"It's kind of cute! Gemini is the 'twins' astrological symbol, right? And most of the dates that you can be born on to be a Gemini, astrologically, are in June. And then the 'bugs' part just got tacked on. The real name is the Gemini Guard."

"As predicted: cute!"

"There are also Gemini Schools but those don't have a cute name. Is this the only mutant school on the planet?"

"There's a couple of others. There's a Japanese school for super-ninjas, in particular, they're apparently our rivals, they try to steal the busts out of our cottages and we beat the crap out of their teams and take the leaders' signet rings. Because we're better than them. But yeah, we're definitely the biggest. Mutants are not a large portion of the population, and most other parts of the world tend not to, uh, retain them very well. Because they're too busy murdering them. Europe's got a couple of schools, I think there's somewhere in Australia, the Chinese may or may not have something or other."

"I don't know a lot about how other countries handle their twins. Gemini Schools are it in the United States and I think Canada has something similar. Some places might not do anything in particular. But everybody's very firmly agreed on controlling the hell out of fertility drugs."

"Oh man, yeah, that sounds like- something that could go super nasty. Did you guys get that Octomom lady? She had the one set of twins and the octuplets, so that'd be, like, a whole little mercenary enclave. Wonder how she's doing. Apparently she had some kind of sex tape thing, so that's good."

"I have not heard of anyone going by this charming epithet in my world. The school I went to in Phoenix had several sets of triplets, one set of quads, and one batch of probably-illegal six who used to be octuplets but infant mortality - and the survivors are looking very much forward to their birthday, because the results of overcrowding aren't very pretty."

"Eeesh. Our lady had good luck on that, her children were all successfully alive and grew up into an apparently healthy little herd of younglings." She tosses Bella her phone, featuring a picture of the lady in question surrounded by apparently healthy younglings. (Ariel herself is reclining on the ceiling, the room being well and arranged.)

Bella catches it easily. "Good for her. And they don't have superpowers?"

"They wouldn't've manifested yet, typical age is 12-15. Early manifestors tend to be way more powerful, but the earliest case that didn't just burn out instantly was seven years old. She was a pyrokinetic energizer and exemplar, totally heinous power on the fire, but her body image template turned her into a horrible demon thing 'cause she came from a religious family. That... did not go well for anybody."

"...Body image template?"

"It's what the Exemplar transformy thing goes off of. Usually it's your idea of the perfect insert-gender-here, but some people's get fucked up for some reason. Friend of mine got turned into this- thing, he looks like the monster from some extremely Japanese horror cartoon. Four arms, way too many teeth, massive bone spikes coming off his joints, the works."

"That sounds very uncomfortable."

"It wouldn't be, usually. He's got other problems- GSD, Gross Structural Dystrophy, it's an entirely different horrible mutant problem and that one makes his everything hurt constantly. He's not thrilled, but he's good at rolling with whatever. Plus he's bulletproof now, so, y'know. Pretty sweet"

"...And there aren't any other mutants with powers that can help him?"

"Oh, believe me, there has been massive amounts of research into how to potentially fix that shit. Problem is, there's problems. There's apparently an energy barrier that's, like, incomprehensibly greater then the lightspeed barrier, and the procedure would be so complex that you'd need a couple dozen supercomputers to take the first step. And magical attempts have led to... profound failure. The kind of failure that demolishes Buenos Aires."

"...Under what circumstances does magically failing at things lead to demolishing Buenos Aires, because we still have one of those and I'd like to keep it all else being equal."

"Don't fuck with any BITs. Leads to blood-crazed skyscraper-sized snake monster made of fire where you used to have a half-snake pyro dude with some emotional issues. There really aren't any other situations on that level until you get up to the upper levels of the Wiz mutation. So don't invite any Wiz-5 or above mutants who haven't been vetted by a trustworthy source."

Bella opens one of her new notebooks and pulls out one of her new pens and starts sketching out notes. Then she pauses. "If I take notes in a fairly basic cipher and the wrong mutant picks it up and peers at it what are the odds they instantly crack it?"

"If they're trying? Very, very high. Accidentally not so much. But yeah, mutants in general are kinda cheaty. Sorry."

"And is there anybody who can do the same thing if I destroy the paper first, and is there anybody who sufficiently motivated could do this with notebooks that I leave back home?"

"The second, not without a serious investment. The first... there's a difference between 'there are people who could do that' and 'people are going to do that,' of course. But if you want to be totally sure, you'll want to do it exclusively in my room, which is magically Weird As Shit because of Sally's crazy aura and can't be clairvoyanced at or scried pretty much at all, and either use pencils that you immediately burn, or use one writing implement that you never let out of your sight, to keep psychometrists from getting at them. And you wouldn't have to destroy them if you didn't want, just store them in our room or back home. Burning's your best option if you want them gone, it cleanses an object magically so nobody could, like, make the shreds of paper grow into the full sheet. Or something."

"I'm not totally unwilling to take it on faith that my notebooks won't get read by a shortlist of people. I didn't always do it in cipher at all, not until I caught Alli reading one. I'm... not currently a very interesting target as far as I know, but I am now apparently a dimension-hopping future wizard-gemini hybrid, and if that attracted attention, I would want to have an expectation of privacy anyway, and since I'm anticipating that now, I want to make sure it will be operative even if people can see the past or look at things I wrote last year which are in my closet in my world."

"Sure. My room is always available for notebooking purposes if you would like to satisfy your thirst for privacy."

"That's very kind of you. I can probably live with doing most of it in plaintext; the only reason I use cipher for most of it is to keep in practice."