"They'd let you off if you made a fuss, I bet, the martial arts stuff is mostly so we can live in a world we never made et cetera. You seem to live in a world with fewer threats that can be solved by punching."

"There exist supervillains, but not very many, and my utility to the major American organization that deals with them is weighted heavily towards evac, not enforcement."

"Good for America, then."

"I swear to God, Xan, if you get pissy that the other world with superheroes doesn't have a proportional villain population I will slap you."

Xan huffs with excruciating dignity.

"I mean, it makes some sense that there would be more here because you seem to get higher variance superpowers and be much more able to use them effectively without cooperation. I'm well above average in power utility, my sister is slightly above average, and even working together we could at worst mildly inconvenience, say, any two or three of the deSanto quadruplets. The fourth one does not work for the Junebugs even though the girls do, and might go supervillain if he could, but his powers basically do squat without his sisters, so, sucks to be him."

"Well, we get villain teams and all, though. The main reason we have so many is that mutants are hated and feared et cetera, and that causes a lot of backlash, often in the form of taking vengeance on a hateful world et cetera. But since your world apparently doesn't hate you, it makes sense that you wouldn't need to backlash against them, and so there's no need for villains, Xan."

"That is probably a factor too but I still think mine's at work. You don't get to pick who your siblings are. If Alli wanted to be a supervillain I wouldn't help her and she couldn't go shopping at the sister store for somebody else who could heal, twine, and teleport her - I mean, maybe she could find somebody else who could teleport her, but they wouldn't have any twinset advantages at it like I do."

"Yeah, that does make sense. But, like, I'm one of seven kids. If I was twinned with any given one of them in your world, I can absolutely guarantee they would've gone villain and taken me with them. Plus there actually are villainous twins here, they even get synchronized powers a lot of the time. Half of them are heroes instead, but it stands. I do get what you're saying, though. Your end of things seems to have more, uh, generally stable people being given powers anyway."

"And predictable in advance," Bella adds. "Social services, for example, are all over you if they think you're not a fit parent for a twin set - we actually had some trouble when we were little because before my basics came in, I tripped over everything and nothing and kept turning up to kindergarten with bruises. We spent a week in a foster facility before I finally convinced them to prevail upon a lie-detecting gemini to confirm my story."

"Ooh, that's totally a thing too, I hadn't even realized. Yeah, we are very unpredictable."

"Not all of us are predictable because chimeras and similar also get basics, but they don't get bonuses," Bella adds, "just basics, and just the basics that don't require the actual involvement of an actual twin."

"Yeah, a low-level exemplar on the loose could be a problem, but not so much when you've got a superteam to mop them up."

So it is! Leo and Xan frolic off to acquire books and do vaguely ominous things in an attached ritual chamber.

"I am from another dimension and not a mutant. I'm a twin - for disambiguation let's say I'm a gemini. We get our powers when we turn sixteen, on the dot, and they come with fewer inconveniences and lower variance. I have some stuff that in local terms you'd call Exemplar traits, and I can talk to my sister at any distance, and sympathetically heal her at touch range, and also, teleport." Bella teleports a foot to the left. "I can do that eight times a second if I concentrate, but I can only hit stationary targets within and relative to my gravity well and they have to be defined in terms that cannot include property boundaries but may include streets."

He scribbles furiously in the direction of a notepad. "Fascinating. Fascinating. What happens if you're born on leap day? Can you teleport objects you're touching- well, you can get your clothes, but could you put an anvil over someone's head? Can deaf geminis talk to their twins? What's the damage range on the healing? Am I asking too many questions too quickly?" He forces himself to stop talking and twiddles the pencil stub he's using excitedly.

"Sixteen is divisible by four. So leap days are not a problem, if you're born on February 29th you also get your powers the same day sixteen years later. I can take things I'm near enough, I don't have to touch them, but I do have a limit - one non-sister passenger, and about fifty pounds. Deaf gemini who have twins to talk to are not so much a thing - we get spontaneously healed of everything when our powers come in, including deafness, and if it's acquired later on, twin healing. I suppose somebody might have gamely put out their eardrums and performed the experiment but that would have to be looked up. Healing will handle anything short of death but it's sympathetic healing, so the one who's doing it hurts like hell for a few seconds while it kicks in. And yes, a bit."

"Sorry, sorry. I just don't get to deal with a lot of, uh, dimensional visitors. I'm just barely refraining from a lot of complicated questions about solar versus calendar versus objective year that you definitely wouldn't know the answer to."

"Not without making Alli look stuff up, no. And her tolerance for that is likely to be fairly limited so I'd rather hold it down to really important stuff."

"Aaaagh. Maybe I'll pass a collection around the labs to fund whatever ritual we'd need to get a techie sent over there to pester all of your scientists."

"What does it take to locate my world? Do I have to be involved in that or can you do it without me somehow?"

He makes a vague gesture with his clipboard. "Maybe? I'm not exactly what you might call 'hep' to the Mystic Arts folks' 'jive'. I assume interdimensional travel is expensive and difficult, because most supervillains don't have massive extradimensional armies, and they generally jump right on that kind of thing."