[iamnotpolaris]

"Technology that doesn't explode is my favorite."

[thinkering]

"...It might make an awful noise. But you can teleport, and better than my dad can even, so just drop it in the sea or something, it won't even poison the fish."

[point_b]

"Are you sure I shouldn't take it apart and try to find a secondary market for that exciting ceramic?"

[thinkering]

"Yyyyeah, don't do that."

[alli_oop]

"You don't call him Charlie."

[thinkering]

"Pardon?"

[point_b]

"When he's not around I often call our dad Charlie and our mom Renée."

[thinkering]

"Oh. Did that, kicked the habit when I found out he was a cape. We're publicly father/daughter so I can say 'dad' helmet on or off."

[point_b]

"Makes sense."

[whatamithinking]

"I've never really gotten the impulse to call your parents by their first names, but then I understand Emily and I are somewhat atypical in that we're as likely to refer to each other as 'my sister' as our first names."

[alli_oop]

"Sometimes I say 'my twin' but mostly because everybody knows that means stuff."

[whatamithinking]

"Makes sense."

[iamnotpolaris]

"I'm trying to figure out some kind of equivalent for mutants but it doesn't work, we just don't have interdependent powers that way."

[point_b]

"I don't think I've ever even listed the gemini package completely - so, twins who actually both exist when they turn sixteen, as opposed to being chimeras or one of them dead or something, get bonuses that work well together. How much varies, Alli and I have powers that work pretty well independently and the only obvious synergy is that she doesn't count against my passenger limit. The bonuses vary in quality and aren't necessarily fair within a set; like, you could have someone whose bonus is turning things yellow who had a twin with the power to make yellow things blindingly bright. But you won't get someone who can turn things green and a twin whose power is to make yellow things blindingly bright. And in addition to the bonuses are basics: Olympic-level ability - but not form - no maintenance required in general physical can-do, and we can talk to each other at any distance but have to talk aloud to do it, and we can sympathetically-heal anything short of death."

[iamnotpolaris]

"Healing sounds useful. Magnetism and telepathy aren't really linked but teleportation and duplication don't seem linked until you get to the passenger limit thing, I wonder what a pair of us who were from your world or an equivalent would be like."

[point_b]

"I have no idea. But you don't look familiar, so if you exist you haven't been making waves."

[iamnotpolaris]

"Oh, I think we probably don't exist in your world. I was speaking purely hypothetically."

[point_b]

"None of us look familiar to you, right?" Flicker asks Mistral and Lumiere.

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"I mean, I think magnet girl looks a little like a character in a television show I used to watch way back when, but I think the actress's name was Karen Something," Lumiere says.
"I don't even recognize that much," Mistral says.

[point_b]

"Pity. I like having an alt. She makes me presents."