An interrogation, a Bar-recommended stimulant, and some variously expensive transactions later, Linyabel has a scanner sitting on Bar's surface, whirring away, converting borrowed paper books at many pages a second into sensible electronic formats, and she is finishing up a plate of loaded savory waffles and a slab of goose and a pomegranate pudding for her snack-plus-added-stimulant-related-
An interrogation, a Bar-recommended stimulant, and some variously expensive transactions later, Linyabel has a scanner sitting on Bar's surface, whirring away, converting borrowed paper books at many pages a second into sensible electronic formats, and she is finishing up a plate of loaded savory waffles and a slab of goose and a pomegranate pudding for her snack-plus-added-stimulant-related-
"We would like to but we're a private institution, not the government, and...there is no way that asking the government to try to keep comprehensive statistics on mutants is going to go well. If it's happened it hasn't happened often, anyway, we would have found out if it happened often."
"Which is itself surprising. Most changes are not improvements. But if you can get wings or telepathy in one step, maybe all the changes are so dramatic that anything unsafe causes spontaneous abortion? If not outright killing the carrier - how did the plasma eye beam one develop to term in a living person?"
"The living person has a mutation that lets them adapt to otherwise-fatal situations. They literally reconstituted themself after being disintegrated by similar plasma beams generated in a far less perilous fashion."
"Oh. I suppose that would help. So, all right, bizarrely coherent but perhaps high-variance anomalous traits, some of which cause miscarriage before anyone would notice them and some of which produce useful - powers. This sounds like an interesting world."
"Really? That sounds very versatile if you're creative enough and keep ferrous metal on hand."
"It so incredibly is. I can't do it in Milliways, though, Milliways isn't on a planet and doesn't have the requisite magnetic fields."
"Totally worth it, though, Milliways has the previously mentioned reverse-engineerable technology and also beverages made of fruits that don't exist back home. Speaking of which, Bar? What would you recommend today?"
"I've had that," says Linyabel. "It isn't very much like Earth pears, just similarly shaped." Her scanner finishes a book. She gives it a new one and returns the first to Bar.
"Bar's recommendations are pretty much never wrong. Emily gets a different fruit thing pretty much every time she's here."
Bar supplies an Escobar pear nectar. Linyabel puts away the last couple bites of her meal and the dishes vanish. "I've enjoyed her expertise myself."
"If I didn't know better I'd suspect she was a telepath too, but even I can't do drink orders like that when someone gives me permission to read them."
And a knack.
"And a knack."
"Mm-hm. So what exciting reverse-engineerable technology have you been bringing home to the nineteen hundreds?"
"That's a good choice. I'm importing some of the same. Bar says that when Ivan was here she could not find Miles useful anaesthetic without knowing more about his medical properties, but I always carry," she pats a small object, "a medical scanner which has a recent scan of him, and I have his complete genome on my pen, so between the two it's only a little worse than if she had him here to look at, and I think he'll be delighted. He has the oddest allergies."