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]

"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."

[whatamithinking]

"Well, no one knows how the hell the human genome randomly spawned a superpower-activating gene, so I guess we're about even."

[point_b]

"It happened and everybody was divided between figuring out what happened and banning fertility drugs stat, and only the second batch had any luck."

[iamnotpolaris]

[whatamithinking]

chuckle

"So what's the state of the black market on them, I wonder."

[point_b]

"Every now and then there's a set of sextuplets and no one can prove anything. More than three, sometimes four, and the kids are often not born very healthy and they don't always all survive to be healed when they turn sixteen; but if they get that far they're golden and get great collective powers because the synergy stacks all ways. Anybody with more than two in a batch is watched very, very closely, even more than regular gemini families. Like, they might not have believed me and Alli that our mom wasn't hitting me if there were four or five of us, because being wrong there could get so much worse."

[whatamithinking]

"Ah."

"That sounds...both unfortunate and not unreasonable, to be honest."

[point_b]

"Yeah. They might have just given the whole passel of us to Charlie, but then I'd have just kept falling over, so."

[alli_oop]

"But you'd have had more witnesses...?"

[point_b]

"Which might have mattered and might not, depends on how much attention they were paying."

[iamnotpolaris]

"Honestly, when I was little, if I were clumsy and thought it would get me taken away from my parents, I might have just sat down in a big soft chair and flat-out refused to get out of it."

[point_b]

"I didn't know this was a risk until it happened, which was in the first grade."