"Oh, hello! First time at Milliways?"

"I must conclude the answer is yes," he says.

"Milliways is a transdimensional bar that likes hijacking random doors in myriad universes. The bar itself is sentient and female. She does very good drink recommendations, and can make things that don't exist in your universe of origin. In addition to beverages, she can also do...anything that's not alive, a weapon, or too large to fit on top of her."

"What an interesting set of qualifications."

"Weapons and alive things seem to be an ethical limitation, as far as I can tell. I'm not sure if she literally can't make things larger than herself or if it would just be unpleasant but either way I'm not asking her to."

"Hm," he says. "So, how transdimensional is the transdimensional bar? Clearly there's some selection for similarity going on since the bar appears to be approximately a bar and you appear to be approximately a human."

"There's some selection for Earths for some reason. And I am...debatably human."

"What are the sides of the debate?"

"Well, one side is that there's no actual evidence that mutants actually qualify as a separate species under any scientific definition. The other side is that the layperson public got their teeth into the idea and aren't going to let something like logic pry it away from them."

"That would be people, yes."

"They do persist in being people. Anyway. My name is Mark, if exchanging names is the sort of thing one does in a transdimensional bar."

"Among other things, yes. I'm Emily. It's nice to meet you."

"It's certainly the most interesting thing that has happened to me this week. What's your universe like?"

"Late twentieth century Earth, mostly standard except with mutants and some boosted technological development from the fact that I've been coming here for years and know people who can reverse-engineer gadgets I bring home."

"That must be convenient. 2999 for me, and we have an Earth but I haven't been there in a while."

"Oh, I met a guy in here a few weeks back who was from 2999 and a not-Earth planet. Maybe you're from the same universe."

"Yeah? Did he mention any identifying features of the universe in question?"

"A planet called Barrayar with some unfortunate habits regarding physical differences, a couple of other planets called...Escobar and Tau Ceti, the Earth's atmosphere hasn't been lost to pollution, Oxford still exists..."

"...What?"

"It's just... an interesting coincidence that Barrayar was the first planet you mentioned. I have family there."

"Well, apparently it practices infanticide. And has opinions on people called mutants, that's pretty relevant to me. Plus the guy I met was from there, that's...actually how I learned about the other stuff, was that I mentioned I was a mutant and he reacted."

"How badly?"

"He went eep and eventually apologized, he's apparently very progressive for a Barrayaran. He was a sweetie overall," she adds, blushing just a tiny bit. Most people probably wouldn't notice.

"Ivan Vorpatril."

"To a high degree of likelihood, that would be my cousin Ivan."

"Oh, are you the cousin with the...genetically engineered wife?" she asks, sounding very much as though she had been going to say something else.

"Actually no. That cousin is my brother Miles. I am unmarried."

"Ah, okay. Ivan didn't particularly mention you, but if you don't have the bone thing then that's probably because you weren't relevant to the 'Barrayar is not a nice place to be if you are different' explanation."

"The story as regards me and 'the bone thing' is somewhat complicated, but no, I do not as such have it."

"Complicated like it would take a long time to tell, involve incomprehensible medical jargon, or make people look at you funny?"

"Eh, mostly the third one. I can shorten it reasonably well if you don't fancy hearing the six centuries of historical context, and the incomprehensible medical jargon can be left out without ruining anything."

"I don't mind hearing six centuries of historical context."

"Well then. It all began in approximately 2225 when humanity discovered wormhole jump technology and started colonizing distant planets. Barrayar was one of the first. Halfway through the process of terraforming the planet and bringing in all the equipment and colonists, one of the wormholes on the route from Earth to Barrayar collapsed, stranding fifty thousand colonists on the far side without enough technological infrastructure to finish terraforming the planet or even keep their spaceships and power plants and computers in working order. Six centuries of reinventing assorted wheels both societal and technological ensued; meanwhile, the rest of the galaxy went merrily on. And then they discovered a second wormhole route to Barrayar."

"I think Ivan mentioned a Time of Isolation."

"Yeah, that would be the one. So, the original route was a straight shot to Barrayar from Earth, but these days Earth isn't nearly as much of a galactic hub as it was during the first wave of colonizations. Barrayar's new link to the wider galaxy goes through a planet called Komarr, which is so minimally terraformed that everyone has to live in sealed arcologies because there isn't enough oxygen outside to breathe, but they have a lot of wormhole routes so they get rich off trade and traffic. The Barrayar route looked to be more of the same. Except that one of Komarr's preexisting neighbours, the eight-planet Cetagandan Empire, decided they liked the look of this newly rediscovered planet whose inhabitants had only just figured out gunpowder again. They bribed the Komarrans to let them take an invasion fleet through, and conquered Barrayar fairly handily thanks to the technological disparity."

"Lovely. Ivan mentioned that in passing too, a couple times--apparently it's part of why your sister-in-law needs a bodyguard."

"Right," he agrees. "Well, eventually they kicked the Cetagandans out - no mean feat, considering it was essentially swords against atomics at the beginning. And almost immediately afterward, Barrayar conquered Komarr, to forestall any repeat incidents. You have to wonder what Komarr was thinking when they took the bribe in the first place - I mean, it would've been somewhat ridiculous at the time to think Barrayar could've won, but if the Cetagandan occupation had actually been successful Komarr would've been a waypoint on the only route between two member planets of an expansionist empire, and there's only so long that situation can remain stable. Anyway. The man who headed the Barrayaran invasion of Komarr was Aral Vorkosigan, and he did as neat a job as you please. Wrote a book about it. Barely a shot fired, because the arcologies made the Komarrans so vulnerable that the invasion fleet didn't have to do much more than loom threateningly and offer generous terms of surrender."

"If that was all it took to conquer Komarr, why hadn't the Cetagandans done it already?"

He waves a hand dismissively. "Galactic politics. They weren't going to start with Komarr, it'd signal to the rest of the galaxy that any one of them might be next, and that sort of thing tends to make one's enemies band together and one's allies dry up. But Barrayar didn't quite count because they were barely considered a civilized planet. Part of the work the Barrayarans did to resist Cetagandan occupation was send the most charming available prince out to solicit galactic aid, get people thinking of them as worth helping."

"Aaaaah. But Barrayar could conquer Komarr because Komarr arguably started it."

"Yeah. And arguably it worked in their favour politically, by firmly establishing them as a planet you don't want to fuck with - when you're the biggest interplanetary empire in the galaxy, it's in your interest to mollify lest your neighbours collectively decide you are making them uncomfortable, but when the most memorable thing about you is that you were just conquered by the biggest interplanetary empire in the galaxy, it may be in your interest to adopt a more threatening posture."

"I don't think I had heard the 'biggest interplanetary empire' bit, but boy does that ever make sense."

"Yeah. But I believe I was describing the Komarr invasion. Admiral Vorkosigan got his generous surrender terms tied up with a neat little bow, and then one of his subordinates decided that not enough Komarran blood had been shed for his liking, and rounded up two hundred wealthy and politically notable Komarrans and had them all killed in contravention of both the admiral's peace agreement and his explicit orders, not to mention common fucking sense."

"And that would be several of my top ten reasons why I am never joining any military ever neatly packaged into one moron."

Snort. "There were some politics at work, it wasn't just a case of one moron, but yes. Unfortunately for Admiral Vorkosigan, when he found out about the Solstice Massacre his temper got the better of him and he killed the offending subordinate on the spot, which prevented him from acquiring any evidence to prove the man had not been secretly acting on his orders the whole time, so everyone promptly assumed exactly that, and the family name remains a curse on Komarr to this day. He ended up with a galactic reputation as a bloodthirsty murderer too, but that one was neither as personal nor as long-lasting."

"How sure are you that he wasn't secretly acting on orders? Not that I don't believe you, exactly, I can imagine people I care about similarly losing their tempers."

"In my firm and well-researched opinion, the likelihood of Aral Vorkosigan secretly ordering someone to commit a massacre against his openly sworn word is best described using phrases like 'when pigs fly' and 'a cold day in hell'."

"Just checking. So some idiot kills a bunch of people and Aral Vorkosigan gets blamed, and this through some circuitous route leads you to having healthy bones."

"Patience. I'm getting there. You asked for the six-century version, I remind you. So, Aral Vorkosigan went on to marry a brilliant woman named Cordelia Naismith, and they had one son, Miles. Thanks to an assassination attempt while Cordelia was pregnant, Miles was born with a rather atrociously malformed skeleton. Modern medicine did the best it could and he's still pretty short and funny-looking. Then, when Miles was about six, the ongoing unrest on Komarr broke out into active rebellion. One of the leaders of the rebellion, when he saw that rebellion per se did not appear to be getting the job done, decided to make things a little more personal. He faked his death, stole some of Miles's tissue samples - not hard, the kid was in and out of hospitals on nearly a weekly basis while they monitored his bone development - and took them to an illegal cloning lab on Jackson's Whole."

"...Oh."

pause

"I'm sorry."

pause

"Also sorry, I wasn't trying to be impatient, I just thought we had gone on a bit of a tangent, and. Yes."

"It's fine," he says cheerfully. "Yeah, so, I'm the result of a clone substitution plot. I was supposed to impersonate Miles, kill his father, and then murder my way to becoming Emperor of Barrayar, which was sold to me as a valid possible outcome but was actually supposed to activate cultural tensions about visible deformity and lead to a nastily divisive civil war so Galen could take back Komarr while the Barrayarans were busy killing each other. And I don't in fact have my brother's bone disorder, but for obvious reasons I was surgically altered to look exactly like him, which is why it's not quite accurate to say I 'don't have the bone thing'."

"Oh, wait, I misremembered. It wasn't the mutant thing, it was when I told him I was in the habit of bringing home medical technology to reverse-engineer, and he wanted to see if he could get a safe painkiller for his cousin."

"Yeah, Miles's metabolism is a bit of a clusterfuck as far as drug reactions. As far as I can tell I don't have it nearly as bad."

"Better than not, I suppose. So is Galen still around in any capacity, is that a thing that needs taking care of?"

"Nah. Killed him."

"Good for you! So does Ivan in fact know you exist, or..."

"Oh, yeah, we've met."

"It didn't go well?"

"Well, I did kidnap him, but then I also rescued him afterward. It's complicated."

"...You know, I think he might have mentioned you after all. Did he get locked in a seawall?"

"Yeah."

"Your assumption is correct."

"Generally when someone is at the nonexistent mercy of an older terrible person for significant lengths of time their unfortunate actions can be blamed on their captor."

"Yeah. Well, not entirely. If I'd killed someone for Galen, they'd still be dead and I'd still have done it. I still am the person who kidnapped Ivan in the first place, even though I neither knew about the seawall plan at the time nor agreed with it when I found out."

"I suppose. I just don't hold much with grudges against people who aren't terrible when there's a convenient dead awful person to direct the negative feelings towards instead."

"Mm. Enlightened of you."

"Well, there's a reason I already had a 'held captive by an evil person for many years' archetype in my head, let's just say that. It's easier to learn to forgive people for a thing when someone you love did the thing."

"That does make sense. And who do you know who was held captive by an evil person for many years?"

"My best friend's dad. He was...do future people still remember the Holocaust, I will be moderately disturbed if the answer is no."

"You might find worse recognition among ones who aren't interested in history and have never lived on Earth, but since I fulfill both criteria, yes, I know of it."

"My best friend's dad is a Holocaust survivor. One of the evil Nazi doctors took an interest in him."

"That does sound like approximately a Galen level of terrible."

"To be completely honest, most of the things that have cause to be laid at Dr. Schmidt's feet were done while Edie's dad was hunting him down for revenge, after the war, not while he was a captive. So it's not quite the same thing."

"Yeah. I... would not have been able to hunt Galen. I'm lucky I got the opportunity I did. Well, I say 'lucky', in large part I have Miles to thank for it."

"He was fourteen when it started and got out a handful of years later. It's not the same thing. It wasn't even the time he spent suffering himself that he was trying to get revenge for, it was that Schmidt had killed his mother to try to motivate him to do better. Edie's named after her, it was the only thing he had left of her."

"Not the same thing, no," he agrees.

"So it's a very good thing he's dead without anyone having to spend almost two decades tracking him down."

"Yeah."

"I mean, it wasn't all bad! That's how he met my father, is that the nazi was trying to do evil things again and my father was trying to thwart him."

"Oh, good for your father."

"Yeah. And then of course the whole mutants thing went public..."

"Oh?"

"Ah--when I say mutants, I don't just mean blue eyes or lactose tolerance or the shit that apparently goes down on Barrayar. 'Mutants' in my world are people with something called the X-Gene that activates a bunch of what would otherwise be junk DNA. Results range from blue skin to fully-functional wings to less explicable superpowers, often in the same person. I do magnetism." She flutters her fingers, and her steel bracelet divides into three pieces and floats off her wrist. "Evil Nazi Doctor was also a mutant, he did some really nasty stuff with energy. He took an interest in Edie's dad because he manifested his mutant powers trying to avoid being separated from his mother. He...had no way of knowing how badly that was going to backfire. Anyway, thwarting Schmidt--who was using the name Sebastian Shaw at that point, we still don't know which if either was his real name--ended up being very public. Do you know about the Cuban Missile Crisis, Ivan didn't but he was neither raised on Earth nor did he display any particular historical interest that I observed."

"It rings a distant bell. Cold War...?"

"Yeah. In my universe, Shaw-slash-Schmidt engineered the Cuban Missile Crisis to try to turn the Cold War hot, because he for some idiot reason believed that massive amounts of radiation would benefit mutants while it was killing off everyone else, creating a new world where he was on the top and only people with what he saw as good genes would survive."

"Your variety of mutants is clearly something very out of the ordinary as far as my world's science is concerned, so is that as absurd a plan as it sounds...?"

"Yes. My kind of mutants is caused by one gene that affects other genes. Random genetic damage is still random. And radiation poisoning will still get you before you could reproduce in the first place unless your mutation would specifically protect against that, which some of them would."

"Oh, what fun. And how did your father and his friend deal with this fool...?"

"My father's a telepath, and Erik--that's his name, Erik Lehnsherr--does magnetism too, so Papa held him still while Erik drove a coin through his forehead. This being the same coin he had failed to lift when Shaw was pointing a gun at his mother," she clarifies.

"How very poetic."

"That's one word for it. At that point in his life he was kind of a tangle of rage and drama."

"Yeah."

"But he got better, thank God."

"That's good."

"Evidence mostly in the form of 'people from similar but very, very different universes' suggests that if Edie hadn't happened he would've graduated to supervillain after the fight he had with my father when it was over. So yes, it definitely is."

"Mm?"

"Okay, so after Shaw was dead, some idiot decided to fire missiles at the commotion on the beach. Erik stopped them. Erik was going to throw them back at the people who fired them. Papa objected. They ended up wrestling, and someone decided to shoot Erik in order to stop him from causing an international incident. He deflected the bullet. He did not deflect the bullet enough. It hit Papa in the spine. Words were exchanged. They were not, in the heat of the moment, well-thought out words. Erik took Aunt Raven and Shaw's former cronies and went off to sulk for a while. Then it became apparent that Edie--and I--existed, and this led to the two of them being stuck in a room together long enough that it came out that no, the things Papa said when he had just been hit in the back with a bullet were not his objective opinions, and they reconciled."

"I see. Out of curiosity, are you dancing awkwardly around the family situation of the four of you or is there something else going on?"

"I am dancing awkwardly around it. So you know how I mentioned that people could have blue skin and wings and stuff..?"

"Yes?"

"It's not only obvious, external physical differences that happen. From a purely medical standpoint my parents are both basically hermaphrodites. But they're both men in every other meaningful way."

"Did they know anything about this before the - I'm assuming accidental pregnancies? That must have been quite the surprise."

"It was. And no, they didn't. To make it even more dramatic, as far as anyone can tell Edie and I were conceived not very long at all before the whole beach fiasco."

Snort.

"And there was literally no barrier between Edie's brain and Dad's--Erik's--which meant that if nothing had been done about it she literally would have rendered him brain dead from projecting tiny baby love into his brain too hard."

"Well that's terrifyingly adorable."

"Yeah, that's actually why they were stuck together long enough to resolve their issues--Papa had to keep her contained and not breaking anyone's mind. Not that anyone besides Dad was at risk."

"Theoretically, I've got the same mutation in reverse, but since I'm not attracted to girls it's probably not going to come up."

"Unless you somehow manage to get a boy accidentally pregnant. One would think you'd have more cause than most to worry about the possibility."

"I did say the mutation's not externally apparent. In order to get a boy pregnant I'd basically have to grind my...bits against his anus. That's not a sex move I'm terribly interested in."

Mark giggles.

More blushing, this time of the "I am mortified I actually said that" variety.

"There's an established minority population of hermaphrodites on my mother's home planet, but they are the externally visible variety. And resulted from deliberate genetic engineering."

"That sounds very convenient for them."

"They run into a bit of trouble if they try to travel the galaxy; not everyone has heard of them, and of course there are planets like Barrayar where understanding the situation wouldn't make people any friendlier."

"Yeah. Ivan was pretty clear on that point."

"Yes."

"He was very nice about the whole thing though! A bit startled, but he recovered nicely."

"He does try, generally."

"I liked him."

blush

"He is very likeable."

"I know! He was very sweet. He has such pleasant facial expressions, and he was quite the gentleman. And he definitely...you know how some people just have a kind of emotional magnetism, he was like that, but with niceness. I'm really not coming up with a better way to explain it."

"I think I might know what you mean."

More blushing. "And he--no, you're his cousin never mind, sorry."

"I am his cousin and therefore...?"

"And therefore you probably do not want to hear details of certain other ways in which he is nice of which I am aware," she admits.

"Oh, that."

More blushing. Emily did not blush this much at the time, what is going on.

"Ivan is very fond of girls."

"I noticed."

"It's endearing."

"It really is. Especially when you're a girl."

"I'll have to take your word for that part, being his cousin and not especially girl-like."

"Yes, quite!"

Giggle.

"I have no idea how long it's been in your universe or I'd ask if you knew how he'd been doing since I saw him last."

"I don't, anyway. I haven't seen him since I left Earth, very shortly after the seawall incident."

"Oh well. I don't think he was intending to tell anyone about Milliways--it's a bit of a fantastic story--but if you mention you met me here next time you see him he might make an amusing eep again."

"Which would be delightful."

"I know, right?"

"Shame I won't be around to see the look on his face, but you can't have everything."

"If I see you again afterward I will try to describe it as accurately as possible."

"Thank you, I appreciate it!"

Smile!

Smile!

She's not exhibiting attraction to him--whether because she doesn't find him attractive or because he's Ivan's cousin--but she definitely likes him.