"Have you - not been here before? I could imagine being forgettable but I think Milliways isn't. I met - the person who I was talking about - here."

"Oh. Then you aren't my - the Edie I knew. Sorry about that."

"Are... you okay?"

"What happened?"

"Why do you imagine I would trust you enough to answer that question?" A tinge of fear and hostility leaks into her voice. She tries to clamp down, but isn't fully successful.

"You can't -? Oh. There's some hostile mind magic floating around in my world, not a ton but some, but I have a spell for it now. Were... you... trying to read my mind. Without asking. Is that a thing you were doing."

"I was trying not to get fucking killed."

"I'm not trying to kill you! All I did was recognize you from having met one of your alts once!"

"Even assuming I believe you, I was supposed to know this how? If you don't want to kill me that puts you in a club of less than a fifth of the people I've met over the last three years."

"Then you kind of have a problem, but that doesn't mean you should go around preemptively being everybody else's problem!"

"I know I have a problem, but I'd rather be somebody else's problem than dead."

"Supervillain version of Edie: not as fun a surprise as a free drink," mutters Bella.

"I'm not the fucking supervillain, the supervillains are the people who murdered a school full of children, my parents, literally everyone I have ever loved except my sister, and thousands if not millions of other innocent bystanders. I'm pretty sure you only count as a supervillain when it is significantly less ambiguous that you are the lesser of two evils. I would love to be able to afford to have ethics again, but every day I get to decide between reading some peoples' minds without saying pretty please first and letting not only myself but also dozens of innocents die. If it helps I'm under no illusions that I count as an innocent anymore."

"I'm not saying those people are not also supervillains, but I've been murdered a few times and the people I'm madder at are the ones I needed my fucking mind defense spell for!"

"Well lah di dah for you, I imagine I wouldn't mind people trying to kill me as much if I could get back up again afterwards!"

"That's not the point! You can't just declare unaffordable mental privacy for random people! It's not yours to refrain from purchasing!"

"It's also not mine to spend, the lives of the people who are depending on me!"

"You shouldn't be claiming responsibility you can't handle, and you clearly can't handle it!"

"If there was anyone else who could, I'd gladly step down. If abdicating responsibility didn't mean people died, I'd gladly step down. Do you literally think that mindreading is worse than death, and that you have the right to make this choice for everyone else I interact with?"

"You're not trading it off for specific people! You didn't read my mind and look, neither of us is dead! You are harming everybody who crosses your path!"

"This place, whatever it is, is an anomaly for me! I can, in fact, personally confirm that I would have died a dozen times over if I had more lenient habits! Woman, I live in worse than a war zone!"

"There are things you should sooner die than do!"

"Do you think I think I'm going to make it out of this alive!? I live to protect those in my care. When my purpose is complete, if it ever is, if someday the survivors live in peace and don't have to look over their shoulder lest jackbooted thugs or murderous robots end them, one way or another I'm going to be dead."

"If only your victims were making such a noble sacrifice!"

A remarkably familiar voice from behind Bella says, "Uhhhh..."

"Tell me you've got a mental shield. Mine doesn't work on anybody else yet," says Bella, turning towards the... new?... Edie, "and she - she -"

"I thought she was you for like... four seconds," Bella mutters. "Assuming you're you; do you recognize me?"

"Of course I do," she says, flushing slightly. "It's--really great to see you again, although I could wish it had been under happier circumstances--do you have mental shielding, do you need to borrow the staff? I can probably do without if I have to."

"I've got shielding, she can't even sense I'm here, I got a spell for it last loop and cast it at the start of this one."

"Just one loop. Door in Buffalo was there again," murmurs Bella.

"What - happened?"

"...She couldn't let herself believe me if she didn't have a look for herself. I don't actually mind having my mind read in principle, so I let her. She's currently trying to reconcile I've been being willfully blind for the past three years with and this led me to do terrible things with and collapsing into a heap of self-loathing and/or suicide is the opposite of helpful," Cerebella murmurs. "...I'm so, so, tempted to just--blame everything she did on the people who hurt her, but it doesn't work like that, does it." She shivers. "I just hate to think--that I could have ended up like that. I wouldn't," she whispers fiercely to herself. "I wouldn't do that. Not me. Not now."

Bella takes her hand and squeezes it.

"No need."

"Yeah. I'm really glad you already had a way of protecting yourself before you met here."

"Me too."

Hugs. Hugs are appropriate in this situation.

Hugs.

"...What do you think we should do with her? I imagine she's not going to leave Milliways until she's come up with something better than what she previously had, but...even if she was handling it badly, I'm still not comfortable just throwing her back into whatever broke her."

"I don't know. I don't think I dare leave through somebody else's door myself, considering, or I might help if it seemed like something I could manage..."

"If she stabilizes enough to get a good read on and the read is promising sending her through my door like we did with you might be a good idea. There isn't even an enraged supervillain on the other side this time."

"Yeah. And if that works and she needs a lot of oomph I could get her an evil furball, although it's anyone's guess if she'd get the spell to sustain herself in my cheaty fashion without witches..."

"Depending on how long you're interested in staying to help she could probably get it before it would be a problem that she didn't have it even if she didn't get it to start. ...Although...maybe it would be a good idea to chuck her through my door now, if she agrees to it. Take advantage of the personal achievement boosts from figuring out how to put herself back together." She nibbles her lip. "It's a gamble, if it turns out she puts herself back together badly and then she has this power, but it could have a high payoff if it worked out."

"Security can take her if it has to but that's a short term solution..."

"Yeah...I mean, it's unlikely that she's going to come out of this doing something worse than what she was already doing. I, uh," she winces. "I got a look at what she could do when she checked my sincerity. She...was actually showing nonzero restraint. Not that this excuses what she did, but..."

"Do I want to know what she was restraining herself from...?"

"Short version is that her mindreading can be pretty selective and she was mostly refraining from touching anything that she didn't feel she absolutely needed to."

"What's in that category?"

"I'm not really sure how to explain it. Basically, um...intentions? Motivations? What do you want to do in relation to me and mine and why. That's not quite comprehensively it, but that's most of it."

"Still intrusive but at least it wasn't comprehensively looking at everything..."

"Mhm. Like I said, not saying it was okay. But."

Nod.

"Like the fluff's? In what way is it like fluff telepathy?"

"In terms of...sensation? Like how if you stick your hand in a bucket of water and then you stick your hand in a bucket of, I dunno, milkshake, it's really different but also there's a unifying feature of wet?"

"Okay..."

Bella snorts slightly.

"I'm sure you are, right now in this nice safe environment with an alt to telepath at. I'm worried about what happens when you go home."

"I wasn't doing it because I wanted to. I'm--I'm not saying that makes it okay, but I was a traumatized teenager making terrible choices because trauma, not--a mustache-twirling villain who'd keep on doing it even if--" she glances worriedly at the mirror. "That's why I want more options."

"I'm going to leave it up to her whether to give you her kind of magic because she knows more about it on two counts."

"Okay." Pause. "When I first realized there was someone there and I couldn't even tell your mind existed I thought you were--one of the people who was trying to kill me because--back home there's only one thing that can do that. It's an alloy. The only amount of it anyone knows to exist comes from a helmet my dad had before they killed him. So. I--I don't know, I don't even know why I'm telling you this..." her hands are trembling.

"This is an interdimensional bar. There might be any number of reasons you wouldn't be able to read someone in here."

"It lasted for like half a second before I turned around and saw your bare head. I didn't really have time to think it through."

"I mean, I think there are some people who can't help it," she offers, "...which even I think is bad but goes more in the 'innocently radioactive' category than the 'arguable supervillain' category."

"Sure, if they can't help it. But they'd better live in a cabin in the woods. With signs."

"Or around other telepaths who can do their filtering for them. We had a couple of little kids who hadn't learned to stop, back when there was a school." She sighs.

"I guess that could work too."

Bella sits down at Bar and asks for a recommendation and puts the resulting bottle of beverage into her shield.

And eventually Cerebella comes out of the mirror. "I think it should be fine," she reports.

"I'm not going to second-guess you but I'm curious about what makes you confident of that."

"...Part of it is that she's not likely to resort to unethical things when she has better options, part of it is...she thinks she can work up to a resurrection spell at some point, at which point she gets to answer to her version of Dad for any nonconsensual mindreading she did and Dad isn't fond of it either. Like, a lot of her terrible decision making is predicated on 'nothing can ever be okay again' and now she has evidence that it is theoretically possible for anything to be okay ever again, and damn is the inside of her brain a depressing place."

"Gotcha."

"She's me gone horribly wrong, but she's still me. Which makes her unusually easy to figure out, if nothing else."

"I stayed here a long time, last time, but didn't run into any alts."

"That's a shame."

"Yeah. I finally left when I noticed a drop in muscle memory for some of my basic witch-fighting routines."

"How long did you end up staying?"

"Two and a half months."

"And then another loop is a month...and it's been four months for me."

"It's nice to see you again."

"Yeah, same."

"What've you been up to?"

"Schoolwork. Magical Girling, both of the rescuing-people-thwarting-villains variety and the networking-for-future-plans variety."

"Any progress on the future plans you want to brag about?"

"In the wake of one of the rescues, I actually ended up talking to Prismatic Waterfall Legend about my ideas, and she's a Middle Eastern immigrant to the US, so she's been dealing with that level of social bull, and she said she could probably get me in touch with Mystical Mirror Madchen, who's from a family a lot like mine in the sense of 'recent ancestors came over because German Jewish and Holocaust,' although I think hers got out beforehand whereas apparently Grandpa Jake had a number tattooed on his arm. Anyway. It was suggested that I'd have more effect if I started out working on one issue and made some significant ground on it before trying to organize a major intersectional group rather than just running around talking to people with nothing to back it up. So with any luck I'm going to talk to her soon and we can discuss strategy for dealing with anti-semitic problems--you probably haven't had this happen yet, but there's some really scary shit going down in France-for-example--and I haven't actually met her yet so I can't plan out for sure where exactly it goes from there."

"My attention has not been drawn to France, but I haven't actually been there, my last fuck-it-I'm-vacationing-in-Europe loop was Italy and then after that it was Scandinavia. What's wrong with France?"

"There's been rioting and attacks on Jewish businesses and synagogues."

"That sucks."

"So incredibly. You'd think the Holocaust would have finally put an end to this bullshit, at least, but nope."

"I wonder what the motive feels like from the inside."

"Like not wanting to deal with shit so obviously it must be someone else's fault? I mean, that's my best guess from my observation of that kind of thing."

"But they pick the targets somehow, they decide to go from assigning fault to violence somehow..."

"We're kinda traditional."

"Which suggests that if anything the Holocaust would have made it worse."

"I mean, kinda, except it got a whole lot more backlash than the historical cases. 'Nazi' is pretty much synonymous with evil, now."

"But in a way mostly divorced from the details."

"It sure didn't put a dent in homophobia, but out of all the different groups the Nazis decided to throw in death camps, Jewish people are the most iconic ones."

"Yes, and it made anti-Semitism... impolite, but it didn't scratch much deeper, I think? And you can talk around an impolite thing. Talk about Israel instead, or whatever."

"Yyyyeah apparently the people doing the rioting were calling themselves pro-Palestine or something, you're not wrong."

"It hasn't been my focus but I listen around."

"It's just...kind of discouraging."

"Yeah." Handsqueeze.

Handsqueeze. "Sometimes I just want to take over the world because I could run it better, but then I remember that that's the best way to get branded a villain, thwarted by my peers and with a severely damaged ability to persuade other people to stop being terrible."

"Well, that's a reason not to violently take over the world."

"Any other method would be enough more work--in terms of developing a viable plan as well as executing it--that I have yet to determine that would be more efficient than just keeping on as I currently plan to, in terms of fixing things."

"Yeah, fair enough. What I'd do if I were you about the anti-Semitism thing is find former anti-Semites. People who know the mindset and how to get from there to here."

"I mean, it's a good idea, but then you have the question of how to find them. Just asking seems...ineffectual at best, extremely rude at worst."

"Well, don't go ask individuals on the street. Maybe try the Internet or ask nice friendly Christian clergypeople if they can put you in touch with anyone who has that sort of history."

"I might go with the latter one, that's a good idea. Trying to find someone on the internet with criteria like that...I'm not sure how I'd go about it."

"You'd have to be prepared to filter. Heavily."

"...Doing it personally sounds like an exercise in anger management techniques, but maybe I could hire a magical girl groupie or something to do it."

"Do you get a lot of those?"

"Personally, not a whole lot, but I'm public enough about my goals and opinions to have a niche following of mostly tumblr social justice warriors. The trick would be finding one who would not also find the task an exercise in anger management techniques."

"I'm not sure anyone describable as a 'social justice warrior' will match that description."

"Yeah. It is only mostly, thankfully, but."

"What's tumblr?"

"...It's a website. For blogging, mostly. And you can 'reblog' someone else's post to your own blog and add a comment and add tags and there's a bunch of cultural baggage to go with it."

"Joy."

"Enh, it's not bad. Not, like, bad cultural baggage, I just mean that I don't think I can explain the whole thing without more time than I suspect either of us care to allocate to the project."

"All right."

"Um," says the other one. "What's the internet?"

"Nineteen-eighty."

"So, the internet is when computers get really cheap and popular and can call each other on the phone only better. So if you assemble some information or write a story or take pictures or whatever you can put them on a computer and all the other computers can get ahold of it at any time. It is even cooler than it sounds."

"Oh. That does sound pretty cool."

"It's great. I'm sure it gets even better, only I'm stuck in early 2005 till I figure out how to save the world."

"Well, we might not get it at all, considering. Maybe if things ever settle down."

"What happened?"

"...Okay, so I'm a mutant. Most mutants aren't telepaths, but we usually have powers of some kind. A rogue faction of the government got scared enough of us to develop murder robots, kidnap my shapeshifter aunt to--augment their adaptability somehow, I don't know--and decide to wipe us out, and incidentally conquer the country since otherwise they'd be fugitives for mass murder. Things...sort of escalated from there."

"Did it snowball to other countries too?"

"I don't know. It hadn't as of three years ago, but I haven't had access to consistent enough communications since then to know if that's still the case."

"I'd teach you to stow away on an airplane but I rely heavily on my ability to stop time to do that."

"What good would that do?"

"Let you go have a look at how things are in Canada or Brazil or wherever?"

"My sister can fly, but it's harder to carry a dozen kids with her, and I think the Sentinels can fly too now. Actually an airplane would be kind of terrifying because if a Sentinel grabs the plane there's nowhere to flee."

"And I guess you don't dare leave the kids long enough to send a scout?"

She shakes her head.

"Well, that's a mess, but do you have a long term plan that isn't 'eternal defense'?"

"Right now? 'Become a magical girl.' Previously? 'Pray for a miracle and keep an eye out for any opening.'"

"I can't tell if you're disapproving or pitying."

"Both, really."

"I did mean it about keeping an eye open. This whole mess started five years ago, and until two years later we had plans to fix this. And then they found us and killed almost everyone who was left and it was all Emily and I could do to grab a handful of the littlest ones and flee. I promise, if I had reason to think there was anything in particular that would work I would have been on it like a starving man on a sandwich."

"To the extent I'm convinced you exhausted your options it is pity and not disapproval."

She looks like she's about to say something, then stops and looks away.

"I'm--trying to think of something to say that doesn't sound unnecessarily--conflict-starting. I--I don't blame you for being upset at the--misjudgement I've been making. That's perfectly reasonable. But I've kept six small children alive for three years while we're chased by genocidal robots, and it--hurts my feelings when you look down on me for not also creating a viable plan to solve the entire problem."

"I'm probably being unfair because I'm solving a bigger problem but I have better powers to do it with."

"...You said something about being stuck in 2005?"

"I'm in a time loop. Whenever I die or deliberately reset, I wake up in the hospital having recently been hit by a van in miraculously perfect health. I haven't gotten any farther than a month past that because that's when the giant monster gets too big and eats the world."

"...Okay, so I'm aware that it's unfair of me that my first reaction is that you're lucky for having infinite chances to fix it."

"Well, before I found Milliways I could have figured out how to kill the witch and then continued to have the problem with the evil magical aliens. I now have an inkling of an end run around the problem, admittedly."

"You have to deal with evil magical aliens too? What do they want?"

"They want to harvest the emotions of teenage girls, but they don't mind if a witch eats the planet because the witch is very harvestable and does more for their energy crisis than killing it and continuing to do their thing would."

"...Ew."

"They're cute and fluffy and grant wishes. It took me a few loops to figure out they were evil."

"Apparently emotions are rare among intelligent species in my world and also break conservation of energy somehow."

"...How."

"I have not figured out the science of it because if I get too inquisitive with the fluffy evil aliens things get real hairy fast in ways slightly more complicated than 'dead, try again'."

"I mean, mutants behave in ways that seem to break conservation of energy all the time, if someone told me my brain slash emotions broke conservation of energy somehow I'd probably be slightly smug rather than any kind of disbelieving but just normal people's? Maybe we ought to rethink this whole conservation of energy thing."

"They only prey on teenage girls in particular because they have more fuel-grade emotions, so I'm not sure it's the same deal as mutants, it might just be a quirk of my world."

"The fluff thought my Emily and I would be decent potential magical girls too, though, so if so it's probably not something about emotions in your world..."

"Well, I'm not sure its fuel-grade-emotions-sensor is well calibrated for foreigners."

"I'm okay with cheating it out of wishes without the actual potential for fuel. Well, theoretically, in practice it's probably not worth the risk."

"Well, the wishes are real, granted without malicious interpretation, and generally pretty damn good. The problem is then your soul is moved into a gem which you must sustain with the byproducts of killing witches, who are ex-magical-girls."

"Yeah, 'not getting a spell to clean out the soul gem fast enough' is the risk in question. Unless you wanted to hang out in Milliways cleaning 'em for us until we managed."

"I don't know how long that might be..."

"Neither do I. I'm not desperate to be your kind of magical girl, just acknowledging the possibility. ...Although if we wanted to make her both kinds of magical girl I suspect that doing yours first would be the better idea. I don't think it's a coincidence that you got what you got first and not something, I don't know, time-related."

"Yeah, it was a little convenient. I - okay, the concern I have is, this is how you did with these powers and these problems. What if you acquire more powers but then also your problems get worse?"

"...I mean, you probably wouldn't have had a problem with my sister if you'd met her instead, except insofar as she's been condoning my behavior by not forcing me to stop somehow and/or leaving. It seems to me like the problem is less quantity of power and more type, so as long as I don't just get more telepathy I'm not sure it's relevant. And, also, falling too far into the despair pits, but I know to guard against that this time."

"If you turn into my kind of magical girl, despair will turn you into a witch. It can work real fast if you're paying attention to how sad you are and not how badly your gem needs clearing."

"...Is witch the kind of monster that eats your world."

"Yeah, but usually they don't get that big."

"Yes but let's not turn me into a despair-monster, that seems like a bad idea. Being two kinds of magic would be nice but I am not, actually, making bad enough choices as a result of trauma not to realize how much of a risk there is of that going badly."

"You won't get an argument from me."

"Did I know that?" Cerebella asks. "If I did I forgot, sorry."

"I don't recall if I brought it up. It would have been on the warning list if you'd been seriously considering taking the fluff's offer."

"I'm not despairing of anything in particular so if I thought I was particularly close to a spell I might be tempted, but, no."

"I'm just glad I'm not particularly subject to ennui. I can come back from dying but I didn't find that out on purpose and I likewise don't plan to experiment with whether I can come back from witching."

"Good plan. Well, you're now significantly less likely to find that out by accident..."

"Yeah. It's a good spell. I got some really unprecedented reactions when I showed it off last loop."

"Ooh, like what?"

"Couple girls in Toronto who normally won't give me the time of day wanted to be best friends, that sort of thing."

"Makes sense. Did the fluff react to it in any meaningful way?"

"I'm not sure yet if the fluff was reacting to that or to remembering having interacted with you, but I did have a bit of an exciting end-of-loop."

"...Good exciting or bad exciting?"

"Bad, but informative, at least potentially if I spend long enough testing guesses."

"What happened?"

"Fluffs and girls operating on the orders of fluffs trying to steal my gem, much faster response time replacing any given fluff I killed, fluffs speculating about how I must have managed to make my wish when they don't remember it, eventually they amassed superior firepower that I did not manage to take a photo of before I reset."

"If it's just that they remembered me that seems like it would be more convenient for future loops."

"Yeah, I need to work out a set of experiments to perform. This loop my experiment was mostly 'see if the door's there again' but if no fluffs see me I can do another thing too."

"I'm glad the door was there again."

"Me too! It involves a redeye flight, but I can reliably catch it whenever I want."

"Redeye flight?"

"Yeah, I have to go stow away on a plane the same day I wake up in the hospital, fly across the country overnight, and come straight to the particular door."

"Why'd you do that the first time?"

"Trying to catch the big witch when she's less big. She seems to come west across the US/Canada border."

"Maybe some kind of sensor spell would help with that...what did you do that got you the mind-shielding spell?"

"Fluffs sent a girl with mind-controlly powers after me, which was not fun, but I explained to her what was going on and I... went overboard and she witched then and there and I had to kill her. Not a super fun story. I might check on her this loop."

"Yikes. Yeah, that...that would get you mind shielding."

"Which helped when there were too many of them to have a conversation with, later on."

"Eek. What other hazards are there, should we be trying to figure out how to get you new defensive spells in Milliways before you go back out there?"

"I mean, it's basically okay if I die, I have good emotional control, and I can clean my gem now. I'm pretty safe. But if you can think of good personal accomplishments I can try to aim at something like teleportation or translation I won't say no."

"Yeah, mind stuff is kinda the major hazard for an immortal...um...is there anything trivial you've always wanted to do, like eating an enormous dish of ice cream in one sitting or doing a thousand skips in a row with a jump-rope?"

"Um... I kind of have lots of opportunities to indulge things like that in my monthly life. Anything I haven't gotten around to... um... I have not yet read a Dostoevsky novel in one sitting?"

"Would you feel a sense of accomplishment if you did?"

"Probably, yeah."

"Then that could get you a spell. If it had to be a really major accomplishment I wouldn't have as many as I do."

"Then I'll do that while I'm in here. Might be a good angle on translation because I won't be able to read it in Russian."

"Ooh, yeah."

"Teleportation I'm less sure. I missed a lot of opportunities by getting good physical coordination well before I became a double magical girl, so I've already gotten a fair amount of the yen to run and dance and ice skate out of my system..."

"...Gymnastics? Dancing with someone?"

"I have not danced with anyone! Or done any elaborate gymnastic routines."

"Would you like to? I know some dances."

"Sure."

"Okay, I can--waltz, foxtrot, tango, or lindy hop. My sister keeps dragging me to various dance classes, so I'm competent but not fantastic at all of them."

"I don't really know enough to discriminate between them, pick something."

"Let's start with waltz. Bar, can we borrow some kind of music player with waltz music?"

Bar provides! Dah-dah-dah, dah-dah-dah, dah-dah-dah, daaaaaaah.

Edie: is a reasonably competent dance instructor.

Bella: has perfect coordination once she knows what to do with it.

Edie's coordination isn't perfect but there's nothing in particular wrong with it. This is fun.

Whee!

Whee indeed. Edie may or may not be grinning like a loon, she can't tell, she can't see her face to tell whether or not her grin counts as loony.

Waltz waltz waltz. "I never went to school dances or anything."

"Because you didn't have anyone to go with or because they're not your kinda thing?"

"Because I would've tripped and broken my neck. I sat out of gym. I could barely walk across a level linoleum floor without falling."

"Oh. Wow. Anything diagnosable, or just--really clumsy?"

"Just really clumsy."

"Was it just a balance thing or did you also have dexterity problems?"

"Mostly balance. My gross motor control wasn't that great, I'd knock mugs off tables and stuff, but my handwriting and so on were fine."

"Oh, good. Not being able to write well would suck."

"Especially for me."

"Yeah. So it could have been worse, and now it's not an issue."

"Yep. Don't even have to spend magic on it, free with the package."

"Aaand the package is much better now, thanks to the magic of not having to kill your monsterfied peers to not join them."

"I don't have a way to de-witch witches, so I do still have to kill them, but yes."

"...Yet."

"Yet!"

"I feel disproportionately proud of having introduced you to my world's magic."

"You should be. It might literally save my entire planet."

"I mean. Saving the world is kind of in my job description."

"And you saved an extra one."

"We're awesome."

"We are!"

Particularly swishy waltz step in lieu of unwaltzly twirling. "I wish I had a way of getting Milliways doors on demand. Or--consistently, anyway."

"Maybe you can get a spell for it."

"...I'm going to finish my letter to--and--wait--I just realized it's probably possible to use Milliways to cheat at archaeology."

"Maybe! What do you mean specifically?"

"Hebrew! My first thought was that I could finish my letter to Mystical Mirror Madchen, and my second thought was that if I could convince the translation effect to cooperate I could work on my Hebrew, and then I realized that I could probably get documents from Bar in Hebrew from before Hebrew was an exclusively religious language. There's even some stuff in the Old Testament that people aren't quite sure how to translate because of hapax legomenontry or however you modify that word--"

"I didn't get the translation effect to be particularly exploitable when I was staying here, but you can definitely take documents home, I'll provide all the counterfeit Bar wants for it."

"I speak and read some Hebrew, is why I think it's plausible that I might be able to see stuff as being in Hebrew, I'm just not perfectly fluent. And, yeah, even if that doesn't work I can just copy stuff down for a Rosetta Stone-like effect."

"If you know some it might work. I haven't learned enough of any languages to make it work but I never cared very much about Spanish class."

"I don't care much about French class, but I do care about Hebrew. I wonder if I can make something be in Hebrew if I try? 'Your lips are like a crimson thread, and your mouth is lovely. Your cheeks are like halves of a pomegranate behind your veil.'"

"Comprehensible. Poetic. Kinda makes me want to kiss you."

Well, in that case: kiss!

Kiss!

"It is poetry," she adds, after kiss. "It's from the Song of Solomon."

"And you just have it memorized?"

"It's pretty!"

"I don't deny it."

"Also I'm kind of a huge nerd about my heritage."

"Speaking as a person with extremely boring heritage, how come?"

"Lots of reasons. Partly it's because stories about my family specifically are...kinda thin, after the Holocaust, and our history is a way of connecting to the people my grandparents lost. Partly it's to spite everyone who ever tried to wipe us out. Partly it's because I think Hebrew is beautiful."

"And backward!"

"Backwards and forwards is completely arbitrary!"

"Yes, I know."

"And it's not like I care about any heritage I might have on Mom's side of the family, so much."

"Generic white people like me?"

"Yep. Possibly less generic since her family came over from England only a couple of generations ago--one time when someone was asking me for my ethnicity in a particularly obnoxious way I identified as 'half Anglo-Saxon half Ashkenazi'--but for all intents and purposes yes."

"What was particularly obnoxious about it?"

"It was follow-up to some racist remarks, and I think he was expecting me to just answer 'white' in a way that would have supported his point, if he had a meaningful point to make."

"These conversations never seem to happen to me, I wonder why."

"Probably because you're generically white and don't make a point of doing relevant forms of social justice work?"

"My mom has social justicey inclinations, but not in a particularly activist way, so I guess that might not do it."

"Yeah. For every rally there'll be idiots in opposition loitering nearby jeering."

"And you go have conversations with them because?"

"Because I'm loitering nearby getting ready in a way that doesn't make it visually obvious which side I'm on and they address me first."

"Aha."

"Since then I have taken to wearing t-shirts printed with relevant slogans to that kind of event."

"How much does that help?"

"Well, I haven't had a repeat of that particular incident, but it was a bit of a one-off even beforehand, so who knows."

Hug, and then interrogating Bar for archaeological purposes.

Bar is as helpful as she can be.

"...I can get some of them in Hebrew," she reports. "Not any of the ones that contain large quantities of non-scriptural words."

"Interesting."

"The ones I can perceive are all ones I can read pretty well anyways, so there's that. If there's much of anything in a text I'd find really tricky the whole thing get's translated, is what it looks like to me."

"What counts as a single text, I wonder, if you got a book of poems and some were ones you knew...?"

"I don't so much know discrete poems. I know chunks from Proverbs and the Song of Songs and stuff like that."

"Then we cannot readily experiment, alas."

"Alas. On the other hand, I don't exactly take French class seriously but I do care about my grades enough to pretty much learn the material, and there's been some songs on the curriculum. Caaan I see a, um, songbook that has Lark, At the Point of Avignon, and, um, the one that goes At the clear spring, as I strolled by, I found the water so beautiful, that I bathed myself."

Bar provides!

"I assume you're getting the whole thing in English but I do see those three songs in French, and not the rest."

"It's all English to me," nods Bella.

"Well, that answers that question. Hooray for scholastic competence."

Giggle.

The giggle is adorable! Edie thinks she will kiss it.

Eeee.

Bella giggles a little bit.

"For, uh, purposes of studying differences between alternate universes, I should probably mention I'm straight," the other Edie says, eyes still firmly on her book.

"Good for you."

"...I mean, in the absence of any other alts to learn things from, it is potentially useful information on how we vary," Cerebella admits.

"Yes, yes."

"Well, if you'd feel a sense of accomplishment from hugging her parents..."

"...I think probably not, but it's...a good thought. Anyway." She gives her alt a look. Cerebella rolls her eyes a little, and opens the door. The other one darts through it.

She says yes almost before it offers her the choice.

Power fills her as though she had been merely an empty vessel waiting for it. Her entire being glows with potential, and the channels to exersize it are obvious

"Not a bad name," Bella comments.

"It really isn't. I...don't think either of yours came up."

"Salvation Jewel Princess."

"Psychic Maiden Cerebella."

"Not terrible, but yeah I like mine better."

"You're very thematically thorny."

She looks down at her rose-petal mid-thigh skirt, and at her forearms. She has bracers. With roses like corsages on the wrists, and otherwise--thorns, yep. "Indeed. Well, I can't say I don't feel thorny."

"My magical girlnesses played pretty nice with each other. I got shinier colors but the same basic costume design I already had."

"This kind of magical girlness...does seem like the kind of thing that plays well with others."

"More or less, yeah."

"There's a backyard, but don't hurt the squid."

"Squid?"

"There's a giant squid in the lake, who is a long-term resident and should not be shot at."

"Is this typical of direct magical attacks with this magic system?"

"In what way?" Cerebella asks.

"Like, are you surprised that her attack is a swarm of colorful roses, at all. My kind usually winds up with actual weapons of some kind or sometimes beams of energy."

"Oh. No, there's plenty of beams of energy and actual weapons, but this isn't outside the norm."

"Huh." Bella inspects the damage dealt by the rose barrage

The rose petals were traveling at high velocity and, apparently, behaving as though they were harder than whatever they hit.

Bella picks up a petal.

It is soft and silky.

"I wonder at what point in the process they lose their rigidity?"

"Probably when they lose their velocity."

"Makes sense."

"Do you think we could borrow a sheet of steel or something from Bar? I want to see how well hard metals hold up against this thing," Rose says.

"I mean, if you wreck it you buy it."

"...Does Bar even care if she gets it back broken? Worth checking."

"She doesn't care care, but she'll still put it on your tab."

"I might ask anyway, about chunks of iron or whatever that would only be good for scrap anyway so it wouldn't matter how many pieces it was in so long as the mass was the same."

"I don't know her policy on that."

She shrugs and heads back inside, repeating her query to Bar.

If shapeless hunks of metal will serve, then I will not add to your tab if they are differently shapeless when returned.

"That will do fine, thanks."

Bar produces a heap of shapeless hunks of metal.

And Edie...will haul them outside one at a time with her unaugmented strength, because if there's one thing besides despair living through five years of apocalypse will teach you it's stubbornness.

"...Do you want help with that?"