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]

"Like so the ash doesn't get in my lungs or to protect my identity? The former might actually be helpful, while I'm focusing on larger things it would help not to have to make sure I don't breathe in flecks of volcanic glass."

[point_b]

"The former. I'll get us a couple."

Pop. Pop. Have a mask.

[maggie_of_the_owls]

Mask.

She carefully attaches the leads to various points on her body--her temples, a few pulse points--and feels it take effect.

She is the wind.

She has a flesh body, of course, but she pays it no more attention than you would give your little toe. She is the wind, and the wind is heavy with ash.

This needs to stop.

Carefully, as her consciousness settles into the ten feet or so above where the ashpiles have already settled, she stills it, noting the way the air was moving before so she can put it back later. Winds gather the particles into clumps, letting them fall from the sky like black snow. The still zone rises as the ashlevel gets higher, always leaving a safe zone. The ash over areas not devastated already is carefully herded over to the destruction before being shaken from the sky.

When she is done, she takes a moment to remember where her body was, and fumbles for a moment before turning the machine off.

"Ngh," she winces. Coming down like that--becoming merely human again--was always the not fun part. She checks her watch. It's several hours later.

[point_b]

Bella is sitting nearby, with a book. "Hey. I forgot to ask how long that would take but fortunately your girlfriend had a guess. How'd it go?"

[maggie_of_the_owls]

"I don't think I got every single last speck, but your meteorologists should be freaking out over how the sun isn't all blocked soonish."

[point_b]

"Awesome. I hope Lorica doesn't feel redundant; there's still a lot of ash on the ground and I can bring her little robot to places that might need that to not be the case, but this is a bigger deal. Back to Milliways?"

[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."