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Mehitabel reads a lot.
She starts calling herself "Tab", for short, not that anyone calls her anything apart from Kers. She writes suitably encrypted emails to Aelise about ideas for fixing the world - mostly she asks questions, to start, forming a picture of the exact problem she has to solve.
She misses her parents, but not very much. At least she got to say goodbye.
When her brain won't absorb new information, she bounces around in zero-g.
After six months, Aelise visits again.
Tab says, "Anybody you store up here must be important somehow. If I don't know about the other secret person, I won't know how to come up with ideas that work with them being important however they're important."
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giftedandtalented
"Me neither," says the pillow.
"Do you not want to talk about her?"
"I really don't!"
"Okay. I'm sorry."
He sighs, removes the pillow from his face, and hugs it instead.
"Whatever."
"Whatever."
"What's the world you lived in like?" asks Tab after a respectful silence.
"No Chelsa," he says.
And then, "They had one, but she died."
And then, "They had one, but she died."
"And everybody didn't start killing each other?" asks Tab, sitting up at attention.
He snorts. "Nope."
"Aelise thinks that if something happened to Chelsa here people would start having wars again. I'm supposed to think of a way for that to not happen, and then Chelsa can go away here too."
"The other Chelsa wasn't doing her thing to the whole world," says Harley. "Just a little piece of it. It was the other you who killed her," he adds offhandedly.
"There's another me?" Tab asks, sitting bolt upright and looking utterly fascinated.
"There's like twelve," says Harley, with a little smile. "I've only met one, though. Her name's Bella and she's a vampire empress."
"Wow." Tab isn't sure if she believes this story, but it promises to be fascinating. "There are vampires in that world? And my - mirror universe twin is the empress of it? I bet she isn't seven, though. How do you know I'm her?"
"You look like her and you talk like her, if she was seven."
"Huh. Wow. What are the vampires like?"
"...They're... like vampires," he says. "I only know about the one kind. I mean, they drink blood and they're immortal and stuff?"
"I think being immortal would be nice," says Tab. "I don't think drinking blood would be very nice."
"Being immortal kind of sucks sometimes," says Harley. "But drinking blood would suck worse, I can't believe they don't miss food more."
"How does being immortal suck?" asks Tab.
"When you want to die and can't."
"Why would you want to?" Tab asks, furrowing her brow and frowning.
"Chelsa," sighs Harley.
Tab considers. "I might be able to make you safe," she says. "But you're already up here, being secret."
"Yeah," he says. "As long as she doesn't ever have to see me again, there's no point. I can just stay up here and be Aelise's battery."